What Comes Next (10 page)

Brian was perched on the hood of Adrian’s old Volvo, knees drawn up, smoking a cigarette. Smoke curled up into the blue sky above the two of them. He was wearing filthy, tattered olive drab fatigues that were flecked with blood spatters. His flak jacket was ripped. His helmet was at his feet, sporting a peace symbol drawn in thick black ink and an American flag decal with the words
Death Dealer and Heart Stealer
scrawled beneath it. He had rested his M-16 between his legs, holding the stock in place with his jungle boots. Sweat streaked Brian’s face, and he was pale and cadaverously thin and barely twenty-three years old. He was resting in a position similar to a photo that had been taken years earlier—a Larry Burrows picture, snapped on assignment for
Life
shortly before he was killed and that his brother had kept framed on his desk in his office as a reminder, as he had once told Adrian, although he wasn’t specific as to what he was reminding himself of. The photo was now in a dusty box in Adrian’s basement, along with many of his brother’s other things, including the Silver Star he’d won and never told anyone about.

As Adrian watched, Brian stepped down from the hood with a slow, painful motion, as if he was exhausted, but which had a complacent laziness that Adrian recognized from their childhood. Brian was never hurried, even when things were exploding all around them. It was one of his best qualities—the ability to see clearly when others panicked—and Adrian had always loved his brother for the calmness he projected. Caught in a dangerous current, Brian could swim when others floundered and drowned. In all their years growing up, separated by just two years in age, whenever something—
anything
—had happened, Adrian had always looked first to his brother to gauge what his own reaction should be. Which had made his death all that much more incomprehensible to Adrian.

Brian shook himself like a dog unhappily rising from a deep sleep and pointed at his right arm, where the battle tunic sleeve was rolled up, leaving only a single patch visible—the solid bar and horse’s head profile of the First Air Cavalry in yellow and black

Brian stretched his thin, muscled arms and slung his weapon over his shoulder. He looked up into the glare of the sun, shading his eyes momentarily.

“College town, oh brother of mine,” he said. “Pretty tame. Not like Nam,” he said with a half-joking snort.

Adrian shook his head. “And not like Harvard, or Columbia Law School. Or that big firm on Wall Street you worked for. And not much like the big Upper East Side apartment where you—”

He stopped. “Sorry,” he quickly apologized.

Brian laughed. “Not like a lot of things. And don’t worry about it. You want to talk about why I killed myself, well, there’s still plenty of time for that. But right now, seems to me we’ve got work to do. The start of any investigation is where the heavy lifting happens. Got to make progress while things are still relatively fresh. Get going before the trail gets cold. I think you’ve already delayed too much. Didn’t you listen to Cassie? She told you to get a move on. So let’s get started. No more time for delays.”

“I don’t exactly know where to begin. It’s still very…” He hesitated.

“Scary? Confusing?” His brother gave him a laugh. He often attached laughter to matters of deep concern, as if he could lessen the worries that went with them. “Well, the pills will help, I think. Just maybe hold things at bay a little bit, while we sort through what we know.”

“But I don’t really know anything.”

Brian smiled again. “Sure you do. But it’s a matter of pragmatics. Got to work steadily, see every question as a hole that needs to be filled in.”

“You were always good at organizing things.”

“The army trained me well. And law school trained me even better. That wasn’t my problem.”

“You’ll help me?”

“That’s why I’m here. Same as Cassandra.”

Adrian paused. Dead wife. Dead brother. Each would see things a little differently. He didn’t care
who
might spot him at that moment talking animatedly to no one. He knew with whom he was conversing.

Brian had removed the clip from the M-16 and was tapping it against the hood of the Volvo to make sure it was full. Adrian wanted to reach out and touch the worn clothing. He could smell dried sweat and jungle rot and a faint odor of cordite. It all seemed very real and, still, he knew it wasn’t, but he didn’t dislike that.

“I always thought I should have gone, too, just like you did.”

Brian snorted. “To Vietnam? Wrong war at the wrong time. Don’t be old and stupid. I went for all the wrong reasons. Romance and excitement and sense of duty—maybe that wasn’t the wrong reason—but loyalty and honor and all those fine words that we assign to men going off to battle. And it cost me big time. You know that.”

