What Comes Next (45 page)

“The Moors Murders, Dad. What tripped up the killers?”

“They exposed themselves.”

“What does that mean, Dad?”

“It means they were overconfident and weren’t thinking of the consequences when they gave up their anonymity.”

“Isn’t that what you should be looking for?”

His son’s voice sounded confident, determined. Tommy had always had the knack of expressing complete control even when things were disintegrating. It was why he was such a great combat photographer.

Adrian looked back at the screen.

“Hey, professor…”

Wolfe sounded unsettled. Adrian started to talk like a student being questioned by a teacher.

“What I see is someone who, for whatever reason, wants to be on that screen,” he said. “I see someone who is playing by some rules, willing to perform. I see someone who hasn’t been forced to scar herself.”

Wolfe smiled. “That was poetic, professor. I think the same.”

“I see exploitation. I see commerce.”

“Do you see evil, professor? A lot of people would say they see depravity and something frightening and awful at pretty much the same time. And then they would stop looking.”

Adrian shook his head. “In my field, we don’t make moral judgments. We just assess the behaviors.”

“Sure. Like I believe
that.
” Wolfe seemed amused but not in an irritating way. Adrian thought that the sex offender had spent some time considering who he was and what he was drawn to. As Wolfe turned back to the computer keyboard, Adrian heard Brian whisper in his ear, “Well, so he’s a pervert and a deviate, but lo and behold he’s
not
a sociopath. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?”

Brian’s laugh faded as Wolfe punched some keys and the screen filled with red and black. It was a close-up of a dungeon, replete with whips, chains, and a black wooden frame, where a man wearing a skin-tight leather mask was being systematically beaten by a large woman, also encased in black leather. The man was naked and his body shuddered with each blow. Pleasure or pain, Adrian couldn’t tell. Maybe both, he thought.

“This sort of dark place,” Wolfe said.

Adrian watched for an instant. He saw the man quiver. “Yes. I see. But this…”

“Just an example, professor.”

Adrian was quiet for a moment. “We have to narrow the search criteria down.”

Again, Wolfe nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”

He wanted to blurt out “
Where do I look?
” hoping that Tommy or Brian would know, but they frustrated him with silence. “We have to look for captives,” he said.

Wolfe seemed to be thinking as Adrian continued.

“Three people. The two kidnappers and Jennifer. How do they enlist people in what they’ve done? They need to make money. Otherwise, this is a useless search. So find me the money, Mister Wolfe. Find me the way someone would use a girl they stole from the street.”

Adrian was insistent. His voice had an authority that defied his disease. He could hear his brother and his son in some recess of his head, echoing applause.

Wolfe turned back to the computer. “Settle in,” he said quietly. “This is going to be difficult, especially for an old guy like you.”

“Not difficult for you, Mister Wolfe?”

The sex offender shook his head. “Familiar territory, professor. I’ve seen it all before.”

He continued punching the keyboard. “You see, when you’re like me, it’s not as if you automatically understand precisely what”—he hesitated—“attracts you. There’s an exploration involved. As your mind fills with ideas and passions, well, you search them out. You do a lot of traveling in your head and then on your feet.”

He shrugged. “That’s usually where you get caught. When you’re not sure what it is you are looking for. Once you know, and I mean you
really know,
well, professor, then you’re home free, because you can plan things with a concrete purpose.”

Adrian doubted that any of the teachers in his former department could have given such a succinct analysis of the entangled emotional issues gathered around a variety of sex offenses and deviant behavior.

Wolfe suddenly stopped with his finger poised above a final key.

“I need to know you’re gonna back me up,” he said brusquely. “I need to know I can count on you, professor. I need to be sure that all this stays with us.”

Adrian suddenly heard both Tommy and Brian urging him.
Go ahead and lie.

“Yes. On this you have my word.”

“Can you watch someone get raped? Can you watch someone get killed?”

“I thought you said that snuff films didn’t exist.”

Wolfe shook his head. “I told you that in the reasonable world they don’t. They’re urban legend. In the
unreasonable
world, well, maybe they do.”

