What Comes Next (20 page)

“I think you go,” he said after a moment. “She still seems so scared. When I enter the room, we should play that for maximum shock.”

“You’re the boss,” Linda said.

“The hell I am,” Michael replied, laughing.

He pushed himself away from the computers and walked over to the table with weapons. He searched for a moment before picking up a Colt .357 Magnum. Linda took it from him as Michael turned back to his sheets of paper, flipping rapidly through them. “Here,” he said. “Read this.”

Linda ran her eyes over the page. “Okeydoke,” she said, grinning. She looked over at a clock. It was shortly after midnight. “I think I’ll make it breakfast,” she said.

Linda opened the door slowly and stepped into the basement. She was dressed as before, in a crinkly white Hazmat suit and black balaclava that covered everything except her eyes. She carried a tray, the sort found in cafeterias everywhere. On the tray was a plastic water bottle with all brand and manufacturing labels removed. She had prepared a bowl of instant oatmeal, using an American recipe that was shipped all over the world. There was also an orange. There were no utensils.

She saw Number 4 pivot in her direction, stiffening at the sound of the door opening.

Linda moved onto one of the chalk
X’s
that Michael had put on the floor. She heard a faint
whirring
as Michael adjusted electronically the direction of the camera.

“Sit still. Do not move,” Linda said.

She then repeated this command in German, French, Russian, and Turkish.

Her command of languages was slight. She had memorized some phrases, some expletives, because they came in handy from time to time. Her accent, she knew, was poor, but she did not care about this. When she spoke in English, she occasionally used Britishisms, common substitutions, such as using
lift
instead of
elevator
or
bonnet
instead of
hood.
She did not believe that these small changes in language would ever fool a trained investigator with access to voice recognition systems. But Michael had assured her that the likelihood any police agency that sophisticated would pursue them was negligible. Michael—eternal student that he was—had carefully examined the jurisdictional dilemmas all their series of Internet dramas created. He was confident that no one agency had the patience to look into what they were doing.

They were, she thought, operating in the grayest of arenas.

“Face the front. Place your hands at your sides.”

Again, she repeated the commands in a series of languages, mixing them up. She was sure that she got some of the words wrong. This made no difference.

“I will place a tray on your lap. When I give permission, you may eat.”

She saw Number 4 nod.

Linda stepped to the side of the bed and lowered the tray. She stayed in position, waiting. She could see that Number 4 had started to shake and that her muscles were knotting in spasms.
That must be painful,
she thought. But Number 4 managed to remain tight-lipped and, other than the involuntary motions caused by fear, followed each command.

“All right,” Linda said. “You may eat.”

She made sure that she wasn’t blocking any of the cameras. She knew that the clientele would be fascinated by the simple act of feeding Number 4. It was why their webcasts were so popular: they had taken the simplest, most routine parts of life and made them
special.
If every meal might be Number 4’s last it took on a whole new meaning. The viewers understood this and it drew them inexorably closer. With so much uncertainty surrounding the fate of Number 4, the most ordinary things became compelling.

That, Linda knew, was the genius in what they had designed.

She watched as Number 4 lifted her hands to the tray and discovered the bowl, the orange, and the water bottle. She went first for the water and drank greedily, sucking down the liquid with abandon.
It will make her sick,
Linda thought. But she said nothing. She watched as Number 4 slowed, as if she realized that she might want to save a drink for the end of the meal. Number 4 then felt the bowl with the oatmeal. She hesitated and her fingers searched the tray top for a utensil. When Number 4 found none she opened her mouth, as if to ask a question, but stopped.

Learning,
Linda instantly understood.
Not bad.

Number 4 lifted the bowl to her mouth and started to shovel the oatmeal down. Her first bites were tentative, but after she got a sense of the taste she wolfed down the remainder, licking the bowl clean.

A nice touch,
Linda realized.
Viewers will like that.

