What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  “Stand up, Number Four.”

  She did as she was told.

  “Pull down your underwear.”

  She could not help herself; hesitation crept into her hands. But Jennifer sensed the woman’s fist curling, getting ready to smash her again. She did as she was told. She told herself it was like going to the doctor’s office, or being in a locker room after a sweaty workout. There was no shame in her nakedness. But behind her blindfold even she knew this was a lie. She could feel the camera probing her and she was humiliated. Tears were close when the woman said, “You may return to your seat.” She grabbed at her flimsy panties and tugged them into place and sat down. It was as if something had been cut away from her. It was worse than when the man had forced her to bathe naked. This had been an inspection. A meat inspection.

  “Before you came to this room, what was your greatest fear?”

  She needed to think. Her mind was crowded with embarrassment.

  “Greatest fear, Number Four?” The woman’s voice was insistent.

  Jennifer struggled to come up with a reply.

  “Spiders. I hate spiders. When I was little a spider bit me and my face swelled up and ever since then—”

  “That is some thing you fear, Number Four. But what is your greatest fear?”

  Jennifer hesitated.

  “Sometimes I would get scared that I would be trapped in a room filled with spiders.”

  “I can make that happen, Number Four”

  Jennifer shivered involuntarily. She knew the woman could. She imagined that she had only scratched the possibilities of the woman’s cruelties. And she expected the man’s to be worse.

  “But what is your greatest fear, Number Four?”

  The same question hammered her. She wondered, What was wrong with my answer?

  A word or two caught in her throat and she coughed. She had another idea.

  “That I would never get out of the little town I lived in and that I would be stuck there forever.”

  The woman paused. Jennifer thought that maybe she’d taken the woman by surprise with her answer.

  “So, Number Four, you hated your home?”

  Jennifer’s head bobbed up and down as she replied.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you hate?”

  “Everything.”

  Again the woman spoke carefully. Her voice hammered at Jennifer. The steady beat of the questions felt like blows raining down on her heart.

  “And so you wanted to escape, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still want to escape, Number Four?”

  Jennifer felt sobs crushing her chest. She wasn’t sure whether the woman meant escape from her home or escape from her cell. This indecision hurt.

  “I just want to live,” she said. Her voice quavered.

  The woman paused before continuing. The questions were relentless.

  “What have you loved in your life, Number Four?”

  She was flooded with childhood memories. She could see her dead father standing in the midst of her blindfold darkness, except now he was alive and wearing a familiar grin that lit up his face and beckoned for her to come to him. She could remember parties and playgrounds. She could recall moments that were ordinary, picnics and a family trip to Fenway Park for a summer afternoon’s ball game and hot dogs. Once during a school excursion to a nearby farm she had crawled into an enclosure where newborn puppies were being nursed by their mother, and she had marveled at the tiny energy and softness of life. She could see a picture of herself and her mother, whom she truly believed she no longer had a reason to love, swimming in a river in a state park, where a little waterfall cascaded cold water over their heads and the two of them had battled the goose bumps because it felt so wonderful. All these images accelerated around her, like being caught in a fast action movie inside the darkness. She breathed in sharply. All these thoughts belonged to her and she knew she had to protect them.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  The woman laughed.

  “Everyone loves something, Number Four. I repeat. What have you loved?”

  Jennifer felt ideas rushing toward her. All sorts of images jumbling together. A torrent of memories. She had to fight them off, keep them hidden. She hesitated before speaking briskly.

  “I had a cat . . . actually, I found a stray kitten. It was wet and scrawny and lost. I was allowed to keep it. I named it Socks because it had white paws. I fed it milk and it would sleep on my bed every night. For years she was my best friend.”

  “What happened to Socks, Number Four?”

  “When she was seven she got sick. The vet couldn’t save her. She died and I helped bury her. We dug a hole in a garden and put her into it. I cried for days afterward, and my parents offered to get me a new kitten but I didn’t want something new, I wanted the one I’d had who died.” She hesitated then briskly added, “There. That’s something I loved.”

  “Touching, Number Four.”

  Jennifer was about to say you asked but she didn’t want to be hit again. She steeled herself to hide a derisive grin but indulged in an inner sarcastic glee. The story of Socks was a complete and total lie.

  No cat, you bitch. No dead cat at all. Fuck you.

  “One last question, Number Four.”

  Jennifer did not move. She waited.

  “Are you a virgin, Number Four?”

  She could feel thickness in her tongue, a sour taste on her lips. They were dry and she licked them several times. She did not know what the right answer was. The truth was Yes but was that a good or bad reply? She could feel fear creeping into her. The vague implication about sex was stifling. They want to rape me, she thought.

  “Are you a virgin, Number Four?”

  If she replied No was that some sort of invitation? If she indicated she had had sex before, was that like giving them permission? Was her naivete a good thing or a bad thing?

  She hated making a decision. She didn’t know what was right.

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice cracked slightly.

