What Comes Next (50 page)

“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.

“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.

Terri bellowed out, “Professor Thomas?” although she knew he wasn’t there. She walked through the living room, repeating, “Professor Thomas, are you here?” while Wolfe stepped into a side room.

She shouted at the sex offender, “Hey, stick with me!” but he ignored her.

“This is what you really need to see,” Wolfe called out loudly.

She went to his side and saw that he had already seated himself at a computer in the professor’s study. Wolfe was typing furiously.

“What are you going to show me?” she asked.

“I suppose you want to see the website that got him all excited. He told me it wasn’t the right one, but then he called you about the damn scar and the—”

“Yeah, the tattoo, keep going.”

She bent to the computer screen, leaning over the sex offender’s shoulder.

The welcome page for Whatcomesnext.com came up in front of them. Wolfe typed in the password
Jennifer
and
Greetings Psychprof
appeared before the image of the young woman came up on the screen. It seemed grainy, shaky, as if out of focus to Terri Collins, although she could feel her pulse accelerate, so it was more likely that it was
her
that made it difficult to see, not the high-def feed.

She saw a naked young woman, chained to a wall, handcuffed and hunched in a fetal position, clutching a stuffed animal. The figure of the young woman was partially turned away from the camera, so making out the details of her body was difficult, and a dark hood obscured her face. Terri could see the black flower tattoo on a scrawny thin arm, but not the scar that Professor Thomas had asked about.

“Jesus,” she said. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a live webcam feed,” Wolfe said. He sounded a little like the professor. “The world wants everything to be live, immediate. No delays. Instant gratification.”

Terri continued to stare, trying to collate the image of the young woman with her memory of Jennifer, unconsciously duplicating precisely what Adrian had done earlier.

“It’s got to be an actress,” Terri said, disbelieving.

“You think?” Wolfe snorted. “Detective, you don’t know anything about this.”

He clicked on the keys that brought up the menu. He chose a random chapter and the two of them were suddenly watching the blindfolded girl bathe herself, trying to hide her nakedness from prying eyes. The figure of a man swept in and out of the camera feed. This time, Terri saw the scar in addition to the tattoo.

“Those don’t fit,” she said out loud, although there was hesitancy in her voice.

“Yeah,” Wolfe said. He spoke rapidly, excited. “That’s what you told the professor last night, except it was pretty damn obvious to me that he didn’t believe it. Or he thought these were Hollywood-type makeup.”

“I need to see her face,” Terri said. Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

“Can do,” Wolfe said. “Sort of. They keep her masked.” He brought up the chapter where Number 4 was interviewed. There was a little distortion in her voice as she answered questions, and Wolfe the expert explained, “They probably just tweaked the audio feed a little so that you couldn’t just listen and recognize what she sounds like.”

Terri stared at the blindfolded girl, paying careful attention to each word she spoke. She thought of the times she had sat across from Jennifer. She tried to hear something in the voice that would confirm that her Jennifer memory and what she was seeing now were the same person.

It has to be her,
she thought, astonished, even when she heard “I’m eighteen” tumble from the girl’s mouth.

“Where…” she started.

“That’s the thing,” Wolfe said. “It’s not in LA or Miami or Texas. This damn website is about two hours from here.”

Terri could see a map in her head.
Does it take two hours to drive someone into purgatory?
she wondered.

“I’ve got the GPS,” Wolfe continued. “Same as the professor does. Probably that’s where he’s headed. In fact, I’d count on it. He’s just a little bit ahead of us. But I bet the old guy won’t be driving as fast.”

No. He will,
Terri thought. She did not say this out loud. She pulled out her cell phone to call him but Wolfe shook his head. “He’s not that modern,” the sex offender said, as if replying to the obvious question. He reached into his pocket and plucked out his own cell, the one Adrian had used.