She still hadn’t moved from the bedside. But as Number 4 started to peel the orange skin away to get at the fruit inside, Linda slowly removed the .357 Magnum from inside the Hazmat suit. She tried to coordinate her movements with Number 4’s so that the gun emerged at the same moment that Number 4 bit down into the orange.

She lifted the gun as the orange went into Number 4’s mouth. She watched as some of the juice slid down from Number 4’s mouth.

Linda thumbed back the hammer, cocking the pistol.

The noise made Number 4 stop in midbite.

She won’t know exactly what it is,
Linda thought,
but she will understand that it is deadly.

Number 4 seemed frozen by the sound. The orange was just inches from her lips but not moving. Number 4’s body shook.

Linda stepped forward, placing the barrel of the pistol millimeters away from the space between Number 4’s eyes, almost resting against the blindfold. She waited for an instant before pressing the gun directly against Number 4’s face.

The smell of gun oil, the pressure of the barrel, these things would be unmistakable to Number 4, Linda knew.

She held that position. She could hear a whimpering sound bubble up from Number 4’s chest. But the teenager said nothing and didn’t move, even though every muscle in her body seemed about to explode with tension.

“Bang!” Linda whispered. Loud enough for the audio pickup, but just barely.

Then she slowly dropped the hammer back into a resting position. She exaggerated her movements as she slowly pulled the gun back away from Number 4’s face and replaced it inside her suit.

“Mealtime is finished,” Linda said briskly.

She removed the remains of the orange from Number 4’s hand and then lifted the tray from her lap. She saw Number 4’s body convulse again, head to toe. She hoped the cameras had captured that.
Panic sells,
she thought.

Moving deliberately, her feet making only the smallest padded sounds against the hard cement, Linda exited the room, leaving Number 4 alone on the bed.

In the control room above, Michael was grinning. The interactive response board was lighting up. Lots of opinions, lots of responses. He knew he would have to go over them all later. He was always particularly careful to assess the chats that went on between clients on the board he’d created for
Series #4.

Linda breathed in deeply, closed her eyes, and pulled off the balaclava.
I am an actress,
she thought.

Neither Linda, just outside the basement door, nor Michael upstairs at the monitors noticed what happened next. Some of their clients did, though, as they bent to their computers. Number 4 had leaned back after hearing the door close, leaving her once again alone in the room. She had picked up her teddy bear and clutched it to her chest, nestling the worn toy between her small breasts, rubbing its head as if it were a baby, all the time mouthing something silently to the inanimate object. No one watching was sure what it was she was saying, although some were able to make the lucky guess that she was repeating over and over again a single phrase. They were unable to tell that what she said was,
My name is Jennifer my name is Jennifer my name is Jennifer my name is Jennifer.

18

Terri Collins walked back and forth in the driveway outside Adrian’s house as he demonstrated where he was located when he spotted the van. She scuffed her feet and kicked at a stray stone as he slid behind the wheel of his car to show her where he had parked. She asked, “And that’s exactly where you were positioned the evening Jennifer disappeared?”

Adrian nodded. He could see the detective measuring sight angles and distances, imagining the shadows that dropped on the street that night.

“She can’t see it,” Brian said.

He was seated on the passenger side. He, too, was looking at the spot on the street where the van had slowed, stopped, and then accelerated.

“What do you mean?” Adrian whispered.

“What I mean is this,” Brian replied, with a forceful bluster. “She’s not allowing herself to picture the crime. Not yet. She’s staring right at the spot but she’s still trying to see reasons
it didn’t
happen, not reasons it did. This is where you come in, brother of mine. Persuade her.
Make
her take the next step. Gotta be logical. Gotta be forceful. C’mon, Audie.”

“But…”

“Your job is to make her see what you saw that night. It’s what any investigator does, although they might not want to admit it because it sounds crazy at worst and flaky at best. They envision everything that happened just as if
they were there
… and it tells them where to look next.”

