The Dead Student (27 page)

The trooper paused.

“A lousy death. Impact didn’t completely kill her. It was the combination of blood loss, shock, and hypothermia. Got damn cold that night, like upper twenties. Maybe took a couple minutes, maybe a couple hours. Couldn’t tell for certain. Son of a bitch hit-and-run driver killed the dog, too. A golden retriever. Sweetheart of a dog. From time to time, she used to take the dog into a psych ward where she worked. People said the dog was better for the patients than any therapy.”

“And your investigation?”

“Went kind of nowhere,” the trooper said. “Very frustrating.” Moth could hear the shrug over the phone line.

“We put out a BOLO—a Be on the Lookout—for the car, once we’d identified it from a paint chip that stuck to the dog’s leash. We notified body shops in a three-county area—you know, look out for anyone with left front end damage. Pulled all sorts of rental records, auto sales, registrations—the works—looking for the car. But it didn’t show up for six months, and then …”

The trooper’s voice trailed off a bit, before coming back on strong.
“Burned out. Torched. Way back in the woods. Forensics pulled the VIN number off it, but all it did was match up with a vehicle stolen from a mall parking lot in the next state over four days before the accident.”

Again the trooper hesitated. “There was one detail that really stuck with me. Seen it before, seen it again, but it’s still pretty damn nasty.”

“What’s that?” Moth asked. He sounded like a reporter collecting facts; the more terrible, the more flat and sturdy he sounded.

“There were some signs in the leaves and other debris around the doc’s body that the hit-and-run driver stopped, got out, went and stood next to the doc—you know, checked out what he’d done—before taking off.”

“In other words …”

“In other words, made absolutely certain she was dying and then left her.”

“And?”

“And that was that. Dead end. Some lucky bastard got away with a vehicular homicide, unless you can tell me something I don’t know.”

Moth considered this request. There was a lot he could say. “No,” he said, “I was just trying to get in touch with the doctor to inform her about my uncle’s suicide. They had been classmates together, and there’s a memorial fund. When I found out she was dead, I just got curious. Sorry if I’ve wasted your time.”

“No problem,” said the trooper. Moth could hear suspicions in the man’s voice. He didn’t blame him.

But at the same time, he wanted to pound the table.
What is there in a hit-and-run that speaks about the study of psychiatry?

Nothing he could readily see—except that telling statement:
made absolutely certain …

Another ex-student. Two calls.

How did he die?

Fourteen years after graduation:

First: a college-age son.

“Dad was alone at the summer house up on the lake. He liked to go up there early in the season, before anyone else showed up—get the place
open, putter around, be by himself … You know, it’s really hard for me to talk about it. I’m sorry.”

Second: Taylor-Fredericks Funeral Home in Lewiston, Maine.

“I’ll have to check my records,” the manager said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Thank you,” Moth replied. He waited patiently.

The man came back on the line. He had a whiny, nasal voice, almost a caricature of a funeral home director’s.

“Now I remember …”

“Boating accident?” Moth asked.

“Yes. The doctor had a small sailboat that he typically took out every day in the summer. But this was early April—you know, ice melt was just about finished, house-opening season. No one was around. He must have put the boat in the water, decided to take a little spin. The weather wasn’t that mild and he shouldn’t have been out on the lake. People don’t want to hear it, but in April there’s still a lot of leftover winter in these parts. He shouldn’t have done that.”

“But what exactly killed him?”

“Sudden gust, probably. At least, that’s what the county coroner sort of figured. Boom must have caught him on the side of the head. Knocked him into the lake, probably unconscious already. Water temperature was maybe forty-five degrees. No, probably lower. Can’t last long in that. Ten minutes, they tell me; that’s it. Anyway, it was forty-eight hours before divers found his body, and that was only because some other home owner spotted the overturned boat out in the lake and called the cops. Coroner noted some damage to the back of his head—but the body had been in the water, so hard to say exactly what happened. And the boat flipped after he went out—at least that was what folks guessed—so anything left behind was gone. Sad story. Family had him cremated and his ashes spread on the lake. I gather it was a special place for him.”

Very special,
Moth thought.
The place he was murdered.

But the leap from
murdered
to
how?
eluded Moth. And there was nothing in what seemed like a random accident that spoke of medical school thirty years earlier.

“God damn it,” Moth whispered, hanging up his phone.

Suicide. Hunting accident. Hit-and-run. Hospital mistake. Boating accident. Each death either spread out over years or jammed together a few weeks apart. None of it seemed to occupy any realm of probability; but it might start to make sense if seen from the perspective that Moth alone occupied.

He looked over at Andy Candy.
Maybe not completely alone,
he hoped.

“ ‘My fault,’ ” Moth said.

Andy lifted her head. “That’s what Doctor Hogan said. Same as your uncle. Sort of.”

“Five people are dead. There was a reason. Let’s find out what they shared.”

Andy Candy nodded. “This is what we have,” she said, pointing at Jeremy Hogan’s scribbled notes. “It doesn’t seem like much. But it is, really.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He was the only professor. The others were all students. So …”

“So we know
when
whatever it was they were to blame for happened. We just have to find out what it was.”

Andy Candy used her most persuasive voice, the one in which she mingled a young-girl, bright-eyed innocence with the persistence of a veteran investigative reporter. No one in the current dean’s office at the university’s medical school had been on the job thirty years earlier, and they were reluctant to give out contact information for retirees.

But
reluctant
didn’t mean they wouldn’t. She obtained a phone number for a doctor long gone from the university.

On the fourth ring, a woman answered.

Andy quickly went through the cover story—Ed’s suicide, the memorial fund. She was halfway through when the woman interrupted.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think we can contribute.”

“Can I speak with the doctor?” Andy Candy persisted.

