The Dead Student (24 page)

A simple answer:

A murder that isn’t a murder at all.

Student #5 reached for his throwaway phone.

He was so focused that he did not hear the car pulling to the front of the house, and from where he was poised he could not see it.

Jeremy Hogan was at his desk, feverishly writing notes on a yellow legal pad. Every snatch of conversation, every impression, anything that might help discover who Mister Who’s at Fault might be. He scrawled words across the page, disorganized and hurried and lacking all the scientific precision he’d developed over the years. He had no idea what might help him, so every random thought and observation flooded the pages.

He looked up only when he heard the car come down his drive.

“That’s them. Got to be,” he said out loud.

Jeremy glanced out the window and saw a young couple exit the nondescript rental car.

He smiled. “She’s beautiful,” he whispered. It had been a long time since he entertained a young woman as striking as the one hesitating in his drive
way. He had the odd thought that the young woman was far too pretty to talk about murder.

Grabbing the yellow legal pad, he jumped up and hustled to the front door.

Neither Andy Candy nor Moth knew what to expect when the door swung open. They saw a tall, lanky, white-haired man, clearly both pleased and nervous as they greeted one another.

“Timothy, Andrea, delighted to meet you, though I fear the circumstances are problematic,” Jeremy Hogan said rapidly. With a small wave, he ushered them into the house. There was a small, awkward moment.

“This seems very nice,” Andy Candy said, just being polite.

“Lonely and isolated, alas,” Jeremy replied. “All alone now.” He looked over at Moth, who shifted, unsettled.

“I suppose we should get right to it,” the doctor continued. He held up his legal pad, filled with notes. “Been trying to get organized, so we’d have a place to begin. Sorry it all seems so confusing. Let’s go into the living room and sit.” Before they could agree, the phone rang.

Jeremy stopped. The corner of his mouth twitched.

“He’s called me,” Jeremy said slowly. “Several times. But I don’t think he will call again. Our last conversation …”

His voice faded, as the phone continued to ring.

The old psychiatrist turned to the young couple.

“Odd,” he said. “Ironic? The phone is either a killer or some damn fund-raiser for yet another worthy cause.”

He pushed his notes to Andy Candy.

“Wait here,” he said, leaving them in the entry.

They watched as he walked into the kitchen and stared at the caller ID on the phone. It read
Anonymous.
His first instinct was to ignore it, but instead he picked up the phone.

Student #5 sighted down the rifle barrel.

He heard Jeremy’s voice: “Yes?”

Now there was no more need to conceal his voice with an electronic scrambler. He wanted the doctor to hear the real him.

“Now, Doctor, listen very carefully,” he said slowly.

Jeremy gasped. Surprised. He felt frozen in position.

In the crosshairs of the scope, Student #5 could see Jeremy’s back. He adjusted slightly, keeping the phone to his ear, finger caressing the trigger.

“A history lesson. Just for you.” As he’d expected, Jeremy didn’t reply. “A couple of decades ago, four students came to you and wanted your help in getting the fifth member of their study group dismissed from medical school because they thought he was dangerously crazy and threatening their careers. They wanted to sacrifice him so they could get ahead. You did their bidding. You were the enabler. The facilitator. I was the person who suffered. It cost me everything. What do you think it should cost you?”

Jeremy stammered. His words were misshapen. Incomprehensible. The only word that he was able to choke out that made any sense was, “But …”

“The cost, Doctor?”

Student #5 knew Jeremy would not respond.

He had thought hard about what he would say. Ending with that question had a specific design: It would hold the doctor in position, confused, hesitant.

“That’s a fine blue shirt you’re wearing, Doctor.”

“What?” Jeremy asked.

A poor choice for a final word,
Student #5 thought.

He dropped the cell phone to the soft earth at his feet, steadied his left hand against the rifle stock.

He took a single breath, held it, and gently pulled the trigger.

Familiar solid recoil.

Red mist.

