Then Pollack looked right at me. ‘A reporter at the Washington Post denies it, but why wouldn’t he? The leaks come from a Crime Analyst named Monnie Donnelley. You’re working with her, aren’t you, Dr Cross?’
Suddenly the SIOC Suite room seemed very small and constricting. Everyone had turned toward me.
‘Is this why I’m here?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Pollack. ‘You’re here because you’re experienced with sexual-obsession cases. You’ve been involved with more of them than anyone else in the room. But that wasn’t my question.’
I thought carefully before I answered. ‘This isn’t a sexual-obsession case,’ I told Pollack. ‘And Monnie Donnelley isn’t the leak.’
‘I’d like you to explain both of those statements,’ Pollack challenged me immediately. ‘Please, go ahead. I’m listening with great interest.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘The abductors, the group or ring behind the kidnappings, are in this for the money. I don’t see any other explanation for their actions. The slain Russian couple on Long Island are a key. I don’t think we should be looking at past sex offenders as our focus. The question should be, who has the resources and expertise to abduct men and women for a price, and probably a very large price? Who has experience in this area? Monnie Donnelley knows that and she’s an excellent analyst. She’s not the leak to the Post. What would she have to gain?’
Stacy Pollack looked down and shuffled some of her papers. She didn’t comment on anything I’d said. ‘Let’s move on,’ she said.
The meeting resumed without any further discussion of Monnie and the charges against her. Instead, there was a lengthy discussion of the Red Mafiya, including new information that the couple murdered on Long Island definitely had connections to Russian gangsters. There were also rumors of a possible mob war about to break out on the East Coast, involving the Italians and Russians.
After the larger meeting, we broke off into smaller groups. A few agents took workstations. Stacy Pollack pulled me aside.
‘Listen, I wasn’t accusing you of anything,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t suggesting that you’re involved in the leaks, Alex.’
‘So who accused Monnie?’ I asked.
She seemed surprised by the question. ‘I won’t tell you that. Nothing is official yet.’
‘What do you mean, “nothing is official yet”?’ I asked.
‘No action has been taken against Ms Donnelley. We will probably pull her off this investigation, though. That’s all I have to say on the subject for now. You can go back to Quantico now.’ I guess I’d been dismissed.
Chapter Sixty-One
I called Monnie as soon as I could, and told her what had happened. She got furious – as she should. But then Monnie took hold of herself. ‘All right, so now you know – I’m not as controlled as I look,’ she said. ‘Well, fuck them. I didn’t leak anything to the Washington press, Alex. That’s absurd. Who would I tell – our paperboy?’
‘I know you didn’t,’ I said. ‘Listen, I have to stop at Quantico, then how about I take you and your boys for a quick meal tonight. Cheap,’ I added and she managed to sniffle out a laugh.
‘All right. I know a place. It’s called the Command Post Pub. We’ll meet you. The boys like it there a lot. You’ll see why.’
Monnie told me how to get to the pub, which was close to Quantico on Potomac Avenue. After I made a stop at my temporary office at Club Fed, I drove over to meet her and her two boys. Matt and Will were just eleven and twelve. They were big dogs, though, like their father. Both were already close to six feet.
‘Mom says you’re okay,’ said Matt as he shook hands with me.
‘She said the same about you and Will,’ I told him. Everybody laughed at the table. Then we ordered guilty pleasures – burgers, chicken wings, cheese fries, which Monnie figured she deserved after her ordeal. Her sons were well mannered and easy to be with, and that told me a lot about Monnie.
The pub was an interesting choice. It was cluttered with Marine Corps memorabilia including officers’ flags, photos, and a couple of tables with machine-gun rounds in them. Monnie said that Tom Clancy had mentioned the bar in Patriot Games, but in the novel he said there was a picture of George Patton on the wall, which upset everybody at the bar, especially since Clancy had made a career out of being in the know. The Command Post was a Marines bar, not Army.
When we were leaving, Monnie took me aside. A few Marines were going in and out. They gawked a little at us. ‘Thank you, thank you, Alex. This means a lot to me,’ she said. ‘I know denials don’t mean a damn thing, but I did not leak information to the Washington Post. Or to Rush Limbaugh. Or O’Reilly either. Or anyone fucking else. Never happened, never will. I’m true blue to the end, which apparently could be near.’
‘That’s what I told them at the Hoover Building,’ I said. ‘The true blue part.’
Monnie rose on her toes and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I owe you big time, mister. You should also know, you’re impressing the hell out of me. Even Matt and Will seemed neutral to positive, and you’re one of the enemy to them – grown-ups.’
‘Keep working the case,’ I told her. ‘You have exactly the right attitude.’
Monnie looked puzzled, but then she got it. ‘Oh yeah, I do, don’t I. Fuck them.’
‘It’s the Russians,’ I said before I left her at the door of the Command Post. ‘It has to be. We’ve got that much right.’
Chapter Sixty-Two
Two people very much in love. Often a beautiful thing to watch. But not in this case, not on this starry night in the hills of central Massachusetts.
The devoted lovers’ names were Vince Petrillo and Francis Deegan, and they were juniors at Holy Cross College in Worcester, where they had been inseparable since their first week as freshmen. They’d met in the Mulledy Dorm on Easy Street and had rarely been apart since. They’d even worked at the same fish restaurant the past two summers in Provincetown. When they graduated, they planned to be married, then do the grand tour through Europe.
Holy Cross is a Jesuit school which, justly or unjustly, has some reputation for being homophobic. Offending students can be suspended or even expelled under the Breach of Peace rule, which forbids ‘conduct which is lewd or indecent’. The Catholic Church does not actually condemn ‘temptation’ toward members of the same sex, but homosexual acts are often considered ‘intrinsically perverted’ and constitute a ‘grave moral disorder’. Because the Jesuits could be hard on homosexual relationships, among the students anyway, Vince and Francis kept theirs as private and secret as they could. In recent months, though, they figured their relationship probably wasn’t a very big deal, especially given the other scandals among the Catholic clergy.
The Campus Arboretum at Holy Cross had long been a hangout for students who wanted to be alone, and who sometimes had romantic intentions. The garden area boasted over a hundred different kinds of trees and shrubs, and overlooked downtown Worcester, ‘Wormtown,’ as it was sometimes called by students.
That night Vince and Francis, dressed in athletic shorts, T-shirts, and matching royal-purple-and-white baseball caps, strolled down Easy Street to a brick patio and lawn area known as Wheeler Beach. It was crowded, so they continued on to find a quiet spot in the Arboretum.