What Comes Next (36 page)

Wolfe seemed to be both intrigued and put off, two conflicting sensations battling within him.

“What do you think I can do for you?” he asked, though the question had been reverberating in the room throughout the evening.

Adrian could feel his brother’s hands on his shoulders, gripping him tightly, pushing him slightly forward.

“Here is what I want, Mister Wolfe. I want you to use your imagination. The same way you do when you walk past a school yard at recess…”

Wolfe appeared to stiffen.

“I want you to put yourself in some shoes. I want you to consider what you would be if you had Jennifer. I want you to tell me what you would do with her, and how, and where, and why. And I want you to imagine that at your side is a woman. A young woman, who loves you, and who wants to help you.”

Wolfe was listening hard.

“And I want you to imagine how you would make money off of Jennifer, Mister Wolfe.”

“You want me to…”

“I want you to be who you are, Mister Wolfe. Only more so.”

“And if I do this what do I get?”

Adrian paused, thinking. “
Give him what he wants
” Brian said.

“But what is that?” Adrian said. Wolfe eyed him again.

“There’s only one thing. It’s what everyone like him wants.”
Brian spoke with certainty.

Privacy,
Adrian thought.

“What I
won’t do
is tell the detective what you’re doing. And I won’t tell her about your mother’s computer. I won’t tell anyone about it. And, after you find Jennifer for me, you can go back to being who you really are and waiting for the day when you’ve got everybody fooled and no one is paying attention to you.”

Wolfe smiled, not unpleasantly. “I think, professor, that finally we’ve arrived at a sales price.”

30

Terri Collins spent the morning caught between looking at grainy black-and-white images on a bus station security videotape and listening to confused lies from a pair of college sophomores who were unsuccessfully trying to give a benign explanation for the dozen computers, television sets, and PlayStations that had been discovered in the back of their car by an alert patrolman. He had pulled them over for speeding.
What sort of idiot crooks speed recklessly away from burglaries?
she wondered. It had simply been a matter of splitting up the two young men, repeatedly questioning them, waiting for their stories to diverge, which was inevitable. Terri had taken the time to contact the university security head as well, and she informed the operators who took the local 911 calls to be on the lookout for irate fellow students who had returned to school to find their off-campus apartments ransacked.

Every year she handled several of these types of cases, and the inherent stupidity of these break-ins bored her. She wondered how new students had imagined they must be the first criminal masterminds to think up the unique advantages of ripping off their classmates. She knew that sooner or later one of the two would give up the other and describe the entire foolish scheme. She had already typed up the felony arrest forms for the pair, but she doubted much would happen. They would spend a night or two in jail and then the legal system would find some way to plead them out. They were going to have to do some explaining to family and future employers. This, she thought, went directly into the
tough luck dumb fuck
category.

She hurried through her paperwork. It took time away from the images on the video that fascinated her and troubled her, because of both what it showed and what it didn’t show.

Primarily: no Jennifer.

It had taken her a series of calls to track down the person who had returned Jennifer’s mother’s credit card to a bank in Lewiston, Maine. This, too, was a college student, who told a story that made little sense but which was undoubtedly true. The student had been in Boston with two roommates and a boyfriend, visiting old high school buddies. They had caught a late bus back to their own school. This was the sort of thing that took place hourly in a city dominated by colleges and universities. Where the tale had departed from the rational was when the student described emptying out her travel backpack and coming across the strange credit card. It was issued by a bank where she did not have an account. It was under a name she did not recognize and how it had gotten into the outside pocket of her pack was a mystery to her.

Under most circumstances, she simply would have tossed it out, but by happenstance she had to visit her own bank that day, so she had turned it in to a teller there, who had diligently called the issuing bank’s security department, who had, in turn, called Mary Riggins.

It was a slow, winding trail.

The bus ticket the card had purchased was for New York. The East Coast runaway’s mecca.

It made no sense to the detective. Why not simply toss the card away?

A mistake?
Then she thought,
No.

