The Dead Student (51 page)

Sandy the lawyer snorted. “Let’s call the police right now. No delays. Presumably Susan knows where to send them.”

She dug her cell phone out of a large Gucci purse, and held it up.

“The wrong person will get arrested,” Susan said quietly. “You don’t get it.”

The woman hesitated, finger poised over the dialing screen. “Get what? What do you mean?”

“It’s Timothy who is the killer tonight.”

Again the room burst into objections.
“No way”
and
“Don’t be crazy”
and
“That’s stupid”
filled the area, a torrential downpour of disagreement.

“It’s Timothy who has the weapon and the motive and is breaking the law tonight.
Premeditated
. You all know that word. We’re not talking about the bad guy—right now, he’s innocent. So who do you think the cops will take into custody when they show up? The person who owns the house, or the person who broke in, armed and dangerous? That’s assuming Timothy surrenders promptly. I wouldn’t want to make that assumption.”

“Well, perhaps,” Sandy countered. “But a call from you would direct them to the right guy …”

“Without evidence? With only wild and crazy suppositions? I tell them, ‘Hey, don’t arrest the guy bent on murder and revenge. Arrest the other guy.’ They won’t do that. And even if they did—how could they hold him? And if they can’t hold him, I know one thing for certain.”

“What’s that?”

“He will disappear.”

“Ridiculous. He can be tracked, the same way that Timothy tracked him.”

“No, not necessarily. That was dogged persistence and more than a little damn fool luck. And this guy won’t make the same mistake a second time. He will vanish. It can be done; I would wager he’s prepared to do just that. Actually, it’s not that hard. So, count on one thing: Whatever happens to Timothy tonight, if the man who killed his uncle is still alive in the next few hours, he will be long gone.”

The room silenced again. Susan could hear breathing. She added softly, “And that’s assuming whoever we try to send gets there in time.”

“We need to call someone,” the dentist said.

Another pause. It was like the Redeemer One regulars’ sudden silences were weighted, heavy, iron. People were sorting through possibilities.

“What,” said Fred the engineer, “if you go?”

“He had the opportunity to include me.” Susan shook her head. “Didn’t take it. In fact, kicked me out of whatever he was planning.” She thought that was
mostly
honest. But the word forming in her head at the same time was
coward
. She suspected that would be an accurate description of her behavior by the end of the night. Irony encapsulated her. The best outcome for her depended on her doing nothing. It would give her excuses,
deniability
, which were crucial if she was going to rescue her own career and her own future. There were felonies littering her world—and starting to avoid them was her priority. Of course, she understood, that
might
mean someone was dying that night.

“So what? We should protect him—even if we’re protecting him from himself. That’s what we try to do here, right?”

There was a murmur of assent.

“What if we all go?”

“Too late for that,” Susan said.

Another silence. Then the philosophy professor said, in a cold, very hard voice:

“What is it that it is
not
too late to do?”

Susan hesitated. “I think,” Susan spoke out slowly, “we should trust Timothy to do what is right.”

She did not offer a definition of
what is right
for any of the people gathered at Redeemer One. For a second, she thought she might be able to walk away at that moment, but before she could move, another wave of furious obscenities and outrage surged through the room.

Moth sat across from the killer. An ironic thought pressed through him:
This is like sitting across from Uncle Ed. Same age. Same stakes.
The gun in his hand seemed to be heavier than he recalled its being earlier in the evening. He knew he’d completed the first phase of murder—now he had to move quickly to the next step.

“Andy,” he said, trying to maintain toughness and determination in his voice, “why don’t you give this place a bit of a search, see what you can find.”

“Okay,” she said.

Student #5 smiled at her. Teacher and struggling student. “Don’t touch anything,” he said with a helpful tone.

She stopped, looked hard at him, as if she didn’t understand what he’d said.

“Fingerprints,” he continued. “Are you sweating? That would leave a little DNA behind. Should be wearing latex gloves. I notice you are wearing that most attractive floppy stay-out-of-the-sun hat. No, no, don’t take it off. It might pull out a stray hair. You don’t want to leave a hair anywhere, because that can be traced to you …”

He turned back to Moth. “Those bottles … made you seem like just another Key West drunk sleeping it off in the bushes—I liked that touch. Clever. Showed enterprise. But fingerprints? Did you think of that? And what about the moist ground of the plant area—did you leave a shoe print in there? Whoa, that would be bad, too. Cops can identify the tread styles of almost any pair of shoes, and I bet yours are pretty common. And did you know that the dirt here in Key West has a different composition than other places? So a forensic scientist examining the soles of your shoes might be able to link you to that exact spot.”

This last bit, Student #5 knew, was a stretch. Probably a lie, but it sure sounded good, and he was pleased with it. He assumed that most of what The Nephew and The Girlfriend knew about murder and subsequent investigations had been gleaned from television shows not known for their accuracy.

