What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  Michael wondered if after they left the place would be haunted. He burst out in a small laugh: ghosts would probably disappoint his imaginary couple.

  He stopped the truck near the front, carefully turning it so that it was pointed down the drive. He left the keys in the ignition. He liked the truck and would be sad to abandon it. He did not think about what he had to do to Number 4. Like the truck, she was now a commodity that was nearing the end of her usefulness. For an instant, he found his mind wandering. He was having difficulty remembering Number 4’s real name.

  Janis, Janet, Janna—no, Jennifer.

  He smiled. Jennifer. Goodbye, Jennifer, he thought.

  Linda rocked in her fancy desk chair.

  She was unsure playing the two injections of sound was a wise idea. The subscribers preferred the noise of Number 4’s labored breathing, which she suspected they considered a type of music. On the other hand, everyone seemed to get energized when they used one of the other disorientating sound effects. These triggered their fantasies, just as they did Number 4’s. Linda made a mental note that in the future they should increase the variety of added noises. Playgrounds and babies crying were good, police sirens were excellent, but they had to expand their repertoire. Number 5 needed to be surrounded by constantly shifting fake worlds.

  Linda believed that they learned something new with each series as she picked up Michael’s outline for the last hours of Series #4.

  They were getting better and better at what they did but she simply wasn’t satisfied with the way he’d outlined the denouement. It didn’t have the right passion.

  Bad memories, Linda thought. Number 4 deserves a better send-off.

  Number 1 had died accidentally. The rope they’d used to confine her snagged and throttled her when she tumbled from a bed in the midst of a nightmare. Michael and she had not been paying enough attention and it brought their first series to a premature ending. Her death had really upped the devotion they paid to monitoring all activities.

  Despite their plans, Number 2 had died offscreen. Their initial scenario had been to combine rape and murder in traditional snuff terms—but it had devolved into a fierce cat fight, and Linda had been forced to cut the outgoing feed and help Michael with the knife. It had been sloppy and grotesque and unworthy of their professionalism. A huge mess to clean up, Linda remembered. It had left a decidedly sour taste in their mouths and had been a very poor business decision. They had been more careful with Number 3. They had spent hours working on the smallest details of her death, only to be cheated when she got precipitously sick. Linda had suspected that the illness was somehow related to the beatings they’d administered. They had overemphasized the physical aspects of submission. These mistakes were why they had been far more cautious with Number 4. Hurt but not hurt. Torture but not torture. Abuse but not abuse.

  Never before had the end actually played out on camera as designed, while everyone watched, glued to computers and television screens. She knew the clientele wanted this—no, demanded this. They wanted action. They didn’t want accident, or severed feeds, or excuses and they sure as hell didn’t want Number 4 to simply stop moving, choke up some blood, and die as her predecessor had.

  But they also didn’t want Michael to simply execute her on camera. Linda even found this distasteful. It would make them little more than terrorists. They had to be far more sophisticated.

  Linda glanced around the room and spotted the table filled with their collection of weapons. The beginnings of an idea formed in her imagination. She rose up, went to the table, and grabbed a .357 Magnum revolver. With an expert flick of the wrist, she opened the chamber and checked to see if it was loaded. Smiling, she replaced the pistol on the table and grabbed a stray pad of paper. She scrawled some notes, suddenly excited. A challenge, she thought. A unique challenge for the viewers. But even more so for Number 4.

  Linda lifted her head. She heard the truck arriving outside. She bent to the task of writing, thinking, Michael is going to love this.

  It was like a present.

  40

  Adrian could feel Cassie moving about just behind his head. He leaned back in his seat and felt her fingers running through his hair. Then her arms wrapped around him, hugging him like a child. She was crooning to him, as once upon a time she had with Tommy, when he was young and feverish. It was probably a lullaby but he couldn’t make out the tune. Still, it calmed him, so when he heard her whisper “It’s time, Audie. It’s time,” he was ready.

  Mark Wolfe was no longer important. The sex offender’s house, his mother, his computer—all the unsettling spots they had visited ­electronically—seemed to be sliding into a distant recess. Detective Collins was no longer important. She was confined by procedures and too worried about the wrong things to help. Mary Riggins and Scott West were no longer important. They were handcuffed by arrogance, uncertainty, and runaway emotions. The only person remaining actively hunting for Jennifer was Adrian, and he knew he was teetering on the precipice of madness.

  Perhaps madness would be an advantage, he thought. His dead wife and his dead child and his dead brother jumbled together with the image of the hooded girl reaching out through the computer screen directly to him. It was like listening to two instruments playing the same piece of music but in different keys and different octaves.

  He pushed himself reluctantly out of his wife’s embrace. He could feel her hands slipping from his skin, leaving it on fire with recollection of happier days.

  “You have enough to go on, now,” she said, prodding him.

  “I think so.”

  On a piece of scrap paper he had written the GPS coordinates for the website Whatcomesnext. He went over to his computer and hesitated.

