Jennifer is not ransomed.
Jennifer is lost.
It was like a poem on a page. “The Missing Jennifer.”
Adrian looked at the naked figures on the screen. The models weren’t coupling because they loved each other or because they desired each other or even because they wanted pleasure.
Money. Or exhibitionism. Or both.
“But they didn’t ask for ransom, Dad, did they?”
Tommy’s voice had dropped to a whisper. It seemed to be echoing somewhere inside his head.
“But how can someone make money off of . . .” Adrian stopped. The entire world made money off of sex.
“Connect, Dad. Connect.” Tommy was pleading with him.
He felt stupid. He felt uneducated and caught in some sort of brain mire.
“How do I . . .” He stared, then he hesitated as Tommy interrupted him.
“You know who can tell you,” Tommy said. “But he won’t tell you what you need to know easily. Take help. Take persuasion.”
Adrian nodded. He closed up the computer and placed it in a satchel. He found his coat and tugged it on. He looked down at his wristwatch and checked the time. It read 6:30. He did not know whether this was morning or evening. He did not know how he knew this, but he was certain that Tommy would not accompany him. Maybe Brian, he thought. He looked around for Cassie, because he could use a word of support and encouragement. They were both braver than I ever was, he thought. My wife. My son. But Tommy’s voice seemed to have faded away and she was absent, although in the next instant he could feel her, as if Cassie were right in front, pulling him along. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he said, as if she were impatient. He remembered that when they were young, sometimes he would be working, engrossed in some psychological study, or a piece of scientific writing, or trying to construct one of his poems, and she would come into the room where he was and wordlessly take him by the hand and, with a small nod and a laugh, lead him to the bed to make really abandoned love. But this time there was some other, far more pressing need waiting in the upstairs bedroom for him and he could feel her dragging him insistently in that direction.
It was dark and he could hear the voices raised in anger right through the door. The shouting seemed to come mostly from Mark Wolfe, with his mother wailing pathetically in response. He listened intently for a few minutes, standing outside, letting the night chill creep inside his skin. The door muffled just enough of the rage so that he could recognize only the intensity of the argument, not the subject, although he guessed it had something to do with the computer in his satchel.
Adrian wondered if he should wait for a lull, and then he simply knocked on the door.
Immediately the shouts stopped.
He knocked again and took a single step back. He expected the anger to buffet him like a wave against the beach when the door opened. He heard a lock being unfastened and light poured over him as the door swung wide.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Son of a bitch,” Mark Wolfe said.
Adrian nodded. “I have something of yours,” he said.
“No shit. Give it here.”
Mark Wolfe reached for him, as if by seizing Adrian’s coat he could repossess the computer.
He did not know who was shouting instructions in his ear—Brian? Tommy?—but he lurched back, avoiding the sex offender’s reach, and suddenly he realized he had his brother’s 9mm automatic in his hand, and it was pointing directly at Wolfe.
“I have questions,” Adrian said.
Wolfe recoiled. He eyed the weapon. The presence of the 9mm seemed to throw a blanket of calm over his rage.
“I bet you don’t even know how to use that,” he choked out.
“It would be unwise for you to test that theory,” Adrian replied pedantically. He was shocked at the ice that each word contained. He thought he should be scared, nervous, maybe crippled by his condition, but he seemed oddly focused. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sensation.
The gun had Wolfe’s full attention. He seemed to be caught between diving back out of the line of fire and leaping forward and trying to wrestle it away. He was frozen like a freeze-frame picture.
Adrian lifted the weapon slightly, pointing it at Wolfe’s face.
“You’re not a cop. You’re a professor, for Christ’s sake. You can’t threaten me.”
Adrian nodded. He felt wondrously cool.
“If I shot you, do you think anyone would care?” he asked. “I’m old. Maybe a little crazy. Whatever happens to me would be irrelevant. But your mother . . . well, she needs you, doesn’t she? And you, Mister Wolfe, you are still young. Do you think this particular moment is one worth dying over? You don’t even know what it is I want.”
