The Big Bad Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page B

one of my weaknesses was to look for the good in people. I understood it was a weakness sometimes, but I wouldn’t change, or maybe I couldn’t change.
    “Are you a good guy?” I asked him.
    “Of course I am,” Burns said with a wholesome grin that could have landed him a starring role on
The West Wing.
“You can trust me, Alex. Always. Absolutely. Just like you trusted Kyle Craig a few years back.”
    Jesus, he was giving me the shivers. Or maybe the director was just trying to get me to see the world his way:
Trust no one. Go to the head of the class.

Chapter 12
    AT A LITTLE PAST ELEVEN, I was on my way down to Quantico. Even after my “final” in Baltimore, I still had a class on “Stress Management and Law Enforcement.” I already knew the operative statistic:
FBI agents were five times more likely to kill themselves than to be killed in the line of duty.
    A Billy Collins poem was floating through my brain as I drove: “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House.” Nice concept, good poem, bad omen.
    The cell rang and I heard the voice of Tony Woods from the director’s office. There had been a change of plans. Woods gave me orders from the director to go straight to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. A plane was waiting for me.
    Jesus! I was on another case already; I’d been ordered to skip school again. Things were happening faster than even I had expected, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
    “Does Senior Agent Nooney know that I’m the director’s one-man flying squad?” I asked Woods.
Tell me that he does. I don’t need more trouble down at Quantico.
    “We’ll let him know posthaste where you’re going,” Woods promised. “I’ll take care of it personally. Go to Atlanta, and keep us posted on what you find down there. You’ll be briefed on the plane. It’s a kidnapping case.” But that was all Tony Woods would tell me on the phone.
    For the most part, the Bureau flies out of Reagan Washington National. I boarded a Cessna Citation Ultra, tan, with no identifying markings. The Cessna sat eight, but I was the only passenger.
    “You must be important,” the pilot said before we took off.
    “I’m not important. Believe me, I’m nobody.”
    The pilot just laughed. “Buckle up, then, nobody.”
    It was perfectly clear that a call from the director’s office had preceded me. Here I was, being treated like a senior agent. The director’s troubleshooter?
    Another agent jumped aboard just before we took off. He sat down across the aisle from me and introduced himself as Wyatt Walsh, from D.C. Was he part of the director’s “flying team” too? Maybe my partner?
    “What happened in Atlanta?” I asked. “What’s so important, or unimportant, that it requires our services?”
    “Nobody told you?” He seemed surprised that I didn’t know the details.
    “I got a call from the director’s office less than half an hour ago. I was told to come here. They said I’d be briefed on the plane.”
    Walsh slapped two volumes of case notes on my lap. “There’s been a kidnapping in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. Woman in her thirties. White woman, well-to-do. She’s the wife of a judge, which makes it federal. More important,
she isn’t the first.
”

Chapter 13
    EVERYTHING WAS SUDDENLY in a hurry-up mode. After we landed I was driven in a van to the Phipps Plaza shopping center in Buckhead.
    As we pulled into the lot off Peachtree, it was obvious to me that something was very wrong there. We passed the anchor stores: Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor. They were nearly empty. Agent Walsh told me that the victim, Mrs. Elizabeth Connolly, had been abducted in the underground parking lot near another large store called Parisian.
    The entire parking area was a crime scene, but particularly Level 3, where Mrs. Connolly had been grabbed. Each level of the garage was marked with a purple-and-gold scroll design, but now crime-scene tape was draped over