What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  “Okay, professor.” Wolfe was calculating just as rapidly as Adrian was. “Tell me what you need.”

  “I want a guided tour of your world. The midnight world.”

  Wolfe nodded.

  “It’s a big place. A big fucking place, professor. I need to know why.”

  “A pink hat,” Adrian answered. Nonsensical. But it would keep Wolfe unsettled. He took a step forward, keeping the gun at eye height, using both hands. “Is this what you meant?” he asked. “Yes. I see. This seems like a much better way to hold the gun.”

  Wolfe recoiled. Adrian saw a flicker of fear in his face.

  “You won’t kill me.”

  “Probably not. But it seems like a foolish gamble on your part.”

  There was a momentary silence in the room. Adrian knew what the sex offender would say next. There was only one logical way out.

  “Okay, professor. Let’s do it your way.”

  A concession. Probably a lie, but Adrian thought he had managed to balance the authority in the room. It was Wolfe’s home and they would be entering his territory. But Adrian’s mystery—just how erratic was he?—trumped the sex offender’s cold, rational self. Adrian had never thought he’d been particularly clever, but this made him smile. His dying madness was just slightly more compelling than Wolfe’s psychopathic desires. Adrian thought that now he just had to bring these two elements together.

  Adrian nudged the satchel with the computer toward the sex offender. “Show me,” he said.

  “Show you what?”

  “Everything.”

  Wolfe shrugged, a motion contradicted by the eagerness with which he reached for the computer.

  Time dissolved into a cascade of images. They were all different yet all the same. Races, ages, positions, perversions flooded the television screen after Wolfe hooked up some wires to Rose’s laptop. Like a maestro directing an orchestra, Wolfe displayed to Adrian what was out there in the Internet netherworld. It was a dizzying, never-ending ocean of mind-numbing sex. Passion faked, it had everything to do with being explicit, nothing to do with real connection.

  Wolfe was an expert guide. A Virgil to all of Adrian’s inquiries.

  He did not know how long they had been at it. He felt adrift. And the discomfort at the explicit intimacy that rolled up in front of him dissipated rapidly. He felt chilled by the constancy of it all.

  Wolfe clicked on a couple of keys and the images on the screen changed. A woman encased in skin-tight black leather bondage stared out at them, inviting them into a room for discipline. Membership was a single, onetime fee of $39.99.

  “Watch carefully, professor,” Wolfe said.

  He typed in a new set of instructions and leather-clad Woman #2 replaced leather-clad Woman #1. She was offering the same disciplinary system, only her price was euro 60 and she was speaking in French. Another rapid-fire series of clicks and leather-clad Woman #3 appeared in front of them. Her price was in Japanese yen and she spoke in that language.

  The lesson was not lost on Adrian.

  “So, professor, you need to tell me what you’re looking for. Specifically.”

  The sex offender grinned. He was clearly enjoying himself.

  Wolfe clicked on site after site. Children. Old people. Fat people. Torture. “What intrigues you, professor? What fascinates you? What rings your bell? Maybe gets a little blood pumping? Because whatever it is, it’s out there somewhere.”

  Adrian nodded, but the acknowledgment rapidly turned into a head-shaking denial.

  “Show me what you are interested in, Mister Wolfe.”

  Wolfe shifted about. “I don’t think we share the same desires, professor. And I don’t think you want to go along with me all that much.”

  Adrian hesitated. He had used the gun to get that far. But as he stared at Wolfe’s eyes, he did not think that the sex offender would let him into his own private world. There had to be another route, though.

  He could feel his brother behind him, as if Brian were pacing rapidly in the small space, back and forth, tossing over the dilemma in his mind. He could hear the clip-clop of his brother’s footsteps, resounding against a hardwood floor, even though there was carpet everywhere in the sex offender’s home. Adrian sensed Brian stopping, leaning forward, whispering in his ear, like an adviser to the crown. “Entice him, Audie. Seduce him.”

  Easier said than done. “But how?”

  He must have said this out loud because he saw Wolfe stiffen in surprise.

  “Who do you both know?”

  Adrian nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “He doesn’t really know why I’m here.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Wolfe asked nervously.

  Adrian didn’t answer him.

  “I need to find Jennifer. Jennifer is young. Sixteen. She’s beautiful.”

  “I don’t get it,” Wolfe said. “Now you talking to me?”

  “Jennifer is gone,” Adrian continued. “But she is somewhere. I need to find her.”

  “This Jennifer, she your granddaughter or something?”

  “I need to find her. I’m responsible. I could have stopped them from taking her, but I wasn’t fast enough.”

  “Someone stole this Jennifer girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “From around here?”

  “Yes. From in front of my house.”

  “And you say I know her? That doesn’t make sense. They don’t let me anywhere near kids that age.”

  “You don’t know how you know her but you do. You are connected.”

  “You’re not making sense, professor.”

  “I am. You just don’t see how. Not yet.”

  Wolfe nodded. Somehow this seemed reasonable.

