What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  Her fingertips tickled at the worn synthetic bear. She wondered why they had let her have it. She recognized that it couldn’t be to help her. It had to be helping them and for a second she wondered whether she should fling the familiar toy into the void where she could never find it. It would be defiance. It would be an act that would show the man and the woman that she wasn’t going to just roll over and let them do whatever it was they intended to do.

  She gripped her hand tightly around the stuffed animal’s midsection and felt her muscles grow taut, like a pitcher readying to deliver a baseball to home plate.

  She gasped.

  Don’t! she suddenly shouted to herself.

  Or maybe it was out loud. She couldn’t tell.

  She listened for an echo but could hear none.

  She pulled the bear to her chest and nuzzled him, running her fingers down the toy’s backside. “I’m sorry,” she whispered out loud. “I didn’t mean it. I don’t know why they let me find you, but they did, and so we’re in this together. Just like always.”

  Jennifer craned her head to the side, as if expecting to hear the door, or the sound of the baby crying again, but there was nothing. All she could hear was her own heartbeat and she imagined that she was sharing that with the toy.

  It made her feel a little better to hear her own voice even if it faded away quickly. It reminded her that she could still talk, which meant that she was still who she was, if only a little, but it was an important little.

  She almost laughed. There were many evenings when she had lain in her bed at home, the lights out in her room so she was surrounded by night, curled up with Mister Brown Fur, pouring out all her hurts and tears onto the stuffed animal, as if he alone in the entire world understood what she was going through. Many conversations, over many years, about many troubles. He had been there for her throughout, from the first instant that she’d torn open the bright Happy Birthday wrapping that her father had placed somewhat incompetently around the toy. He’d been very sick then, and it had been the last thing he’d been able to give her before he’d gone off to the hospital. So there it was: he gave her a toy and then he died, and she hated her mother because she hadn’t been able to do anything about the cancer that murdered him.

  Jennifer breathed in and stroked the bear. Maybe they’re killers, she thought harshly, as if she could pass the words in her head directly into the stuffed animal, but they aren’t cancer.

  She told herself that was the only thing in the world she really feared. Cancer.

  Another deep sigh and she shifted on the bed.

  “We need to be able to see,” Jennifer whispered in the bear’s ragged ear. “We need to be able to see where we are. If we can’t see, we might as well be dead.”

  She hesitated. These words made her nervous probably because they were true.

  “You look around carefully,” she continued softly. “Memorize everything. And then you can tell me later.”

  She knew this was foolish, but she found herself pivoting the bear’s head back and forth, so that the little glass beads that made up his eyes could survey wherever it was she was being held. Though she knew this was stupid and childish, it made her feel much better and a little stronger, so that when she heard the sound of the door opening she didn’t stiffen quite as quickly, nor did her breathing get raspy. Instead, she turned toward the sound, hoping that it was something as routine as a meal or a drink, but nervous that it might be a signal of something new happening to her.

  She knew right then that whatever was in store for her, it wasn’t to be fast and sudden. This thought made her hand twitch with fear. But she was smart enough to know that every second that passed, and every new element that was introduced into the dark world she inhabited, might help her as much as hurt her.

  21

  Adrian lay curled on his bed, his head cradled in the lap of his naked, six-months-pregnant wife. He breathed in deeply, separating different scents, as if each said something unique about Cassie’s personality. Cassie hummed some leftover sixties Joni Mitchell tune that seemed to come from a long- forgotten time. She slowly stroked his tangled gray hair in time to the music, pushing it back from his forehead, and then ran her fingers around his ears, gently massaging them. The sensation went way beyond seductive.

  He remained motionless and thought that it reminded him of the long-ago moments after lovemaking. Exhaustion that soared.

  Adrian wanted to close his eyes, tumble endlessly into the depths within him, and die, right at that moment. If there were a way to will one’s heart to stop beating, he would have done it without hesitation.

  Cassie bent her head toward his, whispering, “Do you remember how many hours you would spend lying like this, Audie, waiting to feel Tommy kick?”

  He did. Not one wasted second. It was the happiest time of his life. Everything seemed filled with possibility. He had obtained his doctorate and his appointment to the university. Cassie had already had her first show, at a prestigious New York gallery, just off Fifth Avenue, and the reviews—Art World and the New York Times—had been respectful and almost glowing. His poetry habit—he had often thought of it in the terms one usually confined to an addict—was just taking root. Discovering Yeats and Longfellow, Martin Espada and Mary Jo Salter. Their son was about to be born. He had been filled with excitement every day, greeting the first shafts of morning sunshine with unbounded energy. He had taken up running just after the sun rose, pounding out six miles at a fast pace, just to keep all of his enthusiasm in check by expending effort. Even the college’s cross-country team, which viewed running as the most positive obsession on earth, had thought the newly appointed psych prof who beat them out every morning was more than a little nuts.

  “There was so much to love, then,” Cassie said. Her voice had a lyrical tone.

  “But it’s all gone now.”

  He opened his eyes and realized that he was alone and that his head was scrunched up against a pillow and not his wife. He reached out, as if he could catch her and hold her the way she was in his memory.

