The Dead Student (10 page)

And although he knew that
maybe
the person seated across from him wouldn’t even notice him droning away under cross-examination, he also knew that
maybe
the person seated across from him would hate him forever with a slowly building homicidal fury.

Maybe
was a word he was intimate with.

He had a less formal delivery that he employed in the classroom with medical students delving into forensic psychiatry: “Look, boys and girls—we can believe that all the relevant factors exist that will keep this patient or that patient on a path of violence. Or, conversely, a path where he or
she responds rapidly to what we can offer—medication, therapy—and we wonderfully defuse all those violent, dangerous impulses. But we are not equipped with a crystal ball that allows us to see the future. We make, at best, an educated guess. What works for one subject might not work for another. In forensics there is always an element of uncertainty. We may know, but we just don’t know. But never say that to a family member, a cop, or a prosecutor, and never under oath in a courtroom to a judge and jury, even though that’s the only thing—and I really mean
the only thing
—those folks want to learn.”

The students hated that reality.

At first, they all wanted to be in the business of psychiatric fortune-telling—a detail he often jokingly insulted them with. It was only after time spent on a few high-security wards listening to widely varying degrees of paranoia and wildly unmasked impulses that they slowly came to understand his classroom point.

Of course, you arrogant fool, you taught them about limitations but never believed you had any yourself.
Jeremy Hogan wanted to laugh out loud. He liked to inwardly mock himself, to taunt and tease the younger self that lived in his memory.

You were right a bunch. You were wrong a bunch. So it goes.

He pulled out of the driveway, leaving the nursing home behind in the rearview mirror. Jeremy was very cautious driving. A patient
left, right, left
look as he merged onto the street. He stuck tenaciously to the speed limit. He was devoted to using his lane change blinker. He braked well in advance of stop signs and never ran a yellow light, much less a red one. His sleek, big black BMW would easily have topped 135 mph—but he rarely asked the car to do anything except meander along at a boring and leisurely pace. He sometimes wondered if the car was secretly angry with him, or frustrated deep in its automotive soul. Consequently he infrequently used the car, which still, after ten years, had a new-car sheen and extremely low mileage.

Usually he employed an old battered truck he kept beside the ramshackle barn at his farmhouse for his occasional forays out for the few
groceries he needed. He drove the truck in the same elderly-gentleman manner, but because it was haphazardly dented, its red paint was faded, it rattled and creaked, and one window would go neither up nor down, this style seemed more appropriate to it.
The BMW is like I once was,
he thought,
and the truck is like I am now.

It took him an hour to get back to his farmhouse deep in the New Jersey countryside. That New Jersey even had
countryside
came as astonishing news to some folks, who imagined it as a paved parking lot and twenty-hour-busy industrial park adjacent to New York City. But much of the state was less developed, acres of rolling, deer-infested green space that sported some of the finest corn and tomato crops in the world. His own place was only twenty shady minutes outside of Princeton and its famous university, set back on twelve acres that abutted miles of conservation land that a century earlier had been part of a large, working farm.

He had purchased it more than thirty years ago, when he was still teaching an hour away in Philadelphia and his wife the artist could sit on the flagstone back patio with her watercolors and fill their home and the collections of wealthy folks with gentle landscapes. Back then the house had been quiet, a respite from his work. Now it wasn’t a sensible house for an old man: too many things frequently breaking down; too narrow and steep a stairway; too many overgrown lawns and runaway gardens that constantly needed tending; old appliances and bath fixtures that barely worked; a tired heating system that was far too cold in the winter and far too hot in the summer. He’d routinely fought off the developers who wanted to buy it, tear it down, and build a half-dozen McMansions on the acreage.

But it had been a place that he’d loved once, that his wife had loved as well, where he’d spread her ashes, and the mere notion that there just might—or might not—be a psychotic killer stalking him didn’t seem like a good enough reason to leave the place, even if he couldn’t get up the stairs without his knees delivering piercing arthritic pain.

Get a cane,
he told himself.

Get a gun.

He pulled into the long gravel drive that led to the front door. He sighed.
Maybe this is the day I die.

Jeremy stopped and wondered how many times he had driven up to his home.
It’s a perfectly reasonable place to make a last stand,
he thought.

He looked around for some telltale sign of a killer’s presence—an inspection he knew was completely ludicrous. A real killer wouldn’t leave his car parked out front, adorned with a “Murder 1” license plate. He would be waiting in a shadow, concealed, knife in hand, ready to spring. Or hidden behind some wall, drawing down on him with a high-powered rifle, placing the sight squarely on his head, finger caressing a trigger.

He wondered whether he would hear the
bang!
before dying. A soldier would know the answer to that question, he believed, but he knew he wasn’t much of a soldier.

Jeremy Hogan breathed in deeply, and extricated himself from behind the wheel. He stood by the car, waiting.
Maybe this is it,
he thought.

Maybe not.

He knew he was caught up in something. Periphery or center? Start or end? He just didn’t know. He was ashamed of his frailty:
What were you thinking, going to a nursing home? What good would that do you? Did you think that by accepting how old and weak you’ve become it would hide you? “Please, Mister Killer, don’t shoot me or stab me or whatever you plan to do to me because I’m too old and will probably kick the bucket any day now anyway, so no need to trouble yourself with actually killing me.”
He laughed out loud at his absurdity.
There’s a strong argument to make to a murderer. And anyway, what is so great about life that you need to keep living it?

He made a mental note to call the saleslady and politely decline the purchase of the apartment—
no,
he thought,
prison cell
.

He wondered how much time he truly had. He’d been asking himself this question every day—no, every second—for more than two weeks, since he’d received an anonymous phone call one night around ten, shortly before his usual bedtime:

“Doctor Hogan?”

