What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

Jennifer felt a chalky taste on her tongue. Beneath the hood, she could sense her head spinning. Her eyes rolled back and, as once again she descended into an internal darkness, she wondered whether she had been poisoned, which didn’t make any sense to her. Nothing made sense except the awful sensation that it did to the woman with the voice and the man who had punched her into unconsciousness. She wanted to shout out something, to protest, or just to hear the sound of her own voice. But before she could form some words and thrust them past her cracked dry lips, she felt as if she were teetering on a narrow ledge. Then, as the drugs clumsily concealed in the water took hold, she felt herself tumbling.

  8

  What she needed to do was to both hurry up and be patient.

  Terri Collins knew that the best chances to find Jennifer were rapidly sliding past, so she had to move quickly in the few areas that might work. But she was filled with doubt, not only of the likelihood of a quick Here she is success but of the actual reasons behind Jennifer’s third time running away from home. Too many questions, not enough answers.

  By the time she got back to her office it was well past midnight, creeping into the early morning hours. Other than the phone dispatcher and a couple of overnight duty patrolmen, there was little activity in the building. The cops watching over the nearby colleges and suburban streets were all out on patrol or holed up at a Dunkin’ Donuts fueling themselves with coffee and sweets.

  She hustled to her desk. She immediately dialed numbers for the police substations at both the main bus terminal in Springfield and the downtown train station. She also contacted the Massachusetts State Police barracks along the turnpike and the Boston Transit Police. These conversations were brisk—a general description of Jennifer, a quick plea to keep an eye out for her, a promise to follow up with a faxed photo and MISSING PERSONS flyer. In official worlds, the police needed copies of the documents in order to act; in the unofficial world, getting some phone calls and some radio traffic out to the late-night shifts working the bus stations and the highways might be all that was necessary. If they were lucky, Terri hoped, a trooper cruising the Mass Pike would see Jennifer forlornly hitchhiking near an entry ramp or a cop taking a pass through North Station would spot her in line for a ticket and all would end up more or less resolved: a stern talking-to, a ride in the back of a squad car, a teary-eyed (that would be the mother) and sullen-faced (that would be Jennifer) reunion, and then everything that had been one way before would continue again—until the next time she decided to escape.

  Terri worked quickly to create the circumstances that might lead to that rosy scenario. She tossed her bag, her badge, her gun, and her notebook on her desk in the small warren of offices that the college town police department called the detective bureau but which was sarcastically referred to on the force as Gold Shield City. She dialed numbers rapidly, spoke directly to dispatchers and shift lieutenants using her best try to move fast voice.

  Her next calls went to Verizon Wireless security. She explained to the person in a call center in Omaha who she was and the urgency of the situation. She wanted any usage of Jennifer’s cell phone reported to her immediately along with the identification of the cell phone tower that processed the call. Jennifer might not know that her cell phone was like a beacon that could be traced back to her. She’s smart, Terri thought, but not that smart.

  Terri also alerted overnight security at Bank of America, who would report if Jennifer tried to use her ATM card. She did not have a credit card—Mary Riggins and Scott West had been adamant that this indulgence was for affluent others and not Jennifer. Terri hadn’t quite believed this.

  She tried to think of anything else that might diminish Jennifer’s invisibility. She had already gone past her department’s formal guidelines because, technically, a Missing Persons report couldn’t be filed for twenty-four hours and a runaway wasn’t considered a crime. Not yet. Not until something actually happened. Terri was all too aware that the something that might happen was usually terrible. The informal idea was to find the child before it happened.

  She did not believe for an instant they would be so lucky.

  After she made the calls, Terri went to a large black steel case file container located in a corner of the office. The Riggins family file documented the two previous runaway efforts. After the previous attempt Terri had left the manila folder in the active section, where it had remained for more than a year. It should have been sent to storage but Terri had known that this particular night was inevitable even if she didn’t know exactly why.

