What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  A part of her wanted to reassure herself, It’s okay, it’s okay, you can run just as you are, but if this thought crept into her imagination it was hidden. She stepped forward.

  Jennifer repeated to herself get out get out get out without thinking what she would do next. All she had was the vague idea of bursting free somehow and shouting for the police upstairs. Inwardly, her fantasy kept changing with every small action. Now she had to find them, not the other way around.

  She took a deep breath and crossed the cell floor, bare feet slapping against cement, stepping past the camera and reaching for the door handle.

  Don’t be locked don’t be locked . . .

  Her hand wrapped around the knob. It turned.

  Mister Brown Fur we’re free!

  Gingerly, trying to be as silent as possible, she pushed the door open. She tensed, telling herself, Get ready. We’re going to run. Run hard. Run fast. Run harder and faster than you ever have before.

  She had time for a single breath, a single vision of where she was. She saw a dark, shadowy basement, littered with ancient must, a wooden framed window filled with a black night sky and covered with cobwebs and dusty debris, before a light, brighter than any light she’d ever known, exploded in her eyes, blinding her instantly. She gasped, holding up her bear, trying to block the explosion. It was like a fire bursting toward her.

  Suddenly everything went utterly black as a hood—like the hood that had encased her in her first second of captivity—was jammed down over her head, cutting off the light. Before she choked she heard the woman’s harsh voice: “Poor choices, Number Four.” For a second she struggled wildly, but then she was thrown down and clamped in a grip that was part pain, part vise. Whatever terror she had known in the days past gathered in a single horrible second and seemed to spiral into a great dark hole.

  She plummeted helplessly after.

  The performance artist shook her head. “Damn,” she said, instantly sad but still fascinated. “Damn.” The filmmaker husband sighed. “I told you so,” he whispered quietly as they watched Number 4 struggle helplessly. “This is so wrong,” his wife said. But she did not turn off the feed. Instead, she clutched his hand and shuddered as they settled back on their couch and, utterly unable to turn away, continued to watch.

  At the same time, at the University of Georgia, in the Tau Epsilon Phi house, the frat boy frantically sent a text message to his roommate still stuck in a late-night class. It read: “No shit! We 1! It’s goin down now. Yer missin it.”

  In the corner of the screen in front of him the Virginity Clock stopped on a number, which flashed red for a moment before going back to zero.

  36

  “No,” Adrian said.

  “No. No. No. No,” he repeated.

  Image after image of young women leaped onto the screen. All were involved in various sex acts or else posturing for a live webcam that captured them covered in suds while taking a shower, naked while they assiduously put on makeup or salaciously entertained a man or another woman. Usually a man with tattoos or a woman with billowy blond hair. Some were budding porn stars. Others were rank amateurs. There were college students and call girls. All seemed to play to the camera. Adrian thought they were all childlike and beautiful yet mysterious. He berated himself inwardly: Years of studying psychology and you cannot tell why someone would expose themselves so intimately for any stranger to watch.

  Of course, he knew one answer. Money. But this made little sense to him.

  Then he had a second thought: The camera isn’t public. It’s only the means of distributing themselves.

  Adrian turned to the sex offender, who was ordering up each entry. He expected Mark Wolfe to look exasperated, to throw up his hands in frustration, because that was what he felt, but the sex offender did nothing of the kind. He simply continued punching computer keys and bringing up pictures, penetrating website after website. It was a cascade of pornography, flowing downhill into the computer. Wolfe had a maestro’s style, clicking away, rarely pausing to take a lingering look at the sights or videos that flooded the screen, ignoring the constant moaning and groaning that came through the speakers. Adrian, too, had settled into a rhythm of viewing, paying little attention to the actual details of each image, as if the numbing repetition had somehow immunized him to what his eyes absorbed, watching instead for a telltale sign that they had stumbled on Jennifer.

  He shifted about in his seat.

  “Mister Wolfe,” he said slowly, “are we going about this the right way?”

  Wolfe stopped. He punched the key that cut the sound off from the computer, leaving a girl who seemed barely eighteen writhing with what Adrian assumed was the most phony of passions in the background. He held up a list he’d made on a pad of legal-sized paper. It was filled with dot.com addresses and website names such as Screwingteenagers.com or Watchme24.com. Adrian thought just about any combination of sexually suggestive words had evolved into a spot on the Internet map.

  “I’ve got a lot of places yet to go,” he started, before shaking his head.

  Adrian tried again: “The right way, Mister Wolfe?”

  “No, professor,” he replied. Wolfe pointed at the woman in front of them. “And,” he said slowly, “as you can probably tell by now, not too many of these people are being forced to do anything they don’t want to do.”

  Adrian looked at the screen. He felt as if he’d been in a fight.

  “No, I’m not exactly right,” Wolfe continued. “Maybe they’ve been forced because they’re broke, or forced because they don’t have a job, or forced because it’s the only thing they can do. Or maybe something inside them forces them, because it turns them on. Possible. But that sure ain’t the case for little Jennifer, is it?” Wolfe finished his statement with a question.

