The Dead Student (42 page)

Kill the pilot lights on the stove. Rip out the flex tube that carried more propane from the large old tank outside. Kitchen explosion imminent.

Dash to the bedroom with a gallon jug of 100-proof vodka. Pour it over Homeless Guy. Open the propane tank Homeless Guy can’t see from his position, tied into the chair. More gasoline. On the bedding. On the floor. On the walls.

Fast. Fast. Fast.

“Okay, Homeless Guy, this is the big moment,” Student #5 said. Before the man had a chance to respond, Student #5 jammed a gas-soaked rag
into his mouth, gagging him.
Now you will understand: No chance; there never was a chance.
He didn’t look to see—although he knew it was there—panic in the man’s face.

He took four votive candles and lit them with a safety match, hoping that the fumes instantly filling the room wouldn’t explode in that moment. He breathed a small sigh of relief when they didn’t. He balanced the candles on the man’s quivering legs.

“I wouldn’t let those drop,” Student #5 said.

Of course, that was an impossible suggestion. They would fall. It was inevitable.

He switched on the tape recorder.

Cries of
“Help me!”
filled the room.

Then he took the fishing line attached to the shotgun trigger, carefully tied it to the back of the door handle, and closed the door behind him.

Move!
he told himself.
They will be approaching the front door.

One minute. Two. Three.
He had lost track of the time and hoped that his practice runs were close to the real thing. He felt a little like a sprinter in a track meet: hours, days, months, and years of training for ten seconds of flight.

At the rear kitchen door, he didn’t look back.

He let himself out the back as quietly as he could. No scraping, sliding door noises. No hurried footsteps on the deck.
Stealth
. This was the only moment he truly feared. He doubted the visitors would have the sense to cover the rear exit. Any professional would know to do this—but not a history student and his ex-girlfriend.
They’re not killers. Nor are they cops.
The Prosecutor might know—if she was arriving at the trailer with an army of policemen. But she wasn’t.

Across the yard. Into the brush. Stick to the right. Stay low. Stay quiet. Stay concealed.
He remembered the bear he’d seen in the yard.
None of that noisy lumbering about,
he told himself. Tree branches and thorns plucked at his clothes, but he fought his way forward.
Find the kayak where you hid it in the bushes by the river’s side. Paddle downstream to the picnic area where you parked the rental car. Rub yourself down with perfumed cleaning wipes—
eradicate any lingering gas smell. Put all your clothes and especially the shoes into a double-sealed plastic bag. Remember to drop it into the big McDonald’s Dumpster close to the interstate highway that gets picked up every day. Change into the blue pinstriped business suit in the suitcase on the backseat. Drive away nice and slow and remember to wave at the volunteer fire department trucks that will be flying by in the opposite direction.

Goodbye, Mister Munroe. You were a good person to be for many years, but your time has come. You’ve been used up. Passed the “sell-by” date. Turned the last page on your story.

Goodbye, old, sad trailer, and goodbye, Nephew, Girlfriend, and Prosecutor. Out of the old forever.

Hello, new.

39

In the car, Susan Terry chambered a round in her pistol.

She was filled with righteous fury, half-derived from the way the man inside the ramshackle trailer had screwed up her life, half from the burgeoning sense that she was close to a killer who’d gotten away with multiple crimes and that she was about to corner him.

“Stay behind the cars,” she said. “Keep low, whatever happens. If this guy has done what you’ve said he has, then he can shoot distances accurately. Don’t give him a clean look.”

“What are you going to do?” Andy Candy asked. Her voice was dry.

“Find out who he really is,” Susan replied. “And after that, take him into custody. And then the pressure will get to him.”

If this was not exactly a plan, Moth still felt swept up in something that he had started. Now that it was about to become much more real than he’d ever envisioned, he was unsure what to say or do. He began sorting through moments of decision for great men, trying to see how a Washington or a Jefferson, a Lincoln or an Eisenhower, might react. This was absolutely no help and no reassurance whatsoever.

“One more thing,” Susan said. Her voice was edgy, chilled. “If everything goes to hell, use the cop’s radio and call for help. Whatever happens, don’t let this guy get away.”

She looked them both in the eyes. “Got that?” she asked in a way that meant it wasn’t really a question, it was a command.

They exited the rental car.

Donnie the cop was already standing outside his patrol car, looking across to the front door of the double-wide trailer. It seemed quiet, and his first thought was,
Abandoned and empty.
He immediately replaced this with an Afghanistan-born sense of alertness. He pivoted toward Susan—and saw the pistol in her hand.

“Whoa,” he grunted out. “What the hell …”

“This man may be dangerous.”

“I thought you said
witness
…”

“Yeah. That. And maybe more.”

Donnie immediately removed his own service weapon. He too chambered a round. “I should call for backup if you’re expecting trouble. Do you have a warrant?”

Susan shook her head.
This is my show and I’m not willing to share it. In a few minutes, everything in my life will be back on track. Or something else.

“We’re going to knock. See what happens. But be damn careful.”

Donnie looked a little wide-eyed and shook his head. “I don’t know about this,” he said.

“We’re here. We’re going to do this,” she replied firmly. “We walk away, and we might never have this chance again.”

In her experience, killers rarely believed in shooting their way out of a situation when they could just as easily talk their way out. This thought was buttressed by the notion that this killer
knew
there was little evidence against him. And this, she believed, would make him arrogant.

And talkative.

She was further armored by the belief that he would
never
expect them there in front of his house. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Susan glanced back and saw that Moth and Andy Candy were crouched
behind the rental car. She could not see the .357 Magnum in Moth’s hand—but she expected it was there.

Donnie the combat vet was suddenly aware that there seemed to be no cover anywhere, and he wasn’t happy about this. He was accustomed to clear-cut, well-defined missions, being led by highly trained professional military men, and suddenly everything he was doing seemed small-town stupid and wildly inexperienced.

