The Dead Student (18 page)

The sister wouldn’t testify against her brother.

The whole family’s fingerprints were on the Purdey shotgun.

And she knew that the high-priced criminal defense attorney engaged
by the family had lined up a series of teachers, psychologists, and school friends—all of whom would happily describe in sympathetic detail the relentless terror that the dead father had brought to that house.

And then that defense attorney would tell a jury it was all an accident. Tragic. Regrettable. Sad. Terrible even. But when all was said and done, an accident.

“The father was beating the mother as he had done a hundred times before and the son tried to threaten him with the shotgun to make him stop. Defending his mother. How sweet. How noble. We’d have all done the same thing. The poor lad, he didn’t even know it was loaded, and it went off …”

A powerful argument to a deeply moved jury—who would not see the coldness in the son’s eyes, nor the glee in his voice as he described patiently hunting the father through the many rooms of the house in much the same way the father had probably used the shotgun to stalk grouse in the fields. He’d ambushed the father in the study when the mother was nowhere near.

Money can’t buy you love,
Susan said to herself, echoing another song.

Especially when there’s a serial abuser involved,
she thought.
The dead man might have been a prominent, fabulously wealthy businessman with a big Mercedes and a powerboat tied to his private dock, on every local board, lending his name to every local good cause and needy charity—but he liked to use his fists on his family.

Fuck him.

And now the kid’s going to get away with killing him.

Fuck the kid.

And just maybe fuck me, too.

At the very least, she knew she was due a real chewing-out. At the worst, she’d be spending a couple of months handling DUI cases in traffic court.

She hated complicated crimes. She liked simple ones. Bad guy. Innocent victim.
Bang
. Cops make an arrest. Here’s the gun. Here’s the confession. An efficient lineup of reliable witnesses. Plenty of forensic evidence. No problems. Then she could get up in a courtroom and point her finger with all the self-righteousness of some outraged Puritan staring at an accused witch.

But even more, she hated losing, even if in losing there was some measure of justice, as there had been that day. And when she lost, especially when she’d been humiliated, she invariably felt the tug of
need
. Cocaine instantly replaced defeat and helped her soar back into the necessary compulsion of being a prosecutor.

When your day is done and you wanna run …

So, on this night of failure that obscured truth, she was back at the AA meeting. Susan Terry sighed, thought she’d delayed long enough, started to hum the refrain,
She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie …
and emerged from the shadows. “Damn it to hell,” she said out loud, still thinking of the courtroom that morning. “It was all my fault.” The words
my fault
made her pause, because just at that moment she saw Moth hurrying toward the front door of Redeemer One.

Moth was already speaking when Susan slipped quietly into one of the chairs near the rear of the room, hoping that no one noticed her tardy entry. It did not take her long to realize he wasn’t talking about drink or drugs.

“Hello, I’m Timothy, and now I’ve got twenty-two days without a drink …”

Soft applause. Murmured congratulations.

“And I’m more convinced than ever that my uncle didn’t kill himself. I’ve been all over his life, and there’s nothing suicidal there.”

The room grew quiet.

Moth looked around, trying to measure in the eyes of the people in the room how they would react to what he was saying. He knew he should speak carefully, render his words and phrases organized and precise. But he was unable, and feelings tumbled from him like pearls from a broken strand.

“We all know—even me, and I’m the youngest here—what has to happen in order to make that last decision. The
I can’t go on any longer
decision. We all know the hole you have to fall into and the one you know you can’t climb out of. We all know the mistakes that are necessary …”
He emphasized the word
mistakes
because he knew that everyone in the meeting would understand everything that was connected to that single word.
Despair
.
Failure. Drugs and booze. Loss and agony.
He paused again. Everyone in that room had probably imagined killing themselves even if they had not precisely said the word
suicide
out loud. “And more than almost everyone, we know what goes into that choice.”

Moth thought that everything he said had created a slight wind in the room, like an air current, cold, direct on the face.
What do I know more than anything else about my uncle?
Moth asked himself.
The Ed I knew hated secrets. He hated lies. He’d put them all behind him.

He looked around. The entire point of being in that room right at that moment was to leave deception and dishonesty behind.

“It’s not there. Not for Ed. Not in the last few days. Not in the last few weeks. Not in the last few months or years. That leaves only one logical conclusion. It’s the same one I reached the minute I sobered up after his death.”

He looked around.

“I need help.”

When he said
help,
it was as if the room stiffened. Everyone was familiar with the sort of
help
that the meetings typically offered. But Moth was asking for something different.

The meeting slipped into silence. Susan Terry tried to assess the responses of the other addicts in the room to Moth’s declaration.

“So, you tell me,” Moth said cautiously, “where do I look for a killer?”

Again there was silence, but it was broken when the engineer leaned forward.

“When did he start drinking? I mean, really drinking …”

“About three years after he launched into his bad, dumb-ass marriage. He thought he needed a cover-up, or maybe he thought he could not be gay if he was married and he was lying to himself and everyone else about who he was. His practice was starting up, and things should have been great, except they weren’t …”

“So,” the engineer said, “that was when he started to kill himself.”

This was a harsh assessment. But accurate.

“And then,” the engineer continued, “he stopped trying to kill himself and came here.”

“That’s right,” Moth said.

The philosophy professor half-stood, then sat down and spoke in a determined voice, waving his arms theatrically to underscore his points. “If you go back—to when Ed first became a drunk like me or you or most of the people here—well, why would someone need to kill a person who was doing it to themselves so efficiently?”

