What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  Jennifer took another deep breath.

  Retreat to the bed, she told herself, and you will sit there terrified because you won’t know.

  This seemed to her a terrible choice. Uncertainty versus going back and touching whatever it was to try and determine what the dead thing might be.

  She twitched. Her hands shook. She could feel tremors up and down her spine and she was both hot and cold at the same instant, sweating yet chilled.

  Go back. Find out.

  Her lips and mouth were even drier, if that was possible. She knew her head was spinning with the choice presented to her.

  I am not brave. I’m just a kid.

  But she thought there was no more room left inside the hood for being a child.

  “Come on, Jennifer,” she whispered to herself. She knew everything was a nightmare. If she did not go back and find out what her toe had touched, the nightmare would just grow worse.

  She took a step. Then a second. She did not know how far she had recoiled. But now, instead of measuring, she took her left leg and pointed it outward, moving it back and forth like a ballet dancer or like a swimmer unsure about the temperature of the water.

  She was afraid of what she would find, afraid that it had disappeared. Something dead, something inanimate was far preferable to something alive.

  She was unable to tell how long it took her to locate the object with her toe. It might have been seconds. It could have been an hour.

  When her toe touched the object she fought off the urge to kick out.

  Steeling herself, she forced herself to kneel down. The cement scratched against her knees.

  She reached out toward the object with her hands.

  It was fur. It was solid. It was lifeless.

  She pulled her hands back. Whatever it was, it wasn’t an immediate threat. She had the urge to simply leave whatever it was where it was. But then something different, something surprising spoke to her, and she reached out once again, and this time she let her fingers linger on the surface of the object.

  Familiarity.

  She wrapped her hands around the shape and pulled it closer. It shifted in her hands and, as if reading Braille, she ran her fingers over it. A slight tear. A frayed edge.

  Recognition.

  She immediately knew what it was.

  She clutched the object tightly to her chest and moaned softly to herself, whispering: “Mister Brown Fur . . .”

  It was her teddy bear.

  Jennifer could not hold back. She sobbed uncontrollably and caressed the worn surface of the only item from her childhood that she had thought crucial to take with her on her escape from home.

  15

  Terri Collins told herself to remain professional. She reminded herself to stick to facts and not speculation. But she had nothing but doubts.

  Back in her office, she started with the truck that Adrian described. It defied the small town police logic that she’d developed over years and had just seemed too convenient for Scott, who was the type who wanted to see huge governmental conspiracies or demonic plots in all sorts of mundane events. She was surprised by the electronic reply from the Massachusetts State Police that a set of license plates beginning with the letters QE had been stolen from a sedan parked in the long-term lot at Logan International Airport nearly three weeks earlier.

  So when her computer screen beeped with the reply and she saw the single line of type, she scrunched forward, bending toward the information displayed in front of her, as if by moving closer she could determine its value.

  There had been a delay in reporting the theft, because the thief had taken the time and risk to attach a different set of plates to the businessman’s car. That second set had been stolen from a mall one hundred miles away in western Massachusetts a month earlier. The businessman probably would not have noticed that his plate was different—how often does a person look at his own license plate?—had he not been pulled over on a DUI. The duality of the paperwork—a theft reported in one part of the state, then found on a different vehicle being driven by an obnoxious, arrogant drunk who, in addition to a series of insults tossed at the trooper who pulled him over, hadn’t had any intelligible explanation for where his assigned plates might be—created a DMV bureaucratic knot of red tape.

  Two sets of stolen license plates were interesting. Someone was taking extra precautions.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s something.”

  Professor Thomas, she thought, had managed to get the numeral and the third letter wrong. The Quod Erat was correct but the Demonstrandum was a mistake, although she thought it pretty typical of a college professor with an Ivy League doctorate and a pristine reputation like his to automatically expect a D after a Q and an E. It went with all that education.

  Still, the similarity of two letters and the reported theft made her expand her computer inquiries. She went to databases for Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont searching for a recent white panel van theft. If whoever was involved in this random kidnapping had gone to the trouble of stealing two different sets of plates, she doubted the person would use anything other than a stolen vehicle.

  She found three: a brand-new van taken from a dealer’s lot in Boston, a twelve-year-old clunker stolen from a trailer park in New Hampshire, and a three-year-old panel van that fit Adrian’s description taken one week earlier from a rental lot in downtown Providence.

  This truck was interesting. A large fleet—twenty, maybe thirty, all with the same basic look and configuration—would be parked in rows in the back of a lot in some blighted urban area. Unless the person who jacked the truck left obvious signs of entry—a chain-link fence ripped aside or a lock sliced by a high-pressure bolt cutter—it might take the rental company twenty-four hours to do an inventory and realize one truck was missing. And, Terri thought, if the guys working the lot were less than competent it might take longer.

