What Comes Next (32 page)

She was ready to file Mark Wolfe and his connection to the soon to be stepfather of a missing girl under the category of wasted time. Indeed, the entire electronic search for Jennifer was pretty much stalled, in her mind, despite the eagerness of the old man. She knew she had to follow up on the credit card that had been returned in Maine, which might lead her somewhere, but she had her doubts.

Terri closed up the computer and breathed out slowly. The pain of it was she would have to return the damn thing to Wolfe. She reached for her telephone and called the home store where he worked.

“Mark Wolfe, please,” she told the receptionist who answered. “This is Detective Collins calling about an ongoing sex abuse case.”

Making Mark Wolfe squirm was one of her priorities. She doubted that anyone where he worked knew his background and she wondered how long it would take for the receptionist to mention at some coffee break that a police detective had called for one of the salesmen. This would lead to speculation. And speculation would lead to some nasty details being circulated around the workplace. The trouble she was making for him didn’t bother her in the slightest. She understood that this wasn’t a very enlightened or forgiving attitude but she didn’t care.

When Wolfe came on the line she was blunt.

“You can come around to my office and pick up your computer,” she said. “I’ll be here until six p.m.”

He merely grunted in reply.

She had some time before he would show so she shoved the computer aside roughly and picked up the credit card report. She dialed the number for the bank in Waterville, Maine.

A computer, Adrian thought, is like a funhouse mirror. It reflects much about who someone really is, when one sees past the contortions and blurred shapes.

The puzzle lay in finding the keys to open it up.

Wolfe’s mother had given him some of the right words to open up encrypted files when Adrian had played around with combinations.
Roses-knitting
had opened one door that contained a portfolio of photographs of young women—all in various states of undress—posed provocatively. The first notion that leaped to his head was
kiddie porn
—but he recognized that wasn’t quite accurate. The pictures were provocative and filled with the enticements of fantasy. They made Adrian uncomfortable, until he forced himself to inspect them closely and he realized they were only
suggestions
of slightly older than children. The models in picture after picture were shaved and coy selected for their immature bodies and childlike faces. But they only
looked
young. In Adrian’s mind, they were probably all within days, or weeks, of the eighteen years they needed to avoid being classified as illegal child pornography. As he flipped through them, the pictures increased in intensity. There were shots of teenage boys coupling with the models, joined by pictures of significantly older men, middle-aged and beyond, doing the same. Lechery trumped, he thought.

The
Rosesknitting
files were unsettling but, he knew, not the sort of download that would be flagged on some Interpol computer, or even draw the attention of the local police. He found a link to sites called Barely 18 and Just Old Enough. He didn’t bother to examine these.

There were other files, which he had trouble opening, that made him wish he had a younger person’s expertise with the machine. He tried a series of variations with the word
Sandy.
He guessed that the only reason that name had penetrated the fog of the mother’s disease was because it had been in use in the house. He knew some concoction with that word would open up something in the computer. But every combination he tried was rejected.

Past becomes present, influences the future, Adrian knew. This was something of a mantra for psychologists. Things, events, people, experiences scored into memory affect steps taken in the present and dreams about the days ahead. Mark Wolfe, sex offender, was no different from anyone, except that his damage was more virulent and had created someone with potential. Where it had come from was a mystery. Where it currently resided was clear from the computer screen. Where it would take him was uncertain.

He typed in the password
KillSandy
and images immediately leaped onto the screen.

He stared at a picture of a young girl bending to accept an old man’s erection with her lips. The images made him feel as if he needed to wash his hands and get himself a glass of ice water.

Adrian started to push away from the seat at his desk. He thought he should find a book of poetry read some subtle, rhymed verse, something that had a pristine and honorable quality to it. Perhaps some Shakespearean sonnets, he suggested inwardly, or Byron. Lines that spoke of love in a silken, pure fashion, images that created passion—not pictures of hairy men forcing their engorged energies on women that were closer to girls.

