What Comes Next (44 page)

She used the loose vernacular of the therapists they knew socially.

“Look, you’re wrong, just damn wrong,” the filmmaker responded, his own voice rising as he watched the screen. “If she doesn’t obey them, she could be opening herself up for almost anything. They’ll panic. They might…”

His wife was pointing at the corner of the screen. Number 4 had lifted both hands to the collar around her neck. This motion had gained their attention. Abruptly, the angle on the screen changed to an overhead view, slightly behind Number 4, and held that position. The filmmaker noted this shift, knew instinctively what it meant, and leaned forward eagerly. But the performance artist was pointing at something else.

Jennifer tucked Mister Brown Fur under her arm and brought her hands up to the collar and chain. She understood that she had three choices: Make some noise. Try to run. Do nothing and pray for the police to arrive.

The first was what they told her precisely
not
to do. She had no idea whether the policemen upstairs would be able to hear her. For all she knew, her cell had been soundproofed, just in case what was happening did happen. She thought that the man and the woman had planned out so many things; she had to do something unexpected.

This thought terrified her.

She understood that she was at a precipice. She balanced everything, but frantic energy overcame her.

Jennifer started to tear at the dog collar.

Her fingernails ripped and clawed. She gritted her teeth.

Paradoxically she didn’t remove the blindfold. It was as if doing two things that were wrong was too much for her to handle at once.

Jennifer could feel her nails cracking; she could feel the skin on her throat being rubbed raw. She was breathing like a diver trapped beneath the waves, searching for a taste of air.

Every bit of strength she had left went into the assault on the collar. Mister Brown Fur slipped from her grasp and dropped to the floor at her feet. Beneath the blindfold she was sobbing with pain.

She wanted to scream, and in the second that her mouth opened wide she felt the material start to tear. She gasped and wrenched the collar savagely.

And suddenly it fell away.

Jennifer sobbed, nearly falling back on the bed.

She heard the chain rattle as it dropped to the floor.

Silence surrounded her, but inwardly it seemed to Jennifer that there was some great discordant overture of sound, like a blackboard being scratched or a jet engine passing only feet over her head. She clasped her hands to her ears, trying to shut it out.

She tried to steady herself; the sudden freedom made her dizzy. It was as if the chain had been holding her up like a puppet’s strings, and now, abruptly, her legs went rubbery and her muscles flapped like a torn flag in a gust of wind.

The blindfold remained in place. Hundreds of thoughts raced through her head but screeching fear obscured them all. Hands shaking, she reached up and tore it away.

Pulling off the black sheet of cloth was like abruptly staring into the sun. She held her hand up and blinked. Her eyes were watering and she thought she was blind, but just as quickly her vision started to recover, racking into focus like a movie camera.

Jennifer looked around.

The first thing she did was freeze in position. She stared directly at the main camera a few feet away. She wanted to smash it but she did not. Instead, she reached down quietly and picked up her stuffed bear.

Then she slowly turned to the table where she had seen her clothes when she had peeked out from beneath the blindfold days earlier.

They were gone.

She staggered slightly, as if she’d been slapped. A wave of fright-nausea threatened to overcome her and she swallowed hard. She’d been counting on her clothes, as if putting on jeans and a tattered sweatshirt was taking a step back toward the life she had known, while standing near naked in the cell simply continued the life she had been thrust into. She tried to make sense of this division but could not. Instead, her head pivoted right and left, looking, hoping they had merely been moved. But the room was empty—save for the bed, the camera, the discarded chain, and the camp toilet.

A part of her wanted to reassure herself,
It’s okay, it’s okay, you can run just as you are,
but if this thought crept into her imagination it was hidden. She stepped forward.

Jennifer repeated to herself
get out get out get out
without thinking what she would do next. All she had was the vague idea of bursting free somehow and shouting for the police upstairs. Inwardly, her fantasy kept changing with every small action. Now she had to find them, not the other way around.

