What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  “So it is not unreasonable to imagine that one of those less than successful cases might possibly hold some sort of grudge?”

  She phrased the statement as a question, and then eyed Scott cautiously as he responded.

  “It is unreasonable, detective.” He sounded very formal. “To imagine that one of my patients would concoct an elaborate scheme of revenge . . . no. Impossible. I would be aware of that much resentment.”

  Sure, Terri thought. She had to remind herself not to let her own opinions about Scott color her judgment. Nor should she let what she had gleaned from Jennifer’s computer influence the questioning. But inwardly she looked forward to asking those questions on some later day.

  “Still, I might need a list of names from you at some point.”

  Scott made a small dismissive wave. He might have been agreeing or disagreeing. Either was possible. Or neither. Terri did not expect him to comply.

  She turned back to Mary Riggins.

  “Now, family . . . how about your late husband’s relatives?”

  Mary looked confused. “Well, my relationships with them haven’t been great but . . .”

  “Has Jennifer been a source of conflict with them?”

  “Yes. Her grandparents complain that I don’t bring her to see them nearly enough. They say she’s the only part of their son left to them. And I’ve never gotten along with her two aunts. I don’t know, but it seems like they have always blamed me for his death. But this hasn’t escalated to the degree . . .”

  Terri noted that Mary Riggins did not use her late husband’s name. David. It was a small detail but one that struck her as odd. She took a deep breath and continued.

  “I might want those names and some addresses as well.”

  Terri hesitated then. She was looking for the foundations of a felony, and so far she had heard a few things that made her think there might be something hidden in the family that might create a framework for Jennifer’s disappearance—but not enough. She asked, “And ransom? I presume you’ve had no contact from anyone seeking money?”

  Mary Riggins shook her head.

  “We don’t have much. I mean, those cases, those would be businessmen’s sons or daughters. Or a politicians’. Or someone with access to real cash, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  Terri could hear some exhaustion in her voice. She thought this was unprofessional.

  “Sex offenders,” Scott repeated, angrily. “How many live nearby?”

  “Some. I will obtain a list. You know the chances that Jennifer was simply snatched from the side of the road by some unknown criminal—a serial killer or a rapist—are infinitesimally small? These random acts are really the stuff of movies and television . . .”

  “But they do happen,” Scott interjected.

  “They do happen.”

  “Even around here,” he continued.

  “Yes. Even around here,” Terri replied.

  Scott had a smug look on his face. There was a lot, Terri thought, to dislike about him. She wondered how anyone could imagine he could help them.

  “Students must go missing from the college and the university,” he persisted.

  “Yes. These are kids with drinking, drug, boyfriend, or emotional problems. Invariably—”

  “What about that girl, the one from the next town . . . whose body was found in the woods six years after she disappeared.”

  “I’m familiar with that case. And the registered sex offender who was eventually arrested two states away and who confessed to her murder. I do not believe we’ve ever had a crime like that in our jurisdiction—”

  “Not that you know of,” Scott interrupted again.

  “Yes. Not that we know of.”

  “But detective. Listen to what Professor Thomas says,” Mary broke in.

  Terri turned back to the old man. He was looking off into space, as if he were someplace else. It seemed to her that there was a gray fog behind his eyes, a smoky substance that she couldn’t readily identify. It worried her.

  “Tell me again what you saw,” she said. “Don’t leave anything out.”

  Adrian told her about the determined look on Jennifer’s face. He told about the van that had appeared out of nowhere and slowed, shadowing her steps. He described as best he could the woman behind the wheel and the man who disappeared from view. He told about the brief pause, and then the tire-squealing departure. He mentioned the license plate letters he ­spotted. And finally he told about the pink cap left on the side of the street that had brought him to the street where Jennifer lived, to her house and finally to the living room. He tried fiercely to keep everything clipped and orderly, to make it sound straightforward and official. He did not utter any of the conclusions that the ghosts of either his wife or his brother had insisted he make; he left those to the detective.

  The more he spoke, the more he saw the mother gaining in despair, the more he imagined the boyfriend was becoming enraged.

  The policewoman, on the other hand, seemed to grow calmer with each added detail. Adrian imagined that she was like the professional poker players that he occasionally saw on television: whatever she was actually thinking was cleverly concealed.

  When he paused, he saw her dip her head and review the notes she had taken. In that moment he heard a whispered voice.

  “I don’t think you convinced her,” Brian said.

  Adrian did not at first turn to the sound. He kept his eyes on the detective.

  “She’s thinking it over, that’s good. But she just doesn’t believe. Not yet,” Brian continued. He sounded forceful and confident.

  Adrian stole a quick glance to the side.

  His brother was seated on the couch next to him. The young Vietnam grunt Brian had disappeared, replaced by the mature persona of the New York corporate lawyer that he’d become. His sandy hair had thinned a little, and there were streaks of gray—a distinguished color—touching the locks that flowed over his ears and shirt collar. Brian had always worn his hair long, not ponytail ex-hippie long but an antiestablishment unkempt. He wore an expensive blue pinstriped suit and a custom-tailored shirt, although his tie was loosened around his neck. Brian leaned back and crossed his legs.

