The Dead Student (26 page)

“Oh,” Student #5 said, filling his voice with as much phony concern as he could muster, “how awful.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for your loss. It was a lousy break.”

“It seems that way. What a tragedy, but, at least, he was getting on in years. And I think Cousin Jeremy lived alone, ever since his wife passed away. He must have been sad and lonely.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Connie Smith.

“Do you have funeral home information?”

“The paper will publish an obit after the coroner releases the body, so check back in a day or so.”

“Okay. Will do. Oh, one other question, and I really thank you for your help …”

“No problem.”

“How was he discovered? I mean, he didn’t suffer, did he?”

“No. Death was probably instantaneous …”

This Student #5 already knew.
The suffering came earlier.
But he wanted to ask questions that fit the image he was trying to create in the reporter’s mind.
Distant. Modestly concerned. Mostly just curious.

“But how …” he continued.

“Apparently a young couple had come to visit him. Coincidence, really, a cop told me off the record. They weren’t relatives. There had to be some other reason they were there, but it wasn’t in the initial police report and I don’t know what it might be. Probably a medical student looking up a professor emeritus, but I’m just guessing.”

“Did you speak with them?”

“No. By the time I got to the scene, they’d already cleared out. They had to be scared out of their minds. Come to visit and …” The reporter stopped. She was probably afraid of being insensitive.

He was cautious.
Don’t sound eager,
he reminded himself.

“Oh, perhaps I should try to connect with them, then. Do you have names, numbers, anything that might help me get in touch with them?”

“I’ve got their names,” she said. “But no numbers. The cops, I guess, didn’t want me calling them up before they finished their investigation. Typical. Probably they don’t want you calling them, either, but hell. They wouldn’t be too hard to track down.”

“But you haven’t …”

“No. Don’t see much to report here, unless the cops come up with the stupid hunter’s name. Then there will be an arrest and a follow-up story.”

That won’t happen,
he thought.

He listened carefully and asked the reporter to spell the
houseguest
names out twice. Student #5 stared hard at the letters in front of him. They seemed to waver, dancing like heat above a highway on a scorching day. Boy. Girl.

Girl meant nothing: Andrea Martine.

Who are you?

But the boy’s name meant much: Timothy Warner.

I know who you are.

He knew he should be angry with himself because he’d missed a connection. But he let his subterranean fury dissipate into the prospect of more research, thinking that study would help calm him down and maybe make the nasty sensation of …

He paused as if he could make his thoughts hesitate, like reining in a runaway horse, as he considered what he was feeling.
A sensation of what? A threat? A failure? Danger?

“Hope I’ve helped,” said the reporter.

“Yes. Thank you. Immensely,” Student #5 replied.

A part of him wanted to laugh.
Suburban reporter. Inexperienced. You’re talking to the absolute best story ever to cross your desk. Only you don’t see it.

22

On the airplane returning to Miami, Andy Candy fell asleep—exhausted by a sort of tension she’d never experienced before—and her head drooped onto Moth’s shoulder. He thought this was probably the sexiest moment he’d experienced in years. It reminded him of the first time she had ever touched him with intimacy. What had actually been groping and uncoordinated had turned silken and smooth in his memory. He desperately wanted to stroke her cheek, but did not.

He luxuriated in the scent of her hair and tried to concentrate on what had happened to them. The occasional turbulent bump conspired to interrupt the most contradictory of emotions: murder and desire.

Jet engines droned. A stewardess walked the aisle. She smiled at Moth as she passed by.

He was glad to see us. Relieved. Eager to help.

An awful picture formed in Moth’s imagination: the doctor, hand outstretched, welcoming them into his home.
How long did he have left? One minute? Two?

And then the phone rang.

Moth breathed in sharply.
Blood was everywhere. Andy screamed.

He pictured the doctor reaching for the phone.

There was a countdown going on: Five, four, three …

Something was being said.

Two, one … murder.

Moth realized that Doctor Hogan had merely listened, frozen in place. He’d said nothing to indicate who it was on the other end of the line.

How close were we to dying? Suppose we’d followed him into that kitchen and were standing at his side?

Instead, we were ten feet from death.

Moth stiffened in his seat, refusing to shift even an inch because he didn’t want to do anything that would make Andy Candy inadvertently move her head away from his shoulder. He started to look around the plane wildly, imagining that his uncle’s killer had followed them on board. It took him several seconds to calm his racing pulse, insisting,
Don’t be crazy. He’s not here.

At least, not yet.

Moth closed his eyes, listened to the engines.

Before today, murder was an abstraction,
he thought.
Even when I saw Uncle Ed’s body, it was still a killing that had happened, not a killing that was happening.

Verb tenses that underscored death.

We’re learning. Fast.

Fast enough?

He wasn’t at all sure about this.

What they saw, what they heard, what they felt, how they reacted all combined into a stew of violent death. The burgeoning academic in Moth wondered whether all these sensations put together were what soldiers on a battlefield experienced.

And then they have nightmares,
he thought.
Even with all their training, what they get are night sweats and paranoid anxiety. What protects us?

He stole a look at his right hand, imagining that it should be quivering with a drunkard’s shakes. Then he watched Andy Candy and counted each
regular breath she took, trying to see if somewhere on her relaxed face was the beginning of some nightmare.

What do we do now?

For a moment, he had a distant thought, something way on the periphery of what he was trying to process:
Am I going to kill her by asking for her help?
But as quickly as this idea intruded he dismissed it, because he selfishly knew how much he needed her.

