The Dead Student (31 page)

What did I tell her at the start? As soon as she thinks I’m crazy she should walk away.

He wanted to keep her near him for a little longer—and the word
kill
threatened that.

The two of them worked hard the remainder of the day preparing what seemed a little like a term paper or a junior high school science project. They listed everything they’d done, and everyone they’d spoken to. They included numbers, addresses, descriptions, and every detail they could remember from every conversation. They wrote a time line and printed out newspaper articles. They were as organized as a pair of top-notch students could be. They worked hard for a
just the facts
approach—otherwise, as Moth kept saying, Susan Terry would immediately dismiss the entire narrative.

Late in the afternoon, Andy Candy stretched her arms wide. “We should take a break, Moth,” she said. “I haven’t worked this hard since school.”

“We’re almost done,” he replied.

“Well, clear our heads a bit, then finish strong.”

“Is that what you would do at college?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

He smiled, too. “So would I. A little walk, then?”

“Some fresh air would be good.”

The two of them pushed away from the computers and papers. Andy glanced down as she stood. She pointed at the yellow legal pad filled with Jeremy Hogan’s scribbles. “We haven’t really gone over these,” she said.

Moth shook his head. “We’ll just turn it over to Susan and see if she can see something.” He shrugged, and added, “And we haven’t used that, either.” He pointed at the .357 Magnum and a box of hollow-point bullets that he’d put on a kitchen counter. “I should get rid of it,” he said.

Andy Candy nodded. Guns, depression, loneliness, and alcoholism created a potent mix. Leaving the gun with Moth was a scary thought. “Just chuck it,” she said. “Some Dumpster somewhere, or maybe throw it into one of the canals when no one is looking.”

“I can do that,” Moth said. “I bet half the canals in Miami are cluttered with guns that bad guys have tossed.” He did a couple of deep knee bends and grinned. “I haven’t gotten much exercise. Stiff as all get-out.”

Outside, the sun was still warm, but the breeze had picked up. There were some gray-black thunderheads collecting to the west, over the Everglades—but the threatened storm seemed to be a few hours away, even with the strong winds rattling the palms.

They walked fast, stretching their legs. They did not speak much, until Andy Candy asked Moth, “Are we going to Redeemer One tonight?”

And Moth answered, “Yes.”

“If you see Susan Terry …”

“I’ll tell her I want to come to her office to see her. She’ll be okay with that, I guess.”

In the distance, they could hear the afternoon rush-hour traffic starting to build. They crossed a busy street and started down a deeply shaded residential area. The sidewalk was uneven—some of the slabs of concrete had been pushed up and sideways by the roots of trees. They picked their way forward gingerly, making sure they didn’t trip. The street was shadowy. It was a little like walking amidst variations of black.

“Do you think it’s over, Moth?” Andy suddenly blurted out.

He felt a disjointed sadness. “Almost,” he said.

Logic would have suggested that they then talk about themselves, but they did not. Neither of the two of them felt like that was a subject it was safe yet to pursue.

Nor were either of them alert to the person trailing a safe fifty yards behind them, shadowing every turn they made.

Remarkable,
Student #5 thought as he easily kept pace.
One can learn an immense amount about people simply by close observation.

Of course, he knew that was an inherent tenet of the career he was once precluded from joining, but he was inordinately pleased that the capabilities he’d displayed so many years earlier hadn’t disappeared. Indeed, he happily realized, they’d been honed and sharpened to a truly razor point.

28

He watched as Andy Candy waited in her car and Moth went into Redeemer One.

Student #5 thought:
Serendipity. It’s almost as if some totally wayward, completely badass, and decidedly psycho-killer deity absolutely wants me to kill them.

He had been following the two of them since they’d unexpectedly emerged from Moth’s apartment earlier that afternoon, only a few minutes after he’d arrived at the same location, which was a short time after his plane touched down in Miami, and before he’d even checked into the four-star hotel where he’d made a reservation. He was certain they remained unaware of his presence.

