What Comes Next Read online

  Terri thought it was clever the way Jennifer had bought a block of time, sent her mother in directions other than the right one, and hidden the real purpose of her plan. She looked up at Mary Riggins.

  “You telephoned her friends?” she asked.

  Scott answered. “Of course, detective. After the last showings at the theaters we called every Sarah and Katie we could think of. Neither of us could ever recall Jennifer talking about any friend with either of those names. Then we went through every other name we could remember ever hearing from her. None of them had been to the mall, and none had made plans to meet with Jennifer. Or had seen her since school ended in the afternoon.”

  Terri nodded. Smart girl.

  “Jennifer doesn’t seem to have that many friends,” Mary said wistfully. “She’s never been good at a lot of the social networking of junior high or high school.”

  This statement, Terri guessed, was a repetition of something Scott had said in many “family” discussions.

  “But she could be with someone you don’t know?”

  Both mother and boyfriend shook their heads.

  “You don’t think she has some secret boyfriend that she’s maybe hidden from you guys?”

  “No,” Scott said. “I would have picked up on those signs.”

  Sure, Terri thought. She didn’t say this out loud but made a notation on her pad of paper.

  Mary gathered herself together and tried to respond in some less tear-strewn manner. But her voice quavered, endowing each word with a shakiness that perfectly captured her fear. “When I finally thought to go to her room, you know, maybe there was some other note, or something, I saw that her bear was gone. A teddy bear she named Mister Brown Fur. She’s slept with it every night . . . it’s like a security blanket. Her father gave it to her not long before he died, and she would never ever go anywhere and leave it behind.”

  Too sentimental, Terri thought. Jennifer, taking that teddy bear along with you was a mistake. Maybe the only one, but a mistake nevertheless. Otherwise you would have had twenty-four hours instead of the six you’ve successfully stolen.

  “Was there anything specific that happened in the past few days that would prompt Jennifer to try to run now?” she asked. “A big fight . . . maybe some event at school . . .”

  Mary Riggins simply sobbed.

  Scott West replied quickly, “No, detective. If you’re looking for some outward, triggering action by Mary or me that might have prompted this behavior on Jennifer’s part, I can assure you it doesn’t exist. No fights. No demands. No teenage temper tantrums. She hasn’t been grounded. She hasn’t been punished. In fact, things have been blissfully quiet around here the last few weeks. I thought—as did her mother—that maybe we’d turned a corner and things were going to calm down.”

  That’s because she was planning, Terri thought.

  In the cascade of Scott’s pretentious, self-justifying words, Terri believed there was at least one lie and maybe more. She would find it out, she knew, sooner or later. Whether learning the truth would help her find Jennifer was an entirely different matter.

  “She’s a very troubled teenager, detective. She’s very sensitive and bright, but deeply disturbed and confused. I’ve urged her to get treatment, but so far . . . well, you know how stubborn teens can be.”

  Terri did. She just wasn’t sure whether stubbornness was the issue.

  “Do you think there is any specific place she might have gone? A relative? A friend who has moved to a different city? Did she ever talk about wanting to be a fashion model in Miami or becoming an actress in LA or working on a fishing boat in Louisiana? Anything, no matter how offhand or small, might provide a lead we can follow up on.”

  Terri knew the answer that would come. She had asked these questions the two prior times Jennifer had escaped. But neither of these two other times had Jennifer managed to create the lead time she had this night. She hadn’t gotten far either of the other times: a couple of miles the first time; the next town over, the second. This occasion was different.

  “No, no . . .” Mary Riggins said, wringing her hands and reaching for another cigarette. Terri saw Scott try to stop her by placing his hand on her forearm, but she shook him off and seized the package of Marlboros and defiantly lit up a new cigarette, even though a half-smoked one was smoldering in the ashtray.

  “No, detective. Mary and I have tried to think of someone, or somewhere, but haven’t come up with anything we think might help.”

  Terri nodded, thinking.

  “I’m going to need the most recent photo you’ve got,” she said.

  “It’s right here,” Scott replied, handing over something he’d obviously already prepared. Terri took the picture and glanced at it. A smiling teenager. What a lie, she thought.

  “I’m also going to want her computer,” Terri said.

  “Why would you want—?” Scott started but Mary Riggins interrupted him.

  “It’s on her desk. It’s a laptop.”

  “There might be some privacy issues here,” Scott said. “I mean, Mary, how will we explain to Jennifer that we just let the police take her private . . .”

  He stopped. Terri thought, At least he knows how dumb he sounds. Maybe, though, he’s worried about something other than dumb.

  Then, abruptly, she asked a question she probably shouldn’t have asked.

  “Where is her father buried?”

  There was a small silence. Even the near-constant sobbing coming from Mary ceased in that moment.

  Terri saw Mary Riggins gather herself, lifting up as if what she wanted to say needed an injection of strength or pride between her shoulder blades, running down into her spine.

  “Up on the North Shore, near Gloucester. But what relevance does that have?”

