What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  Adrian looked down at the Ruger pistol. His brother’s legacy. No one knew he owned it. He had never registered it, aware peripherally that his faculty friends at the college would find his possession of the weapon deeply shocking. It was a no-nonsense, ugly weapon that left little debate as to what its purpose was. He wasn’t a hunter or an NRA type. He was contemptuous of the right-wing-get-a-gun-to-defend-yourself-from-terrorists mind-set.

  He was sure that over the years his wife had forgotten that it was in the house, if she had ever really known. He had never spoken of it with her, even after her accident when she had hung on but looked to him with longing for release.

  If he’d been brave, he thought, he would have indulged her with the weapon’s finality. Now, that same question and answer were left to him, and he knew he was a coward for using it in the same way it had been used once before. He wondered for a second if when he placed the barrel to his temple or into his mouth and pulled the trigger it would be only the second time the weapon had ever been fired.

  It had a black, metallic skin that seemed heartless. When he hefted the weapon in his hand it felt heavy and ice cold.

  Adrian pushed the weapon aside and turned back to the hat. It seemed to speak as loudly at that moment as the Ruger did. It was like being caught in the middle of an argument between two inanimate objects, as they debated back and forth over what he should do.

  He paused, taking a deep breath. Things seemed to grow quiet in the room, as if there had been some noisy racket associated with self-murder that was abruptly silenced.

  The least I can do, he thought, is make a modest inquiry. The hat seemed to be demanding that small amount from him.

  He picked up his phone and dialed 911. He was aware there was a little irony in the idea that he was calling first about someone he didn’t know, and that later he would make more or less the same call about himself.

  “Police, Fire, and Rescue. What is your emergency?” The dispatcher’s voice had a practiced calm to it.

  “It’s not really an emergency,” Adrian said. He wanted to make sure that his voice didn’t waver or sound hesitant, like the old man he thought he’d suddenly become in the hours after visiting the neurologist. He wanted to sound forceful and alert. “I am calling because I think I may have witnessed an event that might have some police interest.”

  “What sort of event?”

  He tried to picture the person on the other end of the phone. The dispatcher had a way of clipping off each word sharply so that it was unmistakable in meaning. The tone of his voice had a toughened, no-nonsense timbre. It was as if the few words the dispatcher used were dressed in tight high-collared uniforms.

  “I saw a white panel van . . . There was this teenage girl, Jennifer, it’s written in her hat but I don’t know her, although she must live in the neighborhood somewhere and one second she was there, then the next, she was gone.”

  Adrian wanted to slap himself. All his intentions of being reasonable and forceful had instantly evaporated in a sea of choppy, ill-conceived, and deeply rushed descriptions. He wondered, Is that the disease punishing my language skills?

  “Yes, sir. And you believe you witnessed what exactly?”

  The telephone line beeped. He was being recorded.

  “Have you had any reports of missing children in the Hills section of town?” he asked.

  “No current reports. No calls today,” the dispatcher said.

  “Nothing?”

  “No, sir. Very quiet in town all afternoon. I will take your information and forward it to the detective bureau should there be a later report. They will follow up if necessary.”

  “I guess I was mistaken,” Adrian said. He hung up before the dispatcher had time to ask for his name and address.

  None of it made sense to him.

  He knew what he’d seen and it was wrong.

  Adrian looked up and out his window. Night had dropped and lights were clicking on up and down the block. Dinnertime, he thought. Families gathering. Talk about what happened that day, at work, at school. All very normal and expected. He suddenly burst out loud with a question that resonated in the small bedroom, as if it could echo in that small space like it would if he’d shouted above a canyon. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

  “But of course you do, dear,” his wife insisted from the bed beside him.

  4

  The call came in shortly before 11 p.m. but by that time Detective Terri Collins was already thinking hard about heading to bed. Her two children were asleep in their bedroom, homework done, read to and tucked in. She had just made that last maternal visit of the night—where she poked her head in through the doorway, letting the wan light from the hallway toss just enough illumination onto the faces of the two children so that she could tell they slept soundly. No nightmares. Even breathing. Not even a sniffle that might signal an oncoming cold. There were some single parents she knew in the support group she occasionally frequented who could hardly bear to tear themselves away from sleeping children. It was as if during the night they were all vulnerable. All the evils that had created their circumstances seemed to have freer rein after sunset. A time that should have been devoted to rest and renewal had devolved into one filled with uncertainty, worry, and fears.

  But all was right this night, she thought.

  All was safe.

  Everything was normal.

  She left the door ajar just an inch or two and started to pad down to the bathroom when she heard the phone ring in the kitchen.

  She glanced at a wall clock as she hurried to answer. Too late to be anything but trouble, she thought.

  It was the night dispatcher at police headquarters.

  “Detective, I have a distraught woman on the other line. I believe you’ve handled calls from her before. Apparently, we have another runaway.”