  “Nope. I’ve just seen that lookaway look too many times. Usually it’s when your client wants to start lying to you but feels a little guilty about it first. What she’s thinking right now is that what she thought all this was—you know, a teenage runaway—might be something bigger. But she’s really not sure, not at all, and she wants to make sure that she does the right thing here, because a mistake could cost her that next pay bump.”

  Brian spoke in musical tones, almost as if his assessment of Detective Collins were one of the poems Adrian loved so much.

  “You know, Audie,” he continued, “this is going to be complicated.”

  “What should I do next?” Adrian whispered. He told himself not to turn his head, but he did, just slightly, because he wanted to see his brother’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” Terri said, looking up and just catching the sideways glance at its very end.

  “Nothing,” Adrian replied. “Just thinking out loud.”

  The detective continued to eye him, to the point where he became uncomfortable. Neither the mother nor her therapist boyfriend had noticed the small exchange. They were too locked up in their own nightmare to engage in his.

  “She’s sharp,” Brian said, a little admiration creeping into his voice. “I think she knows what she’s doing, except she doesn’t know what it is she’s got to do. Not yet. You’ve got to explain it to her, Audie. The mother and the slimy boyfriend—they don’t matter. Not a bit. But this detective, she does. Keep that in mind.”

  Adrian nodded, but he had no idea what to say, other than telling her exactly what he had seen an
d letting her reach her own conclusions.

  “Now she’s going to ask you a couple of detailed questions,” Brian whispered in his ear. “She needs more information to take to her boss. And she’s feeling you out. She wants to know just how damn credible a witness you are.”

  “Professor Thomas,” Terri asked abruptly. “Or do you prefer Doctor . . .”

  “Either is fine.”

  “You have a doctorate in psychology, right?”

  “Yes, but I’m not a therapist like Doctor West. I was a rats in mazes type. A laboratory geek.”

  She smiled, as if the word defused some tension in the room, which it did not. “Of course. Now, I just want to get a couple of things clear. You never saw Jennifer actually getting forced against her will into the truck, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You never saw anyone grab her or strike her or any other action that you thought was violent?”

  “No. Just she was there. Then she was gone. From where I was seated, I could not see exactly what happened to her.”

  “Did you hear a scream? Or maybe hear sounds of a scuffle?”

  “I’m sorry, but no.”

  “So if she got into that truck, it might have been of her own volition?”

  “It didn’t seem that way, detective.”

  “And you don’t believe you could recognize the driver or the passenger again?”

  “I don’t know. I only saw them in profile. And even then it was just for a few seconds. It was gloomy. Nearly dark.”

  “No, Audie, that’s not right. You saw enough. I think you’ll be able to recognize them when you find them.”

  Adrian half turned to argue with his brother, but then he stopped, hoping the detective didn’t notice the way he’d shifted about.

  Terri Collins nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “This has been really helpful. I will get back to you after I do a little more work.”

  “She’s good,” Brian said. He was leaning forward, almost touching Adrian’s shoulder, and he sounded excited. “She’s really good. But she is still blowing you off, Audie.”

  Before Adrian could say anything, Scott broke in. “What will be your next step, detective?”

  He spoke with the sort of no-nonsense we expect to see results tone that Adrian imagined people usually paid money to hear from him.

  “Let me see if I can find out anything about the suspect vehicle that Professor Thomas has described. That is something concrete I can work on. I will also check state and federal crime databases for similar types of abductions. In the meantime, please be alert to anyone contacting you.”

  “Don’t you want to call in the FBI? Don’t you want to set up a phone trap on our lines?”

  “That’s a little premature. But I will go back to headquarters and discuss precisely that with my chief.”

  “I think Mary and I should be there,” Scott huffed.

  “If you like.”

  “Have you ever worked on a kidnap case before, detective?”

  Terri hesitated. She was not going to answer that question truthfully, which would have been, No. That would only make things worse, which in a cop’s book of procedures was a large mistake.

  “I think I should go with you, detective, and see how the chief reacts.” He turned to Mary. “And you should stay here. Monitor the phones. Make sure you’re alert for anything out of the ordinary.”

  Mary simply sobbed in response but it was a sound of agreement.

  Adrian realized that in their minds—Scott’s and the detective’s—his own role had just ended. He heard Brian shifting position beside him.

  “I told you so,” he said quietly. “The asshole boyfriend thinks you’re just an old fool who accidentally saw something important and the cop thinks now she’s heard everything you have to tell her. Typical.”

  “What should I do?” Adrian asked. He was unsure, as before, whether this had been spoken out loud or he had merely thought it.

  “Nothing. And everything,” his dead brother said. “It’s not like it’s only up to you, Audie. But it sort of is. But don’t worry. I have some ideas.”

