The Dead Student (39 page)

“In a way, the same thing that it did for them,” Moth replied, trying to force a smile. “What they faced was a loss. Maybe humiliation. Freedom. Gallows. Firing squad. Prison. I don’t know. High stakes. That’s what we know.”

“Doesn’t seem all that different for us,” Andy replied. “Hit-and-run. Fake suicide. Hunting accident.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“What do you suppose he will invent for us?”

Moth didn’t answer. His mind reeled with possibilities, none of them good.

Another pause. The practical Andy Candy started to emerge: “Shouldn’t Miss Terry be here?”

“Yes.”

Susan Terry remained in her car, parked outside Moth’s apartment. She was on the twin edges of rage and despair, unsure about both.

What she craved—more than anything else—was to descend into more drug use and instantly forget everything that had happened to her in the past few days. After that morning’s phone call from the lawyer she had immediately fueled herself with the last dregs of coke she had left, wondering
only once why she hadn’t flushed it down the toilet in the wake of her suspension and her trip at Timothy’s side to Redeemer One. She took a deep breath.
I don’t care what I promised those assholes,
she aggressively lied to herself. The siren song of cocaine seemed to pledge a lotuslike forgetfulness:
You won’t have to worry about your job or your career. You won’t have to worry about some killer. Every promise you made to everyone everywhere can be ignored and forgotten. Every pain you feel can be erased.

In her satchel by her side was her semiautomatic.
Did you turn me in, Timothy? Why did you want to ruin my life?

That this made absolutely no sense didn’t diminish her fury. Susan Terry was balanced between the organized and rational state prosecutor who accumulated facts and evidence and the bad girl and drugged-up near criminal she had descended into. She had little idea which side of her was going to win out. But in that second, anger nearly overcame her, and she seized the satchel, exited the car, and rapidly made her way to the apartment.

When she knocked, Moth foolishly opened the door without first looking through the peephole.

Susan instantly thrust the automatic into his face. The hammer was cocked and a round was chambered, and the words “You little motherfucker …” stood for a greeting. Moth staggered back in shock, but Susan pushed after him, so that even with his frantic retreat the gun barrel still lurked inches from his eyes.

He choked out, “Wait, what, please,” but couldn’t come up with another word. He was confused, panicked—not that he hadn’t expected someone to kill him, but this was the wrong person entirely. He thought of trying to find his own weapon and fighting back, but it was unloaded, on a bureau top, useless.

“I want the truth,” Susan said coldly. “No more fucking around.”

Andy Candy gave out a little half-shout of surprise and froze in position on the bed. She had more or less the same frightened thought:
This is wrong. Susan isn’t the killer, is she?

“Truth?” Moth asked. His voice was suddenly dry, and the word groaned
like metal bending under immense pressure. He tried to raise his hands, partially in surrender, partially to deflect the shot he was certain was coming. He felt fear punching him in the stomach, choking his throat.

“Why did you drop the dime on me?”

Drop the dime
sounded incomprehensible in a moment where her finger toyed with a trigger.

Moth continued to reel back, but stopped when his rear butted up against his desk. “What?” he coughed out. He looked at Susan Terry—hair disheveled, eyes wide, edgy tone to everything she said, hand quivering, frantic, in pain, strung out—and he realized that whatever resistance she had to pulling the trigger and killing him hung in some balance between rational and drugged. The apologetic,
I want to be sober
woman who had accompanied him to Redeemer One had been replaced by a stranger. And then, he realized, the Susan with wild eyes and a gun wasn’t a stranger at all. It was just that the same person could actually be two people. He knew this was just as true for himself.

He took a deep breath, trying to find a grip on control. When he spoke again, he realized that in his shock, his voice had grown high-pitched.

“Tell me what you think I’ve done,” he pleaded.

“Why did you call the cops? Give them my name and then my dealer’s name. You know what you’ve done to me?”

Moth forced tightness into every muscle. He tried to will his pounding heart to slow down. He straightened up, tried to look past the barrel of the gun, and replied, “I didn’t do anything like that. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Susan Terry wanted to kill. More than anything, right in that second, she wanted death. But
whose
death eluded her. She stared at Moth. “Then who did?”

He swallowed hard. “You know.”

She could feel every muscle in her body, and especially the muscles in her hand and finger, tightening on the trigger. The noise around her was roaring, like a jet taking off, and then she realized the room was filled with silence and that the deafening noise was coming from deep inside herself.
Someone—it couldn’t possibly be her—screamed from within:
Make a choice!

Moth gathered every tactic he’d ever learned at Redeemer One and quietly said, “Susan, do you know what you’re doing?”

It took an immense effort to lower her gun to her side.
Choice made.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Pressure.”

This word seemed as good an explanation as any. But what was really true was that cracks and fissures were forming inexorably throughout her life.

In the momentary hesitation in the apartment, Andy Candy told herself,
Move!
Before she realized it, she’d risen to her feet and stepped in between Moth and Susan Terry.

“What’s going on?” she demanded.

Inwardly, she thought,
I’m the one that’s supposed to be terrified. The killer called me! And then he went to my house! What the hell is all this?

Susan Terry leaned back. “I think I need a cold drink,” she said.

“Water,” Moth said. “With ice.”
Odd,
he thought,
how one is able to endow a simple word like
water
with utter ferocity.

Romance novels with happy endings; Victorian era literature, with bows and curtsies and infinitely intricate emotional back-and-forth. Sweeping Russian novels from the nineteenth century—
War and Peace
. Hemingway and Faulkner, John Dos Passos and Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
. Novels of manners, novels about spies who came in from the cold, novels about star-crossed lovers. Andy Candy racked her memory, tried to recall all the books she’d read as a literature major, trying to find the one that would steer her toward the right thing to do.