Adrian felt a little chastised. He had always gotten tongue-tied and stammered when he tried to speak with his older brother about emotional things. Everything about Brian had always seemed so perfect, so admirable. A warrior. A philanthropist. A man of laws and reason. Even when they were grown up and Adrian’s education gave him a clinical understanding of PTSD and the dark depressions Brian continually suffered, translating the things he’d learned in a classroom into practical applications to someone he loved had been difficult. There were many things he wanted to say, but they always tripped on his lips and fell into the crevices of forgetfulness.

Brian slapped the tin pot helmet on his head, pushing it back a little, so that his blue eyes could sweep over the parking lot at the pharmacy.

“Good place for an ambush,” he said, idly. “Ah well, can’t be helped. First question: Who is Jennifer? Got to get an answer there. Then we can go about chasing down the
why
.”

Adrian nodded. He glanced down toward the pink Red Sox hat on the seat of the car. Brian followed his eyes.

“That’s right,” the older brother said smoothly. “Someone will recognize that. You say the girl was on foot?”

“Yes. She was walking hard toward the bus stop.”

“So she came from somewhere in your neighborhood?”

“That would make sense.”

“Well,” Brian said, “start there. Draw a mental perimeter. Pick a good six-block circle, a couple of klicks, and then be systematic. Keep notes as to where you go, what the address is, what the people say. Someone will see that hat, hear the name, and steer you right.”

“But there has to be, I don’t know, fifty, maybe seventy-five houses… That’s a lot of doorbells.”

“And you’re going to ring every one.”

Adrian nodded.

“Look, Audie,” Brian said, using his childhood nickname. “Most police work is leg work. It’s not Hollywood and it’s not all that exciting. It’s just hard work. Heavy lifting. Turning possibilities into details and facts and then piecing them together. Mystery writers and television producers like to imagine that they are like those big thousand-piece depictions of the
Mona Lisa
or a map of the world that has to be put together. But more often cases are like those wooden block puzzles they give preschoolers. Fit the picture of the cow or the duck into the cutout of the cow or the duck. Either way when you’re finished you can see something. That’s what ultimately makes it so satisfying.”

Brian hesitated. “Do you remember me telling you about the case I had over there? It was the summer after I came back and we were out on the Cape. We had a fire going on the beach and maybe a few beers too many and I told you about it… the one where I ended up interviewing every member of two different platoons at least four times before the story started to break.”

Adrian did remember. Brian had rarely spoken about being in country and the combat he’d seen while pursuing military justice. This had been a rape case, in 1969. It had been filled with troubling ambiguities—the victim had been Viet Cong, Brian had been certain, as had the men accused of assaulting her. So she was the enemy—they were all sure of it—although there was no concrete proof. And so, whatever happened to her, well, she probably deserved it, or at least that was the justification for five men in a hooch, taking turns until she was nearly dead, which left them with only one remaining choice. It was one of those cases where there was simply no moral good side, where finding out the truth about what had happened in a small sideshow of the war had created no good. A rape took place. The commanding officer ordered Brian to investigate. People were guilty. But nothing happened. He filed his report. The war went on. People died.

Brian shouldered his rifle and pointed down the road.

“That direction,” Brian said. “It might be tedious but it has to be done. Do you think you can keep remembering what you’re supposed to ask? You don’t want to forget…”

“You’ll have to keep reminding me,” Adrian said. “Things sort of slide out of my mind when I’m not paying enough attention.”

“I’ll be there when you need me,” Brian said.

Adrian wanted to reply that he wished he’d been able to say the same. He hadn’t been there when his brother needed him. Simple as that. It made him want to cry and then he understood that desire signified he was having trouble controlling his swinging emotions. He knew he couldn’t actually break into tears in the middle of a bright, clear, mild morning, standing in the parking lot of a pharmacy at the small, busy shopping center on the edge of his college town. It would draw unwanted attention. It wouldn’t be appropriate.

Not for the detective he had to become.

Adrian slipped behind the wheel and started to drive home to his neighborhood, which suddenly seemed to him even in the bright spring sunshine to be far more dark and mysterious than he’d ever believed it could be.

Of the first score of doors he knocked on nearly half didn’t respond, and the others weren’t helpful. People were polite—they assumed he was selling something, or going door-to-door fund-raising for some cause, such as clean water or whale saving, and when he showed the hat and mentioned the name they were taken aback, but didn’t know the girl.