  Adrian nodded.

  “Yeah,” Wolfe said. “And even the amateurs, or the high school kids posting on Facebook, they’re too damn old for the girl you’re looking for. And all these sites, well, in order to keep from getting busted, they’re pretty damn careful about making sure that even the teenagers taking pix with cell phone cameras and sneaking around so that Mom and Dad don’t find ’em are at least eighteen. No one wants the heat that . . .” He stopped. Adrian looked over at him.

  He stared hard at the sex offender. He realized that the places Wolfe had steered their inquiry were far too legal and mainstream. Adrian wondered whether the sex offender had been testing him.

  “Mister Wolfe, you’re the expert here. Give me some expert advice.”

  Wolfe appeared to be thinking, before reaching down to the floor where he’d stashed a bottle of water. He took a long pull. Then he crumpled up the sheets of paper filled with Web locations that he had been using as a guide.

  “I’ve got one idea.” He rocked back in his seat, thinking, before continuing. “Well, you know what date little Jennifer disappeared, so if she’s somewhere in here it has to be a new posting. Most of these other sites have been around for a long time. The faces change. The action doesn’t.”

  Adrian nodded. “Coercion, Mister Wolfe. A child being forced.”

  Wolfe picked up the flyer and stared at Jennifer’s picture. “A child, huh? She looks pretty . . .”

  Adrian must have looked oddly fierce, because Wolfe held up his hand. “I understand. You see a child. I see, well . . .” He hesitated. Adrian suspected he was going to say something that included the word ripe. “All right, professor. Now we’re stepping into the dangerous part. You sure you want to go along?”

  “Yes.”

  “Real dark places. Look at most of this stuff, professor. It might be explicit. It might even be disgusting to some folks. Or shocking, hell, I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be here if there weren’t someone somewhere willing to pay for the opportunity to watch. And enough someones so that all the places we’ve been
to are making money. So fit little Jennifer into that scheme and we’ll know where to go.”’

  “Stop calling her little Jennifer, Mister Wolfe. It makes it sound . . .”

  Wolfe laughed and filled in the word: “. . . trivial?”

  “That’s good enough.”

  “Well, I’ll try. But you gotta understand something. The Web makes everything trivial.”

  Wolfe looked at the entwined bodies on the screen.

  “What do you see, professor?”

  “I see a couple having sex.”

  Wolfe shook his head.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say. That’s what just about everyone says. Look closer, professor.”

  Adrian thought it was Wolfe speaking, but then he recognized Brian’s voice. And it wasn’t alone. It was as if behind the one hallucination there was a second, and he bent forward trying to separate out the tones until he realized that Tommy was echoing Brian.

  “Look deeper,” he heard.

  For a moment he was confused, not sure where the insistence came from. And then he understood it had to be Tommy. He wanted to burst out in a laugh of delight. He had almost given up hope he would hear his son again.

  “Look deeper,” he heard a second time. “It’s what I told you before, Dad. Use poetry. Use psychology. Think like a criminal. Put yourself in the rat’s shoes. Why do they run down one maze corridor and not the other? Why? What do they gain and how do they gain it? Come on, Dad, you can do it.”

  Adrian whispered his son’s name. Just saying the word Tommy filled him with a mixture of emotions, love and loss, all barreling around within him. He wanted to ask his son, What are you saying? but the words got lost on his tongue as Tommy’s insistence interrupted him.

  “The Moors Murders, Dad. What tripped up the killers?”

  “They exposed themselves.”

  “What does that mean, Dad?”

  “It means they were overconfident and weren’t thinking of the consequences when they gave up their anonymity.”

  “Isn’t that what you should be looking for?”

  His son’s voice sounded confident, determined. Tommy had always had the knack of expressing complete control even when things were disintegrating. It was why he was such a great combat photographer.

  Adrian looked back at the screen.

  “Hey, professor . . .”

  Wolfe sounded unsettled. Adrian started to talk like a student being questioned by a teacher.

  “What I see is someone who, for whatever reason, wants to be on that screen,” he said. “I see someone who is playing by some rules, willing to perform. I see someone who hasn’t been forced to scar herself.”

  Wolfe smiled. “That was poetic, professor. I think the same.”

  “I see exploitation. I see commerce.”

  “Do you see evil, professor? A lot of people would say they see depravity and something frightening and awful at pretty much the same time. And then they would stop looking.”

  Adrian shook his head. “In my field, we don’t make moral judgments. We just assess the behaviors.”

  “Sure. Like I believe that.” Wolfe seemed amused but not in an irritating way. Adrian thought that the sex offender had spent some time considering who he was and what he was drawn to. As Wolfe turned back to the computer keyboard, Adrian heard Brian whisper in his ear, “Well, so he’s a pervert and a deviate, but lo and behold he’s not a sociopath. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?”

  Brian’s laugh faded as Wolfe punched some keys and the screen filled with red and black. It was a close-up of a dungeon, replete with whips, chains, and a black wooden frame, where a man wearing a skin-tight leather mask was being systematically beaten by a large woman, also encased in black leather. The man was naked and his body shuddered with each blow. Pleasure or pain, Adrian couldn’t tell. Maybe both, he thought.

