What Comes Next Read online

  She also seemed to like doggerel. She had downloaded samples from Shel Silverstein and Ogden Nash, which were odd choices for a teenage girl in this day and age. She found a file called 6 Poems for Mister Brown Fur, which were rhymed couplets and haiku written for her teddy bear. Some—there were many more than six—were quite funny, which made Terri smile. Smart girl, she thought again.

  She continued searching. There were frequent visits to vegan websites and new age entries, which, Terri guessed, were efforts to understand her mother and quasi-stepfather-slash-boyfriend.

  Terri kept clicking through the computer’s history. She hoped to find some heartfelt misguided teenage longings diary but could not. She wanted some document that outlined Jennifer’s plan, such as it was. But this eluded her. She found stored pictures, but most were of Jennifer and a few friends laughing, hugging, cutting up at sleepovers or parties—although it always seemed as if Jennifer stood just at the perimeter. She kept searching the picture files and finally came across half a dozen nude shots that Jennifer had taken of herself. They couldn’t have been more than a year old. Terri figured she had set up her point-and-shoot digital camera on a stack of books and then posed in front of it. They weren’t particularly sexy, more like Jennifer had wanted to document the changes taking place in her body. She was slender, with breasts that barely curved away from her chest. Her legs were long, and she coyly crossed them, so that only the slightest shades of her pubic hair were visible—as if she had been embarrassed by what she was doing even though she was doing it alone in her room. Two of the shots seemed to have the teenage version of sexy come hither looks on her face, which only made her seem younger and more childlike.

  Terri examined each one carefully. She kept opening them up on the screen in front of her, expecting to suddenly see a naked boy pop into the pictures. She wanted to believe that kids that age weren’t sexually active. That was the mother part of her. The hard-edged detective part of her knew that they all had far more experience than any parent imagined. Oral sex. Anal sex. Group sex. Old-fashioned sex. The kids knew it all, and had experienced much of it. Terri was secretly happy that the only provocative photographs on Jennifer’s computer were of herself alone.

  She stopped and thought there was something sad about the pictures. Jennifer was fascinated by who she was becoming but, as naked as she was, she was still more naked in her solitude.

  She had almost finished her search when a pair of Google requests caught her eye. One was for Nabokov’s Lolita, which Terri knew wasn’t on any high school reading list. The other was for men who expose themselves.

  This inquiry had produced a wide range of responses. More than eight million entries. But Jennifer had opened only two: Yahoo Answers and a psychological forum website that was a link to an Emory University Medical School Psychiatry Department series of papers on the psychological ramifications of Peeping Toms and flashers. This second result contained medical jargon that was far too sophisticated for a sixteen-year-old, although that apparently hadn’t stopped Jennifer.

  Terri leaned back in her seat. She didn’t need to know anything else, she thought. Right in front of her was a crime that couldn’t be proved—it would be Jennifer’s word against Scott’s and even her mother was likely to err by believing him—but which made all the necessary pack your bag and run away sense.

  Terri went back to the poems for Mister Brown Fur. There was one that began with the line: You see what I see.

  Maybe he did, Terri thought, but a teddy bear sure as hell can’t testify about it in court.

  The phone on her desk rang. It was the chief demanding his update. She knew she had to be very careful with what she said. Scott was well known and had many powerful friends in the local community. He’d probably treated half the city council at some point or another, although treat was a word that Terri used cautiously. She said, “I’ll be right up.”

  Terri gathered some notes and was halfway across the room when her phone rang again. With a muffled obscenity she hurried back and stabbed the receiver on the fifth ring, just before it went to voice mail.

  “Detective Collins,” she said.

  “It’s Mary Riggins,” she heard. Sobs. Gasps. Barest controls over a voice that seemed wildly turbulent.

  “Yes, Mrs. Riggins. I was just on my way to see the chief—”

  “She’s not a runaway. Jennifer’s been kidnapped, detective,” the mother on the other end half sobbed and half screamed.

  Terri did not immediately ask for details on how or why Mary knew this. She listened to the sounds of maternal anguish leak over the phone line. She had a sensation that something akin to a nightmare was happening. She just didn’t know precisely what.

  11

  Jennifer awakened to the sensation that something was different, but it took her a few moments to comprehend that her hands were free and her feet were no longer pinned to the bed. Coming out of the drug-induced fog, she felt like someone climbing a steep hill, scrambling to reach the top, clawing at loose dirt and stone, while gravity threatened to pull her down.

  She lifted her hands to her face. The hood was still in place and she touched its silken exterior. She wanted to grab at it, rip it away, see where she was, but she had the sense to control her desire. She took a deep breath and felt something choking her. She slowly lowered her hands and touched a collar. It was cheap leather and studded with sharp points and was fastened tightly around her neck. She could feel the end of a stainless steel chain that leashed her to something but gave her a little leeway to move about. She reached down to her ankles and realized that those restraints had been removed.