“No.”

This was so abrupt she was taken aback.

“Just for a minute or two.”

“No. I’m sorry. He’s in hospice care.”

The woman’s voice seemed to be coming across some vast space, and she stifled a small sob.

“Oh, I’m sorry …”

“He only has a few days, they tell me.”

“I didn’t mean to …”

“It’s okay. It’s been expected. He’s been sick for a long time.”

Andy Candy was about to create some quick excuse and hang up. She could sense the woman’s pain over the phone line, almost as if she were standing next to her. But as Andy pawed at words, she found herself tightening, almost overcome with a sudden determination.

“Did the doctor ever speak about anything—I believe it would have been the class of 1983—anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary with the students?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was my uncle’s class,” Andy lied. “And something happened …”

The woman paused. “What’s this about?” she demanded.

Andy Candy took a deep breath and continued lying.

“When my uncle died, he referred to some event back in his med school program. We’re just trying to find out what he meant.”

This seemed like a reasonable explanation.

“I can’t help you,” the woman said. “My husband can’t help you. He’s dying.”

“I’m sorry. But—”

“Call one of the people who went through the psych program. That program was always the most problematic of all the disciplines. More trouble for the administration than it was worth, I think. Every year there were fifteen admitted. Maybe one of them didn’t end up crazy. Perhaps they can assist you.”

And then the woman hung up.

Andy Candy looked down at her list. The distraught woman hadn’t said anything she didn’t already know—and yet, she had.

Fifteen admitted
.

She counted graduates.

Fourteen graduated.

Four dead.

One missing.

Someone came in, but did not come out.

There it was, and so simple it frightened her.

Andy Candy shivered. Moth must have seen something in her face, because he bent toward her. Andy had difficulty putting what she understood in that second into some articulate statement of discovery. But inwardly she suddenly felt as close to death again as she had in the moment she saw Jeremy Hogan’s head explode and she’d screamed. She wondered whether she was doomed to spend the rest of her life screaming. Or more likely, waiting to scream.

23

Susan Terry made a point of sitting beside Moth at Redeemer One that night. When it was her turn, she declined to speak. She gestured to Moth, who also shook his head, which seemed to surprise everyone, and testifying was passed on to the engineer, who methodically outlined his latest Oxy struggle.

When the session broke up, Susan placed her hand on Moth’s arm, holding him in his seat for a moment.

“I have someone waiting,” Moth said.

“This will only take a minute,” Susan responded.

She watched as the others filed out of the room or milled over by the coffee and soft drink table.

“You’ve missed some of these meetings,” Susan said.

“I’ve been busy.”

“I’m busy too, but I’ve been here. You’re too busy to show up and talk about addiction?”

This was blunt and to the point.

“I was out of town.”

“Where?”

“North.”

“
North
is a big place. They have bars in the
North
?”

She hoped that a little sarcasm would loosen him up. Sarcasm makes people angry, and angry people shoot their mouths off. This was an equation she’d learned in her first day as a prosecutor and that she hoped would work with Moth.

“I suppose so. Didn’t go to any.”

Susan nodded. “Sure,” she said, making a single syllable sound like a dozen. Any interrogation, even the most offhanded one, relied on probing weaknesses. She was well versed in Moth’s greatest weakness, because she shared it. “So, what exactly did you do, up in the great wide North?”

“I went to see a man who knew my uncle when he was younger.”

“Who was that?”

“A retired psychiatrist who was one of my uncle’s teachers.”

“Why him?”

Moth didn’t answer.

“I see,” Susan said. “So, you’re still convinced there’s some mysterious master criminal out there?” She continued her sarcasm, trying to needle Moth into saying something concrete. She ricocheted between doubts and certainties about the uncle’s death:
doubts
that were her own, brand-new ones and which she wanted to disappear as readily and quickly as possible, and
certainties
reflected in Moth’s steadfast and, to her, completely irritating insistence.

Moth faked a laugh. “Yes,” he said. “But I wouldn’t know how to characterize him. You think there is someone—some sort of Professor Moriarty that battles Sherlock Holmes? You think that’s what I’m doing? But what happens to them? Reichenbach Falls. Anyway, in this case
master criminal
seems a little premature.”

He thought this was lying with truths. And he liked using the word
premature
.

“Timothy,” Susan said, trying abruptly to soften her tone, which was usually another effective technique, although she was beginning to believe
that Moth might be immune to most routine approaches. “I’m trying to help you. You know that. I warned you that going off half-cocked on some wild-goose chase was dangerous. Tell me, in your trip north when you visited this man your uncle knew like dozens of years ago, did you find out anything?”

Moth could not stop himself. The word exploded from his lips, though it was spoken in a whisper.

“Yes.”

They were both quiet for an instant. Susan Terry shook her head, unconvinced.

“What exactly was that?” she demanded. This question was spoken in a tone that was unequivocal: a professional prosecutor’s not subtle insistence.

“That I’m right,” Moth said.

Then he rose and walked quickly toward the exit, leaving Susan behind on the couch watching him, anger mixing with curiosity in a dangerous cocktail.

In the car outside Redeemer One
,
Andy Candy waited for Moth and busied herself making more phone calls.

Right about the time she thought the meeting would be winding up she dialed the number for a psychiatrist in San Francisco. He was the third name on her list of surviving graduates and seemed to be in private psychoanalytic and therapeutic practice. He had a mixture of responses on Angie’s List, half of which seemed to canonize him, and half that implied he should be indicted or imprisoned or consigned to the Seventh Circle of Hell. Andy imagined that this range would probably constitute flattery to most shrinks.

She was surprised when the doctor answered his own phone. She stammered briefly as she went through the now-memorized bit about Uncle Ed and a memorial fund.