  None of the three missing vehicles had been recovered, which wasn’t surprising. There were a number of crimes that required a single use of a stolen truck: a quick break-in at an electronics store, a single load of marijuana being hauled up to Boston. She also knew that each of them was probably discarded as soon as the job was completed.

  She expanded her computer search.

  One entry got her immediate attention. The fire department in Devens, Massachusetts, had reported being called to the scene of an auto fire, where a vehicle of the same make and model as the truck taken in Providence had been torched behind a deserted mill. A confirmation was pending—the suspect vehicle had been completely gutted by the fire. It was not the sort of case that any cop placed a high priority on, so it would take some time for an insurance investigator to get to the local auto wreck depository near Devens, crawl all over the filthy charred remains until he found one of the etched serial numbers that had survived the fire, and then compare that to the missing vehicle so that his bosses would eventually cut a check to the rental company.

  All that would happen much faster, of course, if Terri contacted the state police and told them that the truck had been used in a felony kidnapping of a minor . . . if there was such a crime.

  She was still not persuaded but she was much closer to imagining that something unusual was taking place.

  Rising from her desk, she went over to a wall map. She traced her finger across distances. Providence, to the street where Jennifer disappeared, to an empty, forgotten part of Devens. A triangle encompassing many miles but many roads that carved through rural sections of the state. If someone had wanted to travel anonymously a more isolated route could hardly have been chosen.

  She went back to her computer and punched a few keys. She wanted to check one other detail: the date of the fire department call.

  She stared at her computer screen. She felt a hollow sensation inside her stoma
ch, as if she hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, and had just run a great distance.

  The fire department had responded to an anonymous 911 call shortly after midnight, making it the day after Jennifer disappeared. But when they arrived a vehicle was found that had already burned to a blackened hull. Whoever set the fire had done so much earlier.

  She tried to do some calculations in her head. A phone call comes in to a central dispatcher. The dispatcher hits an alarm that sounds in the bedrooms of the volunteers in the fire crew. They drive to the station, change into their gear, and then drive to the scene of the fire. How long did all that take?

  Terri internally posed rapid-fire questions. That was how she worked: she would try to see each bit of evidence from two perspectives—hers as a detective, and that of some anonymous criminal. She thought it important to be able to place herself into the bad guy’s mind-set because, when she managed that, answers came to her. So she demanded: Did someone know about that delay? Is that why they chose that particular spot to torch the truck? Maybe. If I wanted to get rid of a vehicle after a single use I wouldn’t pick a place where firemen might arrive before the flames had done their job.

  Terri noted on the incident report that the fire lieutenant had drawn attention to undetermined accelerants.

  No hair, fingerprint, fiber, DNA would be left in that truck, she thought.

  Terri got up from thecomputer and walked across the cramped office to the battered, stained coffee machine that was a necessity in any police detective’s office. She poured herself a cup of black coffee, then sipped at the bitter taste. Ordinarily she liked two sugars and more than a dollop of cream, but this day sweetness seemed the wrong taste to put in her mouth.

  After a moment she returned to her desk. Her satchel was hung over the back of her chair. She reached inside and removed a small leather case and flipped this open. Inside, encased in plastic sleeves, were half a dozen pictures of her two children. She stared at each photo, taking the time to reconstruct the circumstances of each picture. This one was a birthday party. This one was when we went to Acadia on a camping holiday. This one was the first snow two winters ago.

  Sometimes it helped when she reminded herself why she was a policewoman.

  She picked up the picture on the police flyer she’d had made up for Jennifer. She knew it was a mistake to emotionally join things. One of the first lessons anyone learned as they worked up the police ranks was that home was home and work was work, and when the two collided nothing good happened, because decisions should be made coldly and calmly.

  She looked at Jennifer’s picture. She remembered talking with the teenager after the second runaway attempt. It had been fruitless because, as troubled as the young girl had been, she was clever and determined and most of all tough. Growing up in a town filled with the pretentious, the eccentric, and the precious, Jennifer had been hard-edged.

  And not fake and laughable tough, with teenage posturing and I want a tattoo and aren’t I cool because I called my English teacher an obscene name to her face and I’m smoking cigarettes behind my parents’ backs tough. The detective had imagined that Jennifer was a lot like she was at the same age. And Jennifer had been responding to some of the same emotions that had saved Terri’s life when she had run from an abusive man. It was as if she could see herself in the younger woman.

  Terri sighed deeply. You should walk away from this right now, she told herself. Give the case to another cop and get away, because you won’t see things clearly.

  This was wrong and right at the same time. In some not fully formed way she had come to think that Jennifer was her responsibility.

  Filled with warring notions of what she should do, she typed a quick e-mail memo to her boss, with a copy to her shift supervisor. Some evidence being developed that this is not a routine runaway. Needs additional investigation. Possible abduction situation. Will update with details as I collect more information. Later assessment warranted.