  He could feel her hand in his but he could not see her.

  “You have work to do,” she said briskly. Her voice seemed to come from behind him, above him, beneath him, inside him all at once.

  Cassie was there. Cassie wasn’t there.

  Adrian sat up. “Jennifer,” he said.

  “That’s right. Jennifer.”

  “I can hardly remember her name,” he replied.

  “No, Audie, you remember. You can see her in your mind. And you can see who she was. Remember her room? Her things? The pink hat? You remember all that. And I’m here to remind you. Find her.”

  This echoed, as if it were spoken at the edge of an immense canyon.

  He looked outside and saw that night still gripped the world. It will be cold, he thought. But not as relentless as the winter. If I walked outside, I could feel the spring. It would be hidden in the darkness, but it would still be there.

  He rose, intending to head out the front door, but he did not. He looked over at a mirror on Cassie’s old bedroom bureau and thought that he looked thin, pounds melted away by disease. He tried to remind himself to eat properly. He wondered whether he’d been asleep for hours or only minutes. Take some of the medication, he told himself. You’ve got to stop falling in and out of hallucination. He understood that there was little chance of this happening, no matter how many pills he took. And he liked the visitations. They were a part of his life that he enjoyed a whole lot more than the dying part. He felt like a stubborn old man, which, he imagined, wasn’t such a goddamn bad thing. But, even so, he went to his bureau, found some of the pills that were supposed to be helping him fight his dementia, ignored the notion that he couldn’t remember when he last took any, and slugged a handful down. Then he marched out of the bedroom and over to his office and pushed
aside papers and books and settled in front of his computer. The only thing he arranged beside him was a map of a six-state area. Massachusetts. Connecticut. Vermont. Rhode Island. New Hampshire. Maine. Then he turned to the computer and stared in on statewide Sex Offender Registry entries for each.

  Adrian had little idea that Detective Collins had been busy doing more or less the same thing.

  He punched a few computer keys and then clicked on a name.

  A police mug shot came up on the screen in front of him. A man with beady eyes, thinning hair, and a sallow, furtive appearance. Exactly as Adrian would have expected. There was a listing of arrests, convictions, and court appearances. There was also an address and a simple narrative describing the man’s predilections. There was a “dangerousness” scale and descriptions of his modus operandi. It was all clipped and clear, written in police style, without flourishes and with little acknowledgment regarding the realities of what the man did. He exposed himself outside a mall—that was one arrest Adrian noted. Nothing that indicated what impact this had either on the offender or the people who’d been victimized.

  Adrian sat back in his chair, sighing deeply. Perhaps the entries on the screen would mean something to a professional. But he had spent his life interpreting behavior. When he saw something—whether it was in a laboratory rat or a person—his job had been to extrapolate meaning from the actions. Anyone could identify an action; there was no art or understanding in recognition. His job had always been to find out what it meant, and what it said about others, and what it suggested for the future.

  He clicked on another picture. Another man, this time thickset, bearded, with great sheets of curly hair and a body covered with tattoos. The entry had close-ups of many of these—fire-breathing dragons, sword-wielding Valkyrie maidens, and motorcycle insignia—before filling in the same crime information.

  As he had the sallow-faced man before, Adrian stared at the picture and thought he could tell nothing from the flat vision of the criminal.

  He thought there was no way that anything that popped up on a computer screen was going to tell him anything about the sort of people who had taken Jennifer.

  “So if that’s the case,” Cassie said, as she leaned over his shoulder reading the information on the screen with him, “it seems there’s only one thing to do.” He could feel her hot breath against his cheek.

  He nodded. “But . . .”

  “Didn’t you always say you had mixed feelings about reading the results of other people’s experiments? You only really trusted the experiments that you ran yourself. When you were studying fear and its emotional impacts, didn’t you always say you had to see it for yourself?”

  Cassie was asking questions that she knew the answers to. Adrian was familiar with this approach. She’d used it successfully for years.

  He hesitated. Gnawing questions seemed to chew at his imagination. Before he could stop himself, he asked something that had been reverberating inside him for years.

  “It wasn’t an accident, was it?” he asked back. “With the car, the month after Tommy died. It wasn’t an accident at all, was it? You just wanted it to seem like it was. You lost control and hit that tree on a rainy night. Except you didn’t really lose control, did you? It was supposed to be a suicide that no cop and no insurance agent could call a suicide. Except it didn’t work, did it? You didn’t expect to wake up crippled in the hospital, did you?”

  Adrian held his breath. He had blurted out his questions like an overly enthused schoolboy, and now he was embarrassed, but he also wanted to hear Cassie’s replies.

  “Of course not,” Cassie snorted her reply. “And when you have always known the truth, why is it so important to state it out loud?”

  He didn’t know what to say to this.

  “We never talked about it,” Adrian said. “I always wanted to, but I didn’t know how to ask you when you were alive.”

  “Just barely alive.”

  “Yes. Crippled.”

  “Crippled more by Tommy’s death than by any damn oak tree at sixty miles an hour. That’s the way things shake out, Audie. You know that.”

