What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  “I will place a tray on your lap. When I give permission, you may eat.”

  She saw Number 4 nod.

  Linda stepped to the side of the bed and lowered the tray. She stayed in position, waiting. She could see that Number 4 had started to shake and that her muscles were knotting in spasms. That must be painful, she thought. But Number 4 managed to remain tight-lipped and, other than the involuntary motions caused by fear, followed each command.

  “All right,” Linda said. “You may eat.”

  She made sure that she wasn’t blocking any of the cameras. She knew that the clientele would be fascinated by the simple act of feeding Number 4. It was why their webcasts were so popular: they had taken the simplest, most routine parts of life and made them special. If every meal might be Number 4’s last it took on a whole new meaning. The viewers understood this and it drew them inexorably closer. With so much uncertainty surrounding the fate of Number 4, the most ordinary things became compelling.

  That, Linda knew, was the genius in what they had designed.

  She watched as Number 4 lifted her hands to the tray and discovered the bowl, the orange, and the water bottle. She went first for the water and drank greedily, sucking down the liquid with abandon. It will make her sick, Linda thought. But she said nothing. She watched as Number 4 slowed, as if she realized that she might want to save a drink for the end of the meal. Number 4 then felt the bowl with the oatmeal. She hesitated and her fingers searched the tray top for a utensil. When Number 4 found none she opened her mouth, as if to ask a question, but stopped.

  Learning, Linda instantly understood. Not bad.

  Number 4 lifted the bowl to her mouth and started to shovel the oatmeal down. Her first bites were tentative, but after she got a sense of the taste she wolfed down the remainder, licking the bowl clean.

  A nice touch, Linda realized. Viewers will like that.

  She still hadn’t moved from the bedside. But as Number 4 started to peel the orange skin away to get at the fruit inside, Linda slowly removed the .357 Magnum from inside the Hazmat suit. She tried to coordinate her movements with Number 4’s so that the gun emerged at the same moment that Number 4 bit down into the orange.

  She lifted the gun as the orange went into Number 4’s mouth. She watched as some of the juice slid down from Number 4’s mouth.

  Linda thumbed back the hammer, cocking the pistol.

  The noise made Number 4 stop in midbite.

  She won’t know exactly what it is, Linda thought, but she will understand that it is deadly.

  Number 4 seemed frozen by the sound. The orange was just inches from her lips but not moving. Number 4’s body shook.

  Linda stepped forward, placing the barrel of the pistol millimeters away from the space between Number 4’s eyes, almost resting against the blindfold. She waited for an instant before pressing the gun directly against Number 4’s face.

  The smell of gun oil, the pressure of the barrel, these things would be unmistakable to Number 4, Linda knew.

  She held that position. She could hear a whimpering sound bubble up from Number 4’s chest. But the teenager said nothing and didn’t move, even though every muscle in her body seemed about to explode with tension.

  “Bang!” Linda whispered. Loud enough for the audio pickup, but just barely.

  Then she slowly dropped the hammer back into a resting position. She exaggerated her movements as she slowly pulled the gun back away from Number 4’s face and replaced it inside her suit.

  “Mealtime is finished,” Linda said briskly.

  She removed the remains of the orange from Number 4’s hand and then lifted the tray from her lap. She saw Number 4’s body convulse again, head to toe. She hoped the cameras had captured that. Panic sells, she thought.

  Moving deliberately, her feet making only the smallest padded sounds against the hard cement, Linda exited the room, leaving Number 4 alone on the bed.

  In the control room above, Michael was grinning. The interactive response board was lighting up. Lots of opinions, lots of responses. He knew he would have to go over them all later. He was always particularly careful to assess the chats that went on between clients on the board he’d created for Series #4.

  Linda breathed in deeply, closed her eyes, and pulled off the balaclava. I am an actress, she thought.

  Neither Linda, just outside the basement door, nor Michael upstairs at the monitors noticed what happened next. Some of their clients did, though, as they bent to their computers. Number 4 had leaned back after hearing the door close, leaving her once again alone in the room. She had picked up her teddy bear and clutched it to her chest, nestling the worn toy between her small breasts, rubbing its head as if it were a baby, all the time mouthing something silently to the inanimate object. No one watching was sure what it was she was saying, although some were able to make the lucky guess that she was repeating over and over again a single phrase. They were unable to tell that what she said was, My name is Jennifer my name is Jennifer my name is Jennifer my name is Jennifer.

  18

  Terri Collins walked back and forth in the driveway outside Adrian’s house as he demonstrated where he was located when he spotted the van. She scuffed her feet and kicked at a stray stone as he slid behind the wheel of his car to show her where he had parked. She asked, “And that’s exactly where you were positioned the evening Jennifer disappeared?”

  Adrian nodded. He could see the detective measuring sight angles and distances, imagining the shadows that dropped on the street that night.

  “She can’t see it,” Brian said.

  He was seated on the passenger side. He, too, was looking at the spot on the street where the van had slowed, stopped, and then accelerated.

  “What do you mean?” Adrian whispered.

