What Comes Next (25 page)

“What did you feel? What did you think? Why did you do what you did?”
Cassie finished his words for him with a slight lilting laugh that he recognized from better days.

She slapped his back resoundingly, as if signaling the end of the back rub. “So,” he heard her say briskly, “go ask a rat.”

22

Adrian had to wait only a half hour before the man he’d selected from the list of seventeen registered sex offenders appeared in his doorway and made his way quickly to his car. It was early in the day and the man sported a cheap red tie and a blue cardigan sweater. He carried a worn black leather briefcase and didn’t seem to Adrian much different from any other person heading off in the morning to a boring but regular job with a small but necessary paycheck attached to it.

There was nothing particularly unusual about the way the man looked, nor the street he lived on. He was a little shy of middle age, not very tall, slightly built, with sandy hair, and he wore black-rimmed glasses. He carried a simple gray jacket over one arm as if he didn’t trust the day would ever truly warm up. He had a clerk’s dowdy appearance.

Adrian watched from where he’d parked across the street as the man got into a small beige-colored Japanese car. The single-story ranch-style house where the man lived with his mother—according to the printout Adrian had with him—was kept meticulously trim, set back from the street and freshly painted. There were early season blue and yellow flowers in redbrick flowerpots placed in rows by the front door.

All in all, it gave the appearance of an undistinguished man living in a typical house in an unremarkable neighborhood. The surrounding area was closer to the rural world of farms and plowed fields being readied for corn planting than the more closely packed energy of the college town. This man lived just slightly removed from the mainstream, even if the mainstream that Adrian was familiar with—crowded coffee shops, standing-room-only pizza parlors, paperback bookstores, and handmade crafts outlets—was pretty tame. Not like New York or Boston or even Hartford. No daily rush hour, no frantic get-ahead dedication to jobs. The academic world that dominated Adrians town was ambitious but defined ambition in a tenured professorship way.

The man Adrian watched did not seem to belong to any world Adrian knew. He seemed
separate.

Adrian reminded himself:
Just because he seems humdrum and ordinary, that doesn’t mean he is.
He hesitated, uncertain about what he was supposed to do next.

“No, go ahead, quick! Follow the son of a bitch,” Brian urged. “You need to see where he goes to work. You need to get a handle on who he is!”

Adrian glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the reflection of his dead brother. It was the middle-aged-lawyer Brian, leaning forward, waving his hands as if to push Adrian into action, urging him to get moving. Brian’s long hair seemed tousled, unkempt, as if he’d spent the night awake at his desk. His silk Brooks Brothers rep tie was loose around his neck, and his brother’s voice was urgent and decidedly impatient.

Adrian immediately put the car in gear and pulled out behind the sex offender. He saw his brother slump back in the seat, exhausted and relieved.

“Good. Goddammit, Audie, you’ve got to stop being so…
hesitant.
Every time, from now on, when you want to look at someone or something or some bit of evidence or information with all the slow, steady, cautious style of a professor and an academic, well, tell yourself to get a damn move on.”

Brian’s voice seemed almost reedy, weakened, as if he was summoning up the strength to speak from deep within. At first Adrian wondered if his brother was sick and then he remembered that his brother was dead.

He steered the old Volvo out onto the roadway.

“I’ve never tailed someone before,” Adrian said. The Volvo engine made a whining, reluctant sound as he punched the gas.

“Nothing to it,” Brian replied with a sigh, relaxing, the mere act of moving forward lessening some tension within. “If we were really expecting to stay hidden—you know, do this like professionals—then we’d have three cars and we’d do an overlapping style… you know, trade him off, one car to the next. Same thing works when you’re on foot on the street. But we’re not going to be that fancy. Just follow him to wherever he’s heading.”

“And then what?”

“Then we see what we shall see.”

“Suppose he guesses that I’m following him?”

“Then we see what we shall see. Makes no difference. By the end of the day we’re going to talk to the guy.”

Adrian saw that Brian was staring at the computer printout, reading everything listed there.