  She plucked the folder from the cabinet and returned to her desk. She had most of the relevant information stored in her memory—Jennifer wasn’t the sort of teenager that one forgot easily—but she knew it was important to go over details, because perhaps a clue to where she was heading now had emerged in one of her prior attempts. Good police work is plodding and determined and relies to a great degree on looking at minutiae. Terri wanted to make certain that all her reports on this case that traveled up the bureaucratic chain of command displayed attention to every possibility for success.

  She knew she wanted this, even if the chances of success were slight. She sighed deeply. Finding Jennifer was going to be hard. In truth, the best hope was that the teenager would run out of money before she’d been pimped into prostitution or addicted to drugs or raped and murdered and she would call home and that would be that, sort of. The problem, Terri realized, was that Jennifer had planned this escape. She was a determined teenager. Stubborn and intelligent. Terri did not think that giving up at the first sign of trouble was in Jennifer’s DNA. The problem was, the first sign of trouble might also be the last.

  Terri opened the case file and placed it on her desk, next to the laptop computer that she had removed from Jennifer’s room. Jennifer had placed two bright red flower stickers on the outside and also a save the whales bumper sticker. Ordinarily, she would wait until morning and then contact the state attorney’s office to have one of its forensic technicians examine the computer. Bureaucracy squared. But Terri had audited a graduate-level course at the local university on cyber crime and she already knew enough to get into the hard drive and make a ghost of what was contained there, and then to transfer all the data to a flash drive. She reached for the computer and opened it.

  She took a single glance toward the window. She could see dawn light creeping through the branches of a stately brown oak tree on the perimeter of the department’s parking lot. For a few moments she watched. The light seemed to seek out and penetrate the budding leaves and rough bark skin of the tree, pushing shadows aside briskly. She knew she should have been exhausted after the long all-nighter but her adrenaline gave her just enough energy to carry her forward a little farther. Coffee might help, she thought. She reminded herself to call her home soon, make sure that Laurie had awakened the kids and made their school lunches and hustled them out the door in time for the bus. She hated not being there when they awoke, although the kids would likely be pleased to see Laurie. They always thought it exciting when their mother was called away on some midnight police errand. For a second, Terri closed her eyes. She had a momentary shock of anxiety: Would Laurie watch them get on the bus? She wouldn’t leave them on the side of the street waiting . . .

  Terri shook her head. Her friend was more reliable than that.

  Fear, she thought, is always something hidden just beneath the skin, waiting to burst forth.

  She touched the computer’s on-off switch and the machine blinked to life. Are you here, Jennifer? What are you going to tell me?

  She wondered whether every minute that passed was more valuable than the last. She knew she should have waited for the official go-ahead to probe the machine. But she did not.

  * * *

  Michael was inordinately pleased with himself.

  After burning the stolen van he had stopped at a rest area on the turnpike, where he’d mana
ged to leave a library card with the name Jennifer Riggins in the ladies’ room. He had nursed a cup of black coffee in the food area, between a McDonald’s and a shuttered frozen yogurt kiosk, eyeing travelers as they clattered through the area, waiting for the moment he could be certain that no one was in the bathroom. A quick check had ascertained that there were no security cameras in the vestibule leading to the doors marked men and women. Nevertheless, throughout his time, he’d kept a dark blue baseball cap scrunched down on his head, the visor cutting off any camera that might pick up his profile. He crunched up the coffee container, dropped it into a wastebasket, and made his way to the door marked men. But at the last second he’d swerved into the ladies’ room. He was there only seconds—just long enough to drop the card faceup next to a toilet, where it was likely to be spotted by the next cleanup crew that entered to mop the floors.

  He knew there was every chance that they would just toss the card in the trash. But it was also possible they might not, which would serve his purposes.

  Back outside in his truck, Michael settled behind the driver’s seat and pulled out a small laptop computer. He was pleased to see that the rest area was covered with a wireless Internet connection.