  “And the cops . . .”

  “They’re looking. But they don’t know where.”

  Wolfe looked frustrated and a bit unsettled. “And you think she’s in here somewhere?”

  He pointed at the computer.

  Adrian nodded. “It’s the only place to look that holds out the least possibility of hope. If someone stole Jennifer to use her and then kill her, there’s no chance. But if someone stole her to make something . . . money, maybe . . . before discarding her, well then . . .”

  “Professor, if this girl is acting in porn movies or posing for sex tapes or engaged in this industry, hell, there’s no way we can sit here and find her. Needle in a haystack. There are millions of sites, with millions of girls, eagerly specializing in everything that anyone might possibly think of. Volunteering to do anything. Everything under the sun is in here, somewhere. I mean, there is no way.”

  “She won’t be a volunteer, Mister Wolfe. She won’t be willing.”

  Wolfe hesitated, mouth slightly agape. Then he nodded.

  “That narrows the search down,” he acknowledged.

  Adrian looked around the small living room, as if searching for one of the voices to direct him, but he was trying to determine what to say without saying too much. When he did speak, it was in a low, fierce voice.

  “I get it.”

  He narrowed his gaze, fixing it on the sex offender with intensity. He could hear Brian urging him on in the background.

  “So you have to look at pictures. It’s the only thing available to you, isn’t it, Mister Wolfe? Pictures aren’t quite the same as the real thing, but for the time being they’re an acceptable substitute, right? And then you allow your imagination to take over. That helps you to control things, doesn’t it, Mister Wolfe? Because you need to buy time. You can’t go to prison again, not now, because your mother needs you. But it’s still there, isn’t it, the big desire? Can’t hide that. So you have to compensate because those wants, they just don’t go away, do they? And that is what the computer gives you. A chance to fantasize a
nd speculate and just balance things out, until something in your life changes and you can go back to doing what you want to do. And you’re feeling not so bad about this, because you go to your job, and you see your therapist, and you think you’ve got him snowed completely, don’t you? Because you’ve figured out that he’s pretty curious about all this dark sex and you can tease him into anything. It’s about control, isn’t it, Mister Wolfe? Right now, you’ve got all these things in your life under control and you’re waiting for the right moment when you can get back to doing what it is you want to do more than anything else.”

  Adrian paused. “Make him show you!” Brian was ferocious, right beside him.

  “Open up one of those personal files,” Adrian said.

  The gun came up again. But this time it seemed to have a glow in his hand and he was determined that if he had to he would use it. Wolfe must have sensed the same thing.

  He snarled, but it was the weakest look he’d managed since he’d opened the door to Adrian.

  Wolfe glanced over at the computer and then to the television screen. He punched a few keys. A picture of a very young girl—maybe eleven—flashed up. She was naked, staring coyly out as if inviting with a knowing look, a glance that would have been professional on the face of some woman twice her age.

  Wolfe breathed out hard. “You think you know me, don’t you, professor?”

  “I know enough. And you know that.”

  He paused. “There are places,” he said slowly, “that cater to unusual interests. Very deep places. You don’t want to enter those zones.”

  “But I do,” Adrian said. “That will be where Jennifer is.”

  Wolfe shrugged. “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “I am, indeed,” Adrian replied. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

  “If this girl got kidnapped, professor, and even if she’s somewhere in here”—he gestured toward the computer—“you’d be better off just figuring she’s dead. Because that’s what she’ll be sooner or later.”

  “We all will, sooner or later,” Adrian responded. “You. Me. Your mother. Everyone has a time to die. It’s just not Jennifer’s. Not yet.”

  He said this with conviction backed up by nothing.

  Wolfe seemed to be both intrigued and put off, two conflicting sensations battling within him.

  “What do you think I can do for you?” he asked, though the question had been reverberating in the room throughout the evening.

  Adrian could feel his brother’s hands on his shoulders, gripping him tightly, pushing him slightly forward.

  “Here is what I want, Mister Wolfe. I want you to use your imagination. The same way you do when you walk past a school yard at recess . . .”

  Wolfe appeared to stiffen.

  “I want you to put yourself in some shoes. I want you to consider what you would be if you had Jennifer. I want you to tell me what you would do with her, and how, and where, and why. And I want you to imagine that at your side is a woman. A young woman, who loves you, and who wants to help you.”

  Wolfe was listening hard.

  “And I want you to imagine how you would make money off of Jennifer, Mister Wolfe.”

  “You want me to . . .”

  “I want you to be who you are, Mister Wolfe. Only more so.”

  “And if I do this what do I get?”

  Adrian paused, thinking. “Give him what he wants,” Brian said.

  “But what is that?” Adrian said. Wolfe eyed him again.

  “There’s only one thing. It’s what everyone like him wants.” Brian spoke with certainty.

  Privacy, Adrian thought.

