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.
The trouble was, it did. They just didn’t know it.
She watched as her son plopped down in a chair, ignored the television, and picked up a picture book. She wondered, Did I get away in time? What kept her awake at night was the thought that somehow her ex-husband had left an infection within the child, and that it was biding its time, waiting for the right moment to burst forth violently. Every day she waited for the phone call from the school, the We think there’s a problem call. And, every night, when it had not come, she felt relief and then renewed fear that the next day would be the day it arrived.
She had managed to flee, packing and running when she knew he was wrapped up for a few hours. She had been cautious, giving no signs of flight in the weeks leading up to her escape, performing every boring, routine chore she could, so that when she fled it would be unexpected. She left behind most everything except some pocket money and the children. He could have everything else. She didn’t care.
She had a single mantra, which she had repeated endlessly to herself: Start over. Start over.
In the time that followed, she had obtained the restraining order keeping him away and the divorce settlement that limited his access to the children and had filed all the necessary papers with his commanding officer down in North Carolina at the base where the First Airborne was housed. She had endured more than one session with military counselors, who subtly and not so subtly tried to talk her into returning to her husband. She had refused, no matter how many times they called him “an American hero.”
We have altogether too many heroes, she thought.
But there was never a full and complete escape, at least not one that didn’t involve hiding, false identities, and moving from place to place, trying to be anonymous in a world that seems devoted to publicizing something about everybody. He would never be fully out of their lives. It was, in part, why she had gone back to school and worked so hard to become a policewoman. The semiautomatic in her satchel and the badge she wore carried an implicit message that she hoped served as a barrier between him and whatever poison he wanted to deliver.
She hugged both children and at the same time offered up a small prayer: another safe day. She wanted to light a candle in a church and ask for her ex to become an alcoholic, a drug addict, or to be redeployed into Iraq or Afghanistan, someplace where there were bullets and bombs and indiscriminate death.
This was cruel, heartless thinking, not in any way charitable. She didn’t care.
Terri settled the kids into kid tasks—drawing, reading, watching the tube—and then walked into the kitchen. Laurie, who had been totally reliable since the first moment that Terri had received the call about the missing Jennifer, was putting together a plate of food.
“I figured you weren’t exactly telling the truth,” she said.
Terri looked down at the warmed-up meat loaf and cold salad. She took the plate, gathered a fork and knife, and still standing leaned back against the cabinets and started to eat.
“You should be the detective,” she said between mouthfuls.
Laurie nodded. This was a significant compliment to anyone who spent as much time with Raymond Chandler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Ellroy as she did.
In the other room, the two children occupied themselves quietly, which was something of a victory. Terri started to pour herself a glass of milk, then thought better and found a half-empty bottle of white wine. She took two glasses from a shelf. “Stay for a little bit?”
Laurie nodded. “Sure. White wine and putting kids to bed. I can’t think of a better evening as long as I get back to the tube before CSI comes on.”
“Those shows—you know they’re not real.”
“Yeah. But they’re like little morality plays. In medieval times all the peasants gathered in front of the steps of whatever church and watched actors perform Bible stories in order to teach lessons like Thou shalt not kill. Today, we flick on the tube to watch Horatio What’s His Name in Miami or Gus in Las Vegas inform us of more or less the same thing in a more modern fashion.”
They both laughed. “Ten minutes!” Terri called out to the kids in the other room, an announcement met with predictable groans.
Terri knew that Laurie was eager to ask about the case but was too polite to broach the subject without an opening.
She took a bite of meat loaf. “A runaway,” she said in answer to the question not spoken. “But we can’t be sure. Maybe a kidnapping. Or maybe someone helped her run away. It’s just not clear yet.”
“What do you think?” Laurie asked.
Terri hesitated. “Most children that disappear are taken for a reason. And usually they show up again. At least that’s what the stats tell us.”
“But . . .”
Terri looked into the other room to make sure that her children remained out of earshot. “I’m not an optimist,” she said quietly. She forked some of the salad and took a long swig of wine. “I’m a realist. Hope for the best. Expect the worst.”
Laurie nodded. “Happy endings . . .”
“You want a happy ending, watch television,” Terri said briskly. She sounded much harsher than she thought she should, but her conversation with the professor had left her seeing only gray and dark possibilities. “More likely to find one there.”
It was, she thought, an unusual way of investigating crime.
It had turned late, Laurie had departed with her usual plea to call any time, day or night . . . the kids were asleep and Terri was on her third glass of white wine, surrounded by books and articles, a laptop computer near her elbow. She was in the strange realm between exhaustion and fascination.
“You see, detective, the crime that happened, right in front of me—it was only a beginning. Scene one. Act one. Enter the antagonists. And what little we know about it probably leads nowhere. Especially if the criminals are experienced in what they did.”
She could hear the old professor’s voice echoing in the sanctuary of her small, trim, toy-cluttered house. Experienced. She had not told him about the stolen truck and the torch job that in all likelihood eradicated any evidence inadvertently left behind. Someone who knew what he was doing would take those precautions.
“We have to consider the crime that is taking place, even as we talk.”
The professor, she thought, was wild with suppositions, crazed with ideas. But lurking within were notions that made sense to her. She had listened to him carefully, trying to see a path through two mysteries. The first was the obvious one: What was wrong with him? The second was far more complicated: How do you find a Jennifer that has been snatched out of the world?
She had decided that she would simply bear with the professor. He was smart, perceptive, and extremely well educated. That he rapidly faded in and out of attention, seemed to drift into other lands, and responded to questions and statements that hadn’t been voiced, well, as far as Terri was concerned this was all fairly benign. Somewhere in all his ramblings might be a path that she could follow.
On her lap, spread out, was the Encyclopedia of Modern Murder. She had read through the segment on the Moors Murders twice and then done a thorough Internet examination of the crime. It never ceased to amaze her what one could find lurking in odd corners of the cyber world. She came across autopsy photographs, crime scene maps, and original police documents, all posted on various websites devoted to serial killing and sexual depravity. She was t
empted to order one of the several books about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, but she didn’t want this sort of material taking up bookshelf space next to The Cat in the Hat and The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh.
She was careful to clear her computer’s memory of each of the murder-driven websites she examined. No sense in leaving behind something that her oldest just might know how to click on and open up. Children are natural voyeurs, she thought, but all curiosity should have its limits.
Even after she had moused and clicked everything away into computer purgatory, what she had read lingered within her.
The professor’s point, she understood, was that what tripped up the homicidal couple was the need to share their excesses.
“That’s the key,” Adrian had said. “They needed to reach beyond the two of them. If they had simply shared their love of torture with each other, well, then they would have been able to go on more or less indefinitely.”
Terri had written down a few notes as the professor had lectured her. Short of making a mistake in planning, being spotted by some random person, they could have continued for years.
She knew very little about this sort of crime, despite having spent some classroom time on celebrated murders and serial killings. A few years engaged in the routine of college town crime, with its very limited spectrum, had removed most of her recollections.
“If I take two identical white rats and place them in the same psychological situation, it’s possible to assess their different responses to identical stimuli. But there will still be a baseline of similarity that we can measure from.”
He had been energized. She had imagined that, as he spoke, he could see himself surrounded by students, jammed into a darkened laboratory, watching the behavior of animals, carefully assessing behaviors.
“It is when the similar rats in the identical situation start to deviate from those norms that things become interesting.”
But Jennifer’s disappearance wasn’t a lab experiment.
At least, she thought, leaning back in her chair, I don’t think it is.
What Comes Next Page 17
