What Comes Next (4 page)

She put the dispatcher on hold while she dialed a second number, one that she kept on a list by the kitchen phone. An advantage of having been through what she had experienced was the informal network of help available. Luckily, the woman she dialed was a dedicated night owl. “Hello, Laurie, it’s Terri. I hate to bother you at this late hour, but…”

“You’ve been called in on a case and you need me to watch the kids?”

Terri could actually hear enthusiasm in her friend’s voice.

“Yes.”

“Be right over. No problem. My pleasure. How late do you think you’ll be?” Terri smiled. Her friend Laurie was an insomniac of the first order, and Terri knew that she secretly loved being called in the middle of the night, especially to watch over children, now that her own had grown up and moved away. It gave her something to do other than uselessly watching late-night cable or pacing anxiously about her darkened house talking to herself about everything that had gone wrong in her life. This was, Terri had learned, a lengthy conversation.

“Hard to say. At least a couple of hours. But probably late. Maybe even all night.”

“I’ll bring my toothbrush,” Laurie replied.

She hit the HOLD button and reconnected with the police dispatcher.

“Tell Mrs. Riggins I’ll be at her home within thirty minutes to talk to her and get an investigation started. Are uniformed officers there?”

“They have been dispatched.”

“Let them know I’ll be along shortly. They should take down any preliminary statements so we can put a time line together. They should also try to settle Mrs. Riggins down.”

Terri doubted they would be successful at this.

“Ten-four,” the dispatcher replied, disconnecting the line.

Laurie would be over within minutes. That was her neighbor’s style. She hung up the phone. Laurie liked thinking she was an integral part of whatever investigation or crime scene that Terri was being called to, as important as a forensic technician or fingerprint expert. This was a harmless and useful conceit. Terri went back into the bathroom, dashed some water on her face, and ran a brush through her hair. Despite the late hour, she wanted to look fresh, presentable, and exceptionally capable in the face of frantic panic.

The street was dark and there were few lights on in any of the houses when Terri drove through the Rigginses’ neighborhood. The only home with any outward activity was her destination, where the porch light shone brightly and Terri could see figures moving about in the living room. A single police cruiser was parked in the driveway, but the responding officers had left their flashing lights off, so it merely looked like another car waiting for the morning suburban exodus to work or school.

Terri pulled up in her battered six-year-old compact. She took a minute to breathe deeply before she gathered her things—a satchel with a mini—tape recorder and a bound notebook. She kept her badge attached to the strap of the satchel. Her weapon was holstered and on the seat next to her. She clamped it to the belt of her jeans, after double-checking to make certain the safety was on and no round was chambered. Another deep breath and she stepped out into the night and made her way across the lawn toward the house.

It was a trip she had made twice before in the past eighteen months.

She could see her breath vaporizing in the air like smoke. The temperature had fallen, but not so far that any person in New England did anything other than wrap their coat a little more tightly around their chest and maybe turn up the collar. There was clarity to the cold, not the same as the frost of winter, but a sense that lines were still drawn in the air, even with spring fitfully making its start.

Terri wished she had stopped by her desk at the four-person detective bureau over at police headquarters and pulled her file on the Riggins family, although she doubted that there was any detail or note in those reports that she hadn’t already committed to memory. What she hated was the sensation that she was walking into a scene that was something far different from what it purported to be.
An underage runaway
was how she would write it up for the department records and precisely how the detective bureau would handle the case. She knew exactly what steps she would take and what the departmental guidelines and procedures were for this sort of disappearance. She even had a reasonable guess about the likely outcome of the case. But that wasn’t what was really happening, she told herself. There was some underlying reason for Jennifer’s persistence and there was probably a far worse crime lurking within the teenager’s single-minded dedication to getting away from her home. Terri just didn’t think she would ever uncover it no matter how many statements she took from the mother and the boyfriend or how hard she worked the case.

She hated the notion that she was about to participate in a falsehood.