  The woman laughed.

  “You may return to the bed,” she said. Her voice was tinged with mockery.

  27

  At more or less the same time in different locations, Adrian and Terri were both staring at computers that belonged to the same person, but they had reached opposite conclusions.

  One saw dead ends.

  The other saw infinite possibilities.

  What Terri discovered on the machine centered on her office desk was very much what she had expected. Some low-rent pornography—nothing that surprised her with exceptional exoticism or dark edginess—and a selection of mostly boring excursions to sports websites, medical chat rooms discussing Alzheimer’s, an offshore betting site, and a predictable number of online video games such as Full Tilt Poker and World of War. There was, in her estimation, nothing on the computer that even suggested that Mark Wolfe was reengaging in the sort of activities that had gotten him arrested. Nor was there anything that overtly indicated he might be moving up the sexual predator food chain. The computer seemed to her to contain nothing relevant to the missing Jennifer. And even if she cringed a little at the pornography she found, she guessed that it wasn’t anything different from what she would find on the home computers of half the policemen in her department.

  She was ready to file Mark Wolfe and his connection to the soon to be stepfather of a missing girl under the category of wasted time. Indeed, the entire electronic search for Jennifer was pretty much stalled, in her mind, despite the eagerness of the old man. She knew she had to follow up on the credit card that had been returned in Maine, which might lead her somewhere, but she had her doubts.

  Terri closed up the computer and breathed out slowly. The pain of it was sh
e would have to return the damn thing to Wolfe. She reached for her telephone and called the home store where he worked.

  “Mark Wolfe, please,” she told the receptionist who answered. “This is Detective Collins calling about an ongoing sex abuse case.”

  Making Mark Wolfe squirm was one of her priorities. She doubted that anyone where he worked knew his background and she wondered how long it would take for the receptionist to mention at some coffee break that a police detective had called for one of the salesmen. This would lead to speculation. And speculation would lead to some nasty details being circulated around the workplace. The trouble she was making for him didn’t bother her in the slightest. She understood that this wasn’t a very enlightened or forgiving attitude but she didn’t care.

  When Wolfe came on the line she was blunt.

  “You can come around to my office and pick up your computer,” she said. “I’ll be here until six p.m.”

  He merely grunted in reply.

  She had some time before he would show so she shoved the computer aside roughly and picked up the credit card report. She dialed the number for the bank in Waterville, Maine.

  A computer, Adrian thought, is like a funhouse mirror. It reflects much about who someone really is, when one sees past the contortions and blurred shapes.

  The puzzle lay in finding the keys to open it up.

  Wolfe’s mother had given him some of the right words to open up encrypted files when Adrian had played around with combinations. Roses­knitting had opened one door that contained a portfolio of photographs of young women—all in various states of undress—posed provocatively. The first notion that leaped to his head was kiddie porn—but he recognized that wasn’t quite accurate. The pictures were provocative and filled with the enticements of fantasy. They made Adrian uncomfortable, until he forced himself to inspect them closely, and he realized they were only suggestions of slightly older than children. The models in picture after picture were shaved and coy, selected for their immature bodies and childlike faces. But they only looked young. In Adrian’s mind, they were probably all within days, or weeks, of the eighteen years they needed to avoid being classified as illegal child pornography. As he flipped through them, the pictures increased in intensity. There were shots of teenage boys coupling with the models, joined by pictures of significantly older men, middle-aged and beyond, doing the same. Lechery trumped, he thought.

  The Rosesknitting files were unsettling but, he knew, not the sort of download that would be flagged on some Interpol computer, or even draw the attention of the local police. He found a link to sites called Barely 18 and Just Old Enough. He didn’t bother to examine these.

  There were other files, which he had trouble opening, that made him wish he had a younger person’s expertise with the machine. He tried a series of variations with the word Sandy. He guessed that the only reason that name had penetrated the fog of the mother’s disease was because it had been in use in the house. He knew some concoction with that word would open up something in the computer. But every combination he tried was rejected.

  Past becomes present, influences the future, Adrian knew. This was something of a mantra for psychologists. Things, events, people, experiences scored into memory affect steps taken in the present and dreams about the days ahead. Mark Wolfe, sex offender, was no different from anyone, except that his damage was more virulent and had created someone with potential. Where it had come from was a mystery. Where it currently resided was clear from the computer screen. Where it would take him was uncertain.

  He typed in the password KillSandy and images immediately leaped onto the screen.

  He stared at a picture of a young girl bending to accept an old man’s erection with her lips. The images made him feel as if he needed to wash his hands and get himself a glass of ice water.

  Adrian started to push away from the seat at his desk. He thought he should find a book of poetry, read some subtle, rhymed verse, something that had a pristine and honorable quality to it. Perhaps some Shakespearean sonnets, he suggested inwardly, or Byron. Lines that spoke of love in a silken, pure fashion, images that created passion—not pictures of hairy men forcing their engorged energies on women that were closer to girls.

