The Dead Student (33 page)

“You think there have been other suicides …”

“No. Not suicides. Murders,” Moth replied. “Murders designed to look like something else. Like accidents and mistakes.”

Redeemer One remained hushed. No one had moved from their seats, but Moth felt like they were all crowding around him, pushing him forward; he could almost feel their hands on his back. For the first time in many days, he wished Andy Candy were there, so he could introduce her to everyone in the session. This, he knew, was a crazy thought, and he shed it as quickly as he could. It was a room for addicts, and she wasn’t exactly one of them.

“All right,” Susan said slowly. “Timothy, let’s meet again. We can go over it all another time. You can tell me what you’ve learned. Can you come to my office tomorrow?”
That is, if I have a tomorrow,
she thought.

Moth looked out at the others. Sandy, Fred, the philosophy professor, and the others were all shaking their heads in unison.

“Tonight,” Sandy said in a stage whisper.

The heads all started to nod.

“No delays,” said Fred. “We all know what happens when you delay doing something important.”

He wasn’t speaking about anything other than addiction.

“Tonight,” Moth said.

“All right,” Susan said. But what she thought was,
I guess I’ll live a little longer.
How much longer she couldn’t say. She forced herself to her feet, knowing she had to clean up some to meet with Moth. She stared at the two remaining lines of cocaine.
Not nearly enough,
she thought. Her cell phone was in her hand, and she scrolled through her contacts until she saw the name of her dealer.
Meet Moth. Meet the dealer.
She continued to eye the small amount she had left. She suddenly didn’t know whether she should leave the cocaine behind on the table, or leave the gun. Or perhaps
she should take both with her. For a woman who prided herself on the ability to make wise decisions in a timely fashion, this doubt was as fierce as any desire.

On her lap were Jeremy Hogan’s handwritten notes.

Like any good scientist, he had tried to organize them in an easily understandable fashion, but Andy Candy wasn’t a doctor and so she both struggled and was fascinated. There were headings following each conversation the old psychiatrist had with his killer, and then key words scrawled on pages, along with abbreviated and truncated analyses. Some phrases had been underlined, others starred, and some circled. It seemed free-form, and she was reminded of reading the cantos of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
in a course on Renaissance literature. School seemed suddenly very far away from her. She had an odd thought:
These notes are like the poetry of death.

She saw that his initial conversation with the man who would kill him was brief. At the top of one page he had written “Initial Talk.” And below that he’d scribbled:
Fault. Last account.

Beneath these entries his scrawl continued:

“Others”? Means I am part of a group.

Rule out: Killers I testified against. Individual acts.

Unless “group” includes prosecutors, arresting police, judges, juries, forensic specialists—everyone associated with criminal prosecution.

Very possible. How to check?

Rule out: Ex-colleagues.

Any longtime hatreds, academic slights that might prompt murder?

Unlikely. But possible.

Rule out: Students? Did you flunk someone?

Slight possibility. Go over school records?

Likelihood of finding person that way: Small.

Then he’d written:

Essential: Assess what sort of killer he is.

That was the final entry on the first page.

On the second page of notes, Doctor Hogan’s handwriting seemed hur
ried, and Andy Candy guessed that he’d been writing as he spoke, cupping the phone in the crook between shoulder and ear, pen in hand.

She saw:

Educated. Not prison or street. Not self-educated.

Product of Ivy League—like Unabomber?

Controlled obsession. Manages his compulsions. Puts them to his use. Intriguing.

Not disoriented. No mood/affect influences in speech patterns. No colloquialisms. No accent.

Not paranoid. Organized.

She paused and considered a notation that had been both underlined and circled:

Sociopath. But none like I’ve seen.

The word
none
was underlined three times.

At the bottom of the page, Doctor Hogan wrote in block letters:

He will want to look me in the eyes before killing me. Prepare for that moment. My best chance.

She took a deep breath.

“Wrong about that, Doc,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. But you were wrong about that.”

She hesitated. An idea crept into her head.

“Were you wrong?”

Maybe he’d already …

She stopped herself. It was suddenly hot in the car—no:
stifling
—and she flicked on the ignition and rolled down the windows. She drank in some of the humid air that slid in, hardly different from the stale air inside the car. It was like the distinctions of night had dissipated around her. She had the same uncontrollably nervous sensation that she did when reading some unsettling thriller, or watching a scary movie. She was absolutely certain that if she lifted her eyes and started staring into the night, even in the safety of the parking lot, she would start to see ominous shapes and those shapes would morph into ghostlike killers. So, instead of looking out, she lowered her eyes back to the entries in front of her.

She flipped over to the last page of notes.

She read Jeremy Hogan’s final entry over and over again, unable to stop herself.

He’s already won. I’m already dead.

“Timothy, just tell Susan what you told us. Tell her the same way. She’ll believe you.”

“Or, at least, believe enough to take the next step, whatever that is. She’s a state employee. Hell, she’ll at least want to cover her ass.”

“But Timothy, be careful. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

Admonitions ringing in his ears, Moth fairly jumped down the stairs outside Redeemer One and jogged through the shadows in the parking lot. He saw Andy Candy lift her head as he approached. She had a furtive look about her, but seemed relieved that he had returned.

“We have another meeting tonight,” he said as he slid into the passenger seat.

Andy Candy nodded, started up the car, and backed out of her parking spot. Around them other cars—ranging from the philosophy professor’s small hybrid to the corporate attorney’s big Mercedes—were pulling out of the church’s lot. She paid no attention to the car that headed out in the same direction as them.