The immediate death thought:
All these years and now I’m free.

The only thing that surprised him was the sudden piercing scream that followed. There should have been deep silence marred only by the fading echo of the rifle’s report. This unexpected noise troubled him—but he still
had the internal discipline to pick up the cell phone, make a quick check of his surroundings for any telltale evidence he might have left behind, and start his rapid retreat through the darkening woods. His first few strides were accompanied with the belief:
It’s over
.
It’s over.
Then each subsequent step was marked by the whispered Bob Dylan song lyric to carry him away:
It’s all over now, Baby Blue.

And then a last word that fed his fast pace:
Finally.

PART TWO

Who’s the Cat? Who’s the Mouse?

20

Moth lied.

Sort of. What he found was a way of answering questions that created an impression of truth while obscuring the larger falsehood. He was surprised at how easy this was for him. So much of maintaining sobriety stemmed from being aboveboard, he was a little frightened at how easily dishonesty fell from his lips.

The doctor’s home was suddenly crawling with cops and EMT personnel. Moth had been taken into one room, while Andy Candy was put in another so they could be questioned separately. From where he was standing, he could no longer see the doctor’s body.

“So why were you here, again?” the detective asked.

“My uncle passed away recently—a suicide down in Miami,” Moth answered. “We were very close. Doctor Hogan was one of his important teachers in medical school. I’m trying to gain some understanding for the reasons behind my uncle’s death and I was in contact with the doctor the other day. He invited me to come speak with him. I gather he felt he
was too old to travel and whatever he was going to say wasn’t appropriate for a telephone conversation.”

“Did he say anything about any sort of threats …?” the detective persisted.

“Well,” Moth said hesitantly, “we intended to talk about my loss—and I believe he thought he might be able to help me come to grips with it. He was a prominent psychiatrist, after all. Maybe he was just being polite. Maybe he was lonely because he was living here all alone, and he wanted visitors. I didn’t ask.”

Moth looked at the detective. Nothing in the way the man was standing, sounding, questioning made Moth think,
This is the moment to tell this person everything.

“This is a long way to travel for a single conversation.”

“My uncle was really important for me. And I got a cheap fare.”

Andy Candy lied, too.

It left an odd taste in her mouth, as if her fictions were sour foods, but at the same time it quickened her pulse, because with every falsehood she felt she was surging into an adventure.

“And exactly where were you standing when you heard the shot?” The detective, a young woman only a half-dozen years older than Andy Candy, affected a tough-gal, no-nonsense tone, wielding her notepad and pen with the same authority as she might the weapon strapped to her waist.

Andy Candy hesitated, pointing first, then actually walking to the position she’d occupied when Doctor Hogan died. “Right here. Then here after we heard the …” She didn’t finish this statement instead, continuing instead with, “… Then I went into the kitchen.” She breathed in hard and imagined it was a little like rewinding a tape recording, because she replayed in her mind’s eye what she had seen and heard.

Gunshot.

Distant. Muffled. Barely registered:
What was that?

Split second.

Look up.

Glass fracturing.

Then: a sight that was as loud as any noise—the back of the doctor’s head exploding in a red cascade of brains and blood.

A sickening
thud
as the elderly psychiatrist pitched forward, slamming into the wall, driven by the force of the bullet. The phone in his hand crashed to the floor. He made no sound as he slid down—or none that she could hear, because in that moment she screamed: a high-pitched banshee-wail of immediate panic, shock and fear wrapped together in some primitive, desperate cry. It blended with Moth’s great shout of astonishment and surprise to create a harmony of terror.

It all happened so quickly that it took Andy Candy some time to comprehend what had taken place, and to collect all the disparate pieces of the killing and process it. It was a little like waking up from a nightmare of blistering heat, thinking,
Boy, that was a nasty dream,
and then recognizing that the house around her was actually on fire.