This was about misdirection.

She asked the college student three times whether she or any of her friends recalled seeing a teenager that fit Jennifer’s description in the bus station. Each time the response was no.

Did she see anyone else? Anyone stand out? Suspicious?

No and no and no.

Terri’s imagination churned and she felt a rush of anxiety that hid behind her detective’s cold resolve. In her imagination there was an odd conflation. She had spent time that day speaking with the dumbest of criminals. And she wondered whether she was on the edge of something from the smartest of criminals. It was like being caught between two poles, nightmare and boring routine. Somewhere between all this Jennifer fit.

The security tape lacked clarity. The overhead placement angle didn’t lend itself to precision.

What she could see was a man using the self-serve kiosk at the time the ticket transaction was time-stamped. He was not recognizable from the images captured by the camera, although she knew that more sophisticated police agencies would have photo enhancement equipment that might give her a much clearer look.

She saw the same man seated apart, waiting for the bus, in a later image. Hunched over. Hat pulled down, obscuring his face.

In short, she recognized a man who knew he was being photographed and was taking steps to avoid being caught on film, at the same time behaving in a manner that wouldn’t stand out.

She saw the trio of students getting in line in front of a ticket counter. She saw a different man—she could make out a beard where none had existed before—sliding in behind them. She advanced the video long enough to see that this man did not actually make it to the ticket counter. He peeled off—not to visit a window with less traffic or to use a self-serve machine. As best she could tell he left the station through the front entranceway, not through the back loading area.

She looked again.

The man had no bags other than a small shoulder pack.

She played this over and over, trying to memorize every sight of Man #1 and then Bearded Man #2. She measured their physique, the way they walked, the manner in which they slumped their shoulders and kept themselves hidden beneath hats.

She tried to picture the man that Adrian had described for her. There was not enough to persuade her that the man in the grainy security video and the man glimpsed on the street were the same.

But, she insisted to herself, any other conclusion was nonsensical.

Terri pushed aside the burglary report and gathered all the information she had about the missing Jennifer. It was a jumble of pieces, less a jigsaw puzzle than the detritus of a plane crash, where investigators fit together what hasn’t been destroyed, what is twisted and burn-scarred, and what is recognizable in a way that is designed to tell them something concrete about what happened.

A rebellious runaway teen.

An old man.

A burned panel truck.

No ransom requests.

No cell phone usage.

A bus ticket to nowhere.

A man disguising himself where there should have been Jennifer.

Terri reeled in her seat. She could feel her detective’s skepticism falling away from her. There is a particular sense of despair that infects police detectives when they realize that they are up against the worst possible sort of crime, one that engages anonymity and evil. Crimes are solved because of connections—someone sees something, someone knows something, someone says something, someone leaves something at a crime scene—and eventually a clear-cut picture emerges. There is always some elemental connection that defines the detective’s course.

Jennifer’s disappearance defied that.

If there was anything clear-cut in what she knew, it was that she didn’t know what to do.

But it was equally apparent to her that she had to do something that went beyond what she had been doing. She looked around her desk, as if this
what to do
should be obvious. Then she lifted her head and stared at the cubicle around her, decorated with pictures of her family, some colorful child-art watercolors and crayon drawings, juxtaposed against cold gray police reports and FBI alerts.

She had—she believed—done everything appropriately. She had done everything required by department standards. She had done everything that any official would do.

None of it had brought her any closer to the missing Jennifer.

Terri rocked forward, as if she had a cramp in her stomach.

Jennifer was gone. Terri pictured the teenager, seated across from her on one of the prior escape efforts, sullen, noncommunicative, waiting angrily for mother and boyfriend to arrive and return her to the place she was so eager to flee from while Terri lectured her about the mistake she’d made. Terri realized that the time to save Jennifer had been then. All she had to do was lean across the desk and say,
Talk to me, Jennifer
and open up some sort of line of communication. Now what was she doing? Filing papers and reports, taking useless statements from a deranged retired professor, interviewing a sex offender who didn’t seem to have any link to the runaway, sending out needle-in-a-haystack, shot-in-the-dark inquiries to other police agencies. But, Terri understood, she was mostly just waiting for the day in the future when a hunter scouring dark woods for deer found Jennifer’s skeletal remains, or her decomposing body was hooked by a fisherman probing a lake for smallmouth bass.