Nothing leapt out to her.

She looked over at Susan Terry. The prosecutor was hunched over at a table, two hands wrapped around a glistening glass of ice water, her weapon in front of her, her eyes staring off into the distance.

The phrase
thousand-yard stare
—she thought she’d first come across it in a memoir about Vietnam—came to her.

Moth had moved over to his desk and was shuffling through papers. After a moment, he looked up. “I think the problem is—everything we know about him is in the past. Everything he knows about us is in the present.”

Andy nodded, then said, “Not exactly. I mean, we know a little.”

“He knows who we are. Where we live. What we do.”

Susan was still looking off into the distance.

Andy Candy rose, went over, and picked up one of the notepads she used for sorting her way through information. But this was mostly a prop, to help her organize the ideas in her memory. “We have a name—even if it is a phony one—that my mother saw. And she saw his license. Massachusetts.”

Susan finally looked up. “Area code for the phone—413. And a hat with a UMASS logo on it.”

Andy Candy didn’t ask
how
Susan knew these details.

Andy continued. “The town name my mother saw. It began with
Ch
.”

Moth had turned to his computer
. Chicopee. Cheshire. Chesterfield. Charlemont.
He mumbled these town names out loud.

“Charlemont,” Andy said. “Like Charlemagne, only …” She stopped.

Susan shook her head. “Why would you think he’s gone home—even if one of those towns is his home? Why isn’t he right outside, right now? He seems to like killing in Miami.”

The three of them were silent for a moment. Moth spoke first. “Why should we wait around to be killed?”

The others looked at him.

“If we’re going to hunt him down, then shouldn’t we start there? How else can we get ahead of him?”

Susan nodded—but she didn’t really know why.

Andy Candy went over and squeezed Moth’s hand. She didn’t think of him as much of a protector or a hero, but she thought the two of them together had always been a formidable couple.
Once upon a time
. She hoped she wasn’t deluding herself.

But at the same moment the literature major within her bubbled to the
top of her consciousness: Enough of Dumas, Edmond Dantès, and
The Count of Monte Cristo
. Instead she recalled
Beowulf
. The hero first lies in wait for Grendel. Though he knows it will cost lives, maybe even his own, he can see no other way to fight. But even after the pitched battle and arm-ripping victory, there is a greater threat he hadn’t foreseen. And he must pursue that threat right into its own lair.

36

He didn’t like to think of himself as an overly cruel person, although in the wake of all that he’d accomplished, he was certain that some hard emotional times had been created for children, relatives, maybe even friends of the people he’d killed. This was rudimentary psychology and he wanted to be empathetic.
Nobody suffered too damn much: funerals with tears, fine elegies, and somber black clothes. Not much else.

But when he pictured Timothy Warner, he grew angry—a pulse-accelerating, red-faced, teeth-gritted sort of half-fury. Cold, but in control, while recognizing that he was on the verge of explosion.

He thought:
This fucking kid has no right to be putting me in this situation. I should be all finished with killing. Getting on with things.

Stupid boy. If you hadn’t pursued me, you would live.

Stupid boy. You are taking your friends down with you.

Stupid boy. You should have learned to leave well enough alone.

Stupid boy. Pursuing me is like committing suicide.

He did not think he could hate Andrea Martine or Susan Terry in the same way.

But he was more than willing to kill them. Spectacularly.

What does the military call it? Collateral damage.

He busied himself, in a flat-out hurry, collecting items, planning. What he had in mind for The Girlfriend, The Nephew, and The Prosecutor was significantly more elaborate than his usual design. What he expected was closer to art than it was to murder, although he doubted anyone besides another truly sophisticated killer would ever be able to appreciate that distinction—and he had little respect for other killers, who seemed to him to be mostly gangsters, sociopaths, and thugs, and beneath contempt.

Sometimes, when in New York City, he went to late night midnight shows or off-the-beaten path grimy East Village art galleries to watch performances that blended theater with painting, film with sculpture, forms that used all sorts of avenues to create a visual experience.
Very trendy stuff,
he reminded himself. On other occasions, he drove his old pickup truck to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. There, in faded jeans, uncombed hair, and dirt-encrusted work boots, he examined some of the more exaggerated styles that cutting-edge artists invented.

In Key West he would from time to time attend the drag queen shows on Duval Street, where he would nurse a Key West Sunset Ale and appreciate not merely the cabaret-style singing, Broadway dance numbers, and exotic outfits, but the fact that the shows displayed the ability of people to change who they were into something utterly different.
Chameleons singing show tunes. I wonder if they would appreciate what I am about to put together.

Student #5 was driving a little too fast, heading to a half-dozen different hardware stores for containers—the same containers, at stores spread all over the valley he lived in. Cash each time. He also planned a trip to a Radio Shack for an old-fashioned tape cassette recorder. On the list he’d written, he’d scheduled a stop at Home Depot for electrical switches and wires, a large floor fan, cans of spray odor eraser, bungee cords, Velcro strips, and sixty-pound-test fishing line. All typical purchases for someone living in this rural area.

Student #5 was deeply concerned that he hadn’t left himself enough
time to prepare, so he avoided conversation, even pleasantries, as he collected his items. He kept a baseball cap tugged down on his head, wore sunglasses. He didn’t have any real concern that a security camera might pick him up on video, but overpreparation was an important consideration. He didn’t want to forget a simple item that might derail what he had in mind.

At a wilderness store, he purchased a secondhand one-person kayak. It was orange and slid easily into the back of his truck with his other gear. At a hunting store, he obtained the cheapest-model shotgun he could—there was irony in his choice, he thought, because he wasn’t like Jeremy Hogan, purchasing a top-of-the-line gun that did the dead psychiatrist absolutely no good.