What Comes Next (41 page)

His roommate stroked the screen and settled into the chair in front of the computer.
“
Hey,
”
he said,
“
your disgusting wet French kiss left a mark.
”

The roommate gave him the finger and exited. The remaining frat boy imagined that the echo of the gunshot still reverberated in the cell. He tried to picture what he would do if he heard someone firing a gun in another room. He believed that he would have many options, including flight. That this wasn’t available to Number 4 only fascinated him more. He loved what he considered her resourcefulness, while at the same time he really didn’t want to miss the rape when it took place. He found himself fantasizing, wondering whether it would be quick and violent or some protracted theater of seduction. He suspected the latter. He wondered whether she would give in and just let it happen or whether she would fight and claw and cry. He wasn’t sure which he wanted. On one hand, he loved the domination of the man and the woman over Number 4. On the other, he sort of liked rooting for the underdog, which she clearly was. It was what he and his roommate loved about
Series #4
. Everything was predictable yet completely unexpected. Sometimes he wondered whether there were other students on campus paying to watch Number 4.
Maybe we all love her,
he thought. She reminded him a little bit of a girl he’d known in high school. Or maybe of all the girls he’d known in high school. He was uncertain which. The one thing he was sure of was that Number 4 was doomed.

The gunshot might have been the start of the end, he thought. But then maybe it wasn’t. He couldn’t tell.

But he knew she would die in the end.

He looked forward to seeing how it happened. He was an aficionado of jihadist tapes and YouTube–type postings of gory auto accidents. He loved television shows like
Cops
and
First 48
and he secretly wanted to be on
Survivor
more than any other aspiration he might have had about his future. He absolutely 100 percent knew that if he went on the show he would win the million-dollar prize.

Number 4 was shaking again. He had come to anticipate her loss of bodily control. It told him that her fear wasn’t faked.

He loved this.

So much of what he watched was fake. Porn stars faked orgasms. Video games faked deaths. Television shows faked drama.

Not Whatcomesnext. Not Number 4.

Sometimes, he believed, she was the most real unreal thing he’d ever watched.

His speculation stopped abruptly. There was some movement in the room. He saw Number 4 turn slightly. The camera panned with her. Something was happening.

He heard what she heard. The door was swinging open.

Jennifer twitched to the sound.

She could hear the crinkling noise that told her the woman in the jumpsuit was entering the room. But instead of moving slowly her pace seemed to be hurried. One second she was at the door, the next she was hovering over Jennifer, her face only inches away.

“Number Four, listen carefully. Do precisely what I say.”

Jennifer nodded her head. She could hear anxiety in the woman’s voice. The ordinary cold, modulated tones were accelerated. The pitch had gone up, even with the whisper that she used. She could sense the woman had lowered her lips very close to her forehead, so that hot breath swept over Jennifer’s face.

“You are not to make a sound. You are not to even breathe heavily. You are to remain exactly where you are. Do not move. Do not shift about. No noise whatsoever, until I return. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Jennifer nodded. She wanted to ask about the gunshot but she didn’t dare.

“Let me hear you, Number Four.”

“I understand.”

“What do you understand?”

“No noise. Nothing. Just stay right here.”

“Good.”

The woman paused. Jennifer listened to her breathing. She was unsure whether it was her own heartbeat or the woman’s that pounded, reverberating in the small room.

Suddenly Jennifer felt her face being grabbed. She gasped. She froze as the woman’s fingernails dug into her cheeks, squeezing her skin tightly. Jennifer shivered, fought off the urge to tear at the hands that seized her, tried to toughen herself to the abrupt delivery of hurt.

“If you make a sound, you will die,” the woman said.

Jennifer shook, trying to reply, but she could not. The quivering that raced through her body must have been enough of a response. The woman’s hand relaxed, and Jennifer stayed rigid in position, afraid to move.

