Suddenly, a muffled boom. The agents at the front door went down. One of them didn’t get up. The other got up and stumbled back from the house. It was awful to witness, a complete shock.
‘Bomb,’ said Mahoney in surprise and anger. ‘He musta booby-trapped the door.’
By then, the four other agents were inside the house. They had gone in through a back and side door. There were no more explosions so the doors hadn’t been booby-trapped. Two HRT agents approached the wounded pair at the front of the house. They pulled away the agent who hadn’t moved since the blast.
Mahoney and I ran as fast as we could toward the house. He kept repeating ‘fuck’ over and over. There were no gunshots coming from inside.
I was suddenly afraid Farley wasn’t even in the house. I prayed that Audrey Meek wasn’t already dead in there. Everything was feeling so wrong to me. This wasn’t how I would have done the raid. The FBI! I had always hated and distrusted these bastards, and now I was one of them.
Then I heard, ‘Secure! Secure!’ And ‘We have a suspect! We’ve got him! It’s Farley. There’s a woman here too!’
What woman? Mahoney and I barged in through the side door. I saw thick smoke everywhere. The house reeked of the explosive, but also marijuana and greasy cooking smells. We made our way back to a bedroom off a small living room.
A naked man and a woman were spread-eagled on the bare wooden floor of the bedroom. The woman on the floor wasn’t Audrey Meek. She was heavy, at least forty or fifty pounds overweight. Rafe Farley looked to be close to three hundred pounds, and had hideous clumps of red hair not only on his head but all over his body.
An old poster for the movie Cool Hand Luke was taped over a kingsize bed that had no sheets or covers. Nothing else caught my eye.
Farley was screaming at us, his face deeply crimson. ‘I have rights! I have goddamn legal rights! You bastards are in real trouble.’
I had a feeling that he might be right, and that if this screaming man had kidnapped Mrs Meek – she was already dead, and he knew he had nothing to worry about.
‘You’re the one in trouble, fat boy!’ an HRT agent barked in the suspect’s face. ‘You too, girlfriend!’
Could this possibly be the couple who had taken Audrey Meek and Elizabeth Connelly?
I didn’t see how.
So who in hell were they?
Chapter Forty
Ned Mahoney and I were stuck in a close, dark, pigsty of a bedroom with the suspect, Rafe Farley. The woman, who assured us she was his girlfriend, had put on a filthy bathrobe and been taken into the kitchen to be grilled.
We were all angry about what had happened outside. Two agents had been wounded by a booby trap. Rafe Farley was the closest thing we had to a break in the case, or a suspect.
Things kept getting weirder. For starters, Farley spit at Mahoney and me until his mouth went dry. It was so strange and crazy that, at one point, Ned and I just looked at each other and started to laugh.
‘Think this is fucking funny?’ Farley rasped from the edge of the bed where he was lodged like a beached whale. We’d made him put on clothes, blue jeans and a work shirt, mostly because we couldn’t stand the sight of his flaccid rolls of fat, tattoos of naked women, and a purple dragon that was eating a child.
‘You’re going down on kidnap and murder charges,’ Mahoney snarled at him. ‘You injured two of my men. One might lose an eye.’
‘You had no right comin’ in my house, middle of the night! I have enemies!’ Farley yelled and spit at Mahoney again. ‘You barge in here, ‘cause I sell some weed? Or I screw a married broad who likes me more than she likes her old man?’
‘Are you talking about Audrey Meek?’ I asked.
Suddenly he went quiet. He stared at me, and his face and neck turned bright red. What was this? He wasn’t a good actor, and he wasn’t real smart either.
‘What the hell’re you talking about? You been smoking my shit?’ Farley stammered. ‘Audrey Meek? That chick they kidnapped?’
Mahoney leaned forward. ‘Audrey Meek. We know you know all about her, Farley. Where is she?’
Farley’s piggy eyes seemed to be getting smaller. ‘How the hell would I know where she is?’
Mahoney kept at him. ‘You ever been in a chat room called Favorite Things Four?’
Farley shook his head. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘We have you on tape, asshole,’ Ned said. ‘You got a lot of ’splaining to do, Lucy.’
Farley looked confused. ‘Who the hell is Lucy? What are you talking about, man? You mean, like, I Love Lucy?’
Mahoney was good at keeping Farley off guard. I thought we were working okay together.
‘You’ve got her in the woods somewhere in Jersey. We have it on tape,’ Mahoney yelled, then stamped his foot hard.
‘Did you hurt her? Is she all right? Where is Audrey Meek?’
I picked up.
‘Take us to her, Farley!
‘You’re going back to prison. This time, you don’t get out again,’ I shouted in his face.
It was as if Farley were finally waking up. He squinted his eyes and stared hard at us. Lord, he smelled, especially now that he was scared.
‘Wait a fucking minute. Now I get it. That Internet place? I was just showin’ off.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Farley slumped down into himself as if we’d been beating him. ‘Favorite Four is for freaks to talk. Everybody makes shit up, man.’
‘But you didn’t make up the stuff about Audrey Meek. You know things about her. You got it all right,’ I said.
‘The bitch turns me on. She’s a fox. Hell, I collect catalogs from Meek, always have. All those skinny-ass models look like they need a good, unh, unh, uh!’
‘You knew things about the abduction, Farley,’ I said.
‘I read the newspapers, watch CNN. Who doesn’t? I told you, Audrey Meek turns me on. I wish I’d abducted her. You think I’d be sleeping with Cini if Audrey Meek was around here?’
I jabbed an index finger at Farley. ‘You knew things that weren’t in the newspapers.’
He shook his huge head from side to side. Then he said, ‘Got a scanner. Listen in on police radios and such. Shit, I didn’t kidnap Audrey Meek. I wouldn’t have the balls. I wouldn’t. I’m all talk, man.’
Mahoney cut in. ‘You had the balls to rape Carly Hope,’ he said.
Farley seemed to be shrinking inside himself again. ‘Nah, nah. It’s like I said in court. Carly was a girlfriend. I didn’t rape her none. I don’t have the balls. I didn’t do nothing to Audrey Meek. I’m nobody. I’m nothing.’
Rafe Farley stared at us for a long moment. His eyes were bloodshot, everything about him was pathetic. I didn’t want to, but I was starting to believe him. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. That was Rafe Farley, all right.
Chapter Forty-One
Sterling.
Mr Potter.
The Art Director.
Sphinx.
Marvel.
The Wolf.
The cover names sounded harmless, but the men behind them weren’t. During one session, Potter had nicknamed the group Monsters Inc. as a joke, and that was an accurate description. They were monsters, all of them; they were freaks; they were deviates, and worse.