  “What I won’t do is tell the detective what you’re doing. And I won’t tell her about your mother’s computer. I won’t tell anyone about it. And, after you find Jennifer for me, you can go back to being who you really are and waiting for the day when you’ve got everybody fooled and no one is paying attention to you.”

  Wolfe smiled, not unpleasantly. “I think, professor, that finally we’ve arrived at a sales price.”

  30

  Terri Collins spent the morning caught between looking at grainy black-and-white images on a bus station security videotape and listening to confused lies from a pair of college sophomores who were unsuccessfully trying to give a benign explanation for the dozen computers, television sets, and PlayStations that had been discovered in the back of their car by an alert patrolman. He had pulled them over for speeding. What sort of idiot crooks speed recklessly away from burglaries? she wondered. It had simply been a matter of splitting up the two young men, repeatedly questioning them, waiting for their stories to diverge, which was inevitable. Terri had taken the time to contact the university security head as well, and she informed the operators who took the local 911 calls to be on the lookout for irate fellow students who had returned to school to find their off-campus apartments ransacked.

  Every year she handled several of these types of cases, and the inherent stupidity of these break-ins bored her. She wondered how new students had imagined they must be the first criminal masterminds to think up the unique advantages of ripping off their classmates. She knew that sooner or later one of the two would give up the other and describe the entire foolish scheme. She had already typed up the felony arrest forms for the pair, but she doubted much would happen. They would spend a night or two in jail and then the legal system would find some way to plead them out. They were going to have to do some explaining to family and future employers. This, she thought, went directly into the tough luck dumb fuck category.

  She hurried through her paperwork. It took time away from the images on the video that fascinated her and troubled her, because of both what it showed and what it didn’t show.

  Primarily: no Jennifer.

  It had taken her a series of calls to track down the person who had returned Jennifer’s mother’s credit card to a bank in Lewiston, Maine. This, too, was a college student, who told a story that made little sense but which was undoubtedly true. The student had been in Boston with two roommates and a boyfriend, visiting old high school buddies. They had caught a late bus back to their own school. This was the sort of thing that took place hourly in a city dominated by colleges and universities. Where the tale had departed from the rational was when the student described emptying out her travel backpack and coming across the strange credit card. It was issued by a bank where she did not have an account. It was under a name she did not recognize and how it had gotten into the outside pocket of her pack was a mystery to her.

  Under most circumstances, she simply would have tossed it out, but by happenstance she had to visit her own bank that day, so she had turned it in to a teller there, who had diligently called the issuing bank’s security department, who had, in turn, called Mary Riggins.

  It was a slow, winding trail.

  The bus ticket the card had purchased was for New York. The East Coast runaway’s mecca.

  It made no sense to the detective. Why not simply toss the card away?

  A mistake? Then she thought, No.

  This was about misdirection.

  She asked the college student three times whether she or any of her friends recalled seeing a teenager that fit Jennifer’s description in the bus station. Each time the response was no.

  Did she see anyone else? Anyone stand out? Suspicious?

  No and no and no.

  Terri’s imagination churned and she felt a rush of anxiety that hid behind her detective’s cold resolve. In her imagination there was an odd conflation. She had spent time that day speaking with the dumbest of criminals. And she wondered whether she was on the edge of something from the smartest of criminals. It was like being caught between two poles, nightmare and boring routine. Somewhere between all this Jennifer fit.

  The security tape lacked clarity.
The overhead placement angle didn’t lend itself to precision.

  What she could see was a man using the self-serve kiosk at the time the ticket transaction was time-stamped. He was not recognizable from the images captured by the camera, although she knew that more sophisticated police agencies would have photo enhancement equipment that might give her a much clearer look.

  She saw the same man seated apart, waiting for the bus, in a later image. Hunched over. Hat pulled down, obscuring his face.

  In short, she recognized a man who knew he was being photographed and was taking steps to avoid being caught on film, at the same time behaving in a manner that wouldn’t stand out.

  She saw the trio of students getting in line in front of a ticket counter. She saw a different man—she could make out a beard where none had existed before—sliding in behind them. She advanced the video long enough to see that this man did not actually make it to the ticket counter. He peeled off—not to visit a window with less traffic or to use a self-serve machine. As best she could tell he left the station through the front entranceway, not through the back loading area.

  She looked again.

  The man had no bags other than a small shoulder pack.

  She played this over and over, trying to memorize every sight of Man #1 and then Bearded Man #2. She measured their physique, the way they walked, the manner in which they slumped their shoulders and kept themselves hidden beneath hats.

  She tried to picture the man that Adrian had described for her. There was not enough to persuade her that the man in the grainy security video and the man glimpsed on the street were the same.

  But, she insisted to herself, any other conclusion was nonsensical.

  Terri pushed aside the burglary report and gathered all the information she had about the missing Jennifer. It was a jumble of pieces, less a jigsaw puzzle than the detritus of a plane crash, where investigators fit together what hasn’t been destroyed, what is twisted and burn-scarred, and what is recognizable in a way that is designed to tell them something concrete about what happened.