  Detective Terri Collins knew immediately who it was that the dispatcher had on hold. Maybe this time Jennifer actually got away . . . But this was unprofessional and getting away was only callous shorthand for trading a familiar set of terrors for a wholly different and potentially worse type.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment,” Terri said. She slipped easily from mother mode into police detective. One of her strengths was her ability to separate the different dimensions of her life into neat, orderly groups. Too many years of too much upheaval had created in her a driving need for simplicity and organization.

  She put the dispatcher on hold while she dialed a second number, one that she kept on a list by the kitchen phone. An advantage of having been through what she had experienced was the informal network of help available. Luckily, the woman she dialed was a dedicated night owl. “Hello, Laurie, it’s Terri. I hate to bother you at this late hour, but . . .”

  “You’ve been called in on a case and you need me to watch the kids?”

  Terri could actually hear enthusiasm in her friend’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Be right over. No problem. My pleasure. How late do you think you’ll be?” Terri smiled. Her friend Laurie was an insomniac of the first order, and Terri knew that she secretly loved being called in the middle of the night, especially to watch over children, now that her own had grown up and moved away. It gave her something to do other than uselessly watching late-night cable or pacing anxiously about her darkened house talking to herself about everything that had gone wrong in her life. This was, Terri had learned, a lengthy conversation.

  “Hard to say. At least a couple of hours. But probably late. Maybe even all night.”

  “I’ll bring my toothbrush,” Laurie replied.

  She hit the hold button and reconnected with the police dispatcher.

  “Tell Mrs. Riggins I’ll be at her home within thirty minutes to talk to her and get an investigation started. Are uniformed officers there
?”

  “They have been dispatched.”

  “Let them know I’ll be along shortly. They should take down any preliminary statements so we can put a time line together. They should also try to settle Mrs. Riggins down.”

  Terri doubted they would be successful at this.

  “Ten-four,” the dispatcher replied, disconnecting the line.

  Laurie would be over within minutes. That was her neighbor’s style. She hung up the phone. Laurie liked thinking she was an integral part of whatever investigation or crime scene that Terri was being called to, as important as a forensic technician or fingerprint expert. This was a harmless and useful conceit. Terri went back into the bathroom, dashed some water on her face, and ran a brush through her hair. Despite the late hour, she wanted to look fresh, presentable, and exceptionally capable in the face of frantic panic.

  The street was dark and there were few lights on in any of the houses when Terri drove through the Rigginses’ neighborhood. The only home with any outward activity was her destination, where the porch light shone brightly and Terri could see figures moving about in the living room. A single police cruiser was parked in the driveway, but the responding officers had left their flashing lights off, so it merely looked like another car waiting for the morning suburban exodus to work or school.

  Terri pulled up in her battered six-year-old compact. She took a minute to breathe deeply before she gathered her things—a satchel with a mini–tape recorder and a bound notebook. She kept her badge attached to the strap of the satchel. Her weapon was holstered and on the seat next to her. She clamped it to the belt of her jeans, after double-checking to make certain the safety was on and no round was chambered. Another deep breath and she stepped out into the night and made her way across the lawn toward the house.

  It was a trip she had made twice before in the past eighteen months.

  She could see her breath vaporizing in the air like smoke. The temperature had fallen, but not so far that any person in New England did anything other than wrap their coat a little more tightly around their chest and maybe turn up the collar. There was clarity to the cold, not the same as the frost of winter, but a sense that lines were still drawn in the air, even with spring fitfully making its start.

  Terri wished she had stopped by her desk at the four-person detective bureau over at police headquarters and pulled her file on the Riggins family, although she doubted that there was any detail or note in those reports that she hadn’t already committed to memory. What she hated was the sensation that she was walking into a scene that was something far different from what it purported to be. An underage runaway was how she would write it up for the department records and precisely how the detective bureau would handle the case. She knew exactly what steps she would take and what the departmental guidelines and procedures were for this sort of disappearance. She even had a reasonable guess about the likely outcome of the case. But that wasn’t what was really happening, she told herself. There was some underlying reason for Jennifer’s persistence and there was probably a far worse crime lurking within the teenager’s single-minded dedication to getting away from her home. Terri just didn’t think she would ever uncover it no matter how many statements she took from the mother and the boyfriend or how hard she worked the case.

  She hated the notion that she was about to participate in a falsehood.

  On the front stoop, she hesitated before knocking on the door. She pictured her own two children at home asleep, unaware that she was not right down the hallway in her little bedroom with her own door open and her sleep light, in case she heard any strange sound. They were still young. Whatever heartache and worry they were going to produce—and there was surely to be some—was still to come.

  Jennifer was considerably farther along that road.

  Farther along a couple of roads, Terri thought. The double entendre made sense of the situation inside the house.