A murmur of agreement.

“So, the only way a homicide makes sense today is if the reason for it transcends Ed’s drunken days. Sobriety, his life now—all that accomplishment and success—that has to be an affront. A challenge. I don’t know, but for someone, it had to be a lot more than just
wrong
,” the professor continued.

“Not a robbery. We know that. Not a suicide. That’s what you’re telling us. Not a family dispute or a sex thing. No triangle of jealousy. Those have all been ruled out. Not money or love. They’re off the table. What does that leave you?”

The dentist raised his hand to interrupt. He seemed excited as he rubbed his hands together.

Moth turned to him. He was a slight fellow, with a terrible comb-over and like many in his profession, well versed in suicide. Now he was nodding his head up and down fiercely, and he blurted out: “Revenge.”

“That’s what I was driving at,” said the philosophy professor.

Susan Terry sat ramrod-straight in her chair. Everything she heard seemed half-crazy, half-criminal. She thought she should shout out, tell everyone they were being stupid, it was a closed case and they shouldn’t let their imaginations run away with them, shouldn’t let Moth’s imagination push their own into fantasy.

There were dozens of warnings, denials, objections she wanted to scream.
Why are you all being so stupid?
She glanced over at the dentist. He was smiling, and now he was shaking his head, but not in the way one
does if he disagrees—more as one does when he sees some great irony. “I read a lot of mystery books,” he said. There was a little laughter, then silence crept into the room again.

“So do I,” said the professor finally. “I just don’t let the other department faculty know.”

There was another low series of voices as the folks at Redeemer One bent heads together.
Revenge
wasn’t a word anyone had ever uttered in that setting.

“But for what?” Moth asked.

Again there was silence. Then the well-coiffed lady banker-lawyer spoke softly.

“Who did your uncle hurt?”

They all knew that the lists of people
they
had hurt were extensive for each of them. But quiet dominated the room.

The lady lawyer lowered her voice, but everyone at Redeemer One could hear her clearly: “Or maybe,” she said slowly, forming a sentence into what Moth believed was a question, “he did something worse?”

14

Standing beside his next victim had been intoxicating.

Risky—but well worth the thrill: like driving a car too fast on a wet highway, feeling the wheels slipping against the pavement, then magically regaining purchase.

Student #5 was back in Manhattan, at his own desk, less than five hours after watching the newly well-armed Jeremy Hogan pull out of the gun shop parking lot.
Sometimes,
he imagined,
murder seems predestined. It was serendipity that I saw my target exiting his home, good fortune I was able to follow him unobserved, blind luck that he chose to go to the gun store, and then beating the greatest of odds when I stood within arm’s reach and went unrecognized.

He smiled, nodding his head.
This death will be special.

He loved the danger.
Connect more,
he insisted to himself.
Even if every time raises the threat of detection.

He had to stop his hand from reaching for his telephone, gathering the small attachment that electronically altered his voice, and dialing Doctor Hogan’s number.

Wait. Savor.

Rocking back in his seat, then standing and pacing about his apartment, clenching his hands together, then releasing them, shaking his wrists, as if he could loosen his body, Student #5 warned himself not to get carried away.

Stick to the plan.

Every battle is won before it is fought.

Student #5 kept quotations from Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
on cards that he posted on a bulletin board next to his desk.

Pretend inferiority and encourage your enemy’s arrogance.

If you are near your enemy, make him believe you are far from him. If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are close.

Attack him where he is unprepared. Appear where you are not expected.

It was important not just to know what routes Jeremy Hogan traveled, the hours he kept, the behaviors he couldn’t change no matter how much he might want to, but also to be able to anticipate how the doctor might find the emotional strength to
try
to alter familiar patterns in an effort to elude the person hunting him down. He did not believe Jeremy Hogan would be successful at this. People rarely are, he knew. They cling to established patterns because those are psychologically reassuring. In the face of death, people glue themselves to what they know, when in fact what they don’t know is closing in on them.

These were all observations he’d gleaned from his studies. They dated back to the days when he believed he was destined to be a doctor of the mind.

Who would have thought that the psychology of killing would be so close to the psychology of help?

He had fought off the temptation to assist the old man out to his car with his brand-new collection of guns and ammunition. It would have been a friendly, neighborly offer—but Student #5 knew he had already risked enough, just in trailing the doctor to the gun store and following him inside. He’d made no effort to try to change his voice when he had asked the proprietor for a weapon to try, subtly watching to see if the word tones might trigger a memory—and then recognition—in the old doctor.

He’d seen none.

He’d expected none.

It made him even more confident.

What great camouflage age is
:
Add a few crow’s-feet and deepen the jowls, put in a touch of gray against the temples, wear glasses to make it seem as if the eyes are weakening—and memory deceives us.

Context, too, was important. The doctor who had betrayed him once when he was young wasn’t able to recognize that the nice adult thirty years later holding the store’s door wide for him as he struggled with his purchases was the man who was going to kill him.

Because he never considered that I would be right there at that moment.

Sometimes the best mask is no mask at all.

A sudden curiosity overcame him, and Student #5 started to rummage around in his desk drawers, until he came across a small, red-leather-embossed picture album. He flipped it open. There he was, graduating from high school, and then a similar shot—arm in arm with his parents—when he completed college. Grins of accomplishment and black academic robes. Innocence and optimism. These were followed by a couple of bare-chested beach pictures, some candid snapshots of Student #5 with girls whose names he couldn’t recall or friends that had faded from his life completely.