The Dead Student (48 page)

He had arrived in Key West invigorated, ready to embrace his new life. And almost instantly had slid into a void. From the moment he’d seen the back of Jeremy Hogan’s head explode to this one, nothing had been what he’d imagined.

Student #5 didn’t want to read trashy novels or watch soap operas on television. He didn’t want to fish or sail or swim or do any of the touristy sorts of things that brought folks to the Keys. He suddenly hated the crowds of cruise ship visitors with loud voices in different languages jamming the streets, and the high-priced huckstering that went along with catering to the money that arrived daily. Everything he’d expected to embrace had soured.

“So, what is it you want to do, now that you’re footloose and fancy-free?” he asked himself sharply. “Now that you’ve entered—
retirement
?” He made this last word sound like an obscenity. He paused. He whispered his answer:

“Kill.”

Then in a louder voice: “All right. Makes total sense. But who?” A smile. This question was a bit of a joke. “You know who.”

An entirely new set of challenges.
After all,
he thought,
who poses a threat? Who can steal your life from you?
He knew the real answer to this question was
No one
because of the way he’d established his different identities. But the mere notion that someone might be dangerous to him after all he’d accomplished felt intoxicating. He began to calculate in his head.

The Girlfriend—
that won’t be too hard. Young women are always doing stupid things that make them vulnerable. The key question will be when to strike. One year? Two? How long before her natural sense of safety and stupid overconfidence truly kick in and make her ripe?

This was intriguing. Student #5 instantly moved on to Timothy Warner in his head.

The Nephew—
he’s a drunk, but he won’t slide so quickly into a false sense of safety. Still, he’s young, and he’s weak, and that will obscure whatever precautions he might take when he’s sober.

The Prosecutor …

He smiled. “Now, there’s a challenge,” he said out loud. “A real challenge. She’s complicated—but when all is said and done, addiction or not, she’s still a member of law enforcement, and they guard their own carefully. Planning her death will take effort. Bigger risks, no?”

He answered his own question: “Correct.” Scheming the right death for Susan Terry would be intriguing.
Accident? Suicide? Overdose? Imagine all the enemies she’s made putting people in prison.
This was a welcome puzzle.

He took a long swig of his beer and went to his computer. He had a small work area set up in a sparsely furnished guest room where he’d plugged in his laptop. There was a printer in a corner on the floor. He felt a surge of energy and a calming sense of purpose.
Might as well get started
, he told himself
.
Within a few seconds, he had typed in
Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office
. He went to the public information section on its website called “Who We Are.” Then he printed out Susan’s picture, her resume, a brief biography, and a list of some of her major cases.

Something to study. Just enough to get his juices flowing and his mind working. The simple act of clicking a few keys, then listening to pages drop into the receptacle on his printer gave him the sensation that he was
doing
something. The full-color head shot from the state attorney’s website was the last item to emerge.
Nice long, sweeping black hair. A warm and welcoming smile. Firm jaw, wide lips, and green eyes. Really quite beautiful,
he thought.

“Hello-o-o, Susan,” he said with a lilt.
There’s going to come a day when you will wish that you’d been blown up in my trailer.

He started to hum to himself—music that was rock-and-roll lively; he didn’t pause to wonder why this particular song had leapt into his head. It was ostensibly a love song, in truth more a sex song, but he changed the words to the chorus as he began to sing along, crudely imitating the dead Jim Morrison’s gravelly voice, as if it came from a grave only a few yards away instead of thousands of miles distant in Père Lachaise in Paris. He could hear the Doors singer:
“Love me two times, I’m going away …”

In Student #5’s mind, it became:
Kill me two times, I’m going away …

47

The last few miles, from the National Key Deer Refuge, past Stock Island’s marina and the entrance to the community college, Moth went through details in his mind. It helped him to focus on what he thought they might need—as opposed to examining what they intended to do. He thought it was almost laughable—a couple of college-age kids driving to Key West to become murderers.

