What Comes Next (17 page)

Terri noted on the incident report that the fire lieutenant had drawn attention to
undetermined accelerants.

No hair, fingerprint, fiber, DNA would be left in that truck, she thought.

Terri got up from the computer and walked across the cramped office to the battered, stained coffee machine that was a necessity in any police detective’s office. She poured herself a cup of black coffee, then sipped at the bitter taste. Ordinarily she liked two sugars and more than a dollop of cream, but this day sweetness seemed the wrong taste to put in her mouth.

After a moment she returned to her desk. Her satchel was hung over the back of her chair. She reached inside and removed a small leather case and flipped this open. Inside, encased in plastic sleeves, were half a dozen pictures of her two children. She stared at each photo, taking the time to reconstruct the circumstances of each picture.
This one was a birthday party. This one was when we went to Acadia on a camping holiday. This one was the first snow two winters ago.

Sometimes it helped when she reminded herself why she was a policewoman.

She picked up the picture on the police flyer she’d had made up for Jennifer. She knew it was a mistake to emotionally join things. One of the first lessons anyone learned as they worked up the police ranks was that home was home and work was work, and when the two collided nothing good happened, because decisions should be made coldly and calmly.

She looked at Jennifer’s picture. She remembered talking with the teenager after the second runaway attempt. It had been fruitless because, as troubled as the young girl had been, she was clever and determined and most of all tough. Growing up in a town filled with the pretentious, the eccentric, and the precious, Jennifer had been hard-edged.

And not fake and laughable tough, with teenage posturing and
I want a tattoo and aren’t I cool because I called my English teacher an obscene name to her face and I’m smoking cigarettes behind my parents’ backs
tough. The detective had imagined that Jennifer was a lot like she was at the same age. And Jennifer had been responding to some of the same emotions that had saved Terri’s life when she had run from an abusive man. It was as if she could see herself in the younger woman.

Terri sighed deeply.
You should walk away from this right now,
she told herself.
Give the case to another cop and get away, because you won’t see things clearly.

This was wrong and right at the same time. In some not fully formed way she had come to think that Jennifer was her responsibility.

Filled with warring notions of what she should do, she typed a quick e-mail memo to her boss, with a copy to her shift supervisor.
Some evidence being developed that this is not a routine runaway. Needs additional investigation. Possible abduction situation. Will update with details as I collect more information. Later assessment warranted.

She signed her name to the e-mail and was about to send it, then thought better. She didn’t want to alarm the chief, at least not yet. She was also concerned about any information leaking out to the local press, because the next thing she knew every television station, reporter, and crime blog fanatic would be parked outside the station, demanding interviews and updates and pretty much preventing them from accomplishing anything important, including recovering Jennifer.

If there was any chance.

This made her pause. She thought about all the milk cartons, websites for abducted and missing children, television reports, and newspaper headlines and believed that none of it does any good.

Terri took a deep breath.
Not usually. But sometimes
… She stopped herself. It did no good to fall into speculation one way or the other until she knew for certain what she was up against.

She removed the line
Possible abduction situation
from the e-mail.

She knew she had to find something concrete. She knew what the first question from her boss would be:
How can you be sure?

There was a lot more to do at the computer. She needed to take the few details she had and run them against other crimes, looking for similarities. She had to do a thorough check of all known sex offenders within the triangle she had identified. She needed to see if there were any reports of unidentified sexual predators working in the area. Were there any false alarms? Had any parents called any of the local forces complaining about this man or that man cruising the neighborhood suspiciously? Terri knew she had lots of research that needed to be handled quickly and efficiently.

If Jennifer was kidnapped, the clock was running. If there even was a clock. Maybe it was just one prolonged rape and then murder. That was what usually happened. Gone, used up, and then dead.

She tried not to think about that.

Terri paused.
There had been two people in that truck. That’s what the old man said he saw.
This simply made no sense to her. Predators worked alone, trying to create as much darkness and fog around their desires as they could.

She fidgeted slightly in her seat. Maybe in eastern Europe or Latin America there were kidnappings that were organized parts of the international sex trade, but not in the United States and certainly not in small New England college towns.

Where did that leave her? She did not know.

Terri considered Mary Riggins and Scott West and knew they wouldn’t be any help. Scott was likely to complicate matters with opinions and demands, even more than he already had. Mary was likely to panic further as soon as she heard the word
predator.

There was only one other direction she could go.

She did not know what was wrong with Adrian Thomas. He seemed a little like a flickering light. She pictured the way he had seemed distracted, curiously displaced, disconnected to the room he’d been in and the story he was telling her, as if he were somewhere else, in some parallel location.
Something was definitely not right,
she thought.
Maybe he’s just old and that is what it will look like for all of us someday.

This was a charitable thought that she didn’t actually believe. At that moment, however, his was the only logical direction in which to turn.

16

He thought,
They were truly terrible.

Of course, the word
terrible
hardly captured what they had actually done. The word was antiseptic.

Adrian stared at pictures of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady that adorned the jacket of
The Encyclopedia of Modern Murder
that his friend the ab psych professor had loaned him. He was both fascinated and frightened. The book contained so many horrific details that they became petty, almost routine, because they were bunched together in relentless volume.
This victim was killed with a hatchet. This victim’s screams were tape-recorded. They took pornographic pictures. This child was abandoned in a shallow grave out on the Moors.
Reading the journalistic descriptions was like walking through a battlefield. If you see one dead body, it’s awful and compelling and hard to tear one’s eyes away. If you see a hundred they start to mean nothing.

