What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  “And then what?”

  “Then we see what we shall see.”

  “Suppose he guesses that I’m following him?”

  “Then we see what we shall see. Makes no difference. By the end of the day we’re going to talk to the guy.”

  Adrian saw that Brian was staring at the computer printout, reading everything listed there.

  “I see why you chose this creep,” Brian said. He laughed a little, although there was no joke that Adrian was aware of in any of the pages from the website registry.

  “It’s the age similarity,” Adrian said out loud, as he steered around a corner and then accelerated to keep pace. “He’s been convicted or pled guilty to three separate offenses, each time with young girls ranging in age from thirteen to fifteen.”

  Brian spoke with the certainty of a lawyer who has the facts and the evidence on his side. “A sweetheart, no doubt.”

  This last observation was spoken with ringing sarcasm. It was exactly what Adrian had told himself when he’d gone through the list of seventeen men. The trick was to look at the grouping scientifically and not get stymied by the details of what they’d done but to focus on the underlying disturbance. Most of them were convicted rapists. Some were involved in domestic issues. This man had been different. There had been an arrest for possession of child pornography. Charges had been dropped by an ex-wife, regarding a stepdaughter. Several busts for exposure.

  All rats. But one different rat.

  “He exposed himself to them.”

  “A weenie wagger. That’s what the cops used to call ’em,” Brian said, with a blustery tone. “At least, in the city, that was the phrase they used. I doubt it’s any different up here in the sticks.”

  “That’s right, probably not. But Brian, look at the last conviction and you’ll see . . .”

  Adrian stopped. He switched his eyes between the tan car ahead of him and Brian in the backseat, reading.

  “Ah, he did jail time for . . . Well, Audie, I’m impressed. You seem to be getting the hang of this.”

  “False imprisonment.”

  “Yes,” Brian said. “You understand, that’s a lesser charge than kidnapping . . . but it’s on the same page, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  Brian snorted. “Young teenage girls. And he wanted to grab one, didn’t he? I wonder what he wanted to do then? Well, says a great deal.” He laughed again. “But one thing . . . ”

  “I know. No accomplice. That’s what I need to understand.”

  “Don’t lose him, Audie. He’s heading to town.”

  Some of the traffic had picked up. Several sedans and a pickup truck blocked the man in the tan car. Behind Adrian a school bus had pulled close to his bumper. Adrian maneuvered the car, keeping pace with the man.

  “I remember, Brian, when you had that fancy sports car.”

  “The Jaguar. Yeah. It was cool.”

  “It would be a lot easier to keep up if we were in that.”

  “I sold it.”

  “I remember. I never understood why. It seemed to make you happy.”

  “I drove too fast. Always too fast. Too reckless. I couldn’t get behind the wheel without pushing it way past not just the speed limits, Audie, but the limits of sanity. It made me wild at a hundred, crazy at a hundred and twenty, and genuinely psychotic at a hundred and thirty. And I liked it, going that fast. It felt like freedom. But I was clearly going to kill myself. I almost lost control so many times. I knew I was risking something big; it was too dangerous, so I sold it. Biggest mistake I ever made. The car was beautiful, and would have been a better way to . . .”

  Brian stopped. Adrian saw his brother cover his face with his hands.

  “I’m sorry, Audie. I forgot. That’s what Cassie did.”

  Brian’s voice seemed distant, soft. “She and I, we weren’t alike at all. I know you think we didn’t get along, but it’s not true. We did. It was just that we saw something in each other that frightened us. Who would have guessed that we’d both go south in similar ways?”

  Adrian wanted to say something but was unable to form the words. There were tears welling up in his eyes. All he could hear was pain in his brother’s voice, which matched the pain he remembered from his wife’s.

  “I should have known. I was the psychologist. I was like a shrink. I had the training . . .”

  Brian laughed. “Didn’t Cassie absolve you of that guilt? She should have. Hey, pay attention! The dude’s turning in. Well, I’ll be damned. Isn’t this the sort of place you’d expect a freak like him to work?”

  Adrian didn’t reply. He saw the beige car rolling into a large home appliance and fixtures store that occupied nearly an entire block just on the outskirts of town. He watched as the man drove around the back, past a sign that said employees parking.

  Adrian pulled into a space in front. He waited for fifteen minutes in silence. Brian seemed asleep in the back. At least the hallucination was quiet. Adrian tried to think of something he could purchase inside that would make his trip seem about something else. But he knew all he really wanted was to make sure that the man was at work.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Brian. “Got to make sure that this is where he’ll be today.”

  Adrian exited and walked across the giant lot, scuffling his feet against the macadam. There were pickup trucks and minivans moving in. He saw a cross section of contractors, plumbers, carpenters, and harried ­suburban-dad types heading inside. He followed the steady stream of people, not turning to see if Brian was following, although he felt alone, even in the midst of the crowds.