  “You know what you have to do,” she said cautiously, urging him to action. “Maybe not like Wolfe or the detective but you know enough. They would take what you’ve learned, Audie, and they wouldn’t stop until it was all over.”

  He was thinking, One would do something evil, the other would do something good. One was a criminal. One was a cop. But both would want Jennifer, even if for different reasons.

  “Adrian, love . . .” Cassie was cajoling him forward. “I think you need to hurry.”

  He looked down and saw his hands reach toward the keyboard. Cassie was steering his fingers. Touch an E. Type an R. Spell a word. Click the mouse. He thought he had become trapped between worlds. At first the disease had chipped away only simple things that most people would take for granted. Now it was stealing them wholesale. Inwardly, he stiffened. He told himself that it was only a matter of being tough and determined. He muttered, “You will not stop. You will not hesitate. You will do this just like you used to be able.” The sound of his own voice echoed about his book-lined study, almost as if his words were shouted at the edge of a deep canyon.

  Adrian put aside doubts and employed Google Earth.

  An address came up on the screen. He used that to get to a real estate listing.

  A dozen color pictures of an old, ramshackle two-story farmhouse appeared in front of him. There was also a name and a telephone number for a real estate agent. He clicked on the agent’s smiling picture and saw that she managed many properties. Each of the places was described in glowing, desirable terms. The companion photographs made every listing seem quaint and solid, the type of investments that would inexorably rise in value. Adrian didn’t believe much of what he saw. Realtors could make even the most depressed and neglected New England rural area sound like the next big real estate opportunity.

  He could sense Cassie looking over his shoulder. She must not have believed what she read either.

  “Isolated places,” Cassie said. “Poor places that want richer people to show up, set down roots, start spending money, and save everyone already stuck there.”

  Adrian could see that, and he nodded.

&nb
sp; “These are places where no one gives a damn what you’re doing,” Cassie continued, “as long as you’re doing it quietly and you’re all paid up. No nosy neighbors or curious cops, I’d guess. Just a lot of quiet, hidden spots off the beaten path.”

  Adrian hit the print button and his printer started to whir.

  “Especially the pictures. You are going to need the pictures,” Cassie insisted. It was like being reminded not to forget something at the grocery store.

  “I know,” Adrian replied. “I’ve got them.”

  “You have to go now,” Cassie urged. There was a no-debate tone to her voice that he remembered from times when Tommy had gotten into trouble. These hadn’t happened often but, when they did, Cassie put aside the artist and became as stern as a black-robed Methodist minister.

  He stood up and grabbed a coat from the back of a chair.

  “You’ll need something else,” she said.

  Adrian nodded because he understood precisely what she was talking about. He was pleased that his strides across the room seemed steady. No drunken wavering, no hesitant steps. No old man’s unsteadiness. He took a long look around the house, standing in the front doorway. Memories seemed like a thunderous waterfall of noise around him; every angle, every shelf, every space and inch loudly reminded him of days that had passed. He wondered if he would ever return home. As he paused, he heard Cassie whisper beside him. “You need a verse,” she said quietly. “Something stirring. Something brave. ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward’ or ‘fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.’”

  Adrian heard the poems resonate within him and they made him smile. Poems about warriors. He stepped outside into early morning light and realized that for some unfathomable reason his wife remained at his side, suddenly cut loose from the home they’d shared. He didn’t understand why she was no longer locked inside but the change made him happy and excited. He could feel her stepping in place with Brian and he guessed that Tommy wasn’t far away.

  Adrian and his dead past marched swiftly across the yard to his old Volvo waiting in the driveway.

  Adrian’s voice on the sex offender Mark Wolfe’s cell phone had stuck in an unsettled part of Terri Collins’s mind since she’d heard it. She had hoped that the old professor was finished with meddling in Jennifer’s disappearance. And she thought that Mark Wolfe had been questioned and cleared and had no connection other than coincidence with the situation. She could not see any reason to put the two of them together asking questions about tattoos and scars.

  She was en route to her office. It was morning commuting time, which crowded the main streets even in the precious little college town. In Terri’s mental list of things to do, at the top was to find out what the professor was up to. It wasn’t exactly like he could mess up her investigation. That was at a standstill. She looked around at people behind the wheels of cars and she slowed to a halt to allow a school bus to swing into the drop-off lanes at an elementary school. This reminded her to increase heat on Mark Wolfe. She didn’t see any way she could make enough trouble that he would pack up and leave that day, taking all his perverse desires to a different community where some other local police force would have to deal with him—passing the trash was the phrase cops used for this type of jurisdictional release of responsibility. But the day when his mother was shipped off to a nursing home—that was the day she would damn well make sure Mark Wolfe began to think moving was a really good idea.