“I see why you chose this creep,” Brian said. He laughed a little, although there was no joke that Adrian was aware of in any of the pages from the website registry.

“It’s the age similarity,” Adrian said out loud, as he steered around a corner and then accelerated to keep pace. “He’s been convicted or pled guilty to three separate offenses, each time with young girls ranging in age from thirteen to fifteen.”

Brian spoke with the certainty of a lawyer who has the facts and the evidence on his side. “A sweetheart, no doubt.”

This last observation was spoken with ringing sarcasm. It was exactly what Adrian had told himself when he’d gone through the list of seventeen men. The trick was to look at the grouping scientifically and not get stymied by the details of what they’d done but to focus on the underlying disturbance. Most of them were convicted rapists. Some were involved in domestic issues. This man had been different. There had been an arrest for possession of child pornography. Charges had been dropped by an ex-wife, regarding a stepdaughter. Several busts for exposure.

All rats. But one different rat.

“He exposed himself to them.”

“A weenie wagger. That’s what the cops used to call ‘em,” Brian said, with a blustery tone. “At least, in the city, that was the phrase they used. I doubt it’s any different up here in the sticks.”

“That’s right, probably not. But Brian, look at the last conviction and you’ll see…”

Adrian stopped. He switched his eyes between the tan car ahead of him and Brian in the backseat, reading.

“Ah, he did jail time for… Well, Audie, I’m impressed. You seem to be getting the hang of this.”

“False imprisonment.”

“Yes,” Brian said. “You understand, that’s a lesser charge than kidnapping… but it’s on the same page, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

Brian snorted. “Young teenage girls. And he wanted to grab one, didn’t he? I wonder what he wanted to do then? Well, says a great deal.” He laughed again. “But one thing…”

“I know. No accomplice. That’s what I need to understand.”

“Don’t lose him, Audie. He’s heading to town.”

Some of the traffic had picked up. Several sedans and a pickup truck blocked the man in the tan car. Behind Adrian a school bus had pulled close to his bumper. Adrian maneuvered the car, keeping pace with the man.

“I remember, Brian, when you had that fancy sports car.”

“The Jaguar. Yeah. It was cool.”

“It would be a lot easier to keep up if we were in that.”

“I sold it.”

“I remember. I never understood why. It seemed to make you happy.”

“I drove too fast. Always too fast. Too reckless. I couldn’t get behind the wheel without pushing it way past not just the speed limits, Audie, but the limits of sanity. It made me wild at a hundred, crazy at a hundred and twenty and genuinely psychotic at a hundred and thirty. And I liked it, going that fast. It felt like freedom. But I was clearly going to kill myself. I almost lost control so many times. I knew I was risking something big; it was too dangerous, so I sold it. Biggest mistake I ever made. The car was beautiful, and would have been a better way to…”

Brian stopped. Adrian saw his brother cover his face with his hands.

“I’m sorry, Audie. I forgot. That’s what Cassie did.”

Brian’s voice seemed distant, soft. “She and I, we weren’t alike at all. I know you think we didn’t get along, but it’s not true. We did. It was just that we saw something in each other that frightened us. Who would have guessed that we’d both go south in similar ways?”

Adrian wanted to say something but was unable to form the words. There were tears welling up in his eyes. All he could hear was pain in his brother’s voice, which matched the pain he remembered from his wife’s.

“I should have known. I was the psychologist. I was like a shrink. I had the training…”

Brian laughed. “Didn’t Cassie absolve you of that guilt? She should have. Hey, pay attention! The dude’s turning in. Well, I’ll be damned. Isn’t this the sort of place you’d expect a freak like him to work?”

Adrian didn’t reply. He saw the beige car rolling into a large home appliance and fixtures store that occupied nearly an entire block just on the outskirts of town. He watched as the man drove around the back, past a sign that said EMPLOYEES PARKING.

Adrian pulled into a space in front. He waited for fifteen minutes in silence. Brian seemed asleep in the back. At least the hallucination was quiet. Adrian tried to think of something he could purchase inside that would make his trip seem about something else. But he knew all he really wanted was to make sure that the man was at work.