He was alone with Brian marching just in front. His brother had slipped on aviator-style sunglasses against the morning glare and he had the energy of a young man, which usually put him a few strides ahead of Adrian.

Adrian felt very old as he walked along, although he wasn’t tired and he was secretly pleased to feel his leg muscles taut and uncomplaining as he kept pace with his brother’s ghost.

He stopped, letting the morning sun fill his face, staring up into shafts of light as they danced with shadows. It was always a contest between bringing light and finding darkness. This made him think of a poem; his favorite writers were always working on imagery that trod the line between good and evil.

“Yeats,” he said out loud. “Brian, did you ever read ‘Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea’?”

Brian unslung his rifle and paused a few feet ahead. He hunkered down, dropping to a single knee, staring ahead, as if it were a jungle trail he was surveying, not a suburban neighborhood. “Yeah. Sure. Second-year seminar on poetic traditions in modern verse. I think you took the same class I did and got a better grade.”

Adrian nodded. “What I liked was when the hero realized he’d killed his only son… the only recourse was madness. So he was enchanted and set to fighting with sword and shield against the ocean waves.”

“
The invulnerable tide
…” Brian said, quoting the poet. He held up a fist, as if to slow a platoon of men in single file behind him instead of his only brother. Brian’s eyes centered on a redbrick pathway. “Take the point, Audie,” he whispered. “Try this house.” These words were spoken softly, but Brian equipped them with the force of command.

Adrian looked up. Another trim, suburban clapboard home, like just about every other one. Like his own.

He sighed and went up to the door, leaving his brother behind on the sidewalk. He rang the doorbell twice, and just as he was about to turn and leave he heard hurried footsteps inside. The door cracked open and he came face to face with a middle-aged woman, a dish towel in her hands, red eyes and blond frazzled hair. She smelled of smoke and anxiety and looked as if she hadn’t slept in a month.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Adrian started.

The woman stared out past him. Her voice quavered but she tried to be polite.

“Look, I’m just not interested in Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Mormon Church or Scientology. Thank you, but no thanks.”

As quickly as she had opened it the woman was shutting the door.

“No, no,” Adrian said.

From behind him, he heard his brother’s shouted command: “
Show her the hat!
”

He thrust the pink hat forward.

The woman stopped.

“I found this on the street. I’m looking for—”

“Jennifer,” the woman said.

She immediately burst into tears.

10

By the time Terri Collins managed to get into the hard drive on Jennifer’s computer and copy everything without simultaneously destroying it, it was midmorning and, even with a catnap on a couch outside of an interview room, she was still exhausted. The office around her had awakened. The other three detectives on the small force were at their desks, making calls, sorting through various open-case tasks. She had also received a summons from the chief’s office, wanting a midday update, so Terri was scrambling to put together some sort of analysis of Jennifer’s disappearance. In order to keep processing the case, she needed to create at least the impression that a crime was taking place because, otherwise, she knew the chief would tell her to do what she had already done—put out a picture and description and the appropriate statewide and national bulletins and then get back to work on cases that actually might result in arrests and convictions.

She looked guiltily at the stack of case folders cluttering a corner of her desk. There were three sexual assault cases, a simple assault—that was a Saturday night Yankees—Red Sox fistfight in a bar—an assault with a deadly weapon—what was that sophomore from the tony Boston suburb of Concord doing with a switchblade anyway?—and half a dozen drug cases ranging from a nickel bag of marijuana to a student over at the university arrested selling a kilo of cocaine to an undercover campus cop. Every file needed attention, especially the sexual assaults, because they were all more or less the same—girls taken advantage of after they’d had too much to drink at a frat house or a dorm party. Invariably, the victims wavered, imagining they were somehow to blame. Perhaps, Terri thought, they were. Inhibitions had been washed away in beery excess and provocative dancing, maybe they had heeded the catcalls of
show us your boobs!
that were commonplace at campus gatherings. Each case was awaiting toxicology results and she suspected they would all test positive for Ecstasy. These cases all started: “Hey, baby, let me get you a drink” in a crowded room, music pounding, bodies packed together, and the girl not noticing the slightly odd taste as she sipped at her plastic cup. One part vodka, two parts tonic, a dash of date-rape drug.