  Inside the cavernous area he felt a momentary despair. The place was huge, divided into dozens of sections—for gardening, roofing, kitchen appliances, power tools—a huge list of devices and wares lined up in aisle after aisle. Men and women wearing red vests and name tags scurried about, directing customers and offering advice. Cash registers were already beeping and ringing up sales. Adrian started to wander up and down arrays of tile and wood paneling, stainless steel sinks and faucets, Spackle and hammers and power drills. He was about to give up when he spotted the man, working in the section devoted to home electronics. He watched for a moment as the man energetically spoke with a couple of do-it-yourself types, a man and a woman who looked to be in their early thirties. The man was shaking his head but the woman seemed animated, as if she’d been persuaded that the two of them, with the right tools and the right advice, could rewire their house. The man had the look that young husbands sometimes have, knowing that they are being saddled with more than they can handle, but he was helpless to prevent it. Adrian would have laughed at the picture—having been more than once in the same position with Cassie—except he knew that if the couple were aware of who it was they were speaking with they would have recoiled in horror.

  He watched for a few more seconds and then, understanding that he could return in eight hours after the man’s shift, he turned and left. He felt as if he’d achieved something, but he wasn’t sure what. Perhaps it was just the sensation of being closer to someone who could tell him what he should be looking for.

  But forcing it out of the man was going to be a challenge, and Adrian did not know how he was going to meet it.

  * * *

  He spent the rest of the day in anticipation, although unsure exactly why. More research led him deeper into what he considered perversion. But nothing told him where to find Jennifer. He did not have to hear Cassie or Brian insisting that he move faster, that time was wasting, that every second meant she was closer to dying—if she was still alive. All these admonitions were true. Or maybe not. There was no way for him to tell, and so he simply assumed that the opportunity to save her still existed.

  He thought: Save her. You never saved anyone except yourself.

  And he had a sudden fear
that, were he to stop looking, Cassie and Brian and even Tommy would disappear and leave him alone with nothing except jumbled, disjointed memories and the disease that was twisting them around inside of him like a rubber band stretched to breaking.

  So, alone now, wondering where Brian was, wondering why Cassie couldn’t leave the house, and why Tommy had visited him only once and hoping that his son would come back again to his hallucinatory world, he found himself outside the home warehouse store once again. The day was fading around him and he feared he might have trouble seeing the man when he left work.

  The beige car pulled out from the rear of the store just about the time that Adrian had estimated the eight-hour workday had ended. Adrian pulled in as close behind it as he could manage and kept an eye on the man through the windshield of the car ahead of him, although that was getting increasingly difficult as the daylight faded.

  He expected a return to the trim house, maybe a stop at a grocery store, but that would be it for delays.

  He was wrong.

  The man turned off the main road and headed into town on a side street. This took Adrian by surprise and he pulled across traffic dangerously, causing someone to honk rudely at him.

  The old Volvo labored to keep pace.

  The beige car was about thirty yards ahead, on a street just behind the main thoroughfare. It was a place with some offices and apartment buildings and an artist’s studio or two, just past a Congregational church and a computer repair store. Adrian saw the car turn in and scoot into a small parking lot, slipping between half a dozen cars into the only remaining slot.

  “What’s he doing?” Adrian asked out loud. He expected Brian to answer, but he did not appear. “Damn it, Brian!” Adrian shouted. “I need your help right now! What should I do?”

  The backseat remained silent.

  Cursing, Adrian accelerated down the street. It took Adrian several minutes to find a free parking place in a metered lot a block away. The college town had all sorts of parking restrictions designed to keep students from leaving cars jamming the sidewalk areas. In the summer it was empty. During the semesters it was overcrowded.

  Adrian pushed himself out of the car and slammed the door behind him. He walked as quickly as he could back to where he’d last seen the man.

  From the street he could see the beige car. But there was no sign of the sex offender. There was just a single, older building. It was a stately wooden-framed, white clapboard two-story house that had been cut up into offices. Adrian could see a main entranceway where once had been a front door and he walked over. He told himself to assume the man was inside somewhere, but where, he didn’t know.

  Adrian stepped inside. On the wall by the door was a single sign, delineating six different offices. It was all beneath the heading: valley emotional health services.

  Three MDs and three PhDs.

  It was quiet in the lobby. A single sound-deadening white noise machine hummed in a corner. A couch where people could sit was arranged across from a few chairs, making the whole vestibule into a waiting room. Adrian saw that three offices opened onto the ground floor. Three were up a single flight of stairs. There was no receptionist. This was typical of places for therapy. People knew when their appointments were, rarely arrived more than a few minutes early, and weren’t made to wait long.

  So, Adrian thought, one of six.

  There was, he imagined, no way to determine which of the six offices the man had gone into. But Adrian still turned to the wall where the names of the therapists were located. It was a small town, and he suspected he would know most of them.

  But there was one he’d met only once: that was Scott West.