Andy Candy awakened on the final approach into Miami and realized that she was suddenly wrapped up in a tapestry of killings and that anyone in their right mind would flee the instant they touched down before they got woven any deeper into the fabric. She’d formulated this opinion before. But on those times, it had seemed an intellectual conclusion, like something obvious to any good student taking an advanced English literature course. No longer. Reason battled against something deeper than loyalty. She could feel Moth’s presence in the seat next to her and even if she wouldn’t turn to look at him, she knew that he would be lost without her.
Blinded,
she thought.
That’s what he would be
. She replayed Doctor Hogan’s death in her mind’s eye, and understood that the two of them were naïve and probably foolish to think that they could contend with the sort of threat that fired that rifle.

She had an odd thought:
People celebrate the climbers that risk death to reach the peak of Everest. People wildly criticize the climbers that make some small error in judgment or planning and die on the route to the top of Everest. But people don’t remember the climbers who recognize their limits and turn back toward safety just yards from the summit. They may be alive. But they are forgotten.

Their flight landed without a problem. They went to baggage claim. Moth had checked his small suitcase, and he paced around nervously waiting for it to arrive on the conveyor belt. Andy Candy was a little taken aback by his behavior until she realized that he’d put the doctor’s gun in his bag, and he was afraid some X-ray machine had spotted it.

Five dead psychiatrists.

Four students. One professor.

What did they have in common?

His first instinct was:
a shared class?

Forensic psychiatry. That was what Jeremy Hogan taught. But none of the four dead students specialized in that field. They were a research psychiatrist, a therapist, a child psychiatrist, and one who specialized in geriatric psychiatry. And only Ed had actually taken Doctor Hogan’s class.

Andy Candy had set up a workspace in Moth’s tiny galley kitchen, perched on a stool by the counter, hunched over her laptop, and surrounded by coffee cups and notes—including the scrawled entries on Doctor Hogan’s legal pad. She knew these should have been turned over to the detectives in New Jersey, but also felt certain they would have been ignored. Moth was seated behind a small desk, also working on a computer. It was midday, bright sun flooded through the windows, but Andy Candy thought they were working as if it were closing in on midnight.

Moth stared at the names in front of him:
five unique deaths.
There was no single element that shrieked,
This is the how they died, and that will tell you the why.
They lived in different parts of the nation. They had different career arcs, different types of families. Their histories were wildly different.

What they had in common was a third-year program years earlier when they all decided to go into psychiatry. That told him this: His uncle’s killer was either someone they all treated as students, someone who taught them, or someone in the program with them.

He wondered:
Why would a teacher kill his onetime students?
Moth removed that category.

Thirty years after graduation
: His uncle died from a handgun fired at close range into his temple.

Thirty years after graduation
: He and Andy Candy had witnessed a death from a distance, a shot fired from a high-powered rifle. But of the five deaths he was examining, these were the only ones where guns were involved.

One student. One professor.

“All right,” Moth said to Andy. “We know about two deaths. We have to do a little basic research into the others.” She nodded.

Another ex-student. A phone call to a rich widow:

How did he die?

Twenty years after graduation:

“Stupidity, really. Stupidity, but it became a big-time lawsuit. A young and inexperienced nurse filling in for someone home sick that day—she’d never worked in the ICU before—misread a heart surgeon’s post-op medication instructions, and so the injection he got …”

Moth listened to a story of scrawled notes on a chart and medication that should have been
point five zero milligrams
unfortunately becoming
fifty milligrams.
This was the most common of ICU mistakes and probably happened more often than any hospital wanted to let on. The widow seemed resigned to the story. “The surgeon was tired and hurried, and though he denied making a mistake on the chart, well …” She hesitated, and added, “Well … well, well … you know doctors’ handwriting.” The woman sighed deeply. “There was a little mark on the chart—the lawyers showed it to me. It almost looked like his pen had run out of ink, or somehow it got erased, like some liquid spilled on it, and he claimed it was the missing decimal point. At least, that’s what he would have said in a trial, but it never got that far. Argue this, argue that, but he was still dead. The hospital attorneys were eager to settle.”

Another sigh: “Think about it. You die because of a little mark on a paper that may or may not be there. A damn decimal point. It was ten years ago. I’ve moved on.”

Moth thanked the widow, apologizing for disturbing her, and thinking that nothing in the tone of her voice supported the contention
I’ve moved on
. But as he spoke, he thought,
A medical student would know about dosages and ICU errors. He would know about a decimal point. He wondered about the word
erased
that the widow had used.

Another ex-student. A phone call to a state trooper in charge of auto accident reconstruction:

How did she die?

Eighteen years after graduation:

Gruff, no-nonsense voice: “The doc liked to walk her dog in the evening, right around dusk, on a little two-lane, real narrow country road. No sidewalks. No shoulder. Not smart. And she was walking on the wrong side. Should be facing oncoming traffic, but she wasn’t. She and her husband had split up and he had the kids for the weekend, so there was no one around to call the police when she didn’t return home. When we measured skid marks, checked weather and light conditions, it appeared she was hit from behind on a blind curve just a little after dark, dragged about ten feet before being knocked into a drainage ditch, where she was out of sight from any subsequent motorists passing by. Suspect vehicle was traveling at least fifty miles per hour on impact. Couldn’t find any brake marks until yards past the point of collision. It was morning before someone spotted her down there—and that was some schoolkids walking to a bus stop who didn’t know what to do, so it was even longer before we were on scene.”