If the detective was that lucky.

Terri punched some computer keys and the image of the man in the bus station came up on the screen in front of her. She blew it up, clicking computer keys until the picture filled her entire screen.

All right,
she said to herself,
I think I will find out who you are.

This was easier imagined than done. But she reached for the phone to call the state police lab, which could run some image recognition software on the tape. Maybe she would get lucky, but she doubted it. She was also aware that this was a step that might not be approved by her superiors.

Mark Wolfe walked swiftly across the expanse of black parking lot macadam to where Adrian was waiting next to his car. Adrian could feel Brian’s presence beside him, almost hear his brother’s rapid breath, wondering for an instant why he would be nervous. Brian, Adrian understood, was always in control and never hurried, never anxious. And then he realized it was his own labored sounds he was hearing.

As he approached Adrian, the sex offender looked warily about. Adrian had the odd thought that Mark Wolfe was supremely confident inside his own home, but like a prairie animal out in the open he needed to lift his head and check for predators every few seconds. This was backward, Adrian imagined. Wolfe was the predator.

Wolfe wore a skewed grin.

“I’m not supposed to take a long break,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to miss a major appliance sale. Hey, professor, you need a big-screen TV and surround sound system? They’re on special and I can get you a great deal.”

This wasn’t said with any sincerity.

“This isn’t going to take long,” Adrian replied.

He produced a copy of the Missing Persons flyer that Detective Collins had given him and handed it to Wolfe.

“That’s who I’m looking for,” he said.

Wolfe eyed the picture. “She’s lovely…” The word
lovely
could have been a substitute for
ripe.
It sounded obscene coming from Wolfe’s mouth. Adrian wanted to shudder. “A runaway, you say?”

“No. I didn’t say that. I said she has been a runaway before. But now she’s stolen.”

Wolfe read through the details on the flyer, repeating them in a soft voice,
Five feet six inches, one hundred and seventeen pounds, sandy blond hair, no distinguishing marks, last seen
… Then he stopped reading.

“You know, with my…”—he hesitated—”
background,
if some cop was to find this flyer in my possession it’d be just as bad as…”

“We have a deal,” Adrian said. “You don’t want me to go to the cops and start talking about that other computer and what’s on it.”

Wolfe nodded, but his reply was far more chilling than the nature of their agreement.

“Yeah, I get it. So this is the kid you think is being used. I’m to explore the Web.”

“The alternative is, you see…”

“Yeah. She’s been fucked and killed. Or worse.”

Wolfe twitched slightly. Adrian couldn’t tell if this involuntary motion was caused by distaste or pleasure. Either seemed possible. Maybe the territories defined by both sensations existed simultaneously inside Mark Wolfe. Adrian suspected that was the case.

“You know, all that crap about snuff films, you know that was all urban legend mythology. Totally bogus. Bullshit. Untrue.”

He repeated words for emphasis, creating the opposite impression.
Look behind the words, look behind the way he’s standing, the tone he uses, the way he shifts about.
Adrian thought this was what Cassie would say to him, and it was as if the thoughts in his head had her musical tone of voice.

Adrian stared at the sex offender and then lifted his glance. The sky above them was a wide, cloudless expanse of blue, a promise of fine weather to come. High across the sky, Adrian could see a jet’s vapor contrails drawing a straight line in billowing white against the pale background. People traveling at high speed, to varied destinations. He realized he would never ride on another plane, never have a chance to visit someplace exotic. He was nearly overcome with the direct path the airplane flew so effortlessly; he seemed to be caught up in a mire of disease and doubt. He wished he knew exactly what steps to take, in what direction, and how many miles he had left to travel.