Adrian let the pages rustle together like dry leaves tumbling in a fall breeze as he opened to the entry that described
The Moors Murders.

Like any good scientist Adrian had immersed himself in his subject, trying to learn as much as he could in a short amount of time. There is a processing that teachers develop over the years, where controversial, even repellant, material leaps into their minds in a way that is accessible so that it can be re-formed and presented to students. He was pleased that his ability to absorb much in a short amount of time had not yet slunk away, as had so many of his other intellectual capabilities.

Adrian had entered into a realm where, after spending much of a night and the following morning surrounded by books and making computer inquiries, he knew he could speak intelligently about the curious connections between male-female criminal partnerships.
What will love make you do?
he asked himself.
Wonderful things? Or awful things?

At the same time he hoped no one would come along and ask him to add six and nine together or question him about the day of the week, week of the month, or month of the year, or even what year it was, because he doubted he could answer correctly, even if he got an invisible and subtle assist from someone he once loved who was now dead. Ghosts, Adrian thought, were helpful—but only to a point. He was still unsure how practical the information they shared might be.

He was smart enough to know that every hallucination stemmed from memory about what Cassie or Brian might once have said, or what they might now say, were they alive to say it. He understood that all these things that seemed real were in fact a chemical imbalance in his frontal lobes, a short circuiting and fraying, but still it seemed to be helping somehow, which was all that he asked for.

A voice interrupted his reverie.

“What does it say?”

Adrian looked across his office and saw Cassie standing in the doorway. She looked pale, old, beaten. There was sadness behind her eyes, a look he remembered from the days before her accident, when she was distracted by grief. Gone was the sexy, slender, seductive Cassie from their first years together. This was the tired and sick woman who desperately needed death to come to her. Seeing her this way made Adrian catch his breath and reach out, wanting to find some way of comforting her, when he knew that not once in their final months together had he ever been able to do that.

He could feel his own tears, and so he ignored her question and tried to say something he thought he should have said before she died. Or maybe he had said it a hundred times but it had never resonated.

“Cassie,” he said slowly, “I’m so sorry. There was nothing you or I, or anyone, could do. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do.”

She dismissed this excuse with a single wave.

“I hate that,” she said briskly. “The
there was nothing we could do
lie. There’s always something someone could have said or done. And Tommy always listened to you.”

Adrian closed his eyes. He knew if he opened them they would automatically shift to the corner of the desk where there was another photograph: his son, Tommy, in cap and gown on a sunlit graduation day, ivy walls in the background. Nothing but hope and promise.

He heard Cassie’s voice slice through the start of painful memories. He slowly opened up toward her. She was insistent and forceful, the way she always was when she knew she was right. He had rarely resented this. He considered it her artist’s prerogative. If you knew where to put the unequivocal first line of color on a blank white canvas you had the right to your opinions.

“All those books and computer inquiries, what do they say?” she demanded again.

Adrian adjusted the reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. This was an academic’s notion of acting.

“It says they killed five people together.”

He hesitated. “Five people that the police constabulary in rural England were able to identify. There might have been more. Eight was the number some criminologists believed more accurate. The papers over there called it the
end of innocence.
”

“People?”

Adrian shook his head. “No, you’re right. Need to be specific.
Children.
They ranged in age from twelve to sixteen or seventeen.”

“That’s just about Jennifer’s age.”

“Right. But it’s a coincidence, I guess.”

“I thought in your teaching you
hated
coincidences and didn’t believe they ever happened. Psychologists like explanations, not accidents.”

“Maybe the Freudians—”

“Adrian, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Cassie. That was supposed to be a joke.”

He smiled wanly at his dead wife. She had remained hanging in the doorway, the way she often would, when she didn’t want to disturb him at his work but still had a question that needed an answer. She would hesitate in that transitional space, as if what she asked in that moment would disrupt him less, coming as it did from a slight distance.

“Aren’t you going to come in?” he asked. He motioned toward a seat.

Cassie shook her head. “I have too much to do.”

He must have looked a little dismayed because her tone softened. “Audie,” she said slowly, “you know there’s not much time. Either for you or for Jennifer.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I know.” He hesitated. “It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“It’s turning information into action. These two, the moors murderers—Brady and Hindley—they were tripped up when they tried to bring someone else into their perversion and the fellow they wanted to enlist called the police. As long as it was the two of them, feeding off each other, they were actually safe. It was only when they wanted to impress someone else, someone who turned out to be just slightly not as homicidally perverse as they, that they got caught.”

“Keep going,” Cassie said. Her face had caught a small smile, just the barest of upturns at the corners. She was pushing him forward. Adrian knew that was always the way they were in their relationship. The artist in her would pull his head out of the academic clouds, find a practical application for all his lab work. Adrian felt a rush of passion.
Why wouldn’t he have loved the woman who made his imaginings relevant?
Emotions flooded him and, like so many dinner table, backyard, gathered around the winter fireplace conversations, he picked up his pace.

“The psychodynamics of murderous couples are elusive. There is clearly an overwhelming sexual component. But the linkage seems more profound. That’s what I’m trying to understand. Relationships are like checks and balances—they mean something is processed outwardly, discussed, analyzed, what have you. At least, that’s what they appear to do. But beyond that, Cassie, there is this enabling kind of action. It’s as if the male wouldn’t do what he does without the female there to give it some quality that is frightening. It’s beyond authorization. It’s about taking something to a really deep and dark place.”