The next sensation she felt was unfamiliar, yet fierce. It was a sharp point. It started at her throat and then traveled down her center, circumscribing her body—her neck, her chest, her stomach, her crotch—in a steady, sliding movement, accentuated by small jabs, like a needle being touched against her skin.

Knife!
Jennifer realized.

“And I will make your dying terrible, Number Four. Is this clear?”

Jennifer nodded again, and the knifepoint scraped against her stomach a little deeper.

“Yes. Yes. I understand,” she whispered.

She could sense the woman withdrawing. The crinkling noise she made when she walked faded. Jennifer listened for the door closing but she did not hear it. She remained frozen on the bed, bear in arms, trying to figure out what was happening.

She listened intently, and just as she formulated the thought that something wasn’t right, she felt a hand grasp her throat and she was being choked. She could feel an immense force, stealing every bit of air from her chest. She felt like she was being crushed beneath a huge concrete slab. Fear and surprise threatened to make her pass out. Pain sheeted behind the blindfold, red as blood. She kicked out, at nothing but air. She reached up without thinking but her hands stopped when she heard the man’s voice.

“I can do just as bad, Number Four. Maybe I can be worse.”

Her body quivered. She thought she would black out in the darkness of her blindfold, and then she wondered whether she
had
blacked out, as she choked on slivers of breath.

“Don’t forget that,” the man whispered.

She shuddered at the sound as much as the message.

“Remember. You are never alone.”

The man’s hands suddenly relaxed. Jennifer coughed, trying desperately to fill her lungs. Her head reeled. She’d had no idea that the man—dressed in his skintight black balaclava and long underwear, ballet slippers on his feet—had silently trailed the woman into the room. Now everything was disjointed, disconnected. An argument, a gunshot—that had invented one scenario in her imagination. But both of them in the cell together, acting in unison, acting in tandem, acting in a coordinated fashion, simply pitched her into a vortex of confusion. She could feel herself spinning and she struggled to hold on to anything that might stop her from falling into the pit of darkness.

“Silence, Number Four. No matter what you hear. What you sense. What you think is happening outside. Silence. If you make a sound, it will be the last thing you do on this earth, other than experience unimaginable pain.”

Jennifer squeezed her eyes tightly together. She must have nodded slightly. She did not think she had spoken out loud. But she heard the door close. The man, she realized, had crossed the room without her being able to hear a thing. This was as terrible as any of the explicit threats.

She remained in the darkness, as if encased in ice.

A part of her wanted to move. A part of her wanted to peek out. A part of her wanted to leave the bed. These were the dangerous parts, which warred against the safe parts that told her to do exactly as she’d been told.

She tried to listen for the man or the woman. No sound greeted her.

But this thick absence of any noise except for her own labored breathing didn’t last.

What she heard was something familiar. Something that was both awful and frightening in its own way. It took her only seconds to realize what it was.

A siren. A police or fire siren.

It was distant but closing rapidly.

34

Adrian swerved hard to avoid the other car and was greeted with a horn blasting, tires squealing. The noise resounded through the Volvo’s interior, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the accompanying angry curses and shouted obscenities. He glanced up and saw that he had clearly run a red light, and he avoided an accident only by a couple of lucky yards. He muttered, “Sorry, sorry, my fault, I didn’t see it change…” as if the other driver, who was speeding away, could actually hear him or see the apologetic look on his face.

“That’s a bad sign, Audie,” Brian said from the passenger seat. “Things are sliding. You need to stay sharp.”

“I’m trying,” Adrian replied, a touch of frustration creeping into his words. “I just get distracted. Happens to everyone at some point or another. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You’re wrong about that,” his brother answered. “You know it. I know it. And probably the guy in the other car knows it now too.”

Adrian drove on, more than a little angry, deflecting fears about his own capabilities into fury at his brother.

What Adrian wanted to say was that Brian, like Cassie and Tommy, had left him alone with nothing but questions. Every question was its own mystery. But he couldn’t quite say that for fear he would be demanding too much of his dead brother.

