What Comes Next (21 page)

Adrian hesitated. He wanted to swing toward Brian and demand,
What? What did Tommy tell me before he was blown apart?
And then he remembered his son’s hurried words:
It’s about seeing.

“Look, detective. If Jennifer was snatched from this street in this neighborhood just to entertain some perverse killer in some dark, hidden, remote location, well, then you might as well just go on home and wait until someone finds her body next week or next month or next year or next decade. And we already know she wasn’t stolen for ransom, because no one has contacted her mother. And we know it wasn’t anyone in her family because relationships weren’t
that
strained. And you’ve already asked about the stepfather and his therapeutic practice—actually, I thought that was a clever series of questions—but still the purpose of that sort of abduction would already be clear. I mean if someone wanted to harass or punish Scott West, they wouldn’t be doing it without letting him know they were doing it, because otherwise the message would be lost. Which leaves you and me with only one very modest remaining hope: she was taken for another reason. What that reason is, well, that’s what we need to figure out, because that will be the only way to find her. Find her alive, that is.”

Adrian seemed to be both determined and erratic.

“Jennifer, detective…
Someone needed her for something.
Any other explanation is useless because they all result in the same conclusion:
she’s dead.
So it makes no logical sense to pursue those. The only course is to imagine that she’s still alive and for a specific, well-defined reason. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of your time and my time.”

Brian snorted. “Damn straight!” he burst out. It was like a shout too close to his ear and Adrian twitched a little.

Terri thought this was all madness and that the old professor—whose eyes were blinking rapidly and appeared a little buglike and whose hands were quivering with some sort of electric force that she couldn’t see—was out-of-his-mind crazy, even if she couldn’t put a medical diagnosis to it. She looked around the neighborhood, as if hoping that maybe in that moment she’d be lucky and the white van would come squealing up to the nearby curb, slow down, and Jennifer would be tossed out of the door, a little bruised, maybe sexually assaulted, but in a condition where with some love and some therapy and some painkillers she would survive.

The night fell into darkness around her. The old professor seemed to be perched on the thin limb of an idea. She thought,
What options do I have?

“All right,” Terri said. “I’m going to listen.”

There was a momentary pause while Adrian nodded. He was a little astonished that the detective was willing to hear him out, and a little hesitant, too, because he didn’t know what he was going to say.

“Can you feel it,” Brian hissed, but not unpleasantly. “That breeze. It’s like Jennifer has a chance.”

Adrian held the front door open for the detective, ushering her inside out of the falling night. He hesitated, as if waiting for Brian to slide past him as well, but his dead brother remained on the steps, a few feet away. “Can’t go in there,” he said briskly, as if this were obvious.

Adrian must have appeared surprised because Brian quickly added, “Even hallucinations have rules, Audie. They change around a bit, given the circumstances, given the input, which is something you probably knew already. But, still, got to obey.”

Adrian nodded. This made some sense to him, although he couldn’t have said why.

“Look, you can handle this next bit. I know it. You know enough about behavior and you know enough about crime and your buddy over at the university pointed you in the only direction that has any likelihood of success, so that’s what you’ve got to convince the detective of. You can do it.”

“I don’t know…”

He heard his wife’s voice say something in his ear.
Yes you can, dear.
Cassie sounded totally confident, and when Adrian looked back at Brian he saw the ghost making a power fist of encouragement, because he too must have heard Cassie’s voice.

“In here?” Terri Collins asked.

Adrian shook his memories away. “Yes. To the right. We should sit in the living room. Would you like coffee?”

He made the offer without thinking. He realized suddenly that he probably had no coffee in the kitchen, and he wasn’t exactly sure how to make it, even if he had. And, for a second, he was unsteady, as if he didn’t even know where the kitchen was. He took a deep breath, reminded himself that he had lived in this house for many years and the kitchen was just past the dining room, before the downstairs half bath. The stairs led up to his bedroom and his study and everything was where it was supposed to be.

The detective shook her head. “No. Let’s get right to it.”