The only truly good thing about their murder vacation was that he was with the only girl he’d ever actually loved and, oddly, for the first time in what seemed like years he hadn’t thought about taking a drink, even if purchasing the two bottles—Scotch and vodka—had shaken him.

Beside him, Andy Candy drove steadily, cautiously, although the closer they got to Key West, the more she believed she should swerve her small car drunkenly across the road. Anything that might draw attention to them and prevent them from doing what they intended to do. That was her rational side. The irrational—which she knew was probably the
right
side—forced her to remain quiet, stay in her lane, and obey every traffic signal.

They found a parking spot on a quiet street just off Truman Avenue only
two short blocks from the cemetery. Her car slid into a line of typical Keys vehicles: some shiny, brand-new, and expensive—Porsches and Jaguars—the others rusted-out, battered, dented, paint-peeling, ten-year-old Toyotas covered with bumper stickers proclaiming “Free the Conch Republic” and “Recycle Now!”

Moth shouldered his small backpack, with its clothes engineered filthy by Andy, the bottles of liquor, and the gun. Together, they walked to a nearby bicycle rental store—one of the dozens that dot Key West. Reggae music was blasting away over outdoor speakers, Bob Marley singing
“Every little thing’s gonna be all right.”
The dreadlocked salesman happily rented them two slightly run-down but utilitarian bicycles. He also showed them where to leave the bikes, locked up, if they decided to return them later that evening. Moth had told him they were unsure whether they would be staying one day or two. Andy Candy hung in the back, trying to make herself seem small and unnoticeable. Moth paid cash.

They biked across town and went into West Marine. Moth purchased a small foghorn—the sort that is a staple on every sailboat that heads to the Caribbean out of Key West. At the Angling Company he bought a pair of the neck buffs favored by fishermen—they can be pulled up to cover head and face, or else simply keep the sun off the back of the neck. Andy Candy got a pink one and he would wear a blue one.

He couldn’t think of anything else. He was acutely aware of how much planning the man who’d killed his uncle had put into murder, and thought his own efforts were piecemeal and flimsy. He hoped they were adequate. He felt a little like a novice cook attempting some truly complex French recipe prior to an extremely important dinner for epicures, career and future in the balance of each small taste.

The two of them rode over to Fort Zachary Taylor beach, where they sat on a weather-beaten wooden bench beneath some palm trees twenty yards from pristine clear water. For a few minutes they watched a family finishing up a play day, mother and father trying to corral sandy and sunburned kids, pack up coolers and umbrellas, and leave. It was an incredibly benign sight. Andy was nearly overwhelmed by the contrast between this
family on vacation and the two of them. She thought she should say something, but kept quiet as Moth rose abruptly, hustled over to a street vendor who seemed ready to leave as well, and purchased them each a bottle of water.

Andy gulped at the cold liquid feverishly.

“Andy, I don’t think we can simply walk up to him and shoot him. Too many people might see us. Too much noise. We have to corner him someplace private,” Moth said quietly. He’d taken a film history class once, and that was more or less exactly what Al Pacino did in
The Godfather.
But that was a different era. “It’s as much confrontation as it is killing,” he added. These words seemed oddly hollow.

“No shit,” Andy replied stiffly.

“There’s only one place I can think of,” Moth continued.

“His house,” Andy answered. She surprised herself with the sudden coolness in her voice. She was both terrified and organized. This made little sense to her.

“What I’m worried about is some sort of security system. We want to avoid cameras and alarms.”

“No shit,” Andy repeated.

“We can’t break in. We can’t just knock on the door and ask him to invite us in.”

“No shit,” Andy continued.

“So there’s only one way in.”

Andy thought her breathing was getting shallow. Asthmatic.

Moth hesitated. “Look, if everything goes wrong, leave me. Go back to the car, drive north, get the hell out of here, and then do exactly what Susan said to do. She’ll help you.”

“And what about you?” Andy asked.

“At that point, it probably won’t make a difference,” he said. He didn’t say,
“I’ll be dead,”
although he knew that phrase had crept into both their minds. Moth wondered in that second whether he’d been on some sort of bizarre suicide trip since the very moment he’d seen his uncle’s body and realized that the sole tether keeping him sober, sane, and safe was dead.

