What Comes Next (11 page)

She hated seeing sexual predators skate away when the embarrassed and sobered-up girls and their equally embarrassed parents dropped all her carefully constructed criminal charges. She knew the boys involved would end up boasting of their conquests as they matriculated on to Wall Street or medical school or into some other high-powered profession. She thought it was her policewoman’s duty to make sure that this ascension wasn’t without some sweat and some scars.

Terri went and poured herself her fourth coffee of the long night becoming a long day.

She thought that every other case on her desk should take precedence.

Saving Jennifer Riggins from whatever emotional morass that had instilled in her the need to run was way beyond the detective’s job description.

Yet she could not bring herself to just let her run. Terri knew the statistics far too well.

And, she reminded herself, she knew the necessity of running away with an intimacy that she would never forget.

You had to run once. Why do you suppose this is different?

She answered:
I wasn’t sixteen. I was grown up and with two babies.

Almost grown up.

But you still had to run, didn’t you?

The question reverberated within her and she plopped down and rocked in her seat at her desk, trying to imagine where Jennifer had gone. She leaned forward and took a long pull at the coffee cup. Hers had a large red heart and
World’s Best Mom
written on the side and had been a predictable Mother’s Day gift from her children. She doubted that this sentiment was true, but she was doing her damned best to try.

After a second she sighed, then took the flash drive copy of the hard drive on Jennifer’s computer and plugged it into her own. She sat back and started to survey the sixteen-year-old’s life, hoping that some road map would appear on the screen in front of her.

Jennifer’s Facebook entry was surprising. She had friended a very small number of her classmates at the high school and several rock and pop stars, ranging from a surprising Lou Reed, who was older than her mother, to Feist and Shania Twain. Terri had expected the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, but Jennifer’s tastes were very much outside the mainstream. Under the category Likes she had written
Freedom
and under Dislikes she had put
Phonies
. Terri guessed that word could be applied to any number of people in Jennifer’s world.

In the Profile section, Jennifer had quoted someone named Hotchick99, who had written on her own Facebook entry:
“Everyone in our school hates this one girl.”

Jennifer had replied:
“This is kind of a badge of honor to be hated by people like her. I never want to be the kind of person she would like.”

Terri smiled. A rebel with any number of causes, she thought. It gave her a little non-cop respect for the missing girl, which only made her sadder when she considered what was likely to happen to Jennifer on the streets. Escape wasn’t going to seem so great then.
Maybe she’ll have the sense to call home, no matter how terrible that will seem.

She kept looking through the hard drive. Jennifer had also tested a few computer games, made a number of Wikipedia inquiries and Google searches that seemed to correspond to courses she was taking in school. There was even a
Translate the page
inquiry, where she’d submitted something that Terri suspected was a Spanish assignment. Beyond the ordinary, Jennifer did not seem particularly computer-dependent. She had a Skype account but there were no names listed on it.

Terri raced through an American history paper on the Underground Railroad and an English paper on
Great Expectations
that she found under Word Documents. She half expected to find these were written by a term paper mill but was pleased when she did not. Her impression was that Jennifer actually did most of her own work at school, which made her the exception rather than the rule.

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, and 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.