  “This sort of dark place,” Wolfe said.

  Adrian watched for an instant. He saw the man quiver. “Yes. I see. But this . . .”

  “Just an example, professor.”

  Adrian was quiet for a moment. “We have to narrow the search criteria down.”

  Again, Wolfe nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”

  He wanted to blurt out “Where do I look?” hoping that Tommy or Brian would know, but they frustrated him with silence. “We have to look for captives,” he said.

  Wolfe seemed to be thinking as Adrian continued.

  “Three people. The two kidnappers and Jennifer. How do they enlist people in what they’ve done? They need to make money. Otherwise, this is a useless search. So find me the money, Mister Wolfe. Find me the way someone would use a girl they stole from the street.”

  Adrian was insistent. His voice had an authority that defied his disease. He could hear his brother and his son in some recess of his head, echoing applause.

  Wolfe turned back to the computer. “Settle in,” he said quietly. “This is going to be difficult, especially for an old guy like you.”

  “Not difficult for you, Mister Wolfe?”

  The sex offender shook his head. “Familiar territory, professor. I’ve seen it all before.”

  He continued punching the keyboard. “You see, when you’re like me, it’s not as if you automatically understand precisely what”—he hesitated—“attracts you. There’s an exploration involved. As your mind fills with ideas and passions, well, you search them out. You do a lot of traveling in your head and then on your feet.”

  He shrugged. “That’s usually where you get caught. When you’re not sure what it is you are looking for. Once you know, and I mean you really know, well, professor, then you’re home free, because you can plan things with a concrete purpose.”

  Adrian doubted that any of the teachers in his former department could have given such a succinct analysis of the entangled emotional issues gathered around a variety of sex offenses and deviant behavior.

  Wolfe suddenly stopped with his finger poised above a final key.

  “I need to know you’re gonna back me up,” he said brusquely. “I need to know I can count on you, professor. I need to be sure that all this stays with us.”

  Adrian suddenly heard both Tommy and Brian urging him. Go ahead and lie.

  “Yes. On this you have my word.”

  “Can you watch someone get raped? Can you watch someone get killed?”

  “I thought you said that snuff films didn’t exist.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “I told you that in the reasonable world they don’t. They’re urban legend. In the unreasonable world, well, maybe they do.”

  Wolfe took a deep breath and continued.

  “You see, if I was ever caught with this stuff on the computer, or if some cop that monitors these things ever traced it back to me, I’d be . . .”

  Adrian didn’t have to fill in the obvious word.

  “No. I’m the one demanding you do this. If anything comes of it, like the police, I will take all the blame.”

  “All the blame.”

  “Yes. And you can always tell the truth, Mister Wolfe. That I was willing to pay you to guide me.”

  “Yeah, except they got to believe me.” Wolfe muttered these words and Adrian thought the sex offender was balancing on an edge. On the one hand, he knew the trouble he might be in, even with Adrian’s cover. On the other, Wolfe clearly wanted to keep going. The places they were heading were destinations that Wolfe desired. Adrian could see this, in the hunched way the sex offender bent to the keyboard.

  “All right, professor, now we’re entering into the shadows.” He smiled.

  Adrian understood that Mark Wolfe was a frequent explorer in these worlds.

  The sex offender punched a last key and young children came up on the screen. They were playing in a park
on a sunlit day. In the background, Adrian could make out antique buildings and cobblestone streets. Amsterdam, he guessed. Mark Wolfe seemed to twitch at that moment, an involuntary movement that Adrian caught only out of the corner of his eye. Then both men swallowed hard, as if their throats were suddenly parched, although for diametrically opposed reasons.

  “It looks innocent enough, doesn’t it, professor?”

  Adrian nodded.

  “It won’t be in a minute.”

  The sunlit day and the park dissolved into a white-walled room with a bed.

  “Now watching this or owning this or even thinking about this,” Wolfe said, leaning forward, “is absolutely fucking against the law.”

  “Keep going,” Adrian said, but he hoped that it was Brian who was forcing him to continue, although he hadn’t heard an insistent word from the hallucination in several minutes. It was as if even the brusque dead lawyer beside him was cowed by what appeared on the screen.

  For hours, the two men wandered through a computer world that seemed to exist in a parallel universe, one that had different rules, different morality, and which played directly to aspects of human nature that Adrian believed were coldly outlined in textbooks he’d assigned in classrooms decades earlier. It was a world that had existed for centuries—there was little that was new, except the delivery system and the people engaging in it. He would have been unsettled by what he saw, except he felt a clinical detachment. He was an explorer with a single purpose and everything that passed in front of him that didn’t fit into his theory of Where Jennifer is was discarded instantly. More than once, as he shifted about uncomfortably at the appearance of some awful exploitation, he thought himself lucky to be a psychologist and lucky to be losing his mind and his memory simultaneously. He was doubly protected, he told himself, and was able to watch things that redefined terrible because they would disappear from within him instead of becoming a nightmare.