He scrunched down in his rental car seat and settled in to watch. Eyes firmly fixed on Andy Candy, once Moth disappeared inside Student #5 made his mind as much of a blank as possible. He told himself to clear aside preconceived notions, prejudices, and opinions.
Curious college dropout and lost kid with a drinking problem.
That’s what he knew, and he didn’t think it was much.
People always talk about important, accurate first im
pressions. Bullshit.
He shifted about, trying to find a comfortable position to keep watch. He was about twenty yards away from Andy Candy, not far from the entrance to the church. If anyone were to notice him, he had decided to say that he was there for the meeting, but had second thoughts about going inside—which would be enough to satisfy any curious sort. But he did not expect to need this explanation.
Drug addicts and alcoholics are inherently unsteady and unreliable.

Not hard to imitate that,
he thought.

From where he was parked, he could see Andy Candy poring over some papers. His curiosity was nearly hypnotic. He wanted to get closer. He continued to watch her, thinking he was extraordinarily patient, but knowing that whatever decision he was going to make, it had to be made quickly.

Inside the Redeemer One meeting room, Moth looked around for Susan Terry, but did not see her.
Well, I guess she’s not as dedicated to sobriety as she said she was,
he thought cynically. He slid into a seat on a leather couch, nodding to the other regulars. The meeting began with the usual slow-paced welcome. Then the leader gestured to the first person to his right in the loose circle that they formed. This was the middle-aged corporate woman lawyer. She straightened her designer skirt as she rose.

“Hello, my same is Sandy and I’m an addict. I have one hundred and eighty-two days now.”

Moth joined the others with the greeting, “Hi, Sandy.” This was said in unison, like a responsive church reading. All of the folks at Redeemer One knew Sandy, knew her struggles, and were relieved to hear that she was continuing to stay on track.

“I’ve managed to make some progress with my ex and with my kids,” she said. “They’re going to take me out to dinner this week. It’s like a little test, I think. Plop that bottle of nice red wine in front of me and see what I do. Ignore or guzzle.”

She said this with a wry smile. There was a smattering of applause.

“It could go either way,” Sandy continued. She hesitated, then looked
squarely at Moth. “But I think here tonight, what we all truly want is to hear from Timothy.”

She fixed Moth with an uncompromising stare as she resumed her seat. There was a long silence in the room. A few people shifted about. The engineer stood up. “My name is Fred, and I have two hundred and seventy-two days now. I agree with Sandy. Timothy, it’s your turn.”

The session leader—a onetime alcoholic assistant minister who liked to sport dark turtleneck shirts even in Miami’s heat—tried to interrupt. “Look, it’s Timothy’s choice. No one should be forced …”

Moth stood. “It’s okay,” he said, even if it wasn’t. He looked around the room. He took a deep breath. “Hello,” he said slowly. “My name is Timothy and I have thirty-one days now, although it’s been thirty-four since my uncle was killed.”

He paused, looking around the room. People leaned toward him. He could sense their interest.

“Everywhere I go, someone seems to die,” he said.

Susan Terry was kneeling on the carpet beside the coffee table in the living room of her apartment. It was a glass tabletop and directly in the center, right past where a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red rested, there were two narrow lines of white cocaine powder. She gripped the edges of the table with both hands, as if an earthquake were violently shaking the building and she was hanging on, trying to keep steady.

Do it. Don’t do it.

It was the blood. There was so much blood.

She could feel sweat gathering beneath her arms, lining the top of her temples. For an instant she wondered if the air-conditioning in her building had suddenly gone off, but then she recognized the sweat for what it was: the physical manifestation of a terrible decision.

With an almost impossible feat of strength, she pulled her right hand off the table edge and reached into her pocketbook. Never taking her eyes off the lines of coke, she rummaged in the satchel and finally pulled up the .25-caliber automatic she customarily carried whenever called to a
crime scene, or when forced to leave her office after dark. The gun was an important part of Susan’s
I won’t be a victim like the people I see in court
bravado.

