The Wolf banged on the metal door of Yeggy’s apartment in a high-riser overlooking Biscayne Bay. He was wearing a skullcap and a Miami Heat windbreaker, just in case anyone saw him visiting.
‘All right, all right, hold your urine!’ Yeggy shouted from inside. It took him another couple of minutes to finally open up. He had on blue jean shorts and a tattered, faded-black novelty-store sweatshirt with Einstein’s grinning face on it. Quite the kidder, that Yeggy.
‘I told you not to make me come and see you,’ the Wolf said, but he was smiling broadly, as if he were making a big joke. So Yeggy smiled too. They had been business associates for about a year – which was a long time for anyone to put up with Yeggy.
‘Your timing is perfect,’ he said.
‘How lucky for me,’ said the Wolf as he strolled into the living room and immediately wanted to hold his nose. The apartment was an incredible dump – littered with fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes, empty milk cartons, and dozens, maybe a hundred, old copies of Novoye Russkoye Slovo, the largest Russian-language newspaper in the United States.
The odor of filth and decaying food was bad enough, but even worse was Yeggy himself, who always smelled like week-old sausages. The science-man led him into a bedroom off the living-room area – only it turned out not to be a bedroom at all. It was the lab of a very disorganized person. Ugly brown carpeting, three beige CPU boxes on the floor, parts in a corner – discarded heatsinks, circuit boards, hard drives.
‘You are a pig,’ the Wolf said, then laughed again.
‘But a very smart pig.’
In the center of the room was a modular desk. Three flat screen displays formed a semicircle around a well-worn rumble chair. Behind the display screens was a fire hazard of intertwined cables. There was only one outside window, the blind permanently drawn.
‘Your site is very secure now,’ Yeggy said. ‘Primo. One hundred per cent. No possible screw-ups. The way you like it.’
‘I thought it was already secure,’ the Wolf replied.
‘Well now it’s more secure. You can’t be too careful these days. Tell you what else – I finished the latest brochure. It’s a classic, instant classic.’
‘Yes, and only three weeks late.’
Yeggy shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘So what – wait’ll you see my work. It’s genius. Can you recognize genius when you see it? This is genius.’
The Wolf examined the pages before he said anything to the science-man. The brochure was printed on 8½- by 11-inch glossy paper, bound in a clear report cover with a red spine. Yeggy had cranked it out on his HP color laser printer. The colors were electric. The cover looked perfect. The elegance was weird, actually, as if the Wolf were looking at a Tiffany’s catalog. It sure didn’t look like the work of a man who lived in this shithole.
‘I told you that girls number seven and seventeen were no longer with us. Dead, actually.’ The Wolf finally spoke. ‘Our boy genius is forgetful, no?’
‘Details, details,’ said Yeggy. ‘Speaking of which, you owe me fifteen thousand cash on delivery. This would be considered delivery.’
The Wolf reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a Sig Sauer 210. He shot Yeggy twice between the eyes. Then, for laughs, he shot Albert Einstein between the eyes too.
‘Looks like you are no longer with us either, Mr Titov. Details, details.’
The Wolf sat at a laptop computer and fixed the sales catalog himself. Then he burned a CD and took it with him. Also several copies of the Russian newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo that he had missed. He would send a crew to dispose of the body and burn this shithole later. Details, details.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I skipped a class with a topic on ‘Arrest Techniques’ that morning. I figured I probably knew more on the subject than the teacher. I called Monnie Donnelley instead, and told her I needed whatever she had on the white slave trade, particularly recent activity in the US, that might relate to the White Girl case.
Most of the Bureau’s crime analysts were housed ten miles away at the Criminal Incident Response Group (CIRG), but Monnie had an office at Quantico. Less than an hour later, she was at the doorway of my no-frills cubicle. She held out two disks, and looked proud of herself.
‘This should keep you busy for a while. I concentrated on white women only. Attractive. Recent abductions. I also have a lot on the crime scene in Atlanta. I expanded the circle to get a read on the mall, owner, employees, the neighborhood in Buckhead. I have copies for you of the police and the Bureau’s investigative reports. All the things you asked for. You do your homework, don’t you?’
‘I’m a student of the game. I prepare as best I can. Is that so unusual? Here at Quantico?’
‘Actually, it is for agents who come to us from police departments or the armed forces. They seem to like to work out in the field.’
‘I like field work too,’ I admitted to Monnie, ‘but not until I’ve narrowed it some. Thank you for this, all of this.’
‘Do you know what they say about you, Dr Cross?’
‘No. What do they say?’
‘That you’re close to psychic. Very imaginative. Maybe gifted. You can think like a killer. That’s why they put you on White Girl right away.’ She remained in the doorway. ‘Listen. Some unasked-for advice if I may. You shouldn’t piss off Gordo Nooney. He takes his little orientation games seriously. He’s also basically a bad guy. And, he’s connected.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
I nodded. ‘So there are good guys too?’
‘Absolutely. You’ll see that most of the agents are real solid. Good people, the best. All right, well, happy hunting,’ Monnie said. Then she left me to my reading, lots and lots of reading. Too much.
I started off with a couple of abductions – both in Texas – that I thought could be related to those in Atlanta. Just reading the accounts got my blood boiling again, though. Marianne Norman, twenty, had disappeared in Houston on 6 August, 2001. She’d been staying with her college sweetheart in a condo owned by his grandparents. Marianne and Dennis Turcos were going to be seniors at Texas Christian that fall and planned to be married in the spring of ’02. Everybody said they were the nicest kids in the world. Marianne was never seen or heard from after that night in August. On 30 December of that year, Dennis Turcos put a revolver to his head and killed himself. He said he couldn’t live without Marianne, that his life ended when she disappeared.
The second case involved a fifteen-year-old runaway from Childress, Texas. Adrianne Tuletti had been snatched from an apartment in San Antonio where three girls involved in prostitution were said to live. Neighbors in the complex reported having seen two suspicious-looking people, a male and a female, entering the building on the day that Adrianne disappeared. One neighbor thought it might be the girls’ parents who had come to bring their daughter home, since the fifteen-year-old was never seen or heard from again.
I looked at her picture for a long moment – she was a pretty blonde and looked as if she could have been one of Elizabeth Connelly’s daughters. Her parents were elementary school teachers back in Childress.