Wolfe hesitated. Adrian wondered whether the sex offender had ever actually stared at a weapon before. He thought he had entered into a strange, parallel world, one that seemed alien to the rarefied air of the academic world he knew. This was something far more real. The sensation should have been offensive and terrifying but it wasn’t. He thought he could feel his brother close by.
“You came here and stole my mother’s computer.”
Adrian didn’t say anything.
“What sort of freak are you? She’s sick. You can tell. She’s not in control of her . . .”
He stopped. He snarled like an injured dog.
“I want it back. You have no right to take my mother’s computer.”
“Whose computer?”
Adrian used the barrel of the gun to point down at the satchel. “Maybe I should take it to Detective Collins. I can do that. I know she has more expertise in these things than I do. I’m damn certain that she will find out what you’ve been using it for. She’ll be real interested in the Rosesknitting and the KillSandy files, won’t she? So, really, it’s your choice. What should I do?”
Wolfe stood in the doorway, teetering with the urge to attack. Adrian could see his face contort. He thought that men who lived secret lives hidden from everyday run-of-the-mill, routine existence hated to open any window that might expose who they really were and what they really wanted. All those perverse thoughts cascading around inside, concealed from the authorities, from friends, from family. He sensed that Mark Wolfe was on that edge of anger. Adrian saw him swallow, his face still locked in fury, but his voice now under control.
“All right. It’s mine. It’s private.”
Wolfe spat out each word.
“You can have it,” Adrian said. “But first I want something from you.”
“What’s that?” the sex offender grunted reluctantly.
“An education,” Adrian replied.
28
The baby started crying again. Piteously. Much louder than before.
Jennifer was pulled from a half sleep by the sound penetrating the walls. She did not know how long she had drowsed off—it might have been twelve minutes, it might have been twelve hours. The constant darkness defined by the blindfold had ruined her sense of time. She was constantly disoriented. It was like the waking moments when some particularly vivid and troubling dream clings to consciousness. She twitched, alert to the sound.
Then she did something she had not done before. She clutched Mister Brown Fur tightly and swung her feet from the bed, like anyone would upon waking up in the morning. Still linked by chain to wall, she began to move about, as if by taking a step in one direction or the other she could narrow the range of distance and gauge where the baby’s cries were coming from.
She thought she must appear on the camera to be animal-like, trying to form a mental picture of threat just by sniffing the air. She was acutely aware that she had only a few of her senses available, and she told herself to use what she had as best she could.
The cries increased in volume. And then, ju
st as quickly, they ended, as if whatever sadness had prompted them was eradicated. She hovered, still chained to the wall, but in the empty space between the toilet and the void, her head still cocked to where she thought the cries had come from, she was suddenly aware of a new sound, something very different.
It was laughter.
More than that, it was children laughing.
She stopped, trying to hold her breath. The sounds of play seemed to fade in and fade out, as if they took steps closer to her and then ran away. She recalled times when she was detained in an elementary school classroom for some transgression, punished while the remainder of the class had been shuffled off to the playground, and their play sounds trickled through an open window, too high for her to see out of but loud enough so that she could picture the other children at play. Kickball. Freeze tag. Jump rope. Hanging from the bars of the jungle gym. All the rapid-fire games that filled recess.
Jennifer was enveloped by confusion; she knew she was in the anonymous basement but suddenly it seemed as if she were also trapped in a school that existed only in her past.
She told herself, It can’t be real. But as she listened the sounds seemed so accurate that she was unsure.
The playground noises were so close she thought she could touch them. The sounds of play beckoned to her, inviting her to join in.
She tentatively reached out her free hand.
She told herself that if she could seize a sound from the air, then she could put it in the palm of her hand, stroke it, manipulate it, and somehow come to be a part of it.
It was wrong to imagine that sound could transport her away. But it was tempting and possible. She stretched her hand forward, fingers extended in hope.