  He shifted about in his seat but stopped when he heard his son whisper into his ear, “But Dad, you haven’t looked hard enough. Not yet.”

  Adrian turned around quickly, his arms spread, as if he could embrace his son’s ghost and press him to his chest, but he was alone in the room. Tommy’s voice, however, seemed to be right at his side.

  “What is it you are seeing?” his son asked him. Tommy had a musical tone in his words. It was like listening to a nine-year-old Tommy, not the adult Tommy. Adrian remembered when his son was young there was nothing he liked more than hearing him call out. It was like an invitation for the father to share something with the son, and it had a precious, jewel-like quality.

  “Tommy, where are you?”

  “I’m right here. I’m right beside you.”

  It was like hearing a voice penetrate thick fog. Adrian desperately wanted to be able to reach through the clouds and touch his son. Just one more time, he thought. That’s all. Just once. A single hug.

  “Dad! Pay attention! What is it you are seeing?”

  “It’s just some disgusting pornography,” Adrian replied. He felt a little embarrassed that his son was looking at the same things he was.

  “No, it’s more than that. Much more.”

  Adrian must have looked confused, because he could hear his son sighing. It was like a breath of wind blowing through the stillness of the house.

  “Come on, Dad, connect who you are with what you are seeing.”

  This made no sense to Adrian. He was a scientist. He was a student of experience. That was what he had taught for so many decades. On the screen in front of him were contorted bodies. Nakedness. Explicitness. All the mystery removed from love, acts boiled down into hard-core, no doubts reality.

  “Tommy, I’m sorry, I don’t understand. It’s so much harder now. Things don’t match up the way they should.”

  “Fight it, Dad. Make yourself stronger. Take more of those pills. Maybe they’ll help. Force your mind to remember things.”

  Tommy’s voice seemed to change, back and forth. Child Tommy. Adult Tommy. Adrian felt buffeted between the two.

  “I’m trying.”

  There was a momentary hesitation, as if Tommy was thinking about something. Adrian wanted to be able to see him, and his eyes began to cloud up with tears. It isn’t fair, he thought. I can see the others, but now it’s Tommy and he won’t show himself. It was a little like the great conundrum all parents know, that one day they look at the child they raised and he or she has grown up and entered into a world of their own that seems alien and incomprehensible. The people we love the most become strangers to us, he thought.

  “Dad, when you read a poem . . .”

  Adrian spun about in his seat, as if he could catch a glimpse of his child by darting his eyes about the room.

  “What is it you are trying to see in the words?”

  He sighed. Tommy’s voice was faded and distant and it hurt to listen to it. He could feel pinpricks on his skin.

  “I wanted to be there for you. I can’t stand it that you died somewhere on the other side of the world and I wasn’t there for you. I can’t stand it that I couldn’t do anything about it. I can’t stand it that I couldn’t save you.”

  “The poetry, Dad. Think of the poems.”

  He sighed again. He looked over at a picture of Tommy that he kept above his desk. High school graduation. A snapshot stolen when his son hadn’t been watching. He was grinning, filled with everything that was possible about the world and none of the heartache or trouble that was an inevitable part of it. Adrian almost thought as if the picture were spe
aking to him, except that Tommy’s voice was insistent and coming from behind his head.

  “What do you see in the poems?”

  “Words. Rhymes. Imagery. Metaphor. Art that evokes ideas. Seduction. I don’t know, Tommy, what is it . . .”

  “Think, Dad. How can a poem help you find Jennifer?”

  “I don’t know. Can it?”

  “Why not?”

  Adrian thought everything was reversed. Tommy had been their only child, and it had been Adrian who protected him and encouraged him and steered him along, and now it was like he was the child and Tommy knew things that he didn’t. Except, he understood, it was he himself that knew things, but they were hard to reach, so Tommy was there to guide him even though his son was dead.

  He wondered for a moment, Are the dead always there to help us?

  “What do you see?”

  He turned back to the computer.

  “Just pictures.”

  “No, Dad. It’s not really about the image. Just like in a poem, it’s about how the image is perceived.”

  Adrian breathed in sharply. He remembered this phrase. For years he had taught a popular course at the university, Fear and its Uses in Modern Society, that not only examined the nature of fright physiologically but also then branched into horror films and scary novels and the way fear was a part of popular culture. It was a spring semester senior- and graduate-level course, very popular with students who had spent too many evenings hunched over white mice in laboratories and who were overjoyed to be seated listening to Adrian opine about Jaws and Friday the 13th and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. This was the phrase that he concluded his final lecture with.

  “Yes, Tommy, I know, but—”

  “Jennifer, Dad.”

  “Yes. Jennifer. But how does this—”

  “Dad, think hard. Focus.”

  Adrian grabbed a yellow legal pad from a corner of his desk. He seized a pen and wrote:

  Jennifer runs away from home.

  Jennifer is snatched from the street by strangers.

  Jennifer disappears.