What Comes Next (16 page)

Then there were two more entries.

Help?

Hurt?

Linda turned to the side. An electronic counter was tallying numbers on a different screen.

“They seem to have confidence,” she said, as numbers grew in various columns. “But they are split on whether it will help her or hurt her.” Linda smiled again. “I knew this was a good idea,” she said. “They’re all logging in and they seem pretty damn fascinated.”

Michael concentrated hard on the cameras.

On the main monitor they both watched as Jennifer moved slowly toward the camera. Her hands were out in front of her, her fingers stretched forward, touching nothing except air. Her picture grew increasingly large on the screen. Her hands seemed only inches away when she stopped. She had reached the limit of the chain, fingertips nearly touching the primary camera.

“They will love that,” Linda whispered.

The camera seemed to explore Jennifer’s body, lingering on her slender breasts and then panning down to her crotch. Her underwear seemed little more than a tease. Linda imagined that around the world viewers were reaching out toward Number 4 as if they could touch her through their computer screens. Michael instinctively knew that was what was happening, and he manipulated the cameras expertly, creating a dance with the images. It was stately, like a waltz.

Jennifer backed away and moved a little to her left.

“Ah, she’s got a chance,” Linda said.

She glanced over at the counters, which were rising rapidly.

“I think she’ll get it.”

Michael shook his head. “No way. It’s on the floor. Unless her toe touches it. She’s not thinking vertically enough. She needs to go up and down, to really explore the space.”

“You’re too much of a scientist,” Linda said. “She’ll get it.”

“Want to bet?”

Linda laughed. “Stakes?” she asked.

Michael turned away from the monitor briefly. He grinned like any lover might. “Name ‘em,” he said.

“I’ll think of something when I win,” Linda replied. She touched the top of his hand on the joystick, letting her fingers stroke his. This was something of a promise and Michael shuddered with pleasure.

Then they turned back to see if Number 4 would succeed. Or not.

Jennifer counted each step silently to herself.

She moved cautiously. The bed was behind her but she wanted to reach the wall so that she at least understood the limits of her space. Each small step became a new number in her head.

She kept her hands out in front of her, moving them just slightly but touching nothing except emptiness.

She maintained a constant tension around her throat, trying to imagine herself a little like a chained dog, but not wanting to throw herself to the limit, like the dog would.

Jennifer had reached
eighteen
in her count when her left toe brushed up against something on the floor.

It was sudden, unexpected, and she almost fell.

It seemed soft, furlike and alive, and she stumbled backward. Her mind filled with images.
Rat!

She wanted to run but could not. She wanted to leap back on the bed, thinking that would keep her safe, and panic filled her. She swung out her arms, punching nothing, and she realized that she had screamed once, maybe twice, and now, inside the hood, her mouth was open wide.

The counting process had evaporated. Whatever numbers she had collected were gone. She took a step and tumbled into utter confusion. She no longer could determine where the wall was, or the bed. The darkness inside the hood seemed to be blacker, more confining, and she shouted,
“Get away!”
as loud as she could.

The sound of her voice seemed to echo in the room and was replaced by the adrenaline pumping in her ears like the roar of a swollen river. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she could feel her entire body quiver. She touched the chain—thought that she should use it like she would a line tossed to a drowning person, go hand over hand back to the bed and get her feet off the floor, so whatever it was couldn’t reach her.

She started to do this, then stopped. She listened.

There was no noise of tiny feet running away.

Jennifer took another deep breath. Once there had been a family of mice in the walls of their home, and her mother and Scott had dutifully placed traps and poisons around the house to get rid of them. But what Jennifer remembered in that moment was the unmistakable noise they would make late at night running through the empty spaces behind the wallboard.

There was no similar noise.

Her second thought was,
It’s dead. Whatever it is, it’s dead.

She froze in position, sharpening her ears for any sound.

But she could hear only her own heavy breathing.

What was it?

She stopped thinking of a rat, even though it was a basement she was imprisoned in.

She replayed in her mind the instant sensation against her toe and what she might learn from that momentary impression. She tried hard to form a picture in her mind, but it was impossible.

Jennifer took another deep breath.

Retreat to the bed,
she told herself,
and you will sit there terrified because you won’t know.

This seemed to her a terrible choice. Uncertainty versus going back and touching whatever it was to try and determine what the dead thing might be.

She twitched. Her hands shook. She could feel tremors up and down her spine and she was both hot and cold at the same instant, sweating yet chilled.

Go back. Find out.

Her lips and mouth were even drier, if that was possible. She knew her head was spinning with the choice presented to her.

I am not brave. I’m just a kid.

But she thought there was no more room left inside the hood for being a child.

“Come on, Jennifer,” she whispered to herself. She knew everything was a nightmare. If she did not go back and find out what her toe had touched, the nightmare would just grow worse.

She took a step. Then a second. She did not know how far she had recoiled. But now, instead of measuring, she took her left leg and pointed it outward, moving it back and forth like a ballet dancer or like a swimmer unsure about the temperature of the water.

She was afraid of what she would find, afraid that it had disappeared. Something dead, something inanimate was far preferable to something alive.

She was unable to tell how long it took her to locate the object with her toe. It might have been seconds. It could have been an hour.

When her toe touched the object she fought off the urge to kick out.

Steeling herself, she forced herself to kneel down. The cement scratched against her knees.

She reached out toward the object with her hands.

It was fur. It was solid. It was lifeless.

She pulled her hands back. Whatever it was, it wasn’t an immediate threat. She had the urge to simply leave whatever it was where it was. But then something different, something surprising spoke to her, and she reached out once again, and this time she let her fingers linger on the surface of the object.