Wolfe took a deep breath and continued.

“You see, if I was ever caught with this stuff on the computer, or if some cop that monitors these things ever traced it back to me, I’d be…”

Adrian didn’t have to fill in the obvious word.

“No. I’m the one demanding you do this. If anything comes of it, like the police, I will take all the blame.”

“All the blame.”

“Yes. And you can always tell the truth, Mister Wolfe. That I was willing to pay you to guide me.”

“Yeah, except they got to believe me.” Wolfe muttered these words and Adrian thought the sex offender was balancing on an edge. On the one hand, he knew the trouble he might be in, even with Adrian’s cover. On the other, Wolfe clearly wanted to keep going. The places they were heading were destinations that Wolfe desired. Adrian could see this, in the hunched way the sex offender bent to the keyboard.

“All right, professor, now we’re entering into the shadows.” He smiled.

Adrian understood that Mark Wolfe was a frequent explorer in these worlds.

The sex offender punched a last key and young children came up on the screen. They were playing in a park on a sunlit day. In the background, Adrian could make out antique buildings and cobblestone streets. Amsterdam, he guessed. Mark Wolfe seemed to twitch at that moment, an involuntary movement that Adrian caught only out of the corner of his eye. Then both men swallowed hard, as if their throats were suddenly parched, although for diametrically opposed reasons.

“It looks innocent enough, doesn’t it, professor?”

Adrian nodded.

“It won’t be in a minute.”

The sunlit day and the park dissolved into a white-walled room with a bed.

“Now watching this or owning this or even thinking about this,” Wolfe said, leaning forward, “is absolutely fucking against the law.”

“Keep going,” Adrian said, but he hoped that it was Brian who was forcing him to continue, although he hadn’t heard an insistent word from the hallucination in several minutes. It was as if even the brusque dead lawyer beside him was cowed by what appeared on the screen.

For hours, the two men wandered through a computer world that seemed to exist in a parallel universe, one that had different rules, different morality, and which played directly to aspects of human nature that Adrian believed were coldly outlined in textbooks he’d assigned in classrooms decades earlier. It was a world that had existed for centuries—there was little that was new, except the delivery system and the people engaging in it. He would have been unsettled by what he saw, except he felt a clinical detachment. He was an explorer with a single purpose and everything that passed in front of him that didn’t fit into his theory of
Where Jennifer is
was discarded instantly. More than once, as he shifted about uncomfortably at the appearance of some awful exploitation, he thought himself lucky to be a psychologist and lucky to be losing his mind and his memory simultaneously. He was doubly protected, he told himself, and was able to watch things that redefined
terrible
because they would disappear from within him instead of becoming a nightmare.

Through the long day and into the evening, Wolfe’s mother appeared from time to time at the living room door, hesitantly demanding access to her shows, only to be quickly steered aside by the dutiful son. Eventually he made her a small meal and put her to bed, following the usual nightly ritual, apologizing for monopolizing the television and promising her an extra-long sitcom experience the next day. Wolfe had seemed reluctant to steal those moments from his mother. Adrian noted this sense of empathy at the same time he noticed that Wolfe seemed to tumble with delight into the pictures they found. Sometimes Adrian would say, “Let’s move on” but Wolfe would be slow to respond, reluctant to tear himself from the images. Wolfe was both stimulated and cautious. Adrian guessed that the sex offender had never sat next to another person as he examined the Web worlds.

It was, Adrian thought, exhausting in a numbing way.

They saw children. They saw perversion. They saw death.

It all looked real, even if it was faked. It all looked fake, even when it was real.

Adrian understood that the line between fantasy and reality was beyond blurred. There was no way for him to tell any longer if what he was seeing had actually happened or had been concocted with a Hollywood special effects master’s skill. A terrorist executing a hostage—that had to be real, he thought, but it happened in some nether existence.

Wolfe continued to punch keys but he was slowing down. Adrian imagined the sex offender was fatigued just by the act of being on the precipice of so many of his own desires.

It was late.