On the front stoop, she hesitated before knocking on the door. She pictured her own two children at home asleep, unaware that she was not right down the hallway in her little bedroom with her own door open and her sleep light, in case she heard any strange sound. They were still young. Whatever heartache and worry they were going to produce—and there was surely to be some—was still to come.

Jennifer was considerably farther along that road.

Farther along a couple of roads,
Terri thought. The double entendre made sense of the situation inside the house.

Terri took a final deep breath of the cold night air, like swallowing the last drop of water from a glass. She knocked once, then pushed the door open and stepped quickly into a small hallway. She knew there was a picture of a smiling Jennifer at age nine, pink bow in carefully combed hair, framed on the wall near the stairs to the upper bedrooms. There was an endearing gap between the girl’s front teeth. It was the sort of picture beloved of parents and hated by teenagers because it reminded both of the same time, seen through different lenses and distorted by different memories.

To her left, in the living room, she saw Mary Riggins and Scott West—the boyfriend—perched on the edge of a sofa. Scott had his arm loosely draped around Mary’s shoulders and gripped her hand. Cigarettes burned in an ashtray on a coffee table. Cans of soda and half-empty cups of coffee crowded the tabletop. Poised uncomfortably to the side were two uniformed officers. One was the late-night shift sergeant and the other was a twenty-two-year-old rookie who’d been on the force for only a month. Clearly the sergeant was still engaged in the breaking-in process for the younger man. She nodded in their direction, caught a slight roll of the eyes from the sergeant just as Mary Riggins burst out in a howl: “She’s done it again, detective.”

These words ended in a torrent of sobs.

She had been crying and her makeup was streaked, black lines scarring her cheeks, giving her a Halloween appearance. Crying had turned her eyes puffy, making her look far older than she was. Terri thought that tears were always difficult for middle-aged women—they instantly brought out all the years they tried so hard to hide.

Instead of launching into any further explanation, Mary Riggins buried her head into Scott the boyfriend’s shoulder. He was a little older than she was, gray-haired, distinguished looking even in jeans and faded red-checked work shirt. He was a new age therapist who specialized in holistic treatments for any number of psychiatric illnesses and had a successful practice in the academic community, which was always receptive to different techniques in the same way that some people flit from diet to diet. He drove a bright red drop-top Mazda sports car and often cruised around the valley in the winter with the car open, bundled in a parka and lumberjacks floppy fur hat, which seemed more than merely eccentric and had a sense of defiance to it. The town police were very familiar with Scott West and his work; he and the Mazda collected speeding tickets with daunting frequency, and on more than one occasion the police had been forced to quietly clean up psychological messes created by his eccentric practice. Several suicides. A standoff with a knife-wielding paranoid schizophrenic he’d advised to stop taking Haldol and exchange it with Saint John’s wort purchased from the local health food store.

The cigarettes and soda cans and coffee cups shouldn’t be there,
Terri thought. Scott came from the yoga-Pilates traditions that considered a Diet Coke or a Starbucks latte a sign of disconnect with the greater deep benign forces of nature. Terri thought his attitudes had more in common with astrology than psychology.

If she could have, she would have laughed at him and said something about the addictive powers of hypocrisy. But she had learned early in her police career that there was no end to the many contradictions people clutched in their lives, and pointing them out rarely did anyone any good. Terri liked to think of herself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, reasoned and ordered in her thinking, straightforward in her approach. If this style occasionally made her appear unfriendly, well, that was okay with her. She had already had her fill of passion and eccentricity and madness in her own life in years gone by, and order and process was what she preferred, because, she thought, it kept her safe.

Scott leaned forward. He spoke in a practiced, therapist’s voice, deep, calm, and reasonable. It was a voice designed to make him seem like her ally in the situation, when Terri knew the opposite was much closer to the truth.

“Mary’s very upset, detective. Despite
all
our efforts, on a nearly continual basis…” He stopped there, refusing to complete the sentence.

