What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  Through the long day and into the evening, Wolfe’s mother appeared from time to time at the living room door, hesitantly demanding access to her shows, only to be quickly steered aside by the dutiful son. Eventually he made her a small meal and put her to bed, following the usual nightly ritual, apologizing for monopolizing the television and promising her an extra-long sitcom experience the next day. Wolfe had seemed reluctant to steal those moments from his mother. Adrian noted this sense of empathy at the same time he noticed that Wolfe seemed to tumble with delight into the pictures they found. Sometimes Adrian would say, “Let’s move on” but Wolfe would be slow to respond, reluctant to tear himself from the images. Wolfe was both stimulated and cautious. Adrian guessed that the sex offender had never sat next to another person as he examined the Web worlds.

  It was, Adrian thought, exhausting in a numbing way.

  They saw children. They saw perversion. They saw death.

  It all looked real, even if it was faked. It all looked fake, even when it was real.

  Adrian understood that the line between fantasy and reality was beyond blurred. There was no way for him to tell any longer if what he was seeing had actually happened or had been concocted with a Hollywood special effects master’s skill. A terrorist executing a hostage—that had to be real, he thought, but it happened in some nether existence.

  Wolfe continued to punch keys but he was slowing down. Adrian imagined the sex offender was fatigued just by the act of being on the precipice of so many of his own desires.

  It was late.

  “Look,” Wolfe said, “we need to take a break. Maybe eat something. Get a coffee. C’mon, professor, let’s give it a rest. Come back tomorrow, keep trying.”

  “A few more.”

  “Do you have any idea how much money you’ve spent already?” Wolfe asked. “Just signing up for these websites. One after the next. I mean, we’re into the thousands . . .”

  “Keep going,” Adrian said. He pointed at a list that had popped up on the screen. I’lldoanything.com was followed by YourYoungFriends.com and Whatcomesnext.com.

  Wolfe clicked on the last.

  He sat up sharply. “Look at that. They want some heavy bucks to join. That’s an expensive site,” he said. “They must be offering something special.” This last word was spoken with a sort of excited energy.

  There was only red writing on a black background and a price list, except for a duration clock. No indication what the site was selling, which told Adrian that visitors already knew what to expect. This intrigued him. At the same moment, Wolfe pointed at the duration clock.

  It read: Series #4.

  “Doesn’t that fit with your girl’s disappearance?” he asked.

  Adrian did some quick math. It did. He leaned forward, filled suddenly with a different sort of enthusiasm than what he sensed from the sex offender.

  “Pay the money,” he said.

  Wolfe typed in Adrian’s credit card number. The two men waited for the authorization to come through. The room filled with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as the charge was approved.

  “That’s cool,” Wolfe said as he typed in Psychprof as a screen name, and when a prompt asked for a password he typed Jennifer.

  “Okay, professor, let’s see what we have here.”

  Another click and a webcam image dominated the screen. A young woman, face hidden by a hood, sat on a bed. She was alone in a stark basement room and quivering with fear. She was naked. Her hands were loosely handcuffed to a chain that was fixed to a wall.

  “Whoa,” Wolfe said. “That’s out there.”

  Below the image, the words Say hello to Number 4, Psychprof appeared.

  Adrian stared hard at the image. His eyes traveled over the girl’s skin looking for some telltale sign that might help him. He saw nothing.

  “I can’t tell,” he said, as if answering a question that didn’t need to be spoken out loud. He stood and closed in on the television, hoping that by moving closer he might see something clearer. The room on the television screen filled with the sound of heavily labored breathing and muffled sobs.

  “Look there, professor. On the arm.”

  Adrian saw a tattoo of a black flower on the girl’s arm. As he stared, Wolfe moved next to him. He pointed at the screen, touching it with his hand as if he could caress the person it showed.

  Adrian saw what he was pointing at. A thin scar from an appendectomy on the girl’s side.

  “But she looks like the right age, huh, professor?”

  Adrian picked up the Missing Persons flyer. There was no mention of a tattoo or of a surgical scar.

  He hesitated. He saw Wolfe’s cell phone on the table and he picked it up.

  “Who you calling?” Wolfe asked.

  “Who do you think?” Adrian answered. He dialed a number but his eyes were fixed on the naked, shivering girl in front of him.

  Terri Collins picked up on the third ring. She was still seated across from Mary Riggins and Scott West, working her way through the same explanation for the hundredth time. Mary Riggins seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of tears that had been shed liberally over the hours that Terri had sat next to her. This didn’t surprise the detective. She knew she would have had the same.

  The caller ID on her cell phone came back with Mark Wolfe’s name. This astonished her. It was very late and this made little sense. Sex offenders never called the police. It was the other way around.

  She was taken aback when she heard Adrian’s voice.

  “Detective, sorry to bother you at this late hour,” he started. He sounded oddly rushed. Terri Collins thought Adrian had usually seemed unsteady in the times they’d been together. Hurried was not a word she would have used to describe him in any of their meetings.

  “What is it, professor?”

  She was curt. The tears from Mary Riggins seemed the priority at that moment.