  Like the van they’d used, the computer was stolen. He’d plucked it from a tabletop at a university dining hall three days earlier. This had been a remarkably easy theft. He scooped up the computer when a student had left it to get a cheeseburger. With fries, Michael guessed. The important thing had been not to grab it and run. That would have attracted attention. Instead, he’d slipped it into a black neoprene computer sleeve and walked to a table on the opposite side of the room, where he’d waited until the student returned, saw the loss, and started yelling. He’d put the stolen computer in a backpack so it was concealed, then walked over to the small group gathered around the irate student. “Dude, you gotta call campus security right away,” he’d said, in his best graduate school, slightly older voice. “Don’t wait, you gotta get on it.” This sentiment had been met with many murmurs of agreement. And in the moments afterward, as cell phones popped out of pockets and confusion reigned, Michael had simply sidled away from the gathered undergraduates with the stolen laptop cavalierly hidden inside his backpack. He’d marched jauntily through the knots of students to a parking area outside where Linda was waiting.

  Certain thefts, he thought, were incredibly easy.

  Within a few seconds working the keyboard Michael had reached a reservation window for the Trailways bus lines in Boston. He continued clicking computer keys, feeding in the credit card number from the Visa card he’d taken from Jennifer’s wallet. He presumed Mary was her mother.

  He purchased a one-way ticket on a 2 a.m. bus to New York City. The idea was to create a modest trail for Jennifer—if anyone went looking for her. A trail to nowhere, he thought.

  Then he had put the truck in gear and left the rest area. He knew of a Dumpster behind a large office building just outside Boston that had early morning pickups and he wanted to toss the computer there, beneath piles of trash. Anyone clever enough to trace the reservation back would find a most curious IP address.

  The stop after that was the Boston bus station. It was a stolid square building with a haze of diesel engine smoke and a thick oily smell, illuminated by unforgiving neon lights. There was always an ebb and flow of passengers and buses, moving out onto the streets, passing through the city’s attractions before heading out on Route 93 north or south or on 90 west. It reminded him of dropping a thermometer onto a hard floor and seeing little silver droplets of mercury spread out in all directions.

  The bus station had electronic ticketing but he waited until several people crowded around the ATM-like dispenser. He joined them, swiped the stolen Visa card, and got the ticket. It had Ms. M. Riggins printed on it. He kept his head down. He knew there were security cameras covering much of the bus station, and he imagined that it might be possible for a cop to compare the time stamp on the ticket with video of the dispenser and see that no Jennifer was in sight. Caution, he told himself.

  As soon as he obtained the ticket he headed for the men’s room. Inside, he quickly checked to make sure he was alone and then locked himself into a stall. He opened his backpack and took out a different coat, a floppy bucket-style hat, and a fake beard and mustache. It took him only a few seconds to transform his appearance and head back outside and find a spot in a darkened corner to wait.

  The station had a constant but bored police presence. Their main job was searching for homeless folks who were looking for a warm and safe place to spend the night but who disdained the many shelters available. The cops’ other duty seemed to be preventing someone from being mugged, which might result in an unfortunate headline. The bus station was an edgy place; he could sense he was on the fringe between normalcy, respectability, and crime, one of those spots where different worlds rubbed uncomfortably up against each other.

  Michael thought he looked like he belonged with the respectable folks, which was a nice type of camouflage against the truth.

  Then he waited, seated in an uncomfortable molded red plastic chair, nervously tapping his toes, trying to remain unnoticed, until he saw what he needed: three college-age girls with one distracted-looking boyfriend accompanying them. They all carried backpacks and appeared unaffected by the lateness of the hour. But they also looked like the do-gooder types that would want to do the right thing when they found something that wasn’t theirs. They would call someone. That was what he wanted. Mystery layered upon mystery.