She walked into the living room. It was cluttered with books, half-finished coffee cups filled with curdled milk and cereal, and leftover plates of food and stray silverware. Papers were stacked in various spots, a television played soundlessly—tuned to a sports channel—and a musty sense of enclosed space filled the still air. It was close to a mess, she thought. Not quite there yet. Nothing accumulated in such disarray that a single afternoon spent cleaning and organizing wouldn’t solve. The room, and the house as a whole, she figured, displayed the same qualities shared by young children unaffected by stray toys and abandoned clothing and old people surrounded by heartfelt mementoes and bric-a-brac. Neither group cared all that much for organization.

“I live alone now,” Adrian said. “I’m sorry for the disorder.”

“I have young kids,” the detective replied. “So I’m used to it.”

She pushed some papers off a chair and sat down after noticing that on top of three-week-old copies of
The Boston Globe
were some forms from a doctor’s office that had been only partially filled out. She tried to read what they were but was unable.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me what you think we can do.”

Adrian too shifted books around and plopped into an armchair. He had a momentary surge of confusion, like tides changing within him, and he heard confidence slide from his voice. He had been pleased with his dynamic framing of the case, standing outside. He’d thought he sounded forceful. But now he could hear indecision creep into his words.

“You see, detective…” He hesitated. “I really want her to be alive. Jennifer, that is.”

Detective Collins held up her hand, cutting him off.

“Wanting and being able to do something about it are far different things.”

Adrian nodded in reply.

“It’s important. It’s important
to me.
I have to find her. I mean, it’s nearly all over for me, but she’s young. She has her whole life ahead of her. No matter how bad it’s been for her, it doesn’t mean it should end prematurely…”

“Yes,” Terri replied. “Those are truisms. But they have little to do with police work.”

Adrian felt uncomfortable. He had never dealt with the police before. When Brian had killed himself, the New York City homicide bureau had been quick, efficient, and unobtrusive because everything was so obvious. When Cassie had her accident, the local state trooper who’d called had been solicitous, direct, and to the point. But they weren’t involved in the long weeks it took for her to finally die. And Tommy, well, that had been a perfunctory call from a military spokesman who had given him the details about the dying and a time and date to meet an overseas flight bearing his son’s coffin. He closed his eyes tightly for an instant and, behind the darkness, he heard a cacophony of echoes, as if more than one person was trying to speak with him at the same moment, and he had trouble sorting through the jumble of words and tones and various urgencies.

“Are you okay, professor?”

He opened his eyes. “Yes, I’m sorry, detective.”

“You seemed to fade out there.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

Adrian looked quizzically at her. “How long was…”

“More than a minute. Maybe two.”

Adrian thought that was impossible. He’d closed his eyes for only a second. No longer.

“Are you all right, professor?” Terri asked again. She tried to remove any harsh policewoman’s tone from her voice and sound more like a mother leaning over a feverish child.

“Yes. I’ll be fine.”

“You don’t seem fine. It’s not my business but…”

“I’ve been prescribed some new medications. Still getting used to them.”

He did not think Detective Collins would buy that explanation.

“Perhaps you should speak with your physician. If you were driving a car and—”

Adrian interrupted. “I’m sorry. Let me collect my thoughts. Where were we?”

Terri wanted to finish her statement about the dangers of getting behind the wheel in whatever condition Professor Thomas was in. But she bit off her words and returned to the more important matter.

“Jennifer… and why would—”

“Of course. Jennifer. Here’s the thing, detective. Almost every scenario you or I would be familiar with ends in a simple quotient to a long equation.
Death.
So, from the scientist’s point of view, it makes little logical sense to pursue any of those avenues, even if they have the greatest likelihood of success, because the answer is one that is too terrible to contemplate. So turn it around. What equation is there that ends in
life?”

“I’m still listening.”

“Yes, of course. Here is what we know.”

Adrian stopped, wondering what he
did
know. He looked across at Terri Collins and saw that she had pushed forward slightly in the chair. At the same moment, he felt something pressing him from his side, and he longed to look that way. Then he realized he didn’t have to, because his wife had draped her arm around his shoulders, and Cassie fiercely whispered,
“It’s not Jennifer. It’s what she is, not who she is. Tell her.”