  “You left me all alone.”

  “No. Never. I just died, that’s all, because I had to. It was my time. I couldn’t really handle Tommy’s death. And you never expected me to be able to. But you’re wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “You’ve never been alone.”

  “I feel that way now that I’m dying too.”

  “Really?”

  Cassie’s hands rubbed his shoulders, kneading the flesh and muscles. She seemed older, frayed in the same way she was after they got the news about their only child. She had spent days staring at his picture, then other days obsessively searching the computer for news about other reporters, cameramen, and news people in Iraq. He thought then that she had wanted them all to die, so it would seem to her that her own child’s death wasn’t so unique and this would somehow make it less terrible. He thought he was acting the same way now, only he was trying to find something that would tell him where to look for Jennifer. He bent toward the computer and punched in a new entry.

  “Well, look at that,” he said softly, his voice filled with surprise. He had entered his own college town into the registry database and it had returned a list of seventeen convicted sex offenders living within a few miles of the college and all the elementary schools.

  “When I put a rat in a maze, injected it . . .” he started. Cassie was close by, he could feel her and see her reflection in the computer screen, but he was scared to turn around, because he thought that would chase her ghost away and he liked having her close by. He paused, then laughed a little. A familiar statement: “I always wanted to ask the rat . . .”

  “What did you feel? What did you think? Why did you do what you did?” Cassie finished his words for him with a slight lilting laugh that he recognized from better days.

  She slapped his back resoundingly, as if signaling the end of the back rub. “So,” he heard her say briskly, “go ask a rat.”

  22

  Adrian had to wait only a half hour before the man he’d selected from the list of seventeen registered sex offenders appeared in his doorway and made his way quickly to his car. It was early in the day, and the man sported a cheap red tie and a blue cardigan sweater. He carried a worn black leather briefcase and didn’t seem to Adrian much different from any other person heading off in the morning to a boring but regular job with a small but necessary paycheck attached to it.

  There was nothing particularly unusual about the way the man looked, nor the street he lived on. He was a little shy of middle age, not very tall, slightly built, with sandy hair, and he wore black-rimmed glasses. He carried a simple gray jacket over one arm as if he didn’t trust the day would ever truly warm up. He had a clerk’s dowdy appearance.

  Adrian watched from where he’d parked across the street as the man got into a small beige-colored Japanese car. The single-story ranch-style house where the man lived with his mother—according to the printout Adrian had with him—was kept meticulously trim, set back from the street and freshly painted. There were early season blue and yellow flowers in redbrick flowerpots placed in rows by the front door.

  All in all, it gave the appearance of an undistinguished man living in a typical house in an unremarkable neighborhood. The surrounding area was closer to the rural world of farms and plowed fields being readied for corn planting than the more closely packed energy of the college town. This man lived just slightly removed from the mainstream, even if the mainstream that Adrian was familiar with—crowded coffee shops, ­standing-room-only pizza parlors, paperback bookstores, and handmade crafts outlets—was pretty tame. Not like New York or Boston or even Hartford. No daily rush hour, no frantic get-ahead dedication to jobs. The academic world that dominated Adrian’s town was ambitious but d
efined ambition in a tenured professorship way.

  The man Adrian watched did not seem to belong to any world Adrian knew. He seemed separate.

  Adrian reminded himself: Just because he seems humdrum and ordinary, that doesn’t mean he is. He hesitated, uncertain about what he was supposed to do next.

  “No, go ahead, quick! Follow the son of a bitch,” Brian urged. “You need to see where he goes to work. You need to get a handle on who he is!”

  Adrian glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the reflection of his dead brother. It was the middle-aged-lawyer Brian, leaning forward, waving his hands as if to push Adrian into action, urging him to get moving. Brian’s long hair seemed tousled, unkempt, as if he’d spent the night awake at his desk. His silk Brooks Brothers rep tie was loose around his neck, and his brother’s voice was urgent and decidedly impatient.

  Adrian immediately put the car in gear and pulled out behind the sex offender. He saw his brother slump back in the seat, exhausted and relieved.

  “Good. Goddammit, Audie, you’ve got to stop being so . . . hesitant. Every time, from now on, when you want to look at someone or something or some bit of evidence or information with all the slow, steady, cautious style of a professor and an academic, well, tell yourself to get a damn move on.”

  Brian’s voice seemed almost reedy, weakened, as if he was summoning up the strength to speak from deep within. At first Adrian wondered if his brother was sick and then he remembered that his brother was dead.

  He steered the old Volvo out onto the roadway.

  “I’ve never tailed someone before,” Adrian said. The Volvo engine made a whining, reluctant sound as he punched the gas.

  “Nothing to it,” Brian replied with a sigh, relaxing, the mere act of moving forward lessening some tension within. “If we were really expecting to stay hidden—you know, do this like professionals—then we’d have three cars and we’d do an overlapping style . . . you know, trade him off, one car to the next. Same thing works when you’re on foot on the street. But we’re not going to be that fancy. Just follow him to wherever he’s heading.”