He shifted about in his seat but stopped when he heard his son whisper into his ear, “But Dad, you haven’t looked hard enough. Not yet.”

Adrian turned around quickly, his arms spread, as if he could embrace his son’s ghost and press him to his chest, but he was alone in the room. Tommy’s voice, however, seemed to be right at his side.

“What is it you are seeing?” his son asked him. Tommy had a musical tone in his words. It was like listening to a nine-year-old Tommy, not the adult Tommy. Adrian remembered when his son was young there was nothing he liked more than hearing him call out. It was like an invitation for the father to share something with the son, and it had a precious, jewel-like quality.

“Tommy, where are you?”

“I’m right here. I’m right beside you.”

It was like hearing a voice penetrate thick fog. Adrian desperately wanted to be able to reach through the clouds and touch his son.
Just one more time,
he thought.
That’s all. Just once. A single hug.

“Dad! Pay attention! What is it you are seeing?”

“It’s just some disgusting pornography,” Adrian replied. He felt a little embarrassed that his son was looking at the same things he was.

“No, it’s more than that. Much more.”

Adrian must have looked confused, because he could hear his son sighing. It was like a breath of wind blowing through the stillness of the house.

“Come on, Dad, connect who you are with what you are seeing.”

This made no sense to Adrian. He was a scientist. He was a student of experience. That was what he had taught for so many decades. On the screen in front of him were contorted bodies. Nakedness. Explicitness. All the mystery removed from love, acts boiled down into hard-core, no doubts reality.

“Tommy, I’m sorry, I don’t understand. It’s so much harder now. Things don’t match up the way they should.”

“Fight it, Dad. Make yourself stronger. Take more of those pills. Maybe they’ll help. Force your mind to remember things.”

Tommy’s voice seemed to change, back and forth. Child Tommy. Adult Tommy. Adrian felt buffeted between the two.

“I’m trying.”

There was a momentary hesitation, as if Tommy was thinking about something. Adrian wanted to be able to see him, and his eyes began to cloud up with tears.
It isn’t fair,
he thought.
I can see the others, but now it’s Tommy and he won’t show himself.
It was a little like the great conundrum all parents know, that one day they look at the child they raised and he or she has grown up and entered into a world of their own that seems alien and incomprehensible.
The people we love the most become strangers to us,
he thought.

“Dad, when you read a poem…”

Adrian spun about in his seat, as if he could catch a glimpse of his child by darting his eyes about the room.

“What is it you are trying to see in the words?”

He sighed. Tommy’s voice was faded and distant and it hurt to listen to it. He could feel pinpricks on his skin.

“I wanted to be there for you. I can’t stand it that you died somewhere on the other side of the world and I wasn’t there for you. I can’t stand it that I couldn’t do anything about it. I can’t stand it that I couldn’t save you.”

“The poetry, Dad. Think of the poems.”

He sighed again. He looked over at a picture of Tommy that he kept above his desk. High school graduation. A snapshot stolen when his son hadn’t been watching. He was grinning, filled with everything that was possible about the world and none of the heartache or trouble that was an inevitable part of it. Adrian almost thought as if the picture were speaking to him, except that Tommy’s voice was insistent and coming from behind his head.

“What do you see in the poems?”

“Words. Rhymes. Imagery. Metaphor. Art that evokes ideas. Seduction. I don’t know, Tommy, what is it…”

“Think, Dad. How can a poem help you find Jennifer?”

“I don’t know. Can it?”

“Why not?”

Adrian thought everything was reversed. Tommy had been their only child, and it had been Adrian who protected him and encouraged him and steered him along, and now it was like he was the child and Tommy knew things that he didn’t. Except, he understood, it was he himself that knew things, but they were hard to reach, so Tommy was there to guide him even though his son was dead.

He wondered for a moment,
Are the dead always there to help us?

“What do you see?”

He turned back to the computer.

“Just pictures.”