  She touched her skin, searching for injuries, but could find none, although this didn’t reassure her that there weren’t any. Her only clothing was her flimsy underwear. She leaned slowly back on the bed, staring inside the hood up to where she supposed there was a ceiling, then a roof, and beyond that, the sky.

  She assessed her state. It was better than before—she was no longer spread eagled and her hands were free. But she was still restrained. She realized suddenly that she desperately had to go to the toilet, and that she was still parched with thirst. She knew she should be hungry, but fear filled her stomach. Where she had been hit felt bruised and ached. But she was alive. Sort of. She still did not know what was happening to her; she had only a vague memory of the brief conversation with the woman who had come into the room, but she knew it meant something. Rules. The woman had talked about rules. It seemed to Jennifer that the conversation had happened on some other day, some other year, maybe even in a dream. All sorts of possibilities flooded her imagination, but each was more frightening than the last, so she worked hard to blank her mind. She told herself that inside the hood everything would seem empty and impossible, but she was still breathing and that meant something. She cautiously ran her fingers down the length of the chain attached to the collar around her neck. Jennifer realized that she could move, but only the distance that the chain would allow. She did not yet try to take advantage of this new freedom.

  She had an immense urge to tug on the chain, see if she could break it free from wherever it was fastened. But she fought this off. That, she knew, would be against the rules.

  “She’s awake!”

  The man bending over his computer screen in London stiffened. He was alone in the small office near the back of his apartment, seated at a desk cluttered with proposals, figures, and schematic drawings. He was a draftsman, and nearby there was a tall table where he occasionally made illustrations in pen and ink, although most of his work was now done electronically with sophisticated computer imagery. He was a loner, a freelancer working out of his flat, in considerable demand, so there could have been a Jaguar in his car park, had he actually wanted one. He wished there were someone he could share his astonishment with, but that would defeat the purpose, he thought. Series #4 was to be enjoyed, considered, an
d digested in solitude and utter privacy.

  He looked closely at the figure on the screen in front of him. Number 4 seemed to him to be deliciously young, barely more than a child. He had children from a failed marriage, but he rarely saw them, and at this moment they remained very far from his thoughts. He admired Number 4’s slender figure, felt a rush of excitement pass through him. He imagined there was a pearly smoothness to her skin and his left hand twitched, trying to caress Number 4 right through the computer screen. As if someone were reading his mind, the camera switched to a closer view. Number 4 was reaching out, like a blind person seeking something tactile that she could read with her fingertips. Each touch of nothing—the air in front of her—or of something, such as the wall where she had been chained, sent a pleasurable shiver through the draftsman. “She’s learning where she is,” he said, again out loud to no one. “But she won’t be able to tell.”

  Number 4 remained near the bed, playing a game of blind man’s bluff. Each time she moved, even slightly, the man in London bent closer to the computer screen. In a way, he thought, he was as alone as she was, except he knew that many other people around the world were watching Number 4 with the same intensity.

  She was a prisoner of all of their fantasies.

  Jennifer instinctively understood that panic would serve her little, but it took a huge force of will to fight the waves threatening her. She was breathing hard and her pulse rate was climbing. She felt sweat and tears and everything associated with fear. She had to fight to keep her hands from shaking and her body was wracked with involuntary movements—spasms, twitches, shudders—all of which she could do little to control. She thought it was as if there were two Jennifers at that moment, the one who was fighting to make some sense out of what was happening and the other, who wanted to give in to black agony.

  To stay alive, she knew the first had to prevail.

  Context, she told herself. Fit yourself into something you can understand.

  She had never seen Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner on television. She had never gone into a library to read John Fowles’s The Collector. She knew nothing of Barbara Jane Mackle and the news stories written about her, or the book or the subsequent television drama. She had not even seen the Saw movies that were popular with teenage boys who favored the combination of gore, torture, and naked breasts for entertainment, nor had she seen the more benign vision embodied in the film The Truman Show. Sir Alec Guinness sweltering in his corrugated steel box for refusing to order his officers to work beside enlisted men while building the bridge over the river Kwai didn’t exist for her. She knew nothing of the art, literature, or criminality of confinement. She had not owned a pet growing up, not even a goldfish swimming in a bowl, constantly pressing up against the glass measuring the limits of its world.

  That she was a little like all of these was beyond her.

  Even so, Jennifer had some instincts that she was not able to articulate but which gave her some strengths. She told herself that three times she had the guts to run away. This would be another chance as long as she fought off the urge to descend into terror. She breathed in and out slowly, calming herself.

  She lowered her hands and touched the sides of the bed: a metal frame and a mattress. There was a rough cotton sheet—she pictured a stark white—on the bed beneath her.

  All right, she told herself. Let’s see what we can touch.

  Carefully, she slipped her feet over the edge of the bed and rubbed the floor with her toes. It was cement, cold to the soles.

  That’s what a basement floor feels like, she imagined. She half thought she was speaking out loud and wondered if her words tumbled through the small hole in the hood that had been cut for the drugged water. The lack of orientation made it hard for her to tell whether the thoughts that filled her head emerged through her lips. She might be talking out loud. She might not.