  “So,” Brian said smugly, whispering into Adrian’s ear, as if he’d known all along what Adrian was going to find inside the building, “Jennifer’s mother’s boyfriend is treating a known sex offender. That’s a curious connection. I wonder if he bothered to mention that to Detective Collins when she questioned him the other day?”

  Adrian didn’t turn to his brother. He could feel him hovering right behind. Nor did he say, Where were you when I called for you. Instead he nodded, then replied hesitantly.

  “He could be in one of the other offices.”

  “Sure,” Brian said. “He could be. But I don’t think so. And neither do you.”

  23

  When Detective Collins looked up she was surprised to see Adrian Thomas standing in the doorway to the detective bureau. He was accompanied by a uniformed officer, who shrugged and gave her the I didn’t have a choice look as he pointed the old man in her direction.

  Terri had just gotten off the phone with Mary Riggins, who, in her constantly teary, distraught, hesitant way, had told her that she had just received a call from Visa security that her lost credit card had been returned to a bank in Maine. “And it had been used,” Mary Riggins said bleakly, “to buy a bus ticket to New York City.”

  Terri had dutifully taken down the information and the contact number for the credit card security. She was unsure how the card had managed to travel in one direction when the ticket was headed in another. This was illogical. But it had given her the start of a new time line, and she was searching for the phone number for the Boston police bus station substation when she saw Adrian.

  Her desktop was cluttered with documents and stray bits of information concerning Jennifer’s case and she rapidly collected it all into a pile and turned it facedown. She guessed that the professor had seen her do this and would recognize it for what it was, and so she readied a response that would deflect any inquiry without being rude. She wasn’t going to mention anything about the Visa card. But Adrian, without greeting, simply asked, “Have you obtained a current list of patients from Scott West? I remember you asked for that.”

  She was slightly taken aback. She hadn’t thought he had been paying that much attention when she had met with Scott and Mary in their home.

  Adrian filled the momentary pause with a second question: “He said he would give it to you, and he scoffed at the idea that anyone he’d ever treated would have any connection to Jennifer’s disappearance, didn’t he?”

  She nodded. She waited for another question from the professor but he merely bent forward and fixed her with a look that she suspected had been reserved for wayward, ill-prepared students in decades past. It was the try another answer look.

  She shrugged. She remained noncommittal.

  “He is supposed to bring that list to me tomorrow. It will be confidential, professor, so I would not be free to share any information with you.”

  “What about a list of known sex offenders? I thought I made it clear that was the next step.”

  Adrian was being forceful in a way that Terri had not seen before. She was put off. She had thought that the professor wanted to work in the gray areas of speculation, theory, and supposition. She had expected a tweed jacket, leather arm patch, pipe-smoking sort of academic, happy to sit in an office surrounded by books and learned papers, occasionally chiming in with an observation or an opinion—just as he had when he’d lectured her about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady and the Moors Murders. She had not expected that he would ever arrive at her office. He seemed different, like a baggy shirt that had shrunk to tightness in the wash. The same but barely recognizable.

  “I have been looking over those lists, professor. And I have read a great deal about the British case back in the sixties that you referenced. But concretely connecting these things to Jennifer’s disappearance might seem obvious to a university professor, but to a police officer . . .”

  This was spoken in the practiced tones of a cop who wants to reply without saying anything. He interrupted her swiftly.

  “Does the name Mark Wolfe mean anything to you.”

  She hesitated. The name had a little electricity to it, like a minor charge of current. Something that buzze
d in the back of her memory. But she did not immediately place it.

  Adrian spoke without waiting.

  “Convicted sex offender. A serial exhibitionist with a particular predilection for teenage girls. Lives not far outside of town. Does that help you?”

  The buzzing increased. She knew that the name was on one of the sheets of paper she had concealed from Adrian’s eyes on her desktop. She nodded, while inwardly she was trying to sketch a picture of the man. Glasses. Thick black-rimmed eyeglasses. She remembered those from a mug shot.

  She rocked back in her chair and motioned Adrian toward a nearby seat. He remained standing. She thought he seemed rigid, and she wondered where the distracted, eyes-wandering, I’m someplace else look had vanished to.

  “I saw him today.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yes. And—”

  “How did you happen to know who he was?”

  Adrian reached inside his coat pocket and removed a sheaf of crumpled-up papers. He handed these over and Terri saw that they were printouts of local sex offenders available to anyone who knew how to do a simple Web search.

  “And Wolfe . . . why did you choose him?”

  “He seemed the most logical. From a psychologist’s perspective.”

  “And what exactly is that perspective, professor?”

  “Exhibitionists live in a curious kind of fantasy world. Often they derive titillation and sexual gratification from exposing themselves and triggering the fantasy that the women—in this man’s case the very young women—who witness their exposure will be magically attracted to them as opposed to repulsed, which, of course, is the reality. The act of exposing themselves triggers their imaginations.”

  Terri could hear the measured tones of the classroom in every word.