She knew she was reaching into nothingness, just the stale air of the basement, but she could not help herself. The sound was so close.
Where she had expected nothing—sensation.
Beneath her fingertips, a smooth, papery feel.
Jennifer gasped, pulled her hand back. It was like touching a live wire. Someone’s here! raced through her consciousness.
She heard a low, harsh whisper. It came from the darkness like heat lightning bolting across a hot summer sky.
“You are never alone.”
Then there was an explosion in the black of her vision, red pain and sudden shock, as the woman punched her hard in the jaw. Jennifer staggered back, tumbling onto the bed. She almost dropped Mister Brown Fur as her head spun dizzily. The blow stunned her; it seemed so sudden, it was worse than the moment when the man had smashed her face as he seized her from her street, because this had a completely different type of unexpectedness. It was filled with contempt. It stung.
Jennifer curled into a fetal position on the bed. She could taste the salt of tears and a little blood dripped from her lip.
The room had turned electric hot.
“That is the second time you have forced me to hit you, Number Four. Do not force me again. I can do far worse.”
The woman’s voice continued in the droning monotone that Jennifer had come to expect. She didn’t understand this. If the woman was angry her voice would have been high-pitched. If she was frustrated it would have reflected that in tone. Jennifer could not understand how she could sound so calm in a situation that seemed to defy normalcy.
Jennifer gasped. It’s what a killer sounds like.
She waited, half expecting another blow, but it did not come. Instead she heard the door close with a thud.
She stayed in position, listening, trying to separate sounds, although her racing heart and buzzing head nearly obscured everything. Her whimpering sobs cluttered her hearing. It took an immense force of strength—she could feel the muscles in her stomach and in her legs tighten—to stop the demands of despair. The woman, she thought, either closed the door on her way out or maybe just closed it and was still standing right by the bed, hand drawn back, readying another strike.
Jennifer choked in the stale air.
She could sense different parts of her screaming for attention. The hurt part. The scared part. The despairing part. And, finally, the fight it part. This last managed to quiet the others, and Jennifer felt her pulse slow down. Her chin still seemed blistered but the pain faded.
The clothing she wears crinkles when she moves, Jennifer reminded herself. Her feet make scuffling noises on the cement floor. She always takes a deep breath before she speaks, especially when she whispers.
Jennifer slowly, surely, eliminated all of her sounds and listened only for the woman’s.
Silence overwhelmed her. She was alone despite what the woman said. Despite the camera she knew was watching her.
The happy playground laughter in the background disappeared. There was a momentary quiet and she heard the baby in the distance cry once more, then abruptly stop.
The Tokyo businessman drank warm and weak scotch that had been watered down long before the ice cubes in the glass melted. The bottle it had been poured from was expensive, but he doubted the liquor was anything but a replacement, a cheap local brand, and he curled his lip in disgust. He had an iPhone in one hand and the drink in the other and he sat on an outdoor veranda in a wicker chair that dug into his naked skin. The Thai sex worker was poised diligently between his legs, administering to him with overly faked enthusiasm, as if nothing on earth could possibly be more erotic than satisfying him. He hated every false groan and moan she made. He hated the sweat that glistened on his chest. He did not know the girl’s name, nor did he care to know. He would have been bored by her touch, had it not been for the images that he watched on the telephone screen.
The businessman was middle-aged, and he had a daughter back home with his dowdy wife. His daughter was about the same age as both the Thai girl plying him with her tongue and Number 4, but he did not think of his own child other than to continually remind himself to bring her back a present from his trip. Something colorful and silk, he told himself. He cleared his mind and stared at the small iPhone screen. Instead of the Thai sex worker, he allowed the eroticism of Series #4 to stimulate him. The sudden punch to Number 4’s face had titillated him. It had been unexpected and dramatic and taken him by surprise. He shifted about in his seat and looked over the screen down at the raven-colored hair of the Thai girl. He joined the two in his mind—the sex worker and Number 4. He could feel his own hand clench tightly into a fist, as he contemplated striking the girl just to see what it felt like. Notions of pain and pleasure jumbled together in his head, and he reached out and wrapped his fingers through her hair. He wanted to twist it so she would cry out. But he stopped himself. Number 4, he realized, had barely made a noise when she was hit. Other moments that he had seen, Number 4 had cried and sometimes shouted and even once had screamed, but this time, when she was struck, she had fallen backward but maintained a stoic silence.