“Let’s go,” he said to Brian. “Got to make sure that this is where he’ll be today.”

Adrian exited and walked across the giant lot, scuffling his feet against the macadam. There were pickup trucks and minivans moving in. He saw a cross section of contractors, plumbers, carpenters, and harried suburban-dad types heading inside. He followed the steady stream of people, not turning to see if Brian was following, although he felt alone, even in the midst of the crowds.

Inside the cavernous area he felt a momentary despair. The place was huge, divided into dozens of sections—for gardening, roofing, kitchen appliances, power tools—a huge list of devices and wares lined up in aisle after aisle. Men and women wearing red vests and name tags scurried about, directing customers and offering advice. Cash registers were already beeping and ringing up sales. Adrian started to wander up and down arrays of tile and wood paneling, stainless steel sinks and faucets, Spackle and hammers and power drills. He was about to give up when he spotted the man, working in the section devoted to home electronics. He watched for a moment as the man energetically spoke with a couple of do-it-yourself types, a man and a woman who looked to be in their early thirties. The man was shaking his head but the woman seemed animated, as if she’d been persuaded that the two of them, with the right tools and the right advice, could rewire their house. The man had the look that young husbands sometimes have, knowing that they are being saddled with more than they can handle, but he was helpless to prevent it. Adrian would have laughed at the picture—having been more than once in the same position with Cassie—except he knew that if the couple were aware of who it was they were speaking with they would have recoiled in horror.

He watched for a few more seconds and then, understanding that he could return in eight hours after the man’s shift, he turned and left. He felt as if he’d achieved something, but he wasn’t sure what. Perhaps it was just the sensation of being closer to someone who could tell him what he should be looking for.

But forcing it out of the man was going to be a challenge, and Adrian did not know how he was going to meet it.

He spent the rest of the day in anticipation, although unsure exactly why. More research led him deeper into what he considered perversion. But nothing told him where to find Jennifer. He did not have to hear Cassie or Brian insisting that he move faster, that time was wasting, that every second meant she was closer to dying—if she was still alive. All these admonitions were true. Or maybe not. There was no way for him to tell, and so he simply assumed that the opportunity to save her still existed.

He thought:
Save her. You never saved anyone except yourself.

And he had a sudden fear that, were he to stop looking, Cassie and Brian and even Tommy would disappear and leave him alone with nothing except jumbled, disjointed memories and the disease that was twisting them around inside of him like a rubber band stretched to breaking.

So, alone now, wondering where Brian was, wondering why Cassie couldn’t leave the house, and why Tommy had visited him only once and hoping that his son would come back again to his hallucinatory world, he found himself outside the home warehouse store once again. The day was fading around him and he feared he might have trouble seeing the man when he left work.

The beige car pulled out from the rear of the store just about the time that Adrian had estimated the eight-hour workday had ended. Adrian pulled in as close behind it as he could manage and kept an eye on the man through the windshield of the car ahead of him, although that was getting increasingly difficult as the daylight faded.

He expected a return to the trim house, maybe a stop at a grocery store, but that would be it for delays.

He was wrong.

The man turned off the main road and headed into town on a side street. This took Adrian by surprise and he pulled across traffic dangerously, causing someone to honk rudely at him.

The old Volvo labored to keep pace.

The beige car was about thirty yards ahead, on a street just behind the main thoroughfare. It was a place with some offices and apartment buildings and an artist’s studio or two, just past a Congregational church and a computer repair store. Adrian saw the car turn in and scoot into a small parking lot, slipping between half a dozen cars into the only remaining slot.

“What’s he doing?” Adrian asked out loud. He expected Brian to answer, but he did not appear. “Damn it, Brian!” Adrian shouted. “I need your help right now! What should I do?”

The backseat remained silent.

Cursing, Adrian accelerated down the street. It took Adrian several minutes to find a free parking place in a metered lot a block away. The college town had all sorts of parking restrictions designed to keep students from leaving cars jamming the sidewalk areas. In the summer it was empty. During the semesters it was overcrowded.