“Yes. Who is calling?” He had not recognized the caller ID on the phone
and figured it was some cause or political fund-raiser and he was prepared to instantly hang up before they even got their noxious pitch started. Afterward, he wished he had.

“Whose fault is it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean by ‘fault’?”

“Tell me, Doctor: Whose fault is it?”

“Who is this please?”

“I’ll answer for you, Doctor Hogan: It’s your fault. But you were not alone. The blame is shared. Bills have been paid. You might examine recent obits in the
Miami Herald.
”

“I’m sorry, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.” He was about to angrily hang up on the caller, but instead he heard:

“The next obit will be yours. We will speak again.”

Then the line went dead.

It was the tone, he thought later, the ice-calm words
next obit
that told him the caller was a killer. Or—at the least—fancied himself to be. Raspy, deep voice, probably, he imagined, concealed by some electronic device. No other evidence. No other indication. No other detail he could point to. From a forensic, scientific point of view, this was a stupid, utterly unsupported seat-of-the-pants conclusion.

But in his years as a forensic psychiatrist, he’d sat across from many killers, both men and women.

So, upon later reflection, he was certain.

His first response was to be defensively dismissive, which he knew was a kind of foolish self-protective urge:
Well, what the hell was that all about? Who knows? Time for bed.

His second response was curiosity: He picked up his phone and hit the “call back” feature. He wanted to speak with the person who’d called him:
Maybe I should tell him that I have no idea what he’s talking about but I’m willing to talk about it. Someone is at fault? For doing exactly what? Anyway, we’re all at fault for something. That’s what life is.
He did not stop
to think that the caller probably wasn’t interested in a philosophical conversation. A disembodied electronic voice instantly told him that the number was no longer in service.

He’d hung up the phone, and spoken out loud: “Well, I should call the police.”
They will just think me a cranky, confused old fool, which might be what I am.
Jeremy Hogan did know one thing: All his training and all his experience told him that there was only one purpose behind making a call like that. It was to create runaway uncertainty. “Well, whoever you are, you’ve managed that,” he said out loud.

His third response was to be scared. Bed suddenly seemed inappropriate. He knew sleep was impossible. He could feel light-headedness, almost a dizzy spell as he stared at the telephone receiver. So he went unsteadily across the room and sat in front of his computer. He breathed in sharply. Even with his stiff-fingered, arthritic clumsiness on keyboards, it had not taken him long to find a small entry in the obituary section of the
Miami Herald
website with the headline:
Prominent Psychiatrist Takes Life; Services Set.

It was the only obit entry that Jeremy thought could be even remotely connected to him—and that was only by shared profession.

The name was unfamiliar. His initial reaction had been,
Who’s that?
But this was rapidly followed by:
Some former student? A onetime resident? Intern? Third-year medical school?
He did some age-math in his head. If the name on the web page was one of his, it had to be from thirty years earlier. He felt a surge of despair—those faces who’d attended his lectures, even those who’d sat in his smaller seminars so eagerly, were pretty much all lost to him now; even the good ones who had gone on to importance and success were hidden deep in his memory.

I don’t get it,
he thought.
Another shrink a thousand miles away kills himself and that has something to do with me?

8

Moth did more than a hundred sit-ups on the floor of his apartment, followed by a hundred push-ups. At least he hoped it was a hundred. He lost count in the rapid-fire up and down. He was half-naked—boxer briefs and running shoes but nothing else. He could feel the muscles in his arms twitching, about to give way. When he thought he could not coax one more push-up from his arms, he lay flat on the floor, breathing hard, his cheek pushed against the cool polished hardwood. Then he gathered himself, stood, and ran in place until sweat began to crowd his vision and sting his eyes. He listened to ’80s hard rock on his iPod—Twisted Sister, Molly Hatchet, and Iggy Pop. The music had an odd ferocity to it that matched his mood. Uncompromising power chords and relentless cliché-driven vocals crashed through his doubts. He believed he needed to be as determined as that sound.

As he lifted his knees, trying to gain speed without leaving his position, sneakered feet making slapping noises, he kept an eye on his cell phone, because Andy Candy was supposed to pick him up mid-morning so they could go to the first of the three meetings he’d scheduled for that day.

These were not meetings like the one he’d attended at Redeemer One the night before. These were interviews.
Job interviews,
he thought,
except the job I want is hunting down a murderer and killing him.

Moth stopped. He bent over gasping, grabbed his boxers, and sucked in some stale apartment air. He felt dizzy and shaky, tasted sweat on his upper lip, and was unsure whether this was the alcohol being worked out of his body or the pressing need for revenge.

Moth felt weak, unmanned. He was completely uncertain whether if some well-coiffed, long-legged South Beach supermodel in a black string bikini were to walk into his apartment with an enticing look in her eyes and a welcoming gesture as she undid her bra strap, he could perform. He almost laughed out loud at his potential impotence.
Drink can make you into an ancient old man. Limp. Weak. Didn’t Shakespeare write that?
Then he replaced the South Beach supermodel in his mind’s eye with Andy Candy.

A rapid-fire series of memories crowded his imagination:
First kiss. First touch of her breast. First caress of her thigh.
He remembered moving his hand toward her sex for the first time. It had been outdoors, on a pool patio, and they were jammed together, entwined on an uncomfortable plastic lounge chair that dug into their backs but seemed at that moment like a featherbed. He was fifteen. She was thirteen. In the distance there was music playing—not rap or rock, but a surprising, gentle string quartet. Every millimeter his fingers traveled, he’d expected her to stop him. Each millimeter that she didn’t had made his heart pound faster.
Damp silk panties. Elastic band.
What he had wanted then was to be fast, matching his desire, but his touch was light and patient.
A contradiction of demands and emotions.