  He slowly pulled into line behind them, collar turned up, hat pulled down because he knew this time for certain there were security cameras taping everything. The goddamn Patriot Act, he joked to himself. Except it wasn’t hard to find Internet postings that told him pretty much where those cameras were located and how they conducted surveillance. He waited until the crew of college-age kids crowded forward trying to get the harried late-night ticket man to handle their requests all at once. At that moment, he surreptitiously reached forward and slipped the Visa card into an open pouch on one of the backpacks.

  Sleight of hand, he thought, worthy of Houdini.

  This made him smile because, in their own way, what he and Linda had done was magic: Jennifer had disappeared.

  In her place, handcuffed and hooded, a frozen image heading out into the cyber world, was Number 4.

  9

  Adrian stood across from the pharmacist and watched as she efficiently scooped various pills into containers. Occasionally she would look up at him standing at the drugstore counter and smile wanly. He could sense that she had a small comment on the tip of her lips, but she swallowed it each time it threatened to burst forth. It was a look that he was familiar with from the front of the classroom, when a student launched into some soliloquy that might be totally on point but also could be flying off on a disconnected tangent. For an instant he felt like a professor again. He wanted to lean across the counter and whisper something like I know what all these pills mean, and I know you know it, too, but I’m not scared of dying. Not in the slightest. But what worries me is fading away and these are supposed to help slow that process down, although I know they won’t.

  He wanted to say this but he did not.

  Or perhaps he did, and she did not hear him. He was unsure.

  The pharmacist approached him. “These are really expensive,” she said, “even with comprehensive insurance from the college. I’m terribly sorry.”

  It was as if by apologizing for the outrageous cost of the medication she could actually tell him that she was sorry he was as sick as he was.

  “It’s all right,” he said. He thought of adding something like I won’t need them for all that long but, again, he did not.

  He fumbled in his wallet and then handed over a credit card and watched several hundred dollars get charged to his account. He had a slightly humorous thought:
Don’t pay it. Let’s see the bloodsuckers try to get the money out of some old drooling fool who doesn’t remember what day it is, much less even making the charges.

  Adrian carried a paper bag filled with medications outside the pharmacy into a bright morning. He ripped open the container and dropped an Exelon into his palm. This was joined by Prozac and Namenda, which were supposed to help with confusion, which he didn’t think he needed yet, although he was willing to concede that this might be a sign of exactly what the pill was supposed to help. He only glanced at the long list of nasty side effects that accompanied each medication. Whatever they were, they could hardly be worse than what was awaiting him. There was also an antipsychotic in the bag, but he did not open this vial and was tempted to throw it away. He popped the selection of pills into his mouth and swallowed hard.

  A start, Adrian told himself.

  “Okay, now that you’ve taken care of that, let’s get down to business,” his brother said briskly. “Time to find out who Jennifer is.”

  Adrian turned slowly toward the sound of his brother’s voice. “Hello, Brian,” he said. He couldn’t help but break into a smile. “I was hoping you would show up sooner or later.”

  Brian was perched on the hood of Adrian’s old Volvo, knees drawn up, smoking a cigarette. Smoke curled up into the blue sky above the two of them. He was wearing filthy, tattered olive drab fatigues that were flecked with blood spatters. His flak jacket was ripped. His helmet was at his feet, sporting a peace symbol drawn in thick black ink and an American flag decal with the words Death Dealer and Heart Stealer scrawled beneath it. He had rested his M-16 between his legs, holding the stock in place with his jungle boots. Sweat streaked Brian’s face, and he was pale and cadaverously thin and barely twenty-three years old. He was resting in a position similar to a photo that had been taken years earlier—a Larry Burrows picture, snapped on assignment for Life shortly before he was killed and that his brother had kept framed on his desk in his office as a reminder, as he had once told Adrian, although he wasn’t specific as to what he was reminding himself of. The photo was now in a dusty box in Adrian’s basement, along with many of his brother’s other things, including the Silver Star he’d won and never told anyone about.