Her discipline was something to deeply admire.
He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. For a moment he tried to imagine that the Thai girl had vanished and that it was Number 4 busy between his legs.
He breathed out. He felt stirring throughout his body and he gave in to the conjoined fantasies with a newfound enthusiasm.
Linda was put out. Her hand hurt and Michael wasn’t as instantly sympathetic as she expected him to be.
“Number Four has a prizefighter’s jaw,” she said. “Damn.” When she had struck Jennifer, her little finger had been cut against the teenager’s teeth. There was blood pulsing from a slice near the nail and she sucked on it as she complained.
Michael was amused, which she didn’t appreciate. He was hunting through the medicine cabinet of the farmhouse, searching for some antiseptic and a Band-Aid. “If you close your fist and punch her,” he said, “it might be better if you wore protective gloves. There are some on the table by the main computer.”
He found wha
t he was looking for. “This might sting,” he said, as he dripped some sodium peroxide on the cut. “Did you know that the human mouth is one of the most dangerous, most bacteria-filled spots on the body?”
“You’ve been spending too much time at the Discovery Channel,” Linda responded.
“And that the Komodo dragon on that island in the Pacific can kill you with a bite not because its teeth are sharp but because the infection it dispenses isn’t treatable by modern antibiotics.”
“Animal Planet?” Linda asked. She grimaced at the disinfectant dripping on the cut. “So, maybe for Series Five we will steal a dragon?”
“Sorry,” Michael said. He looked down at the cleaned cut. “It’s pretty deep. Do you think you want to go to the emergency room and get a stitch or two? The nearest hospital is probably forty-five minutes away, but you might actually need them.”
Linda shook her head, but said, “What do you think?”
“I think we could do either. If I apply some pressure, it will heal up, but it might be sore for a day or so.”
Linda held a small washcloth over the wound and walked across their bedroom to a window.
“Is there anything we need out there?” she asked, gesturing with her wounded hand.
Michael took a quick glance around as he did an inventory in his head. “Nothing immediate. We have plenty of food, even if it isn’t what I’d call gourmet. We have weapons. We have all the electronics we need. I think we’re okay for the next few days.”
“Then no trips,” Linda said decisively. “Not unless we actually need something. It makes no sense to let anyone see us.”
She lingered for a moment, staring out of the farmhouse window. It was late in the afternoon and a slight breeze was pulling at the leaves that had started blooming on a line of trees marking the gravel drive that led out to the roadway, which would take them toward town had they any pressing need to go. There was a weather-beaten red barn to her right, where they had stored their Mercedes and covered it with a tarpaulin. Michael’s dented truck was poised outside. It was a typical vehicle for where they were. Beaten enough by hard winters, used on enough back roads to show every bit of wear and tear. She thought the truck made them seem ordinary and local, like a pair of cheap jeans and a sweatshirt, when, in truth, they were silk and high couture. She loved the world of illusion that they’d created for Series #4. They were the nice young couple who had rented an isolated farmhouse in a forgotten and ignored part of New England. They had told the realtor who had found it for them that Michael was finishing his dissertation and she was working on sculptures and this blending of academic and exotic had ended any questions about the need for solitude that had been their primary desire. False names. False backgrounds. Virtually the entire transaction was done over the Internet. The only physical contact had taken place when Linda had dropped into the realtor’s office and paid cash for a six-month lease. Someone with a suspicious mind might have questioned the stack of hundred-dollar bills she had produced, but in an economy buffeted by so many high-profile headline-grabbing flaws the sight of actual money stopped almost every inquiry.
What Comes Next Page 26