  She drove past the school, glancing quickly to the side when she saw the yellow bus disgorge its load. A pair of harried teachers steered unruly children toward the front doors. The start to a typical day. Absolutely nothing out of place. She knew her own children were already inside. She imagined them sliding noisily into classroom seats. There would be art and math and recess and at no time would any of the children have the slightest inkling that just on the periphery all sorts of dangers lurked.

  The police headquarters was only a couple of blocks from the school, and she pulled her car into the rear parking lot. She grabbed her satchel, badge, and gun. She figured the professor would require another stern stay away from police business half lecture, half threat. It was mild outside. Burglaries, she thought. The rise in evening temperatures invariably encouraged more overnight break-ins. Frustrating crimes. Insurance paperwork and angry home owners.

  Fully expecting to spend her day taking reports and maybe going out to a few houses or businesses and inspecting a shattered window or splintered kitchen door frame, Terri Collins walked into the headquarters. Her eyes fell first on the shift sergeant, ensconced behind a security glass panel at a desk in the main vestibule. The sergeant had a paunch and gray hair but a practiced manner with citizens who stomped in through the front entrance with some loud complaint or another—generally these were dogs off their leashes, loud students urinating in public bushes, or cars parked illegally. But as soon as their eyes met, the sergeant pointed to the side, where a dozen stiff plastic chairs were gathered against a wall. This was what passed for a waiting area.

  “This guy’s been waiting for you,” the sergeant said through his safety glass.

  Terri hesitated as Mark Wolfe stood up.

  He had an upset, not much sleep and out of sorts look on his face. She didn’t start with any greeting and she cut him off before he could speak. “How come Professor Thomas used your cell phone to call me?”

  Wolfe shrugged. “I’ve been helping him with research, and he asked me for it—”

  “What sort of research?”

  Wolfe shuffled about.

  “Mister Wolfe, what sort of research?”

  “I’ve been helping him look for that girl. Little Jennifer. The one that went missing.”

  “What do you mean helping him? And what do you mean look?”

  “He thinks the kid will show up on some porn website. He has some pretty far-out theories about why she was taken and . . .” Wolfe stopped.

  This made little sense to Terri Collins, especially the phrase far-out theories.

  “So why are you here? You could have just called me.”

  Wolfe shrugged. “The old guy didn’t show,” Mark Wolfe said. “He told me he was gonna come to my house this morning so we could make some more progress. I even called in sick at work, damn it, and we were supposed to . . .”

  Wolfe said nothing about the money he expected.

  “Supposed to what?” Terri asked sharply.

  “I’ve been showing him around the stuff on the Internet.” Wolfe spoke slowly, cautiously. “He wanted to see, well, you know, some pretty weird stuff. I mean, he’s a psychologist, for Christ’s sake, and I was just helping him out. He didn’t really have a clue where or how to surf around and—”

  “But you did,” Terri said stiffly.

  Wolfe gave her a What can you do? look.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I kinda like the old bastard.” Wolfe’s voice had a curious sort of affection within it. “Look, you and I know he’s crazy. But crazy determined, if you know what I mean.” Wolfe hesitated, measuring Terri’s blank cop poker face. He seemed to shift gears and spoke forcefully. “I need to talk to you,” Wolfe said. “But in private.”

  “Private?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to get in trouble. Look, detective, I’m trying to be the good guy here. The professor is pretty shaky. Hell, you must have seen that.” Wolfe eyed Terri to see if she agreed. “And, look, I got worried about him, okay? Is that so goddamn terrible? Why don’t you cut me some slack?”

  Terri paused. She wasn’t sure she believed the sex offender had suddenly become a proper, attentive, straitlaced citizen of their community. But something had driven him to police headquarters and whatever the something was, it had to be a powerful incentive because a man like Mark Wolfe never wanted to have anything to do with the police.

  “All
right,” she said. “We can talk in private. But first you tell me why?”

  Wolfe smiled in a way that made her even more suspicious.

  “Well,” he said, “my guess is that our friend the professor is about to go shoot someone.”

  Wolfe didn’t know whether this was actually true or not. Adrian had spent enough time waving his semiautomatic pistol in the sex offender’s face that it wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion to draw. In fact, Wolfe believed if one considered the possibility that the professor could accidentally fire the weapon while it was pointed in the general direction of another person then the death odds increased significantly.

  They drove over to the professor’s house, even though Wolfe insisted they weren’t going to find him there. As he’d told the detective, the car was gone and the front door open and unlocked. Without hesitating, Terri Collins pushed inside, Mark Wolfe a stride behind. One realized that she was breaking a pretty clear-cut departmental rule, the other was intensely curious.

  “Jesus,” Wolfe muttered, “this place is a mess.”

  They were greeted by disarray. Terri shrugged it off, although she realized that it had disintegrated further from when she had first visited the professor. Any semblance of straightening up or cleaning had vanished. Clothes, dishes, debris, papers cluttered every surface. It seemed as if there had been a storm inside that just minutes earlier had passed through.