  “None, probably,” Terri said. But inwardly, she told herself, That’s where I would go if I was an angry, depressed teenager filled with an overwhelming need to get away from home. Wouldn’t she want to make a last visit to say goodbye to the only person she believed had ever truly loved her before starting to run?

  She shook her head a little, a motion small enough that no one in the room would notice.

  A graveyard, she thought, or else New York City because that’s a good place to start the process of getting lost.

  Actually, she wondered whether the two places were equally appropriate for a disappearing act.

  5

  In an office in Amsterdam . . .

  In a bedroom in Bangkok . . .

  In a study in Tokyo . . .

  At an Internet bar in Santiago . . .

  On a laptop in a library at a university in Nairobi . . .

  . . . And fed into a flat-screen television mounted on a penthouse apartment wall in Moscow. The room where the television was located was filled with partiers drinking iced vodka from crystal glasses and eating fine caviar, as one might expect. They turned down the blasting techno music and instead focused their attention on the screen, which had been silently showing a replay of a soccer match between Dynamo Kiev and Lokomotiv Moscow. A man sporting a large Fu Manchu mustache held up his hand, signaling for the room to grow quiet. It was his party and his apartment overlooking Gorky Park. He wore an expensive black suit with a purple silk shirt left unbuttoned and gold jewelry with the requisite Rolex on his wrist. In the modern world where gangsters and businessmen often look fundamentally alike, he could have been either or maybe both. Beside him, a slender woman easily twenty years his junior, with a fashion model’s hair and legs, wearing a loose-fitting sequined evening dress that did little to conceal her boyish figure, said first in Russian and then in French and subsequently in German: “We have learned that there is to be an entirely new series on our favorite Web broadcast beginning this evening. It should be of considerable interest to many of you here
.” She stopped there, not offering any further explanation to any of the guests as to what they were going to see. The way the group crowded around the television, slipped into comfortable couches or perched on chairs, indicated that many were already familiar with the offering that came blinking to life in front of them. Indeed, the eagerness in their eyes perhaps suggested that the party was being thrown specifically in celebration of the images that were coming through the computer system into the penthouse.

  A large play arrow prompt appeared on the screen and the party host moved a cursor over the signature and clicked a mouse. Immediately, there was some music: Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” It was played on a synthesizer, followed by a large picture of the very young actor Malcolm McDowell, holding a knife as Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. The picture dominated the screen. He wore the white jumpsuit, eye makeup, hobnobbed boots, and black bowler hat that the collaboration between performer and director had made famous in the early 1970s.

  This image prompted a smattering of applause from the older people at the party, who remembered the book, remembered the film, and remembered the performance.

  The picture of young Alex disappeared, replaced by a black screen that seemed to pulsate with anticipation. Within seconds, vibrant red italicized writing appeared, slicing across the frame like a knife, carving the words: What Comes Next?

  This faded into a second credit sequence: Series #4.

  The image then shifted into an anonymous basement room. It had an oddly grainy, almost single-dimensional quality, despite a broadcast originating with a modern, expensive high-definition camera. The basement seemed a gray, destitute place. No windows. No indication where this scene was taking place. A place of total anonymity. Initially, all the viewers gathered in front of the television at the party could see was an old, metal frame bed. On the bed was a young woman, stripped to her underwear, a black hood pulled over her face. Her hands and legs were cuffed and attached to rings fixed dungeon-like to the walls. The young woman didn’t move, other than to breathe in and out heavily, so the viewers at least at that moment could tell she was still alive. She might have been unconscious, drugged, or even asleep, but after perhaps thirty seconds she twitched, and one of the chains restraining her rattled.

  One of the partygoers gasped. Someone said in French, “Est-ce-que c’est vrai?” But no one answered the question, except perhaps with silence and by the way they craned forward, trying to see more closely.

  In English, another partier said, “It’s a performance. She must be an actress hired specifically for the webcast.”

  The sequined woman looked over at the man and shook her head. Her reply was tinged with her Slavic accent, but delivered impeccably: “Many people thought that, at the start of the prior series. But eventually, as the days pass, one realizes that there are no actors willing to play these roles.”

  She looked back at the screen. The hooded figure seemed to shiver and then turned her head sharply, as if someone just out of camera sight had entered the room. The viewers could see her strain against the chains gripping her.

  Then, almost as swiftly as it had arrived, this image froze on the screen, as if it had suddenly been caught like a picture of a bird in flight. It dissolved into black and once again there was a question in bloodred writing: Want to See More?

  This inquiry was followed on the screen by a demand for credit card information and a subscription fee structure. One could purchase some minutes, up to an hour, or a multihour block. One could also buy a day, or more. There was a large fee cited for SERIES #4 FULL ACCESS WITH INTERACTIVE BOARD. At the bottom of the entries was a large electronic stopwatch, also in bright red. It was set to 00:00. This was followed by the words: Day One. All the party attendees saw as the clock suddenly clicked forward 1 second, then 2 . . . as it began to keep time. It was a little like the digital clock that marks the elapsed length of a tennis match at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open.

  Just beyond that was a statement: Series #4 potential duration 1 week to 1 month.