She took a deep breath and crossed the cell floor, bare feet slapping against cement, stepping past the camera and reaching for the door handle.

Don’t be locked don’t be locked…

Her hand wrapped around the knob. It turned.

Mister Brown Fur we’re free!

Gingerly, trying to be as silent as possible, she pushed the door open. She tensed, telling herself,
Get ready. We’re going to run. Run hard. Run fast. Run harder and faster than you ever have before.

She had time for a single breath, a single vision of where she was. She saw a dark, shadowy basement, littered with ancient must, a wooden framed window filled with a black night sky and covered with cobwebs and dusty debris, before a light, brighter than any light she’d ever known, exploded in her eyes, blinding her instantly. She gasped, holding up her bear, trying to block the explosion. It was like a fire bursting toward her.

Suddenly everything went utterly black as a hood—like the hood that had encased her in her first second of captivity—was jammed down over her head, cutting off the light. Before she choked she heard the woman’s harsh voice: “Poor choices, Number Four.” For a second she struggled wildly, but then she was thrown down and clamped in a grip that was part pain, part vise. Whatever terror she had known in the days past gathered in a single horrible second and seemed to spiral into a great dark hole.

She plummeted helplessly after.

The performance artist shook her head. “Damn,” she said, instantly sad but still fascinated. “Damn.” The filmmaker husband sighed. “I told you so,” he whispered quietly as they watched Number 4 struggle helplessly. “This is so wrong” his wife said. But she did not turn off the feed. Instead, she clutched his hand and shuddered as they settled back on their couch and, utterly unable to turn away, continued to watch.

At the same time, at the University of Georgia, in the Tau Epsilon Phi house, the frat boy frantically sent a text message to his roommate still stuck in a late-night class. It read. “No shit! We 1! It’s goin down now. Yer missin it.”

In the corner of the screen in front of him the Virginity Clock stopped on a number, which flashed red for a moment before going back to zero.

36

“No,” Adrian said.

“No. No. No. No,” he repeated.

Image after image of young women leaped onto the screen. All were involved in various sex acts or else posturing for a live webcam that captured them covered in suds while taking a shower, naked while they assiduously put on makeup or salaciously entertained a man or another woman. Usually a man with tattoos or a woman with billowy blond hair. Some were budding porn stars. Others were rank amateurs. There were college students and call girls. All seemed to play to the camera. Adrian thought they were all childlike and beautiful yet mysterious. He berated himself inwardly:
Years of studying psychology and you cannot tell why someone would expose themselves so intimately for any stranger to watch.

Of course, he knew one answer. Money. But this made little sense to him.

Then he had a second thought:
The camera isn’t public. It’s only the means of distributing themselves.

Adrian turned to the sex offender, who was ordering up each entry. He expected Mark Wolfe to look exasperated, to throw up his hands in frustration, because that was what
he
felt, but the sex offender did nothing of the kind. He simply continued punching computer keys and bringing up pictures, penetrating website after website. It was a cascade of pornography, flowing downhill into the computer. Wolfe had a maestro’s style, clicking away, rarely pausing to take a lingering look at the sights or videos that flooded the screen, ignoring the constant moaning and groaning that came through the speakers. Adrian, too, had settled into a rhythm of viewing, paying little attention to the actual details of each image, as if the numbing repetition had somehow immunized him to what his eyes absorbed, watching instead for a telltale sign that they had stumbled on Jennifer.

He shifted about in his seat.

“Mister Wolfe,” he said slowly, “are we going about this the right way?”

Wolfe stopped. He punched the key that cut the sound off from the computer, leaving a girl who seemed barely eighteen writhing with what Adrian assumed was the most phony of passions in the background. He held up a list he’d made on a pad of legal-sized paper. It was filled with
dot.com
addresses and website names such as Screwingteenagers.com or Watchme24.com. Adrian thought just about
any
combination of sexually suggestive words had evolved into a spot on the Internet map.

“I’ve got a lot of places yet to go,” he started, before shaking his head.