Breathing hard, like someone held underneath the waves seconds too long, she chambered a round in the pistol. Then she placed it in front of her, next to the cocaine.

Might as well kill yourself faster,
she told herself. Still half-frozen in position, she eyed the two alternatives.

Shoot the dogs.
These words slipped into her head, and she repeated them out loud. “Shoot the dogs, God damn it. Shoot the dogs. Just shoot them now. Shoot them both. Watch them die.” She swayed a little unsteadily and whispered, “Shoot the dogs shoot the dogs shoot the dogs.”

The last crime scene she had been called to, early that morning, just before the sun rose, pulled out of bed by a homicide detective’s flat voice that didn’t successfully conceal his sad anger, had produced two things: a small vial of cocaine and the promise of a nightmare. It was a crime scene that had shattered her composure and her carefully balanced tough-gal persona.

“Ms. Terry?”

“Yeah. Jesus. What time is it?”

“A little before five. This is Detective Gonzalez, Miami Homicide. We met once before on that—”

She interrupted. “I remember you, Detective. What is it?”

“We’ve got an unusual murder. I think you should be here. We’re in Liberty City …”

“Drugs?”

“That’s not it exactly.”

“Well, what exactly is it?”

She asked this as she was swinging her feet out of bed, reaching for some jeans and a jacket, thinking mainly about coffee.

“Death by dog,” the detective said.

The last gray-black licorice tendrils of the night were still wrapped around the morning when she headed out for Liberty City. Up on the
interstate, past her usual turn toward the prosecutor’s office, and then down a highway ramp into one of Dade Country’s poorest sections, an area made famous decades earlier by riots and upheaval. The curious thing about Liberty City—as most residents of the area knew—was that it was the highest, most solid ground for miles. It was only a matter of time and rising sea levels before developers figured out it was the safest place to build. And that would re-form the area. Maybe a hundred years—but the likelihood of the poor folks being pushed out and the rich folks moving in seemed a good bet.

The night obscured some of the worst of the poverty. There is a blanketlike sensation to the last of the dark in Miami—between the heat, the humidity, and the richness of the inky sky tones, it feels a little like the loose wrappings of a funeral shroud.

Susan steered her way down quiet streets of small, bedraggled white cinder-block houses and low-slung, cheap apartment buildings. There was debris on the roads, cars up on blocks, scattered broken appliances, iron bars on windows, and chain-link fences everywhere. It was like a whole section of the city was rusted.

Even with the gun in her satchel on the seat next to her, she would never have willingly driven alone down any of these streets.
We like to imagine we are color-blind,
she thought,
but come here alone and the first thing that jumps out is race.

She saw the glow from police strobes two blocks away.

When she got closer, she spotted a coroner’s vehicle, a half-dozen marked patrol cars, and several unmarked—but unmistakable—detectives’ vehicles gathered in front of two cinder-block houses jammed close together, separated only by one of the ubiquitous chain-link fences. A small crowd of the curious milled in the shadows. There was also a yellow Animal Control truck pulled inside the police perimeter, and she saw two green-uniformed wildlife officers animatedly talking with some of the regular police.

No one stopped her as she parked and approached:
Young, white woman who isn’t a cop? Has to be a prosecutor.
She spotted Detective Gonzalez and walked aggressively up to him.

“Hey, Ricky, so what is it?”

“Ms. Terry. Sorry to get you up in the middle—”

“No need to apologize,” she interrupted. “It’s my job, too. What’ve we got?”

The detective shook his head in a world-weary way, said “Thought I’d seen everything,” and pointed to the back of the Animal Control truck, giving a small wave. One of the green-suited officers standing adjacent opened the truck’s double-wide rear doors, exposing two steel-reinforced cages inside. The cages were designed for wayward wild panthers and aggressive alligators.

Or pit bulls. Two of them. Heavily muscled, scarred faces, thick chests. Frothing, snarling, beyond savage, they instantly threw themselves against the cage barriers, shaking the truck, howling banshees, frantic in their desire to get free.