  At the party, someone shouted in Russian, “Come on, Dimitri! Buy the whole package . . . start to finish! You’ve got the money!” This was accompanied by nervous laughter and bursts of acclamation and agreement as the man with the mustache first turned to the gathering, arms spread wide, as if asking what he should do, before he grinned, made a small, theatrical bow, and punched in some credit card numbers. As soon as he did this the screen filled with a prompt for a password. The man nodded to the sequined lady and gestured toward his computer keyboard. She smiled and typed in some letters. One might have imagined that she wrote out her lover’s in-the-bedroom nickname. The party host smiled and signaled a white-jacketed waiter at the rear of the penthouse to refill glasses as his well-heeled guests settled into a fascinated quiet waiting for a final electronic confirmation of the sale.

  Others, around the world, were awaiting the same thing.

  There was no typical user at Whatcomesnext.com although there were probably a much lower percentage of women than men and the public nature of the party in Moscow was an exception; most of the clients signed on to Whatcomesnext.com in private locations, where they could watch the drama unfold on Series #4 in quiet solitude. The website had created a sign-on system filled with access identification through blind passwords, double- and triple-secured, followed by a dizzying sequence of high-speed transfers to various Web engines in eastern Europe and India. It was a system that had been set up by sophisticated electronic thinking and had survived more than one effort by police to penetrate it. But because it didn’t seem to have a political view—that is, the site wasn’t favored by terrorist organizations—and it didn’t deal overtly in child pornography, it had survived these modest and only occasional intrusions. In truth, the infrequent efforts made by police gave the site a certain cachet, or what might have been considered an Internet street cred.

  Whatcomesnext.com sought out a different sort of client. The client list was made up of people who would pay handsomely for a mixture of sexual suggestion and drama that was on an edge of criminality. It used electronic chat and Internet word of high-speed mouth to pass on invitations to subscribe to its service.

  The designers of the site did not think of themselves as criminals, although they had committed many crimes. Nor did they identify themselves as killers, though they had murdered. They never would have considered what they did as perversion although many would argue that it was precisely that. They saw themselves as modern-day entrepreneurs, who provided a specialty service, very rare, very much in demand, and greatly of interest in darker places around the world and hidden inside men.

  Michael and Linda had met five years earlier at an underground sex party in a suburban Chicago house. He was a slightly shy, soft-spoken graduate doctoral student in computer sciences; she was a junior executive at a high-powered advertising agency who occasionally moonlighted for an escort service to make ends meet. She had tastes that pushed boundaries; he had fascinations that he’d never allowed himself to pursue. She had an affinity for BMWs and stimulants such as Dexedrine and flirted with dependency; as a teenager, he was arrested for stealing a neighbor’s small yapping dog. The animal had bit him on the ankle one morning as he passed by on the way to school. Police believed Michael sold the dog—a bichon frise—to a man in rural Illinois who provided bait to people who fought pit bulls. Twenty-five dollars in cash. The charges against Michael had been dropped when a confidential informant that had provided authorities with his name turned out to be involved in worse crimes than dognapping. More than one policeman had seen the teenage Michael exit the courthouse a free man, his juvenile record expunged, and thought it would not be his last time there. So far these policemen had been wrong.

  They had each come from questionable backgrounds and troubled, violent pasts that the veneer of their achievements managed to hide. Straight-A student and class leader and up-and-comin
g businesswoman. Both were intellectually sophisticated and accomplished. Outwardly, they appeared to be the type of young people who had managed to rise above humble origins. But those were external perceptions, and each, independently, thought they were lies, because their true selves were concealed in places only they could access. But they discovered these things about themselves and each other much later. The night they met had been one devoted to a different sort of education.

  The rules at the gathering were simple. You had to bring a partner of the opposite sex; you could use only first names; there was to be no exchange of phone numbers or e-mail addresses after the party; were you to accidentally encounter someone at a later point in a different context you had to promise to behave as if this person was not someone you’d engaged in rough, pornographic, and public sex with but was a total stranger.

  Everyone agreed to the rules. Except for the first, no one truly paid them any attention. The first had to be honored, because otherwise you would be turned away at the door. It was a place for assignations, and an event that spoke of disloyalty and excess. No one walking into the trim, suburban split-level home was particularly interested in rules.

  Contradictions abounded. Two children’s bicycles were abandoned on the front lawn. A shelf was crammed with Dr. Seuss books. Boxes of Cheerios and Frosted Flakes were thrust into a corner of the kitchen—to make room for a mirror left flat on the counter with chopped-up lines of cocaine put out as party favors. A television set in the family room was playing triple-X-rated fare, although few of the thirty-odd guests were paying much attention to filmed versions of what they were actually doing. Clothing was shed rapidly. Liquor was abundant. Ecstasy tablets were offered like hors d’oevres. The oldest partiers were probably in their early fifties. Most were in their thirties or forties, and when Linda came through the door and began the process of dropping her clothing more than one man looked appreciatively in her direction and instantly made plans to approach her.