  “What I mean is this,” Brian replied, with a forceful bluster. “She’s not allowing herself to picture the crime. Not yet. She’s staring right at the spot but she’s still trying to see reasons it didn’t happen, not reasons it did. This is where you come in, brother of mine. Persuade her. Make her take the next step. Gotta be logical. Gotta be forceful. C’mon, Audie.”

  “But . . .”

  “Your job is to make her see what you saw that night. It’s what any investigator does, although they might not want to admit it because it sounds crazy at worst and flaky at best. They envision everything that happened just as if they were there . . . and it tells them where to look next.”

  Brian was dressed in his faded fatigues again. He had propped ragged jungle boots up on the dash and leaned backward, smoking a cigarette. Young Brian. Older Brian. Dead Brian. Adrian realized that his brother was a chameleon of hallucinatory memory. From Vietnam to Wall Street. The same was true for Cassie, and for Tommy, and whoever else from his past chose to arrive in what little of his present he had left. Adrian inhaled and he could smell the pungent odor of smoke, mingling with a thick, damp, wet tropical sensation that covered him, as if Brian had brought the steaming jungle along with him. The crispness of New England’s early spring was nowhere to be found. Or, Adrian thought, it was nowhere where he could find it.

  “Why didn’t anyone else see anything?” Terri Collins said. Adrian wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to answer this question, because she said it in a quiet voice directed more to the falling streaks of daylight than to him.

  “I don’t know,” Adrian said. “People go home. They want their dinner. They want to see their family. They shut the front door and close away the day. Who is looking out at the street at that time of day? Who is looking for something out of the ordinary? Not many, detective. People look for routine. They look for normalcy. That’s what they expect. A unicorn could trot down the street and they probably wouldn’t notice.”

  Adrian said this, and he closed his eyes for an instant, hoping his words wouldn’t conjure u
p a white, horned mythical animal trotting down the street that only he could see.

  “Someone had to have noticed something,” Terri continued, as if she hadn’t heard anything Adrian had said, which made him wonder whether he’d actually spoken it out loud or merely thought it.

  “But they didn’t. Just me,” he said.

  The detective turned to him. She did hear that, he realized.

  “So what is there to go on?” she asked. She didn’t really expect him to reply. She watched as Adrian shifted about in his seat before exiting the car. Once she had interviewed a schizophrenic in the midst of a psychotic episode who had constantly turned in one direction or another as he heard sounds that weren’t there, but eventually, by being patient, she’d elicited a description of a robber that made sense. And there were many times that she’d probed the memories of college kids who were aware that something bad had happened—a rape, usually—but weren’t exactly sure what they’d seen or heard or witnessed. Too many drugs. Too much booze. All sorts of things that cluttered the powers of observation. But her skin crawled slightly, a prickly sensation, when she confronted Adrian. Something was the same, something was different. He seemed slight, slender, as if something were eating away at him every second of the time she faced him. She had the odd feeling that he was fading a little, infinitesimally, with each passing second.

  Adrian took a deep breath.

  Brian whispered, “This is important. Don’t lose her, Audie. Don’t let her get away. You’re going to need her to find Jennifer. You know it. Don’t scare her off.”

  “I think, detective, that this is a helluva problem,” Adrian said, as coolly and forcefully as he could. “If what I saw was indeed an abduction, as I believe it was, well, then it was a type that is pretty unfamiliar around these parts.”

  “Good,” said Brian.

  “Yes. I’m listening,” Terri replied.

  “Random. You know, that’s a word psychologists hate. It acts as an excuse for failing to respond. You see, it was my job—and my profession was teaching—to show that there is nothing that is random. If you continue breaking all the elements down, eventually you arrive at a truth, which suggests the inevitability of an action. Ultimately, what happens all makes sense. A person schedules a plane trip. It becomes a hijacking that ends up in the South Tower. Perhaps there is some bad luck involved—picking out that flight on that day. But it makes sense. Someone had to be somewhere, at some time, and that flight was the logical choice. The odds that the person beside them in line was a nihilistic suicidal terrorist are infinitesimal—but measurable. The key factors, everything that created the terrorist and everything that created the victim, all coalesce in a psychologically defined way in a recognizable pattern. And there’s the truth of it all.”

  Terri stepped back.

  “You sound like you’re preparing a lecture for a class,” she said.

  “Now!” Brian urged in a loud stage whisper. “Get her now!”

  “Yes. A lecture. But if there is any hope for young Jennifer you will have to enter my territory.”

  “Good,” Brian said. “A proposal that grabbed her interest.”

  Detective Collins appeared to be deep in thought. Brian’s voice was energized. Adrian thought he sounded just like he must have in command of men at war, or when he came upon a courtroom moment in which he seized a truth from a reluctant witness. “Now,” his brother urged Adrian, “think of what Tommy told you.”

  Adrian hesitated. He wanted to swing toward Brian and demand, What? What did Tommy tell me before he was blown apart? And then he remembered his son’s hurried words: It’s about seeing.