“Well, I’m not going to do that,” Andy said. “No running away for me. I was never one for retreat or surrender.”

Moth smiled. “I know that. But this is different.”

“I won’t leave you alone, Moth. Not after everything.”

“Of course you will.”

Andy Candy nodded. She was suddenly unsure whether she was lying or telling the truth. “Okay, I will. But only if …”

She stopped. A sudden fierceness nearly overcame her. “If he kills you, Moth, I will kill him. If he kills me, then make sure you kill him.”

“And what if he kills both of us?”

Logic. Cold and direct.

“Then we have nothing to worry about any longer and maybe Susan will put him in prison.”

Moth thought all this sounded so absurd and crazy that it should have been funny. He shook his head, smiled, and shrugged.

“Okay. I promise. You?”

“I promise, too.”

These promises sounded distinctly like those of a pair of fourteen-year-olds pledging eternal fealty—totally unlikely.

“Andy,” Moth started. “There’s a lot I want to say.”

“And a lot I’d probably say back,” Andy said. She reached over and squeezed Moth’s hand. Then she laughed, nervously. “I don’t suppose there’s ever been a pair of lovers—nonlovers, ex-lovers, friends, former high school buddies; I don’t know what are we, Moth—exactly like us,” she said.

Moth grinned, but it faded swiftly. “No. I don’t suppose so. Perhaps we fit into some different category.
Homicidal high school sweethearts—
that’s got a bit of a ring to it. It would make for a really great story on one of the gossip websites, like TMZ.”

He took a deep breath, glanced down at his watch. “Okay,” he said. “Time to go. We can’t let him see us. I don’t think he would recognize you or me or even expect us here, but don’t take any chances. And, no matter what happens, don’t use your cell phone. It would register any call on the Key West tower.”

He paused. He handed her the neck buff, which she pulled up for a moment like an eighteenth-century highwayman’s mask. Then he passed her the floppy, wide-brimmed, old-lady hat and the foghorn. She stuffed the foghorn into her satchel, stuck the hat on her head. She realized it looked ridiculous.

“We are not here now. We aren’t here later. We were never here. Remember that.”

Andy Candy nodded.

“Let’s go look at graves,” Moth said.

Moth and Andy Candy parked their bicycles on the street and slipped into the cemetery as light faded around them. Angels with flowing robes, spread wings, and trumpets lifted to their cold-stone lips, smiling naked cherubs, wilted flowers, and faded headstones. It was a haphazard spot—many of the crypts were raised, creating a maze of rectangles. There was a memorial to the men who died on the battleship
Maine
, a section devoted to Cuban freedom fighters, and gravesites belonging to men of the Confederate Navy. Some of the headstones featured black humor—
“
I’m just resting my eyes
”
and
“
I told you I was sick
”
—while others simply proclaimed:
“
God was good to me
.”

How good could He have been,
Moth thought,
if this was where you ended up?

The cemetery was slightly off the beaten tourist path, but a spot where the occasional homeless drunk passed out in the shade beside a white marble crypt or a former mental patient off his medications stared with fascination at the endless array of names of the departed. Angela Street—where their target lived—was a single narrow and untraveled lane on the west side of the cemetery.

Moth and Andy Candy ducked down near a crypt belonging to a former charter boat skipper and let night shadows flow over them. They expected either the Key West police or some sort of cemetery security guard—Moth imagined there had to be some mood-lightening joke in that job description. He didn’t try one.

They stiffened when they saw a light go on in the house. Andy’s breathing was shallow, and in her crouch she could feel her legs tightening up and was suddenly afraid that they wouldn’t respond when she asked them to. This seemed like the stupidest thing to her. She could feel herself sliding into a type of catatonic uncertainty, where every doubt that lingered in her life threatened to roll her into a ball and kick her into a shapeless mass. She wished, in that second, that there was just one, simple, solid thing in her life. Something that wasn’t complicated, confused, or elusive. She would have traded everything for one small taste of normalcy.