“No,” Susan Terry told the waitress, “just ice water for all of us.” She also ordered sushi for the table, although she was absolutely certain that the raw fish would make her violently ill.

The waitress departed, probably mentally adjusting her tip without a liquor tab added in, and Susan turned to Moth and Andy Candy. “Okay,” she said. “Lay it out for me.”

She looked across the table with as tough a glance as she could muster. “No bullshit,” she added. “This isn’t a game or like doing some college paper. Don’t waste my time.”

Moth knew this was a lot of posturing, but said nothing. Andy looked down at the sheaf of handwritten notes from Jeremy Hogan that was rolled
up in her hand. Moth shifted in his seat. Both of them thought Susan looked terrible. The change from the prim, put-together prosecutor they’d seen in her office, in charge and organized, to the jean-clad and scraggly-haired, pale and slightly shaky person in front of them was striking. That Susan was able to sound the part—her voice steady and demanding—only made the contrast more profound. Moth instantly recognized what the change implied. Andy Candy had a terrible thought:
She looks like I must have when I came out of the abortion clinic.

There was a momentary quiet, while Moth tried to organize his words. But what he finally said was designed to have the maximum impact.

“Four days ago, in rural New Jersey, Andy and I witnessed a murder,” he said.

Student #5
hated
sushi, so after seeing the trio get seated he’d walked over to a nearby fast food restaurant and got a sandwich to go. He was something of a health food nut, and it was rare for him to ever eat anything made at a counter or that came off a fryer. But things seemed oddly different for him this night, as if he was suddenly going to have to make all sorts of changes, and this made him anxious.

He walked back to a bench that was just down the street from the sushi restaurant, a vantage point that would allow him to see them all leave. It was hot, humid, and he felt oddly short of breath. He could no longer actually watch Andy Candy and Moth and the person they were speaking to, but he had an adequate idea of what was being said. He just didn’t yet know who they were saying it to—although he knew instinctively that he would be following her later that night. He needed to achieve at least that small bit of certainty as he was making his mind up.
Whoever it is,
he thought,
she is probably dangerous.

His food seemed ashen in his mouth, as if every slice of cold cut, every tomato, and every piece of lettuce had spoiled, the bread was stale, and his diet soda was watery and flat. He tossed the sandwich after a couple of bites.

30

Student #5 was stretched out on the floor of the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, in an executive suite. It was just before midnight, he couldn’t sleep, and he was naked, doing one-hand push-ups on the carpet.
Ten with the right. Ten with the left. Ten with the right. Ten with the left.
Sweat burned his eyes. The hotel was hosting a tech company start-up convention, and out on a patio a rock band doing ’60s covers was entertaining the young executives. The music seemed out of place to him. What should have been modern hip-hop or rap became leftover Jefferson Airplane, Steppenwolf, and the Rolling Stones. Screeching guitar and power vocals wafted up to his room, which overlooked the hotel’s immense pool and adjacent golf course.

Between rasping breaths, he listened, then said out loud, his up-and-down exertions keeping time to the music, “Absolutely right: I clearly, unequivocally, can’t get
no
satisfaction.”
A conundrum,
he thought. There’s
a clever word to describe my situation.

The word made him want to spit.

He had always liked to think of himself as an intellectual killer, someone who understood the psychological chapter and verse of murder, who
saw the profound emotional depths that killing another person explored.
Killing is like spelunking,
he thought as he continued to snap off push-ups.
Dark caves, mysteries, and each step takes me farther into the unknown.

Not only had revenge killing freed him, he believed it had made him psychologically larger. He imagined himself part Buddhist, a Zen master of death, part James Bond—the book spy, not the movie action hero—who delivered simplicity of decision with a Walther PPK. Killing, to him, was an important process, not something spur-of-the moment or rushed.
No drive-bys or convenience store, gas station, or liquor mart holdups with gunfire for me.
It was artistic, like sculpting a shape out of stone, or filling a canvas with color. The deaths he’d created had reason—and not anything as mundane as money, power, madness, or cruelty. That was why, he inwardly insisted,
his
killings weren’t easily categorized, and, indeed, weren’t really murders at all. He thought everything he’d done belonged in a special definition that was unique but highly appropriate.

Others would do the same.

If they only could.

How many times has a person said “I’d like to kill that guy …” and it made complete, total sense. And then they didn’t act? Foolishness. You can either go through life crippled by what others do to you … or you can take charge.

Up, down. Up, down:
Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three
.
Don’t stop.

When he reached fifty, he dropped to the floor, breathing hard.

It took a few minutes before he rose, muscles burning, and went to his laptop computer. Google Earth gave him bird’s-eye and street-view visions of three addresses: The Nephew’s. The Girlfriend’s. The Prosecutor’s.

This last bit of information had been the result of some clever computer searching after he’d watched the woman he now knew was Susan Terry walk into her condominium building. He’d tailed her deep into the night, a little surprised at the obvious drug connection she’d made before she’d returned home. He’d taken the address, compared it with recent sales and tax rolls, easily obtained a name, then discovered that there had been more than one mention of Susan Terry in the
Miami Herald.
He’d read several articles and said, “Well, young lady, you seem to be on
something of a courthouse losing streak. Need to do better for us taxpayers, ’cause we’re paying your salary. Do you think that little boost of nose candy is going to help you win cases?”

Major Crimes
. That was the section she worked in—and even if she was as incompetent and drug-addled as he guessed, she still couldn’t possibly be a total fool. He was not the arrogant sort of killer who automatically assumed all police detectives to be dull-witted incompetents until the moment some cop sat across the table with a notepad, a recording device, and the arrogance of knowing they had the absolute goods.