What Comes Next by John Katzenbach
Returning to normal disappointed her. Even if normal was going to be a fancy resort beach with a cold drink in hand and money in the bank—it was still something she didn’t look forward to. In a way, she was already impatient and wanted to start planning Series #5.
She leaned back at the desk, eyes still traveling over the monitors, but in actuality she was thinking about who their next subject might be. Number 5 needed to be different. Number 4 had set the bar high, she thought, and their next show would need to surpass what they had done in the past weeks. She was extraordinarily proud of this. It had been her insistence that they move away from the prostitutes they had collected for the first three series and expand into someone totally innocent and significantly younger. Someone inexperienced, she had insisted. Someone fresh.
And random, she reminded herself. Utterly random. Hours spent cruising quiet suburban areas in a variety of stolen vehicles, slinking past schools and shopping malls, lurking around pizza joints, trying to spot the right person to snatch at the right time. It had been risky but she had known it would be rewarding.
Michael, in truth, had been the one who had said that Series #4 should be the worst of middle-class nightmares. He had believed that the very surprise of it all would fuel the drama.
He had been right. Her idea. His refinement of it.
They were the best of partners.
She felt desire swelling inside her chest and she raised a hand and caressed her breast slowly.
Behind her, she heard a familiar shuffling from the bathroom. She quickly turned away from the computers and unpinned her hair, shaking her head seductively. Rapidly she shed her few clothes and, as Michael entered the room, tossed herself, giggling, onto the bed. She turned to him and crooked her finger, gesturing for him to join her.
He smiled and eagerly stepped toward her.
Linda knew that what Michael had done with Number 4 was an integral part of the job. It was critical that she make certain he never thought of it as anything except a duty he did for her. No pleasure. No excitement. No passion. Those belonged to her. Even as she had handled the camera capturing the job with Number 4, she had felt detached, clinical. He should experience no joy.
This was important, she thought, as she reached out to embrace him. She wanted to wrap her arms and legs around him with every muscle she owned, possessing him as deeply as she could, covering him with herself like a huge and powerful wave at the beach. She needed to make certain that the only thing he could feel, the only thing he could smell, the only thing he could hear was her and her caresses and her heartbeat.
“Well,” Michael said, as he was dragged down onto her. He broke into a grin. “Well, well, well . . .”
She paused, stroking his cheek with her hand. She did not have to ask for love. She saw it.
What he had done earlier was just good business.
Linda lifted her lips to his. Only for a second did the next difficult job cross her mind. But she knew Michael would take care of that as well. She knew she would have to help. She always did. But she trusted him to do the hardest part.
Love and death, she thought. They are a little the same.
Then she gave in to all the explosive emotions reverberating within her, closing her eyes tight with girlish delight.
* * *
“Hey, Lin,” Michael said, clicking computer keys. “What do you think of playing this real loud?”
He had risen from their bed after they had completed their lovemaking, drawn magnetically to the computers and the camera monitors.
The speaker system filled the room with the sound of someone singing. It was very country, Loretta Lynn wrapped around “High on a Mountain Top,” which had an intoxicating, friendly aw-shucks beat and attitude, driving a listener with each note farther up into the Ozark or Blue Ridge mountains.
Linda shrugged. “You don’t want to play the babies or the school again?”
“No,” Michael said. “I thought something different. Something really unexpected and kind of crazy. I doubt Number Four has ever listened to old-time country music.”
He paused, clicked a few more keys. Suddenly Chris Isaak groaning “Baby did a bad bad thing” filled the room.
“Our man Kubrick,” Linda said. “That’s part of the soundtrack from his last movie.”
“Think it works?”
Linda made a small face. “I think she’s already totally disorientated and completely lost. I don’t think she has any idea where she is or even who she is anymore. Music, even if it just pounds her, I don’t know . . .”
“We don’t have many audible options left,” Michael said. “I’ve got a few we haven’t used but . . .”
Linda rose, naked, from the bed and went to his side. She rubbed his shoulders.
He looked up at her. “I’ve been reading through the chats,” he said.
“So have I.”
“Maybe we’re near the end,” he said.
He pulled up some of the comments on the monitor in front of them.
Don’t stop. Make her pay!
Do it again! And again. And again.
“A lot like those,” Michael said. “But these . . .”
The two of them bent forward reading words on the screen.
I thought she’d fight more.
Number 4 is broken now.
Number 4 is finished. Kaput. Finito. Toast.
Number 4 is over. She can’t go back. She can’t go forward. There’s only one way out for her now. That’s what I want to see.
The back and forth between clients seemed to reflect a sense of loss, as if for the first time they saw imperfections in Number 4’s ideal figure. At first, she had been exquisite fine china; now she was cracked and chipped. Her being chained in the room, knowing what might happen, anticipating it, had fueled their fantasies. Now that the inevitable had taken place, it was as if she had been soiled and they were ready to move on to what they had always known would come next.