  She moved her feet around to see if there were any obstacles. None.

  Jennifer told herself to try to stand, and then repeated the command. She wanted to hear her own voice work. So she said softly: “Stand up, girl. You can do it.”

  Hearing the difference between words spoken and words thought gave her a little confidence. She pushed herself up to her feet.

  Dizziness almost instantly overcame her.

  Her head spun inside the hood, as if the blackness in front of her eyes were abruptly liquid. She staggered slightly, almost tumbling back onto the bed or collapsing onto the cement floor. But she was able to steady herself, and slowly her head stopped spinning and she could feel some control in her weak muscles. She wished she were stronger, like some of the weight lifting–obsessed athletes at her school.

  Still breathing hard, she took a tentative step forward. She was holding her hands out in front of her. She could feel nothing.

  She swept them right and left and her hand bumped up against the wall. She half turned and, using the wall to guide her, began to move crab-like, feeling the flat plasterboard beneath her fingers. She could hear a rattling sound, which she understood was the chain around her neck playing out. She guessed it was striking against the bed stand.

  Her knee bumped up against something and she stopped. Some of the thick smell of disinfectant penetrated the silken hood. Very carefully, she reached down and, like a blind person, ran her hands over the obstacle.

  It was a camp toilet. It took her a few seconds to form a picture of what it was in her mind, but she could feel the seat and the supporting tripod. That she recognized it was only luck—her father had taken her camping when she was little, and she had made a particular whiny series of complaints about having to use something so primitive in the outdoors.

  Now she was nearly overjoyed. Her bladder hurt and, with the recognition of what it was at her feet, it began to send sharp demanding pains through her stomach.

  She stopped. She had no idea who was watching her. She could only guess that the rules allowed her to use the toilet. She did not know whether she had any privacy. She was almost overcome with a teenager’s sense of violation. Propriety fought against embarrassment. She hated the idea that someone might see her.

  Her groin screamed. She understood she had no choice.

  She positioned herself above the seat and, with a single abrupt motion, pulled down her panties and sat down.

  She hated every second of relief.

  At the monitors in the room directly above where Jennifer was confined Michael and Linda watched every motion she made. The awkward, blindfolded, tentative actions were delicious in their pace. They could sense ripples of intrigue and waves of fascination out in the netherworld of their broadcast. Without sharing a word, both knew that, for hundreds of people, watching Jennifer was going to become a drug.

  And, like any good pusher, they knew how to maintain just the right balance of supply to meet the demand.

  12

  Terri Collins looked over at the old man seated in the corner of the living room and thought, He can’t be the reason why I’m here.

  Adrian Thomas shifted uncomfortably under her gaze. The detective had an unrelenting stare, one that implied something beyond skepticism. He could feel thoughts tugging him in different directions and he hoped that he wouldn’t get flustered, as he had when he’d called the police dispatcher. He replayed the few observations and modest details that he had in his head, like an actor preparing his lines. He tried to organize all these impressions into a coherent assessment of what he’d seen so that the detective wouldn’t simply think he was a confused old man, even if that was precisely what he was. When she turned away to face Mary Riggins and Scott West, Adrian stole a quick glance around, hoping that Brian was concealed in a corner and might give him some advice about how to deal with the policewoman. He would know what to say, Adrian was sure. But at that moment Adrian was alone—or, at least, he was unaccompanied.

  “Mr
s. Riggins,” Terri said slowly, “kidnappings are complicated crimes. Generally, they are either about ransom or else one estranged family member stealing a child from another.”

  Mary shook her head, although she hadn’t been asked a question.

  “Then there’s the third type,” Scott interjected with a nasty glare in her direction. “Sexual predation.”

  Terri nodded. “Yes. Rare. Not unlike being hit by lightning.”

  “I think that’s what you should be focusing on,” Scott said.

  “Yes, but I’d like to rule out these others—”

  “And waste time?” Scott interrupted.

  She could tell that was the direction he wanted her to investigate. She just resented being forced into the position by someone she thought had been on the verge of sexual predation himself. She decided to turn the tables on him.

  “Or maybe there’s some element of this that you haven’t been forthcoming about . . .”

  Terri stopped, turning her stare over at Scott.

  “Perhaps in your practice . . .” She started slowly but picked up a little momentum in her voice as the words tumbled out. “A patient maybe. Someone angry or disgruntled, maybe psychotic even . . . seeking to harm you and chose Jennifer as the means . . .”

  Scott instantly held up his hand. “That is highly unlikely, detective. I am very much aware of all the issues my patients face and none of them are capable of that sort of thing.”

  “Well,” Terri continued, “surely you have some . . . cases that have less than satisfactory outcomes?”

  “Of course,” Scott snorted. “Every therapist who has any self-­knowledge understands that they cannot be ideal for every patient. There are inevitably failures.”