Brian was quiet for a moment. Adrian steered the car down the roadway. A sheet of bright noonday sunshine filled the window in a flash, and then faded, as he maneuvered the car around a bend. They were only a few blocks away from Mark Wolfe’s house, and Adrian thought he should be formulating what he was going to say to the sex offender. He reminded himself that a proper detective would be anticipating whatever it was that Wolfe had uncovered in his computer searches, because whatever it was it had caused him to summon Adrian to his house.

Adrian glanced to the side. His brother was dressed in his usual subtle blue pinstriped Wall Street lawyer’s suit. He was natty. Well put together. But his voice was filled with a softness that Adrian hardly recognized. His brother was always dynamic, the one who made tough choices and fought loudly and fiercely on behalf of clients and causes, and to hear him sound so pummeled by defeat was alien, impossible.

Adrian gasped. Brian’s face was streaked with blood. The front of his white shirt was stained deep crimson. His hair was tangled and matted. Adrian could not see the hole in the side of his head that the bullet had made, but he knew that it was there, just out of his sight.

“You know what surprised me, Audie? You were always this academic, intellectual type. Poetry and scientific studies. But I had no idea how tough you were,” Brian continued, a flat, journalistic tone in his voice. “I couldn’t have survived Tommy dying over in Iraq. I couldn’t have gone on after Cassie drove into that tree. I was selfish. I lived alone. What I had were clients and causes. I wouldn’t allow people into my life. It made it all so much easier for me because I didn’t have to worry about who I loved.”

Adrian shifted his eyes back to the road. He double-checked to make sure he was doing the speed limit exactly.

“Wolfe’s house is just up there,” Brian said. He was pointing ahead. His finger was bloody.

Adrian saw that his brother started to brush the front of his shirt, as if the bloodstains were like breadcrumbs. “Look, Audie, you can handle this guy. Just keep in mind what every detective knows: there’s always one link. Something is out there that will tell you where to look for Jennifer. Maybe it’s right here and coming up fast. You just have to be ready to spot it when it flashes by. Just like that car at the stoplight. You have to be ready to take action.”

Adrian nodded. He pulled the car to the side.

“Just stay close,” he said, hoping that his dead brother would think this was an order, when actually it was a plea.

Wolfe, Adrian saw, was standing in the doorway, watching for him. The sex offender waved in his direction, like any good neighbor on a weekend morning.

Adrian was taken aback by the cheeriness inside Wolfe’s house. Things were clean and neatly arranged. Sunlight poured through open blinds. There was a springtime smell in the house, probably installed by a liberal spray of canned air freshener. Wolfe gestured toward the now familiar living room. As Adrian stepped forward Wolfe’s mother emerged from the kitchen. She greeted Adrian warmly, with a kiss on the cheek, although she clearly had no recollection of his prior visits. Then she bustled herself off to a back room to “do some straightening up and fold some laundry,” which Adrian thought was some sort of prearranged behavior. He imagined that Wolfe had coached his mother carefully about what to say and do when Adrian arrived.

Wolfe watched his mother disappear through a hallway and shut a back room door behind her.

“I don’t have that much time,” he said. “She gets restless when I leave her alone for too long.”

“What about when you go to work?”

“I don’t like to think about that. I have one of her friends stop by every other day. I keep a list of women she knew before all this started to happen who are willing, so I call them as much as I can. Sometimes they’ll take her for walks. But because of my”—he hesitated—“
problems
with the law most of them don’t want to be seen over here. And so I hire a neighbor’s kid to come around after school and check on her for a couple of minutes. The kid’s parents don’t know we have this deal, because if they did they’d probably stop it. Anyway she can’t remember his name nine times out of ten, but she likes it when he stops by. I think she believes the kid is me, only twenty years ago. Anyway, that sets me back ten dollars a day. I leave a sandwich out for her lunch. She’s still capable of eating without supervision but I don’t know how much longer that will last, because if she chokes…”

He stopped. The vise that he was in was obvious.