Both Linda and Michael saw this.
They might not have been able to fully articulate it but they both understood. There was only one step left.
Linda stopped rubbing Michael’s shoulder and squeezed it as hard as she could.
He was nodding his head. He loved many things about Linda, but chief among them was her ability to say so much without words. On stage, he thought, she would have been special.
“I’ll start scripting the exit,” he said. “We need to be careful.”
Both of them knew that, even with all the planning they had put in, Number 4’s popularity had created a situation where the last act had to be special.
“What we need to be,” Linda said slowly, “is memorable. I mean, we can’t just Wham! Bam! End it. We have to do something no one will ever forget. That way, when we get series number five rolling . . .”
She didn’t need to finish her thought.
Michael laughed. Linda drove them creatively, which, he thought, was a kind of lovemaking all of their own. Once he had read a lengthy, appreciative article about the artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who partnered with him in inventing many of their huge projects—draping wide canyons with orange sheets of fabric or encapsulating bay islands with pink rings of plastic—and then, a few weeks later, removing everything so that whatever had once been art was restored to the way it had been. Jeanne-Claude got less credit in the art world, but more credit in the bedroom, he guessed. Regardless, Michael thought the two of them would understand what Linda and he had accomplished.
He cut off the music coming through the speakers.
“All right,” he said. He had a mocking tone in his voice, as if making a joke that would amuse only the two of them. “No Loretta Lynn for Number Four.”
Jennifer could no longer tell whether she was conscious or n
They had allowed her only once into his hospital room. She’d been young and frightened and he’d been trapped on his bed by late-afternoon shadows, surrounded by machines that made strange noises, tubes running from his thin, skeletal arms. The arms seemed like a stranger’s. She knew he was strong, able to lift her up and swing her around the room. But the arms she saw couldn’t have mustered the strength to stroke her hair. It was her father, but it wasn’t, and she’d been scared and confused. She had wanted to touch him but she was afraid she would break him into pieces even with the smallest caress. She had wanted him to smile, to reassure her and to tell her that everything would be all right. But he couldn’t do that. His eyes fluttered and he seemed to slide in and out of sleep. Her mother had said that was the drugs they were giving him for pain, but she thought then that it was death just trying him on, like a suit of clothes. They had hustled her out of the room before the machines announced the inevitable. She remembered thinking that the man on the bed wasn’t the man she knew as her father. He had to be an imposter.
But now, she thought, the same thing had happened to her: all the parts that made up Jennifer had been erased.
There was no escape. There was no world outside the cell and nothing past the hood over her head. There was no mother, no Scott, no school, no street in her neighborhood, no home, no room with her things. None of that had ever existed. There was only the man and the woman and the cameras. It had always been that way. She was born in the cell and she was going to die there.
She imagined she was becoming like him in the hospital. Sliced away slowly, inexorably.
Jennifer pictured the moment early on when her father had come to her and told her that he was very sick. “But don’t worry, beautiful. I’m a fighter. I’m going to fight like hell. And you can help me. I’m going to beat this with your help. Together.”
But he hadn’t.
And she hadn’t been able to help. Not a bit. She was sorry. She had told him she was sorry hundreds, thousands of times in her head where she stored all her memories.
For the first time throughout her confinement, she suddenly no longer felt a need to cry. No tears on her cheeks. No sob crushing its way through her throat. The muscles in her arms and legs, her rigid spine, had relaxed.
As hard as he had battled, there was nothing he could do. The disease was just too powerful. It was the same for her. There was nothing she could do.
She had a single additional thought: if she had the chance to fight and die, that would be better than simply letting them kill her. That way when she saw her father again, she could look him in the eye and say, “I tried as hard as you did, Dad. They were just too strong for me.”
And then he could tell her: “I could see. I saw it all. I know you did, beautiful. I’m proud of you.”
That would be enough for her, she insisted silently to her bear.
38
Adrian felt as if electric current had replaced the blood in his veins. He stared at the television screen and felt years dropping away from him, and he knew that he could no longer afford to be old, sick, and confused. He had to find the part of him that once was but had been lost within layers of age and disease.
“You want me to try another website?” Wolfe asked. It was hard for Adrian to tell whether the tone of the sex offender’s voice reflected late-night exhaustion or a genuine desire to move ahead. When he looked at Wolfe, he saw him still leaning toward the image of the hooded girl on the screen. Adrian understood that Wolfe, even if this wasn’t their quarry, was definitely returning to Whatcomesnext.com as soon as Adrian left him alone. Wolfe’s voice had a dry sound to it, like a parched man but one who excitedly sees an oasis ahead. It was as if fascination, like a powerful smell, had been released in the room.