Terri nodded. She turned to the two uniformed officers. The sergeant handed her a piece of loose-leaf ruled notepaper, the sort that was in every high school student’s three-ring binder. The handwriting was careful, a script formed by someone who wanted to make certain that each word was clear and legible. It was not something that had been rapidly scribbled by a teenager eager to head out the door and do what the note said she was going to do. It was a note that had been worked on. Perhaps it was even the third or fourth carefully constructed draft. Terri guessed if she searched hard she could find discarded alternatives in a wastebasket or in the trash containers out back. Before she responded Terri read through the note three times.

Mom,

I’m going to the movies with some friends I’m meeting at the mall. I’ll get dinner there and maybe spend the night at either Sarah or Katie’s house. I’ll call you after the movie to let you know or else just come home then. I won’t be too late. I’ve finished my homework and have nothing new due until next week.

Very reasonable. Very concise. A complete falsehood.

“Where was this left?”

“Stuck to the fridge with a magnet,” the sergeant said. “Right where it couldn’t be missed.”

Terri read it through a couple more times.
You’re learning, aren’t you, Jennifer?
she thought.
You knew exactly what to write.

Movies
—that meant her mother would assume her cell phone was shut off, and it gave her at least a two-hour window when she couldn’t reasonably be reached.

Some friends
—not specified but seemingly benign. The two names she did provide, Sarah and Katie, were probably willing to cover for her, or were themselves unavailable.

I’ll call you
—so her mother and Scott would sit around waiting for the telephone to ring while valuable minutes were lost.

No homework
—Jennifer removed from the equation the biggest external excuse for her mother to call her.

Terri thought it was clever the way Jennifer had bought a block of time, sent her mother in directions other than the right one, and hidden the real purpose of her plan. She looked up at Mary Riggins.

“You telephoned her friends?” she asked.

Scott answered. “Of course, detective. After the last showings at the theaters we called every Sarah and Katie we could think of. Neither of us could ever recall Jennifer talking about any friend with either of those names. Then we went through every other name we could remember ever hearing from her. None of them had been to the mall, and none had made plans to meet with Jennifer. Or had seen her since school ended in the afternoon.”

Terri nodded.
Smart girl.

“Jennifer doesn’t seem to have that many friends,” Mary said wistfully. “She’s never been good at a lot of the social networking of junior high or high school.”

This statement, Terri guessed, was a repetition of something Scott had said in many “family” discussions.

“But she could be with someone you don’t know?”

Both mother and boyfriend shook their heads.

“You don’t think she has some secret boyfriend that she’s maybe hidden from you guys?”

“No,” Scott said. “I would have picked up on those signs.”

Sure,
Terri thought. She didn’t say this out loud but made a notation on her pad of paper.

Mary gathered herself together and tried to respond in some less tear-strewn manner. But her voice quavered, endowing each word with a shakiness that perfectly captured her fear. “When I finally thought to go to her room, you know, maybe there was some other note, or something, I saw that her bear was gone. A teddy bear she named
Mister Brown Fur
. She’s slept with it every night… it’s like a security blanket. Her father gave it to her not long before he died, and she would never ever go anywhere and leave it behind.”

Too sentimental,
Terri thought.
Jennifer, taking that teddy bear along with you was a mistake. Maybe the only one, but a mistake nevertheless. Otherwise you would have had twenty-four hours instead of the six you’ve successfully stolen.

“Was there anything specific that happened in the past few days that would prompt Jennifer to try to run now?” she asked. “A big fight… maybe some event at school…”

Mary Riggins simply sobbed.

Scott West replied quickly, “No, detective. If you’re looking for some outward, triggering action by Mary or me that might have prompted this behavior on Jennifer’s part, I can assure you it doesn’t exist. No fights. No demands. No teenage temper tantrums. She hasn’t been grounded. She hasn’t been punished. In fact, things have been blissfully quiet around here the last few weeks. I thought—as did her mother—that maybe we’d turned a corner and things were going to calm down.”