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 of marijuana and greasy cooking. We made our way back to a bedroom off a small living room.

A naked man and 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 king-size bed that had no sheets or covers. Nothing else caught my eye.

Farley was screaming at us, his face deep 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.

“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 Connolly?

I didn’t see how.

So who in hell were they?

Chapter 39

Chapter 39

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 questioned.

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 and his tattoos of naked women and a purple dragon 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 while I’m sleeping! 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?”