The Big Bad Wolf

I WAS MARKING TIME at Quantico and I didn't like it much. I attended my classes the next day, then an hour of fitness training. At five, I went to see what Monnie Donnelley had collected so far on White Girl. She had a small, cramped cubicle on the third floor of the dining hall building. On one wall was a collage of photos and photocopies of bits of evidence from brutally violent crimes arranged in an eyecatching cubist's fantasy. I rapped my knuckles against her metal nameplate before entering the cube. Monnie turned and smiled when she saw me standing there. I noticed glossy photos of her sons, a funny portrait of Monnie and the sons, and also a picture of Pierce Brosnan as a debonair, sexy James Bond. "Hey, look who's back for more punishment. You can tell by the size of my digs that the Bureau doesn't realize yet that this is the Information Age, what Bill Clinton used to call the Third Way. You know the joke - the Bureau supports yesterday's technology tomorrow." "Any information for me?" Monnie swiveled back to her computer, an IBM. "Let me print up a few of these choice pieces for your burgeoning collection. I know you like hard copies. Dinosaur." "It's just the way I work." I had asked around about Monnie and heard the same thing everywhere: She was bright, an incredibly hard worker, woefully underappreciated by the powers at Quantico. I'd also found out that Monnie was a single mother of two and struggling to make ends meet. The only "complaint" against her was that she worked too hard, brought stuff home just about every night and weekend. Monnie shuffled together a thick batch of pages for me. I could tell she was obsessive by the way she evened out all the pages. They had to be just so. "Anything pop out at you?" I asked. She shrugged. "I'm just a researcher, right? More corroboration. Upscale white women who've been reported missing in the last year or so. The numbers are out of whack, way too high. A lot of them are attractive blondes. Blondes do not have more fun in these instances. No particular regional skew, which I want to look into more. Geographic profiling? Sometimes it can pinpoint the exact locus of criminal activity." "No obvious regional differences so far. That's too bad. Anything in terms of the victims' appearances? Any patterns at all?" Monnie clucked her tongue, shook her head. "Nothing sticks out. There are women missing in New England, the South, out West. I'll check into it more. The women are described as very attractive, for the most part. And none of them have been found. They go missing, they stay missing." She looked at me for a few uncomfortable seconds. There was sadness in her eyes. I sensed that she wanted out of this cubicle. I reached down for the pages. "We're trying. I made a promise to the Connolly family." There was a flicker of humor in her light green eyes. "You keep your promises?" "Try," I said. "Thanks for the pages. Don't work too hard. Go home and see your kids." "You too, Alex. See your kids. You're working too hard already."