  She signed her name to the e-mail and was about to send it, then thought better. She didn’t want to alarm the chief, at least not yet. She was also concerned about any information leaking out to the local press, because the next thing she knew every television station, reporter, and crime blog fanatic would be parked outside the station, demanding interviews and updates and pretty much preventing them from accomplishing anything important, including recovering Jennifer.

  If there was any chance.

  This made her pause. She thought about all the milk cartons, websites for abducted and missing children, television reports, and newspaper headlines and believed that none of it does any good.

  Terri took a deep breath. Not usually. But sometimes . . . She stopped herself. It did no good to fall into speculation one way or the other until she knew for certain what she was up against.

  She removed the line Possible abduction situation from the e-mail.

  She knew she had to find something concrete. She knew what the first question from her boss would be: How can you be sure?

  There was a lot more to do at the computer. She needed to take the few details she had and run them against other crimes, looking for similarities. She had to do a thorough check of all known sex offenders within the triangle she had identified. She needed to see if there were any reports of unidentified sexual predators working in the area. Were there any false alarms? Had any parents called any of the local forces complaining about this man or that man cruising the neighborhood suspiciously? Terri knew she had lots of research that needed to be handled quickly and efficiently.

  If Jennifer was kidnapped, the clock was running. If there even was a clock. Maybe it was just one prolonged rape and then murder. That was what usually happened. Gone, used up, and then dead.

  She tried not to think about that.

  Terri paused. There had been two people in that truck. That’s what the old man said he saw. This simply made no sense to her. Predators worked alone, trying to create as much darkness and fog around their desires as they could.

  She fidgeted slightly in her seat. Maybe in eastern Europe or Latin America there were kidnappings that were organized parts of the international sex trade, but not in the United States and certainly not in small New England college towns.

  Where did that leave her? She did not know.

  Terri considered Mary Riggins and Scott West and knew they wouldn’t be any help. Scott was likely to complicate matters with opinions and demands, even more than he already had. Mary was likely to panic further as soon as she heard the word predator.

  There was only one other direction she could go.

  She did not know what was wrong with Adrian Thomas. He seemed a little like a flickering light. She pictured the way he had seemed distracted, curiously displaced, disconnected to the room he’d been in and the story he was telling her, as if he were somewhere else, in some parallel location. Something was definitely not right, she thought. Maybe he’s just old and that is what it will look like for all of us someday.

  This was a charitable thought that she didn’t actually believe. At that moment, however, his was the only logical direction in which to turn.

  16

  He thought, They were truly terrible.

  Of course, the word terrible hardly captured what they had actually done. The word was antiseptic.

  Adrian stared at pictures of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady that adorned the jacket of The Encyclopedia of Modern Murder that his friend the ab psych professor had loaned him. He was both fascinated and frightened. The book contained so many horrific details that they became petty, almost routine, because they were bunched together in relentless volume. This victim was killed with a hatchet. This victim’s screams were tape-recorded. They took pornographic pictures. This child was abandoned in a shallow grave out on the Moors. Reading the journalistic descriptions was like walking through a battlefield. If you see on
e dead body, it’s awful and compelling and hard to tear one’s eyes away. If you see a hundred they start to mean nothing.

  Adrian let the pages rustle together like dry leaves tumbling in a fall breeze as he opened to the entry that described The Moors Murders.

  Like any good scientist Adrian had immersed himself in his subject, trying to learn as much as he could in a short amount of time. There is a processing that teachers develop over the years, where controversial, even repellant, material leaps into their minds in a way that is accessible so that it can be re-formed and presented to students. He was pleased that his ability to absorb much in a short amount of time had not yet slunk away, as had so many of his other intellectual capabilities.

  Adrian had entered into a realm where, after spending much of a night and the following morning surrounded by books and making computer inquiries, he knew he could speak intelligently about the curious connections between male-female criminal partnerships. What will love make you do? he asked himself. Wonderful things? Or awful things?

  At the same time he hoped no one would come along and ask him to add six and nine together or question him about the day of the week, week of the month, or month of the year, or even what year it was, because he doubted he could answer correctly, even if he got an invisible and subtle assist from someone he once loved who was now dead. Ghosts, Adrian thought, were helpful—but only to a point. He was still unsure how practical the information they shared might be.

  He was smart enough to know that every hallucination stemmed from memory about what Cassie or Brian might once have said, or what they might now say, were they alive to say it. He understood that all these things that seemed real were in fact a chemical imbalance in his frontal lobes, a short circuiting and fraying, but still it seemed to be helping somehow, which was all that he asked for.

  A voice interrupted his reverie.

  “What does it say?”

  Adrian looked across his office and saw Cassie standing in the doorway. She looked pale, old, beaten. There was sadness behind her eyes, a look he remembered from the days before her accident, when she was distracted by grief. Gone was the sexy, slender, seductive Cassie from their first years together. This was the tired and sick woman who desperately needed death to come to her. Seeing her this way made Adrian catch his breath and reach out, wanting to find some way of comforting her, when he knew that not once in their final months together had he ever been able to do that.