  Adrian nodded in response. He looked around for his jacket. He was sure he’d left it on the couch, or maybe draped over the back of a chair, removing it when he’d entered the house. His head swiveled about and then he realized he was still wearing it. He smiled, but one other person in the room had noticed his awkward forgetfulness.

  13

  Adrian had spent much of his academic life studying fear. It was a far more complicated subject than he had expected when he first launched into his graduate work. He was drawn to the topic nearly fifty years earlier when he’d been on a very rough flight home from his first college semester. Instead of being frightened, he’d been fascinated watching the reactions of the other passengers as the airplane shook and careened about the black thunderstorm-laden sky, so fascinated that he’d forgotten his own anxiety. Prayers. Screams. White knuckles and sobbing. On one stomach-­churning drop when the engine pitch had threatened to drown out all the cries, he had looked around and imagined himself to be the only observant rat caught in a terrifying maze.

  As a professor he had run countless experiments in laboratory settings, trying to identify perceptivity factors that stimulated predictable brain responses. Visual tests. Auditory tests. Tactile tests. Some of his university funding had come from government grants—thinly concealed military financing, because the armed forces were always interested in finding ways to train fear out of soldiers. So Adrian had spent his teaching years bouncing between classrooms, lectures, and late nights in a laboratory surrounded by assistants as he prepared his clinical studies. It had all been rewarding, except that when he’d reached retirement he had understood that he knew both very much and very little about his subject. He understood how and why a snake, say, brought about rapid breathing, increased pulse, sweat, tunnel vision, and near panic in some subjects. He had run systematic desensitization studies introducing National Geographic pictures of snakes, furry toy snakes, and finally real snakes to subjects—invariably undergraduate psychology majors—measuring how familiarity diminished fear. He had also done what were called flooding studies, where subjects were abruptly confronted with large numbers of the feared object, sort of like when Indiana Jones found himself in the underground snake pit in the first of the series of Spielberg movies. Adrian had disliked these sorts of tests. Too much sweat and screaming. He preferred the slower pace of examination.

  His brother had often playfully scoffed at Adrian’s work. “What I learned in the war,” Brian once told him, “is that fear is the very best thing we have going for us. It keeps us safe when we need it, gives us a way of seeing the world that even if skewed a little errs on the side of caution, which, as a general rule, brother, keeps your ass out of trouble and alive for another day.”

  Brian liked to swirl ice cubes with his finger in his whiskey glass, letting the clinking noise punctuate his words. “When you think you should be scared of something, well, you damn well should be, because it makes whatever you do next make sense.”

  Adrian remembered this as he walked across his old campus. He smiled, thinking how much he missed his brother’s way of speaking. One minute Brian would sound like a tweedy philosopher from Oxford, the next a rough-edged, obscenity-driven street tough. The law had been a good profession for him. He could have been an actor, except that Brian had hated taking orders, and the first time some pretentious director tried to tell him what to do, he would have walked off the stage. But he was clever at adopting whatever role was necessary for the legal case he had taken on. His brother had split his time between high-paying corporate clients and pro bono work for the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center. These had been death penalty cases in rural districts, where criminal defendants—more than a few of whom had been unjustly ac
cused—had little chance of avoiding the electric chair until Brian had arrived.

  Brian, he thought, had the ability to make anyone think that he was like they were.

  Adrian shook his head. Maybe that chameleon quality wasn’t so great, because one morning his brother, whom he had believed the strongest man alive, had placed the 9mm to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  He didn’t leave a note. That was wrong, Adrian thought. He should have explained himself.

  Adrian understood, as a psychologist, that his life had been dedicated to unraveling mysteries. Why are we afraid? Why do we behave like we do? What makes us feel what we feel? Where does fear come from?

  And yet, now, with his rational time dwindling, he thought he had no answers to all the big questions in his life and he had a disease that was making finding answers harder and harder.

  Adrian continued along. There is a pace on the walkways of a university campus that he could always read like words in a book. There was the I’m late for class quickstep and the I’ve handed in my assignments and finished up slow march.

  This day, he was moving slowly, deliberately. Age, in part, dictated his speed. But also he was sorting through memories as he tried to plan his next move.

  “Brian?” he blurted out loud. “I think I need your help here.”

  A pair of undergraduate girls smiled in his direction before returning to their cell phones. They walked together, side by side, companions, but conversed with unseen friends.

  He decided, Not that different from me. Except the person on the other end of his conversation was dead.

  There was a story his brother occasionally told after a few drinks, when lights were low and there were only a few people listening, because it was a story he’d shared only with those who loved him, about being on patrol in the A Shau Valley.

  “We were just two klicks away from the base. Last bit of marching at the end of a long, boring day. Hot, thirsty, goddamn tired.”

  Adrian looked around. He expected to see Brian beside him because the voice echoing in his ear, repeating a story told many times before, seemed to be booming from only inches away. But Brian was nowhere to be seen.