  “Look, detective. If Jennifer was snatched from this street in this neighborhood just to entertain some perverse killer in some dark, hidden, remote location, well, then you might as well just go on home and wait until someone finds her body next week or next month or next year or next decade. And we already know she wasn’t stolen for ransom, because no one has contacted her mother. And we know it wasn’t anyone in her family because relationships weren’t that strained. And you’ve already asked about the stepfather and his therapeutic practice—actually, I thought that was a clever series of questions—but still the purpose of that sort of abduction would already be clear. I mean if someone wanted to harass or punish Scott West, they wouldn’t be doing it without letting him know they were doing it, because otherwise the message would be lost. Which leaves you and me with only one very modest remaining hope: she was taken for another reason. What that reason is, well, that’s what we need to figure out, because that will be the only way to find her. Find her alive, that is.”

  Adrian seemed to be both determined and erratic.

  “Jennifer, detective . . . Someone needed her for something. Any other explanation is useless because they all result in the same conclusion: she’s dead. So it makes no logical sense to pursue those. The only course is to imagine that she’s still alive and for a specific, well-defined reason. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of your time and my time.”

  Brian snorted. “Damn straight!” he burst out. It was like a shout too close to his ear and Adrian twitched a little.

  Terri thought this was all madness and that the old professor—whose eyes were blinking rapidly and appeared a little buglike and whose hands were quivering with some sort of electric force that she couldn’t see—was out-of-his-mind crazy, even if she couldn’t put a medical diagnosis to it. She looked around the neighborhood, as if hoping that maybe in that moment she’d be lucky and the white van would come squealing up to the nearby curb, slow down, and Jennifer would be tossed out of the door, a little bruised, maybe sexually assaulted, but in a condition where with some love and some therapy and some painkillers she would survive.

  The night fell into darkness around her. The old professor seemed to be perched on the thin limb of an idea. She thought, What options do I have?

  “All right,” Terri said. “I’m going to listen.”

  There was a momentary pause while Adrian nodded. He was a little astonished that the detective was willing to hear him out, and a little hesitant, too, because he didn’t know what he was going to say.

  “Can you feel it,” Brian hissed, but not unpleasantly. “That breeze. It’s like Jennifer has a chance.”

  Adrian held the front door open for the detective, ushering her inside out of the falling night. He hesitated, as if waiting for Brian to slide past him as well, but his dead brother remained on the steps, a few feet away. “Can’t go in there,” he said briskly, as if this were obvious.

  Adrian must have appeared surprised because Brian quickly added, “Even hallucinations have rules, Audie. They change around a bit, given the circumstances, given the input, which is something you probably knew already. But, still, got to obey.”

  Adrian nodded. This made some sense to him, although he couldn’t have said why.

  “Look, you can handle this next bit. I know it. You know enough about behavior and you know enough about crime and your buddy over at the university pointed you in the only direction that has any likelihood of success, so that’s what you’ve got to convince the detective of. You can do it.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  He heard his wife’s voice say something in his ear. Yes you can, dear. Cassie sounded totally confident, and when Adrian looked back at Brian he saw the ghost making a power fist of encouragement, because he too must have heard Cassie’s voice.

  “In here?” Terri Collins asked.

  Adrian shook his memories away. “Yes. To the right. We should sit in the living room. Would you like coffee?”

  He made the offer without thinking. He realized suddenly that he probably had no coffee in the kitchen, and he wasn’t exactly sure how to make it, even if he had. And, for a second, he was unsteady, as if he didn’t even know where the kitchen was. He took a deep
breath, reminded himself that he had lived in this house for many years and the kitchen was just past the dining room, before the downstairs half bath. The stairs led up to his bedroom and his study and everything was where it was supposed to be.

  The detective shook her head. “No. Let’s get right to it.”

  She walked into the living room. It was cluttered with books, half-finished coffee cups filled with curdled milk and cereal, and leftover plates of food and stray silverware. Papers were stacked in various spots, a television played soundlessly—tuned to a sports channel—and a musty sense of enclosed space filled the still air. It was close to a mess, she thought. Not quite there yet. Nothing accumulated in such disarray that a single afternoon spent cleaning and organizing wouldn’t solve. The room, and the house as a whole, she figured, displayed the same qualities shared by young children unaffected by stray toys and abandoned clothing and old people surrounded by heartfelt mementoes and bric-a-brac. Neither group cared all that much for organization.

  “I live alone now,” Adrian said. “I’m sorry for the disorder.”

  “I have young kids,” the detective replied. “So I’m used to it.”

  She pushed some papers off a chair and sat down after noticing that on top of three-week-old copies of The Boston Globe were some forms from a doctor’s office that had been only partially filled out. She tried to read what they were but was unable.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me what you think we can do.”

  Adrian too shifted books around and plopped into an armchair. He had a momentary surge of confusion, like tides changing within him, and he heard confidence slide from his voice. He had been pleased with his dynamic framing of the case, standing outside. He’d thought he sounded forceful. But now he could hear indecision creep into his words.

  “You see, detective . . .” He hesitated. “I really want her to be alive. Jennifer, that is.”