Familiarity.

She wrapped her hands around the shape and pulled it closer. It shifted in her hands and, as if reading Braille, she ran her fingers over it.
A slight tear. A frayed edge.

Recognition.

She immediately knew what it was.

She clutched the object tightly to her chest and moaned softly to herself, whispering: “Mister Brown Fur…”

It was her teddy bear.

Jennifer could not hold back. She sobbed uncontrollably and caressed the worn surface of the only item from her childhood that she had thought crucial to take with her on her escape from home.

15

Terri Collins told herself to remain professional. She reminded herself to stick to facts and not speculation. But she had nothing but doubts.

Back in her office, she started with the truck that Adrian described. It defied the small town police logic that she’d developed over years and had just seemed too convenient for Scott, who was the type who wanted to see huge governmental conspiracies or demonic plots in all sorts of mundane events. She was surprised by the electronic reply from the Massachusetts State Police that a set of license plates beginning with the letters
QE
had been stolen from a sedan parked in the long-term lot at Logan International Airport nearly three weeks earlier.

So when her computer screen beeped with the reply and she saw the single line of type, she scrunched forward, bending toward the information displayed in front of her, as if by moving closer she could determine its value.

There had been a delay in reporting the theft, because the thief had taken the time and risk to attach a different set of plates to the businessman’s car. That second set had been stolen from a mall one hundred miles away in western Massachusetts a month earlier. The businessman probably would not have noticed that his plate was different—how often does a person look at his own license plate?—had he not been pulled over on a DUI. The duality of the paperwork—a theft reported in one part of the state, then found on a different vehicle being driven by an obnoxious, arrogant drunk who, in addition to a series of insults tossed at the trooper who pulled him over, hadn’t had any intelligible explanation for where his assigned plates might be—created a DMV bureaucratic knot of red tape.

Two sets of stolen license plates were interesting. Someone was taking extra precautions.

“Well,” she said, “that’s something.”

Professor Thomas, she thought, had managed to get the numeral and the third letter wrong. The
Quod Erat
was correct but the
Demonstrandum
was a mistake, although she thought it pretty typical of a college professor with an Ivy League doctorate and a pristine reputation like his to automatically expect a
D
after a
Q
and an
E.
It went with all that education.

Still, the similarity of two letters and the reported theft made her expand her computer inquiries. She went to databases for Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont searching for a recent white panel van theft. If whoever was involved in this random kidnapping had gone to the trouble of stealing two different sets of plates, she doubted the person would use anything other than a stolen vehicle.

She found three: a brand-new van taken from a dealer’s lot in Boston, a twelve-year-old clunker stolen from a trailer park in New Hampshire, and a three-year-old panel van that fit Adrian’s description taken one week earlier from a rental lot in downtown Providence.

This truck was interesting. A large fleet—twenty, maybe thirty, all with the same basic look and configuration—would be parked in rows in the back of a lot in some blighted urban area. Unless the person who jacked the truck left obvious signs of entry—a chain-link fence ripped aside or a lock sliced by a high-pressure bolt cutter—it might take the rental company twenty-four hours to do an inventory and realize one truck was missing. And, Terri thought, if the guys working the lot were less than competent it might take longer.

None of the three missing vehicles had been recovered, which wasn’t surprising. There were a number of crimes that required a single use of a stolen truck: a quick break-in at an electronics store, a single load of marijuana being hauled up to Boston. She also knew that each of them was probably discarded as soon as the job was completed.

She expanded her computer search.

One entry got her immediate attention. The fire department in Devens, Massachusetts, had reported being called to the scene of an auto fire, where a vehicle of the same make and model as the truck taken in Providence had been torched behind a deserted mill. A confirmation was pending—the suspect vehicle had been completely gutted by the fire. It was not the sort of case that any cop placed a high priority on, so it would take some time for an insurance investigator to get to the local auto wreck depository near Devens, crawl all over the filthy charred remains until he found one of the etched serial numbers that had survived the fire, and then compare that to the missing vehicle so that his bosses would eventually cut a check to the rental company.

All that would happen much faster, of course, if Terri contacted the state police and told them that the truck had been used in a felony kidnapping of a minor… if there was such a crime.

She was still not persuaded but she was much closer to imagining that something unusual was taking place.

Rising from her desk, she went over to a wall map. She traced her finger across distances. Providence, to the street where Jennifer disappeared, to an empty, forgotten part of Devens. A triangle encompassing many miles but many roads that carved through rural sections of the state. If someone had wanted to travel anonymously a more isolated route could hardly have been chosen.

She went back to her computer and punched a few keys. She wanted to check one other detail: the date of the fire department call.

She stared at her computer screen. She felt a hollow sensation inside her stomach, as if she hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, and had just run a great distance.

The fire department had responded to an anonymous 911 call shortly after midnight, making it the day after Jennifer disappeared. But when they arrived a vehicle was found that had already burned to a blackened hull. Whoever set the fire had done so much earlier.

She tried to do some calculations in her head. A phone call comes in to a central dispatcher. The dispatcher hits an alarm that sounds in the bedrooms of the volunteers in the fire crew. They drive to the station, change into their gear, and then drive to the scene of the fire.
How long did all that take?

Terri internally posed rapid-fire questions. That was how she worked: she would try to see each bit of evidence from two perspectives—hers as a detective, and that of some anonymous criminal. She thought it important to be able to place herself into the bad guy’s mind-set because, when she managed that, answers came to her. So she demanded:
Did someone know about that delay? Is that why they chose that particular spot to torch the truck? Maybe. If I wanted to get rid of a vehicle after a single use I wouldn’t pick a place where firemen might arrive before the flames had done their job.