“Look,” Wolfe said, “we need to take a break. Maybe eat something. Get a coffee. C’mon, professor, let’s give it a rest. Come back tomorrow, keep trying.”

“A few more.”

“Do you have any idea how much money you’ve spent already?” Wolfe asked. “Just signing up for these websites. One after the next. I mean, we’re into the thousands…”

“Keep going,” Adrian said. He pointed at a list that had popped up on the screen. I’lldoanything.com was followed by YourYoungFriends.com and Whatcomesnext.com.

Wolfe clicked on the last.

He sat up sharply. “Look at that. They want some heavy bucks to join. That’s an expensive site,” he said. “They must be offering something
special.
” This last word was spoken with a sort of excited energy.

There was only red writing on a black background and a price list, except for a duration clock. No indication what the site was selling, which told Adrian that visitors already knew what to expect. This intrigued him. At the same moment, Wolfe pointed at the duration clock.

It read:
Series #4.

“Doesn’t that fit with your girl’s disappearance?” he asked.

Adrian did some quick math. It did. He leaned forward, filled suddenly with a different sort of enthusiasm than what he sensed from the sex offender.

“Pay the money,” he said.

Wolfe typed in Adrian’s credit card number. The two men waited for the authorization to come through. The room filled with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as the charge was approved.

“That’s cool,” Wolfe said as he typed in
Psychprof
’as a screen name, and when a prompt asked for a password he typed
Jennifer.

“Okay, professor, let’s see what we have here.”

Another click and a webcam image dominated the screen. A young woman, face hidden by a hood, sat on a bed. She was alone in a stark basement room and quivering with fear. She was naked. Her hands were loosely handcuffed to a chain that was fixed to a wall.

“Whoa,” Wolfe said. “That’s out there.”

Below the image, the words
Say hello to Number 4, Psychprof
appeared.

Adrian stared hard at the image. His eyes traveled over the girl’s skin looking for some telltale sign that might help him. He saw nothing.

“I can’t tell,” he said, as if answering a question that didn’t need to be spoken out loud. He stood and closed in on the television, hoping that by moving closer he might see something clearer. The room on the television screen filled with the sound of heavily labored breathing and muffled sobs.

“Look there, professor. On the arm.”

Adrian saw a tattoo of a black flower on the girl’s arm. As he stared, Wolfe moved next to him. He pointed at the screen, touching it with his hand as if he could caress the person it showed.

Adrian saw what he was pointing at. A thin scar from an appendectomy on the girl’s side.

“But she looks like the right age, huh, professor?”

Adrian picked up the Missing Persons flyer. There was no mention of a tattoo or of a surgical scar.

He hesitated. He saw Wolfe’s cell phone on the table and he picked it up.

“Who you calling?” Wolfe asked.

“Who do you think?” Adrian answered. He dialed a number but his eyes were fixed on the naked, shivering girl in front of him.

Terri Collins picked up on the third ring. She was still seated across from Mary Riggins and Scott West, working her way through the same explanation for the hundredth time. Mary Riggins seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of tears that had been shed liberally over the hours that Terri had sat next to her. This didn’t surprise the detective. She knew she would have had the same.

The caller ID on her cell phone came back with Mark Wolfe’s name. This astonished her. It was very late and this made little sense. Sex offenders
never
called the police. It was the other way around.

She was taken aback when she heard Adrian’s voice.

“Detective, sorry to bother you at this late hour,” he started. He sounded oddly rushed. Terri Collins thought Adrian had usually seemed unsteady in the times they’d been together.
Hurried
was not a word she would have used to describe him in any of their meetings.

“What is it, professor?”

She was curt. The tears from Mary Riggins seemed the priority at that moment.

“Did Jennifer have a scar from an appendectomy? Did she have a tattoo of a black flower on her arm?”

Terri started to answer, then stopped.

“Why do you ask, professor?”

“I just want to be sure about something,” he answered.

Sure about what?
she thought. This raised her suspicions but she didn’t follow up. She did not want to be cruel to the deranged old man, but neither did she want to distract the mother and erstwhile stepfather with anything that might be misinterpreted as hope.