The Big Bad Wolf

I VISITED SAMPSON AND BILLIE one night and had a great time with them, talking about babies and scaring big, bad John Sampson as much as I could. I tried to talk to Jamilla at least once a day. But White Girl was starting to heat up, and I knew what that meant. I was probably about to get lost in the case. A married couple, Slava Vasilev and Zoya Petrov, had been found murdered in the house they rented on Long Island. We had learned that the husband and wife had come to the United States four years before. They were suspected of bringing Russian and other Eastern European women here for the purpose of prostitution, and also to bear children who would be sold to affluent couples. Agents from our New York office were all over the murder scene on Long Island. Photographs of the two victims had been shown to the high school students who'd seen the Connolly abduction and to Audrey Meek's children. They had identified the couple as the kidnappers. I wondered why the bodies had been left there. As examples? For whom? Monnie Donnelley and I regularly met at seven before I had to attend orientation classes for the day. We were analyzing the Long Island murders. Monnie pulled together everything she could find on the husband and wife, as well as other Russian criminals working in the U.S., the so-called Red Mafiya. She was hot-wired into the Organized Crime Section over at the Hoover Building and also the Red Mafiya squad in the Bureau's New York office. "I brought 'everything' bagels from D.C.," I said as I entered her cube at ten minutes past seven Monday. "Best in the city. According to Zagat, anyway. You don't seem too excited." "You're late," Monnie said, without looking up from her computer screen. She'd mastered the droll, deadpan delivery style favored by hackers. "These bagels are worth it," I said. "Trust me." "I don't trust anybody," Monnie replied. She finally glanced up at me and smiled. Nice smile, worth the wait. "You know that I'm kidding, right? It's just a tough-girl act, Alex. Give with the bagels." I laughed. "I'm used to cop humor." "Oh, I'm honored," she muttered, deadpan again, as she looked back at the glowing computer screen. "He thinks I'm a cop, not just a desk jockey. You know, they started me in fingerprinting. The absolute bottom." I liked Monnie, but I had the sense that she needed a lot of support. I knew she'd been divorced for about two years. She'd majored in criminology at Maryland for undergrad, where she had also pursued another interesting passion - studio arts. Monnie still took classes in drawing and painting, and, of course, there was the collage in her cube. She yawned. "Sorry. I watched Alias with the boys last night. That will be Grandma's problem when she has to get them up this morning." Monnie's home life was another thing we had in common. She was a single parent, with two young kids and a doting grandmother who lived less than a block away. The grandmother was her ex-husband's mother, which told the story of the marriage. Jack Donnelley had played basketball at Maryland, where he and Monnie met. He was a big drinker in college, and it got worse once he graduated. Monnie said he'd never recovered from being all-everything in high school and then just another guard for the Maryland Terrapins. Monnie was five-foot even, and joked that she hadn't played any kind of ball at Maryland. She told me her nickname in high school was Spaz. "I've been reading all about women being traded and sold from Tokyo to Riyadh," she said. "Breaks my heart and it pisses me off. Alex, we're talking some of the worst slavery in history. What's with you men?" I looked at her. "I don't buy and sell women, Monnie. Neither do any of my friends." "Sorry. I'm carrying around a little extra baggage because of Jack the Rat and a few other husbands I know." She looked at her computer screen. "Here's a choice quote for today. Know what the Thai premier said about the thousands of women from his country sold into prostitution? 'Thai girls are just so pretty.' And here's the premier on ten-year-old girls being sold: 'Come on, don't you like young girls, too?' I swear to God, he said that." I sat down next to Monnie and peered at her computer screen. "So now somebody's opened a lucrative market for suburban white women. Who? And where are they working out of? Europe? Asia? The U.S.?" "The murdered couple could be a break for us. Russians. What do you think?" she asked. "Could be a ring operating out of New York. Brighton Beach. Or maybe they're headquartered in Europe? The Russian mob is set up just about everywhere these days. It's not 'The Russians Are Coming' anymore. They're here." Monnie started to spit out information. "The Solntsevo gang is the largest crime syndicate in the world right now. Did you know that? They're big here too. Both coasts. The Red Mafiya has basically collapsed in their country. They smuggled close to a hundred billion out of Russia, and a lot of it came here. You know, we've got major task forces working in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, New York, D.C., Miami. The Reds bought banks in the Caribbean and Cyprus. Believe it or not, they've taken over prostitution, gambling, and money laundering in Israel. In Israel!" I finally got a few words in. "I spent a couple of hours last night reading the files from Anti-Slavery International. The Red Mafiya comes up there too." "I'll tell you one other thing." She looked at me. "That kid who was grabbed in Newport. I know it's a different pattern, I get it, but I do believe he's part of this. What do you think?" I nodded. So did I. And I also thought that Monnie had great street smarts for somebody who rarely left the office. So far, she was the best person I'd met at the Bureau, and here we were in her tiny cube trying to solve White Girl.