The detective questioning Moth was stocky, middle-aged, wearing an ill-fitting suit. “And what exactly did you do, after you realized the doctor had been shot?”

Moth tried to picture his actions, assessing what to put in—heroic—and what to leave out—panicked. What he had done was leap back, like a person coming upon a snake in the grass, before twisting and grabbing Andy in a bear hug and pushing her to the side of the entryway. As the doctor had crumpled to the floor, Moth had cowered beside Andy Candy, hovering over her as if shielding her from falling debris.

Then a different side of him took over, and he let her loose and rushed into the kitchen. All the elements of violent death were being sorted out in his head, and instincts he did not know he possessed were taking over. It did not occur to him that he was exposing himself to a second shot. He bent down, like a battlefield medic, only to pull his hands back sharply. He immediately recognized there was nothing he could do. No tourniquet. No clamping an artery. No CPR or mouth-to-mouth. Deep red blood was already pooling on the floor, marred by pieces of bone and viscous
gray brain matter, and he could see the nightmare vision of gray hair matted by death, skull destroyed.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the array of weaponry on the table, and with a warrior’s cry of defiance, he jumped over, seized the shotgun, did not bother to check to see if it was loaded—which he wouldn’t have known how to do anyway—found himself tugging at the back door, losing seconds to a dead-bolt lock that he fumbled with, then racing crazily outside. He raised the shotgun, swinging it right and left, finger on the trigger, but could see no target. Some vague notion of protecting Andy Candy and himself penetrated his fear. He held his breath.

He stood stock still for what were only seconds, but which seemed to draw out into some indistinct, massive length of time. Night seemed to drop around him, cloaking him in darkness. He wanted to shoot something, or someone, but there were nothing but shadows surrounding him, stretching out of the nearby forest across the doctor’s backyard. Mocking him.

So, he went back inside.

“It’s okay,” he said to Andy, although how he could reach this conclusion eluded him, as it did with what he said next. “Whoever it was has disappeared.”

Andy Candy thought she should cry. She felt tears in her eyes, but an almost iron stiffness throughout her body. She lingered in the doorway to the kitchen, frozen, eyes fixed on the doctor’s body, her hands covering her mouth, as if anything she might say would only add to the fear ricocheting within her. She imagined her feelings were as pale as she was sure her face was.

“Did we,” she stammered, “who, I mean …” She stopped. The
who
part she thought she knew. The
did we
part seemed ridiculous. Her words were so dry they scratched her throat.

Moth seemed cold, robotic. “We know who it was,” he said bitterly, putting sound to the thought that passed into her head. He laid the shotgun on the table.

Andy could feel sweat beneath her arms, although she shivered as if
cold. She could not tell whether she was hot or freezing. “Moth, let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s just go. Right now.”

Run,
she thought.
Escape.

Then:
From what?

And:
Where to?

“I don’t think we can do that,” Moth replied.

At the moment she had no idea what was right and what was wrong, and she doubted that Moth did either. She could only imagine that another window was going to explode and a sniper’s bullets seek her or Moth out. She suddenly felt she was in terrible danger, that every second she lingered might give the assassin time to reload, draw a bead, and end her life.

Andy Candy lurched back, unsteady. One hand shot out and she grabbed at the wall. She felt dizzy and believed she might pass out.

“Help,” she whispered, although what sort of
help
she was requesting evaporated in the room. She had the odd thought:
People think death is the end. It’s only the beginning.

Moth wanted to walk over, throw his arms around her, hold her tightly, stroke her hair, and try to comfort her. He had a cinematic vision of what a hero should do in a moment like this one, but he stumbled as he moved toward her, and then stopped a few feet away.

He saw Andy reaching for her cell phone.
911. Of course,
he thought.

But he said: “Wait a second.”
Comforting Moth
disappeared, replaced by
Thinking-like-a-killer Moth.
He turned back to the weapons on the table. He replaced the shotgun, and picked up the .357 Magnum and all the boxes of shells for the handgun.