  “Did Jennifer have a scar from an appendectomy? Did she have a tattoo of a black flower on her arm?”

  Terri started to answer, then stopped.

  “Why do you ask, professor?”

  “I just want to be sure about something,” he answered.

  Sure about what? she thought. This raised her suspicions but she didn’t follow up. She did not want to be cruel to the deranged old man, but neither did she want to distract the mother and erstwhile stepfather with anything that might be misinterpreted as hope.

  She turned to Scott and Mary. “Did Jennifer have any scars or tattoos that you might not have mentioned?” She asked the question holding her hand over the receiver.

  Scott answered swiftly. “Absolutely not, detective. She was little more than a child! A tattoo? No way. We would never have allowed that, no matter how many times she asked. And she was underage, so she couldn’t get one without our permission. And she’d never had a surgery, right, Mary?”

  Mary Riggins nodded.

  Terri Collins spoke into the phone. “No to both. Good night, professor.”

  She disconnected the line, though not without a number of questions reverberating within her. But their answers would have to wait. She needed to extricate herself from the grief in the room, and she wasn’t sure yet how to do that gracefully. Most cops, she thought, are real good at exiting as soon as they’ve delivered the blow. She wasn’t.

  Adrian clicked the phone shut.

  He continued to stare at the screen. “You can’t tell much,” he said.

  Wolfe was moving to the keyboard. “Look,” he said, “they’ve got a menu. Let’s at least check that.”

  He clicked first on a chapter heading “Number 4 Eats,” which gave them a new screen. In it, the young woman licked at a bowl of oatmeal. Both men bent forward, because in these images a blindfold had replaced the hood. It gave them a few more feat
ures to examine.

  Wolfe held up the Missing Persons flyer, pushing it right next to the television. “I don’t know, professor. I mean, no tattoo . . . but Christ the hair sort of looks right.”

  Adrian stared hard. Hairline. Jawline. Shape of the nose. The curve of the lips. The length of the neck. He could feel his eyes burning into the images. He stiffened when he saw the tray of food being removed by a masked, jumpsuited person. A woman, he thought, as he measured her size and form, even if concealed by the folds of clothing.

  When Tommy spoke to him, it seemed to come from within. “Dad, if you wanted to hide someone’s identity who you had to show to the world, wouldn’t you take some precautions?”

  Of course, Adrian thought.

  “Mister Wolfe, do you know anything about fake tattoos? Or Hollywood makeup?”

  Wolfe looked closely at the television. He touched the appendectomy scar. “I got one of those. Looks the same. So this one doesn’t look fake to me. But that’s the point, ain’t it?”

  He clicked on the chapter heading “Interview 1 with Number 4.”

  They saw the young woman move closer to the camera. The jump­suit was questioning her. They both heard her say “I’m eighteen” to the lens.

  Wolfe snorted. “The hell she is. She’s just been forced to say that bullshit. Two years younger, easy.”

  Adrian thought that there were probably few people he had ever known quite as expert as Mark Wolfe at recognizing a teenager’s precise age.

  Wolfe clicked on a chapter headed “Number 4 Tries to Escape.” They watched as the young woman clawed her way out of a collar and chain around her neck. Just as she ripped off her blindfold the camera angle changed so that it was from behind her, obscuring her facial features.

  “Escape, sure,” Wolfe said cynically. “See how the front camera shut down and now we can see her only from behind? Can’t see her face, can we? Somebody knew what they were doing.”

  Adrian didn’t reply. He was trying to focus on something else. There was a piece of memory floating in his imagination and he couldn’t get it to hold still so that he could examine it.

  Wolfe watched as the young woman approached a door. From the rear, the camera tracked her. There was a flash of light and a masked man jumped into the image. Then the chapter ended. “The next one is ‘Number 4 Loses Her Virginity,’ professor. My guess is that would be explicit sex. Maybe it’s a rape. You want to see that?”

  Adrian shook his head. “Go back to the main screen.”

  Wolfe did. The hooded girl remained frozen in position.

  Adrian had a thousand questions, all about who and why and what was the attraction, but he didn’t ask them. Instead, he simply turned and examined Wolfe’s face. The sex offender was leaning forward. Fascinated. The light in the man’s eyes pretty much told him all he needed to know. He could recognize compulsion when it reared up in front of him.

  Adrian wanted to turn away but he was unable. He suddenly heard a chorus of voices—son, brother, wife—all of them were shouting conflicting things, but all loudly told him to watch and see. The racket in his mind was ratcheting up in volume, steadily increasing, symphonic, all-­encompassing. It screamed in his head and he clasped his hands over his ears but it did no good. Their cries redoubled painfully. The only thing he could do was stare at the screen and the young woman seemingly trapped there.

  And, as Adrian watched, he saw her reach out blindly, feeling around, until her skinny arm wrapped itself around a familiar shape, which she hugged to her heaving chest.

  It was a shape he had seen once before.

  Once he had noticed a worn and tattered stuffed bear, a child’s toy strapped incongruously to a backpack. Same bear. Same bear. Same bear. The thought echoed in his mind, as if it were shouted by each of his ghosts, except this was his own voice now. He stared at the television screen. It’s the same toy bear, he told himself inwardly.