He also didn’t see an option. He knew he wanted to impress Susan Terry and act like he imagined a veteran Miami cop would act. So the only thing he did that made sense was to call his sergeant back in the tiny town offices.

“Sarge? Donnie here …”

“Go ahead.”

His shoulder radio was tinny, and crackled with static, which hid some of the nervousness creeping into his voice. “This might be a little more complicated than just talking to a reluctant witness,” he said.

“You asking for backup?”

“Let’s go,” Susan said impatiently. She was staring at the trailer, looking for any signs of activity.

Donnie nodded and spoke into his radio: “Just stand by.” He was a man who followed orders, and he was being given one.

The two of them cautiously approached the front door. Susan wondered whether there was a rifle aiming directly at her chest. She expected death, and a part of her was absolutely okay with that. Moth’s uncle, she thought, would recognize her rash behavior for the suicidal impulse that it was. But that was as far as she got in reflection. She replaced all these thoughts with a single-minded focus on the man inside.
Killer. End of the line. For someone.

She was far more composed than she had any right to be.

Donnie, on the other hand, felt cold sweat beneath his arms and half-imagined he was back in combat and approaching some dusty clay-and-brick hut in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, not knowing whether some smiling kid would poke his head out the door wanting a piece of
candy or an AK-47 would suddenly open up. But with each step he took forward, Donnie grew more collected, each nerve end on edge, every sense he had—hearing, sight, smell—sharpened.
You’ve been trained,
he told himself.
This isn’t any different.
This gave him some confidence.

He huddled to the side of the front door—
Don’t let someone fire through the woodwork into your chest
—and was about to knock when he heard: “Help me! Help me, please!”

The words were faint, but unmistakable, coming from somewhere within. He looked at Susan Terry. She too had heard the plea. She craned forward, and heard it again.

“In here! Please help!”

“Son of a bitch,” Donnie said.

Instead of knocking, he reached for the door handle.

Unlocked.

He twisted it and pushed the door open six inches. He remembered his police classes. “Police officer!” he bellowed. “Come on out!”

The only response was the continued muffled pleas.

He pushed the door a little wider. “Police!” He tried to think of something else to say, something dramatic, but nothing came to mind. “Show yourself!” was the best he could do.

Donnie pushed the door open wide. It was then that the smell hit him. Gasoline and rotten eggs. At first he thought it was the pungent smell of a body left in the sun after being toasted with high explosives, then he recognized it for the more suburban smell it was: leaking propane. “Jesus,” he said.

“Help me!” came the voice.

Donnie looked over at Susan Terry. “Hang back,” he said.

“No fucking way,” she replied. She placed one hand over her mouth and nose, the other on her weapon.

In a half-crouch, two hands on his weapon, Donnie stepped into the trailer. He saw the fan moving back and forth, but that wasn’t the motion he was trying to find—human motion: a gun being raised, a knife brandished.

“Please, please, please … ,” came the cries.

He could tell they were coming from what he guessed was the bedroom. Still hunched over, he went to the door, stepping past typical clutter and debris, almost choking with the smell.

Carefully, Donnie put his hand on the door handle. With his gun hand, he gestured Susan Terry to a position behind him. Then he slowly pulled the door open.

Gunshot.

First explosion.

Andy Candy half-shouted, half-screamed. The sound was not a recognizable word. Moth stiffened, nearly frozen in place, ducking down, partly shielding Andy with his body.

A second explosion ripped the air with a ferocity that astonished them.

Moth realized he was yelling, a torrent of obscenities fueled by shock and fear. If his first instinct had been to cower and cover Andy Candy, his second was to lift his head, driven by fascination: Whatever was happening seemed almost like something on a movie screen in front of him.

He could see that the rear of the trailer was billowing smoke and that flames were shooting out of the roof. Windows were shattered.

Moth hesitated, almost as if he was hypnotized. Then he shouted, “Stay here!” and shocked himself by rising up from the relative safety provided by the car and racing toward the burning building. He tossed his arms over his head, as if he expected fallout from the explosions to rain down on him.

Andy Candy didn’t do what he said. As soon as Moth dashed forward, she ran in a crouch to the passenger door of the patrol car and jerked it open. The radio microphone was hanging from a hook in front of her. She bent in, throwing herself across the seat, seized it, pushed down on an activation switch—just as she had seen done in dozens of television shows—and began shouting:

“We need help! Help!”

A voice immediately came over the radio. “Who’s this?”

“We were there this morning … with the officer out at the trailer by the river …” Her words were jumbled, confused, but there was no mistaking her tone.

“What’s happened?” It was a woman’s voice, but she seemed calm, which shocked Andy.

“An explosion. There’s a fire. We heard a gunshot …”

“Where is the patrolman?”

“I don’t know. He’s still inside.”

A third explosion shook the air.

“Are there injuries?”

Andy Candy didn’t know, but there had to be. “Yes. Yes. Send help now.”

“Stay where you are. Police, fire, and ambulance on the way,” said the disembodied radio voice.

Andy looked up. What she saw was Moth fighting his way into the flames licking around the trailer’s front door. “No!” she shouted, as he disappeared from sight.

The first blast had driven Susan Terry back, slamming her viciously against a bureau, fracturing her arm in two places, leaving her dazed. The second explosion seemed to scorch the air above her, superheated with flames, turning the inside of the trailer into a furnace. She realized she was in immense pain and almost on her back. Everything she could see was spinning, obscured by smoke and fire. At first she thought Donnie the policeman was dead, a few feet away from her. She reached out for him, but her right arm wouldn’t move, and her left waved uselessly in the air. She wondered,
Am I dying? Here? Now?