Adrian tried again: “The right way, Mister Wolfe?”

“No, professor,” he replied. Wolfe pointed at the woman in front of them. “And,” he said slowly, “as you can probably tell by now, not too many of these people are being forced to do anything they don’t want to do.”

Adrian looked at the screen. He felt as if he’d been in a fight.

“No, I’m not exactly right,” Wolfe continued. “Maybe they’ve been forced because they’re broke, or forced because they don’t have a job, or forced because it’s the only thing they can do. Or maybe something inside them forces them, because it turns them on. Possible. But that sure ain’t the case for little Jennifer, is it?” Wolfe finished his statement with a question.

Adrian nodded.

“Yeah,” Wolfe said. “And even the amateurs, or the high school kids posting on Facebook, they’re too damn old for the girl you’re looking for. And all these sites, well, in order to keep from getting busted, they’re pretty damn careful about making sure that even the teenagers taking pix with cell phone cameras and sneaking around so that Mom and Dad don’t find ‘em are at least eighteen. No one wants the heat that…” He stopped. Adrian looked over at him.

He stared hard at the sex offender. He realized that the places Wolfe had steered their inquiry were far too legal and mainstream. Adrian wondered whether the sex offender had been testing him.

“Mister Wolfe, you’re the expert here. Give me some expert advice.”

Wolfe appeared to be thinking, before reaching down to the floor where he’d stashed a bottle of water. He took a long pull. Then he crumpled up the sheets of paper filled with Web locations that he had been using as a guide.

“I’ve got one idea.” He rocked back in his seat, thinking, before continuing. “Well, you know what date little Jennifer disappeared, so if she’s somewhere in here it has to be a new posting. Most of these other sites have been around for a long time. The faces change. The action doesn’t.”

Adrian nodded. “Coercion, Mister Wolfe. A child being forced.”

Wolfe picked up the flyer and stared at Jennifer’s picture. “A child, huh? She looks pretty…”

Adrian must have looked oddly fierce, because Wolfe held up his hand. “I understand. You see a child. I see, well…” He hesitated. Adrian suspected he was going to say something that included the word
ripe.
“All right, professor. Now we’re stepping into the dangerous part. You sure you want to go along?”

“Yes.”

“Real dark places. Look at most of this stuff, professor. It might be explicit. It might even be disgusting to some folks. Or shocking, hell, I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be here if there weren’t someone somewhere willing to pay for the opportunity to watch. And enough
someones
so that all the places we’ve been to are making money. So fit little Jennifer into that scheme and we’ll know where to go.’”

“Stop calling her
little Jennifer,
Mister Wolfe. It makes it sound…”

Wolfe laughed and filled in the word: “…
trivial?
”

“That’s good enough.”

“Well, I’ll try. But you gotta understand something. The Web makes everything trivial.”

Wolfe looked at the entwined bodies on the screen.

“What do you see, professor?”

“I see a couple having sex.”

Wolfe shook his head.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say. That’s what just about everyone says. Look closer, professor.”

Adrian thought it was Wolfe speaking, but then he recognized Brian’s voice. And it wasn’t alone. It was as if behind the one hallucination there was a second, and he bent forward trying to separate out the tones until he realized that Tommy was echoing Brian.

“Look deeper,” he heard.

For a moment he was confused, not sure where the insistence came from. And then he understood it
had
to be Tommy. He wanted to burst out in a laugh of delight. He had almost given up hope he would hear his son again.

“Look deeper,” he heard a second time. “It’s what I told you before, Dad. Use poetry. Use psychology. Think like a criminal. Put yourself in the rat’s shoes. Why do they run down one maze corridor and not the other? Why? What do they gain and how do they gain it? Come on, Dad, you can do it.”

Adrian whispered his son’s name. Just saying the word
Tommy
filled him with a mixture of emotions, love and loss, all barreling around within him. He wanted to ask his son,
What are you saying?
but the words got lost on his tongue as Tommy’s insistence interrupted him.