  Terri took a final deep breath of the cold night air, like swallowing the last drop of water from a glass. She knocked once, then pushed the door open and stepped quickly into a small hallway. She knew there was a picture of a smiling Jennifer at age nine, pink bow in carefully combed hair, framed on the wall near the stairs to the upper bedrooms. There was an endearing gap between the girl’s front teeth. It was the sort of picture beloved of parents and hated by teenagers because it reminded both of the same time, seen through different lenses and distorted by different memories.

  To her left, in the living room, she saw Mary Riggins and Scott West—the boyfriend—perched on the edge of a sofa. Scott had his arm loosely draped around Mary’s shoulders and gripped her hand. Cigarettes burned in an ashtray on a coffee table. Cans of soda and half-empty cups of coffee crowded the tabletop. Poised uncomfortably to the side were two uniformed officers. One was the late-night shift sergeant and the other was a twenty-two-year-old rookie who’d been on the force for only a month. Clearly the sergeant was still engaged in the breaking-in process for the younger man. She nodded in their direction, caught a slight roll of the eyes from the sergeant just as Mary Riggins burst out in a howl: “She’s done it again, detective.”

  These words ended in a torrent of sobs.

  She had been crying and her makeup was streaked, black lines scarring her cheeks, giving her a Halloween appearance. Crying had turned her eyes puffy, making her look far older than she was. Terri thought that tears were always difficult for middle-aged women—they instantly brought out all the years they tried so hard to hide.

  Instead of launching into any further explanation, Mary Riggins buried her head into Scott the boyfriend’s shoulder. He was a little older than she was, gray-haired, distinguished looking even in jeans and faded red-checked work shirt. He was a new age therapist who specialized in holistic treatments for any number of psychiatric illnesses and had a successful practice in the academic community, which was always receptive to different techniques in the same way that some people flit from diet to diet. He drove a bright red drop-top Mazda sports car and often cruised around the valley in the winter with the car open, bundled in a parka and lumberjack’s floppy fur hat, which seemed more than merely eccentric and had a sense of defiance to it. The town police were very familiar with Scott West and his work; he and the Mazda collected speeding tickets with daunting frequency, and on more than one occasion the police had been forced to quietly clean up psychological messes created by his eccentric practice. Several suicides. A standoff with a knife-wielding paranoid schizophrenic he’d advised to stop taking Haldol and exchange it with Saint John’s wort purchased from the local health food store.

  The cigarettes and soda cans and coffee cups shouldn’t be there, Terri thought. Scott came from the yoga-Pilates traditions that considered a Diet Coke or a Starbucks latte a sign of disconnect with the greater deep benign forces of nature. Terri thought his attitudes had more in common with astrology than psychology.

  If she could have, she would have laughed at him and said something about the addictive powers of hypocrisy. But she had learned early in her police career that there was no end to the many contradictions people clutched in their lives, and pointing them out rarely did anyone any good. Terri liked to think of herself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, reasoned and ordered in her thinking, straightforward in her approach. If this style occasionally made her appear unfriendly, well, that was okay with her. She had already had her fill of passion and eccentricity and madness in her own life in years gone by, and order and process was what she preferred, because, she thought, it kept her safe.

  Scott leaned forward. He spoke in a practiced, therapist’s voice, deep, calm, and reasonable. It was a voice designed to make him seem like her ally in the situation, when Terri knew the opposite was much closer to the truth.

  “Mary’s very upset, detective. Despite all our efforts, on a nearly continual basis . . .” He stopped there, refusing to complete the sentence.


  Terri nodded. She turned to the two uniformed officers. The sergeant handed her a piece of loose-leaf ruled notepaper, the sort that was in every high school student’s three-ring binder. The handwriting was careful, a script formed by someone who wanted to make certain that each word was clear and legible. It was not something that had been rapidly scribbled by a teenager eager to head out the door and do what the note said she was going to do. It was a note that had been worked on. Perhaps it was even the third or fourth carefully constructed draft. Terri guessed if she searched hard she could find discarded alternatives in a wastebasket or in the trash containers out back. Before she responded Terri read through the note three times.

  Mom,

  I’m going to the movies with some friends I’m meeting at the mall. I’ll get dinner there and maybe spend the night at either Sarah or Katie’s house. I’ll call you after the movie to let you know or else just come home then. I won’t be too late. I’ve finished my homework and have nothing new due until next week.

  Very reasonable. Very concise. A complete falsehood.

  “Where was this left?”

  “Stuck to the fridge with a magnet,” the sergeant said. “Right where it couldn’t be missed.”

  Terri read it through a couple more times. You’re learning, aren’t you, Jennifer? she thought. You knew exactly what to write.

  Movies—that meant her mother would assume her cell phone was shut off, and it gave her at least a two-hour window when she couldn’t reasonably be reached.

  Some friends—not specified but seemingly benign. The two names she did provide, Sarah and Katie, were probably willing to cover for her, or were themselves unavailable.

  I’ll call you—so her mother and Scott would sit around waiting for the telephone to ring while valuable minutes were lost.

  No homework—Jennifer removed from the equation the biggest external excuse for her mother to call her.