“No, Dad. It’s not really about the image. Just like in a poem, it’s about how the image is perceived.”

Adrian breathed in sharply. He remembered this phrase. For years he had taught a popular course at the university, Fear and its Uses in Modern Society, that not only examined the nature of fright physiologically but also then branched into horror films and scary novels and the way fear was a part of popular culture. It was a spring semester senior- and graduate-level course, very popular with students who had spent too many evenings hunched over white mice in laboratories and who were overjoyed to be seated listening to Adrian opine about
Jaws
and
Friday the 13th
and Peter Straub’s
Ghost Story.
This was the phrase that he concluded his final lecture with.

“Yes, Tommy, I know, but—”

“Jennifer, Dad.”

“Yes. Jennifer. But how does this—”

“Dad, think hard. Focus.”

Adrian grabbed a yellow legal pad from a corner of his desk. He seized a pen and wrote:

Jennifer runs away from home.

Jennifer is snatched from the street by strangers.

Jennifer disappears.

Jennifer is not ransomed.

Jennifer is lost.

It was like a poem on a page. “The Missing Jennifer.”

Adrian looked at the naked figures on the screen. The models weren’t coupling because they loved each other or because they desired each other or even because they wanted pleasure.

Money. Or exhibitionism. Or both.

“But they didn’t ask for ransom, Dad, did they?”

Tommy’s voice had dropped to a whisper. It seemed to be echoing somewhere inside his head.

“But how can someone make money off of…” Adrian stopped. The entire world made money off of sex.

“Connect, Dad.
Connect.
” Tommy was pleading with him.

He felt stupid. He felt uneducated and caught in some sort of brain mire.

“How do I…” He stared, then he hesitated as Tommy interrupted him.

“You know who can tell you,” Tommy said. “But he won’t tell you what you need to know easily. Take help. Take persuasion.”

Adrian nodded. He closed up the computer and placed it in a satchel. He found his coat and tugged it on. He looked down at his wristwatch and checked the time. It read 6:30. He did not know whether this was morning or evening. He did not know how he knew this, but he was certain that Tommy would not accompany him.
Maybe Brian,
he thought. He looked around for Cassie, because he could use a word of support and encouragement.
They were both braver than I ever was,
he thought.
My wife. My son.
But Tommy’s voice seemed to have faded away and she was absent, although in the next instant he could feel her, as if Cassie were right in front, pulling him along. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he said, as if she were impatient. He remembered that when they were young, sometimes he would be working, engrossed in some psychological study, or a piece of scientific writing, or trying to construct one of his poems, and she would come into the room where he was and wordlessly take him by the hand and, with a small nod and a laugh, lead him to the bed to make really abandoned love. But this time there was some other, far more pressing need waiting in the upstairs bedroom for him and he could feel her dragging him insistently in that direction.

It was dark and he could hear the voices raised in anger right through the door. The shouting seemed to come mostly from Mark Wolfe, with his mother wailing pathetically in response. He listened intently for a few minutes, standing outside, letting the night chill creep inside his skin. The door muffled just enough of the rage so that he could recognize only the intensity of the argument, not the subject, although he guessed it had something to do with the computer in his satchel.

Adrian wondered if he should wait for a lull, and then he simply knocked on the door.

Immediately the shouts stopped.

He knocked again and took a single step back. He expected the anger to buffet him like a wave against the beach when the door opened. He heard a lock being unfastened and light poured over him as the door swung wide.

There was a moment’s silence.

“Son of a bitch,” Mark Wolfe said.

Adrian nodded. “I have something of yours,” he said.

“No shit. Give it here.”

Mark Wolfe reached for him, as if by seizing Adrian’s coat he could repossess the computer.

He did not know who was shouting instructions in his ear—
Brian? Tommy?
—but he lurched back, avoiding the sex offender’s reach, and suddenly he realized he had his brother’s 9mm automatic in his hand, and it was pointing directly at Wolfe.