So Adrian did. He said, “Look, detective, maybe this fits into the category of crime where it isn’t about a specific person, it’s about a
type
of person.”

Terri slowly removed her notebook. She thought the old professor had moved in his seat uncomfortably and now he was hunched over as if out of balance, but what he was saying made sense.

“What do we know? A sixteen-year-old is snatched from a street. Everything that you know about Jennifer or her family isn’t really relevant, is it? What we need to discover is why someone needed the type of person she is, and why they were cruising this neighborhood. And then we need to imagine why they wanted
her
when they spotted her. And we know that it was a male and a female. So we are talking about a very narrow range of crimes here, and predominantly the sort that end in murder.”

Again, Adrian’s voice had returned to the forceful, academic, assured style that he remembered from a hundred million hours in classrooms. It was as familiar to him as his favorite poems, Shakespeare’s sonnets or Frost’s verse. It made him feel much better to recognize the part of him that was disappearing making a return.

“But if it ends in murder…”

“I only said it ends that way.”

“But…”

“We must interrupt it.”

“But how…”

“There is only one way, detective. It is if Jennifer’s abduction has a purpose other than murder. If her presence has meaning that is distinct from how it is that she will end up. And for us to have any hope of success it has to be a purpose that we can identify and then track back to its source. Otherwise, we’d be better off waiting for a body to be uncovered.”

He hesitated, then corrected himself. “Not
a
body. Jennifer’s body.”

“All right. What could that purpose be?”

Adrian felt his wife nudge him and then squeeze his shoulder. He looked off to the side and it was as if the copy of the
Encyclopedia of Murder
that his friend had loaned him suddenly floated up in the air before his eyes and the pages started to flutter, caught by a sudden turbulent breeze.

Macbeth,
he thought. When Lady Macbeth hallucinated the murder weapon.
Is this a dagger I see before me?
Only here floating in front of him was an entry in a book documenting an endless series of episodes of murder and despair.

“I have one small idea,” Adrian said. “Maybe the only idea.”

19

By the time she got home that night Terri Collins was convinced that Adrian was completely crazy and that probably being crazy was the only realistic course to follow.

Her two children rocketed out from in front of the television when she pushed open the door. She was inundated by a sudden cascade of child needs and demands—most of which had to do with listening to tales about school and what happened on the playground or in reading class. It was a little like walking into a movie after it had already begun, where she would quietly try to collect enough observations and hear enough details to fill in the missing plot information. Laurie, her friend and babysitter, was in the kitchen hovering over a sink filled with dishes and called out a greeting that was partially a welcome home along with a question about hunger, which Terri had answered with a negative. Terri’s oldest, eight years old and filled with little boy energy, asked, “Did you arrest any bad guys today?” His little sister, two years his junior and as quiet as he was loud, merely clung to her mother’s leg with one hand while waving a colorful drawing in the air with the other.

“No, not today,” Terri said. “But I think I will tomorrow, or maybe the next day.”

“Real bad guys?”

“Always. Just the really bad ones.”

“Good,” said the eight-year-old. He peeled away from her side and went back to a seat by the television set. Terri watched him move across the room. She searched every gesture he made, every tone attached to any word he spoke, every look on his face for the telltale signs of his father. It was like living with a live hand grenade in the house. She did not know what part of her ex-husband had been passed on to her son, but it frightened her. Genetics, she thought, can be terrifying. She knew that the child already had his father’s easygoing smile and loose seductiveness—he was extremely popular in school and in the neighborhood. She feared that it was all a lie, that like his father he would be charming and evil at once. Her ex was forever wearing a smile in public, telling a joke, making everyone feel good about themselves, till the moment they were alone and he’d suddenly turn dark and hidden and start to beat on her relentlessly. That was the concealed part that no one—except her—had ever seen. It was a mystery, and when she had fled she knew she was leaving behind many folks, family, friends, coworkers who were asking,
How can it be?
and saying
It makes no sense.