Adrian hesitated. He could hear Brian nearly screaming caution in his ear, words that demanded he watch his step. The dead lawyer brother was almost frantically insisting on a contradiction: Move fast but move carefully!
“Look,” Adrian said slowly, as if by speaking in a matter-of-fact tone it would add weight to his lie. “I don’t think this is the right place . . .”
“Okay,” Wolfe replied, reaching for the keyboard.
“But it’s close. I mean this is what we need to be looking for.”
Wolfe did not look at Adrian but let his eyes absorb the image on the screen. Adrian saw that there were moments in the sex offender’s life where it made no difference how tired he was, or how depleted, if he was hungry or thirsty or distracted by anything in life—if desire was triggered he would find himself driven by the infinite resources of compulsion every time.
Wolfe said, “It can’t be close, professor. Either it’s little Jennifer or it isn’t.”
Adrian ignored the sex offender’s little Jennifer.
“I understand, Mister Wolfe. It’s just I saw her only briefly and I’m not completely sure.”
But he was sure. He just didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Well, that tattoo, either it’s real or fake. Same for the scar. When she tells the camera she’s eighteen, well, that’s either the truth or a lie and it sure as hell looks to me like a lie. But you tell me, professor, which is it? That’s your area of expertise. Anyway, it’s late and I think we need to wrap this up for today.”
Truth or a lie. Adrian still needed the sex offender’s help. He glanced at the hooded figure on the screen. Whoever she was, she lived right at that moment trapped on one riverbank. Adrian realized that it was up to him to find a bridge.
“But just so I understand what we’re facing, if I wanted to know where this website was located, how would I . . .”
He tried to make his question sound innocent and ordinary and no matter what he said he thought it was totally transparent. He persisted anyway, counting on Wolfe’s fatigue to help conceal his interest. “I mean, we’ve been surfing back and forth, but how will we actually know where to physically go to find Jennifer once we spot her online?”
The sex offender gave a small dismissive laugh of disbelief, his eyes never leaving the screen. “It’s not that hard,” he said. “Except it sort of depends on the people running the site.”
“I don’t follow,” Adrian said.
Wolfe spoke the way a really tired third-grade teacher would to a student more interested in passing notes than in math. “How criminal are they?”
Adrian rocked back and forth. “Isn’t that like asking if somebody’s a little pregnant, Mister Wolfe? You’re either . . .”
Wolfe pivoted in his seat, fixing Adrian with a crisply cold look.
“Haven’t you been paying attention, professor?”
Adrian remained in his seat, thoroughly confused. His silence became a question that Wolfe seemed eager to answer.
“How much do they want the world to know they’re doing something illegal?”
“Not very much,” Adrian started.
“Wrong, professor, wrong, wrong, wrong. The shadow world. In there, you need credibility. If people think you’re completely legit, well, where’s the fun in that? Where’s the excitement? Where’s the edge?”
Adrian was taken aback by the sex offender’s pointed accuracy about human nature.
“Mister Wolfe,” he said cautiously, “you impress me.”
“I should have been a professor, just like you,” he said. Wolfe’s face creased into a smil
“Okay, professor, you understand that every site has an IP address? Some server has to put it out there. There’s a pretty simple program that gives the GPS location for each server. We can look this one up pretty quickly, except . . .”
“Except what?” Adrian asked.
“Bad guys—crooks, terrorists, bankers, you name it—know this too. There are programs you can buy to keep yourself anonymous while viewing or broadcasting, except . . .”
“Except what?”
“As soon as you buy something that is supposed to hide who you are, well, it doesn’t really. Anything can be broken down eventually. As soon as you use the Web . . . Okay, it really depends on the persistence of whoever is looking for you. You can encrypt things—if you’re a corporation or the military or the CIA, you’re pretty sophisticated about hiding things. But if you’re a site like this . . .”
He pointed at the hooded girl.
“Well, you don’t want to hide. You want people to find you. Just not the wrong people. Like the cops.”
“How do you prevent that?” Adrian asked.
The sex offender rubbed his hands across his face slowly, before replacing them on top of the keyboard.
“Think like a bad guy, professor. You do what you’re doing. Hell, we already paid out money. They’ve got your subscription fee. So they stay at whatever it is that attracted folks just long enough to fill the old bank account. And then poof! they exit, stage left, lickety-split, before they’ve attracted the wrong sort of attention.”
Adrian looked at the screen. He saw the Series #4 duration clock.
Adrian took a deep breath. Psychology professor that he once had been, he could see it. He remembered the Moors Murders. Half, maybe more, of that couple’s excitement came from risk. It was what fueled the relationship and drove it deeper into perversion. He looked at the television. The huge screen was filled with the hooded girl. All the danger accentuated passion.