  Only now it was clutched helplessly in shaky arms.

  37

  In slippers and underwear, Linda was ensconced in front of the bank of computers, diligently taking care of some pressing Series #4 business. Her white Hazmat suit had been tossed haphazardly onto the floor near the bed. She had pinned up her dark hair so that she looked a little like an undressed office secretary waiting for the boss to return from a meeting so she could give him a surprise. She was busy crediting the accounts that had picked the right hour in the rape pool, her fingers racing over a calculator keypad. She thought this was important. Their clientele would expect a rapid return on their wagers, and there was a sense of obligation involved. She was aware that there were any number of ways Michael and she could have cheated the winning subscribers out of their money, but this seemed distasteful and unfair. Honesty, she believed, was an integral part of their success. Repeat customers were important, as was word-of-mouth recommendations. Any good businesswoman knew that.

  Michael was in the shower and she could hear him singing haphazard snatches of tunes. He never seemed to have any rhyme or reason for the songs he chose; one morsel of country and western blended into an operatic aria, followed by something from the Dead or the Airplane—“Don’t you want somebody to love . . . Don’t you need somebody to love.” He seemed fond of antique rock and roll from the sixties. She was the music expert in their relationship and she was in charge of their iTunes account.

  She hummed along as she glanced at one of the monitors keeping an eye on Number 4. Because the blindfold had been discarded and Number 4 was back beneath the hood, it was more difficult for Linda to assess her state of mind. Number 4 remained curled in a fetal position and very well might have finally fallen asleep. As best Linda could tell Number 4 was no longer bleeding. She did need a bath. But, more important, the girl needed her rest.

  They all did. She wondered whether any of the subscribers to Series #4 fully appreciated the constant effort and exhausting work that Michael and she put in to bring the Web theater to its final curtain. They had to battle their own fatigue, along with attention to every conceivable detail. They were constantly alert to both criminality and creativity. Series #4 required that much and more. The subscribers ranged so widely in their backgrounds and interests it was a never-ending chore to make sure all desires and all fascinations that flooded through the interactive board were accommodated. While there were similarities—a request from Sweden might be the same as a demand from Singapore—they tried to adapt their responses, and Number 4’s behavior, to the distinctions in cultures. There was a worldwide audience and she had to be sensitive to detail. This was tough work. That it was astonishingly rewarding, Linda thought, was pretty much beside the point. Ultimately, Whatcomesnext.com was about their dedication.

  Video game designers, porn site maintenance—these were big, mainstream businesses that employed dozens or more. None was anywhere near as edgy as what she and Michael had invented all by themselves. This made her proud.

  She listened for Michael, smiling as he butchered one tune after another. They couldn’t do this, she thought, if they weren’t really in love.

  Linda shook her head.

  She couldn’t help herself. She laughed out loud just as he emerged from the shower.

  Over the years they had been together, she had memorized every routine step that Michael took in the bathroom. He would grab a threadbare towel and dry himself off, rubbing away the residue of his task with Number 4. He would emerge, shiny-skinned, refreshed, glowing a little red from the steamy heat, and naked. She could picture his lanky body as he dried his hair. Then he would stand in front of the mirror and painfully drag a comb through his tangled locks. Maybe afterward he would shave. Slicked down, clean-cheeked, he would step out of the bath and look at her with his endearing, lopsided grin.

  He will be beautiful, Linda thought. And I will be beautiful for him forever.

  Linda checked the mo
nitors again. Nothing from Number 4, except for the occasional rabbit twitch. She wanted to speak to the image on the screen, very much in the same manner that she suspected the subscribers did: You got through the tough part, Number 4. Well done. You survived. And it couldn’t have been all that bad. It didn’t hurt that much. I got through it once. Every girl does. And anyway, it would have been far worse in the backseat of some car or some low-rent seedy motel room or on the living room couch some afternoon before your parents arrived home from work. But it wasn’t the biggest challenge you are going to face. Not by a long shot.

  Listening for the sounds of Michael’s feet padding against the wood floor, Linda took a quick glimpse at the chat boards. There were hundreds of responses filling the queue. She sighed, knowing that the two of them would have to get to all of them promptly, because those responses would guide their next moves.

  Did they want to see more?

  Did they want it to come to an end?

  Were they tired of Number 4?

  Were they still fascinated?

  She predicted that the end was closing in on Number 4, but she wasn’t completely certain. Number 4 had been by far their most intriguing subject—if their bank account and the number of people who were drawn into the story were accurate ways of measuring. Linda felt a twinge of sadness.

  She hated to see things come to conclusions. Ever since she was a child she had hated birthdays, Christmas, summer holidays, not because of what she had done or received on those occasions but because she had known that whatever fun and excitement accompanied them, it had to end. On more than one occasion she had sat as a child in hard-backed pews listening to priests’ phony talk about eternal life standing over a coffin. Her mother’s. Her grandparents’. Finally, her father’s, which left her cold and alone in the world until Michael arrived. That was what she hated, the finishings.