Brian was dressed in his faded fatigues again. He had propped ragged jungle boots up on the dash and leaned backward, smoking a cigarette. Young Brian. Older Brian. Dead Brian. Adrian realized that his brother was a chameleon of hallucinatory memory. From Vietnam to Wall Street. The same was true for Cassie, and for Tommy, and whoever else from his past chose to arrive in what little of his present he had left. Adrian inhaled and he could smell the pungent odor of smoke, mingling with a thick, damp, wet tropical sensation that covered him, as if Brian had brought the steaming jungle along with him. The crispness of New England’s early spring was nowhere to be found. Or, Adrian thought, it was nowhere where
he
could find it.

“Why didn’t anyone else see anything?” Terri Collins said. Adrian wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to answer this question, because she said it in a quiet voice directed more to the falling streaks of daylight than to him.

“I don’t know,” Adrian said. “People go home. They want their dinner. They want to see their family. They shut the front door and close away the day. Who is looking out at the street at that time of day? Who is looking for something out of the ordinary? Not many, detective. People look for routine. They look for normalcy. That’s what they expect. A unicorn could trot down the street and they probably wouldn’t notice.”

Adrian said this, and he closed his eyes for an instant, hoping his words wouldn’t conjure up a white, horned mythical animal trotting down the street that only he could see.

“Someone had to have noticed something,” Terri continued, as if she hadn’t heard anything Adrian had said, which made him wonder whether he’d actually spoken it out loud or merely thought it.

“But they didn’t. Just me,” he said.

The detective turned to him. She did hear that, he realized.

“So what is there to go on?” she asked. She didn’t really expect him to reply. She watched as Adrian shifted about in his seat before exiting the car. Once she had interviewed a schizophrenic in the midst of a psychotic episode who had constantly turned in one direction or another as he heard sounds that weren’t there, but eventually by being patient, she’d elicited a description of a robber that made sense. And there were many times that she’d probed the memories of college kids who were aware that something bad had happened—a rape, usually—but weren’t exactly sure what they’d seen or heard or witnessed. Too many drugs. Too much booze. All sorts of things that cluttered the powers of observation. But her skin crawled slightly, a prickly sensation, when she confronted Adrian. Something was the same, something was different. He seemed slight, slender, as if something were eating away at him every second of the time she faced him. She had the odd feeling that he was fading a little, infinitesimally, with each passing second.

Adrian took a deep breath.

Brian whispered, “This is important. Don’t lose her, Audie. Don’t let her get away. You’re going to need her to find Jennifer. You know it. Don’t scare her off.”

“I think, detective, that this is a helluva problem,” Adrian said, as coolly and forcefully as he could. “If what I saw was indeed an abduction, as I believe it was, well, then it was a type that is pretty unfamiliar around these parts.”

“Good,” said Brian.

“Yes. I’m listening,” Terri replied.

“Random. You know, that’s a word psychologists hate. It acts as an excuse for failing to respond. You see, it was my job—and my profession was teaching—to show that there is
nothing
that is random. If you continue breaking all the elements down, eventually you arrive at a truth, which suggests the inevitability of an action. Ultimately, what happens all makes sense. A person schedules a plane trip. It becomes a hijacking that ends up in the South Tower. Perhaps there is some bad luck involved—picking out that flight on that day. But it makes sense. Someone
had
to be somewhere, at some time, and that flight was the logical choice. The odds that the person beside them in line was a nihilistic suicidal terrorist are infinitesimal—but measurable. The key factors, everything that created the terrorist and everything that created the victim, all coalesce in a psychologically defined way in a recognizable pattern. And there’s the truth of it all.”

Terri stepped back.

“You sound like you’re preparing a lecture for a class,” she said.

“Now!” Brian urged in a loud stage whisper. “Get her now!”

“Yes. A lecture. But if there is any hope for young Jennifer you will have to enter
my
territory.”

“Good,” Brian said. “A proposal that grabbed her interest.”

Detective Collins appeared to be deep in thought. Brian’s voice was energized. Adrian thought he sounded just like he must have in command of men at war, or when he came upon a courtroom moment in which he seized a truth from a reluctant witness. “Now,” his brother urged Adrian, “think of what Tommy told you.”