Andy Candy stole a glance down at her hands. She felt like a soldier walking through a minefield. She wondered if she would betray herself and Moth simply by allowing a droplet of sweat to fall to the floor. She didn’t know what part of her body, or Moth’s, might ruin their lives. No fear is worse than the fear associated with sudden recognition that one is treading in dangerous black waters far over one’s head. Fear can create exhaustion, confusion, and doubt. All of these things flooded Andy at that moment, and she wanted to scream.

Moth didn’t know why he said it right at that moment, but he did, very
calmly: “Andy, don’t worry. It’ll be okay. He’s just talking and it doesn’t mean anything. Just take a look around.”

Moth’s voice helped her. She wasn’t sure whether he was actually
in charge,
but it sounded like he was. “Okay,” she said, stifling the desire to scream. “Give me a minute or two.”

“So, we’re just going to sit here and wait?” Student #5 asked sardonically. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Why not?” Moth answered. “Are you in a rush to die?”

50

Student #5 understood completely that he was in the midst of a deadly game, but it was one he was well trained for. Murder is psychology at its most elemental, as complex as chess, as simple as checkers. It has undercurrents of emotion at every stage, right up through the actual act. It can be sudden, and it can be sophisticated. It can be rash and impulsive, or cautiously planned. It can be driven by psychosis or post-traumatic stress disorder. It has as many variations as there are people and angers. This was a lesson he’d learned both as a killer and as a student of psychiatry.

Student #5 knew that he had to outplay the budding historian seated across from him.
Sometimes people stare at a gun barrel and know it is inevitable—there is no dodging that bullet. Not this night.
He thought:
This night: One death. Probably two, when I kill The Girlfriend as well.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the struggle and see the gun flying free. He imagined the sudden feel of it in his hand and the explosive jerk upward as he pulled the trigger: a happy and familiar memory. Then he would take his time—two hands on the handle, shooter’s stance—and finish the
night. His belief, his instinct, and his desire would all have led to the scenario he absolutely knew would play out.

He was already formulating an exit.

Leave everything behind except death. Say goodbye to Stephen Lewis, just as you did to Blair Munroe. Fast drive north. Flight from Miami. Go someplace different and unexpected, Cleveland or Minneapolis, then take another flight. Phoenix? Seattle? Hang in a hotel for a day or two. See some sights and have more than one good meal before heading back east in a leisurely way to Manhattan. Get swallowed up in New York City. Immediately begin work on a new set of backup identities. Start anew. I think California might be nice. San Francisco, not LA.

Moth’s imagination was ricocheting wildly, uncontrollably. It was as if his thoughts were quivering. He was afraid his body would twitch, so he placed his index finger against the trigger guard of the .357 Magnum. He didn’t want to fire the gun accidentally. His finger seemed stiff anyway, like a broken piece of machinery, and he doubted that it would work. His muscles had turned rubbery and useless. For so many days, miles, and obsessions, all his focus had been on first identifying the man who killed his uncle, then finding him, then finding him again, then getting the drop on him, like in some Old West dry-gulch ambush.

Murder is almost always about the past—but this was also about the future. It had been easy to lie on his bed in the darkness, thinking.
Kill him kill him kill him.

Now that he’d arrived at the
kill him
moment, Moth realized that everything he’d done had brought him to this spot—but not beyond. He remembered Susan Terry’s warning:
Can you pull that trigger?

I think so. I hope so.

Maybe.

And this was a problem that had now frozen his gun hand into an unmanageable, unmovable block. He took a deep breath and aimed down the sight on the barrel, squinting his eye a little, training the gun on the killer’s chest. Then he asked: “Why did you kill my uncle?”
Get that answer,
he thought.
The answer will tell you what to do next.

Moth slid directly into a maelstrom of uncertainty. The man across from him doubtlessly could have told him that this was a poor realm for killing.

Obscenities and fury finally started to dwindle in the air around Susan Terry, like the final spent drops of a hard rainstorm. She stayed quiet until the atmosphere in Redeemer One turned into a sullen silence. “Well,” she finally said, “nothing to do except wait and see what happens.”

Waiting,
she knew, was bordering on a felony. The
right
thing to do would be to immediately notify authorities. It was also the
wrong
thing to do. Susan was maneuvering on a razor’s edge of legal culpability. She didn’t even want to think about moral culpability.

“So, you propose—based on your legal education, familiarity with Timothy and understanding of the situation he’s in, and all other relevant factors—we all just sit around and see what happens?” asked the philosophy professor in his didactic fashion.

“I suppose you could put it that way,” Susan replied.

The professor stood up just as he would have had he been starting his addiction testimony, except that this time he addressed the gathering differently. “That is simply unacceptable,” he said. Then he added, “Does anyone disagree?”

A low murmur filled the room: indiscernible words that amounted to a single
no
.

“If we cannot help Timothy do whatever he is doing tonight,” the professor continued, “then we must help him when he survives.”

Sounds of assent filled the room.

“And I believe he will survive,” the professor continued, his voice ringing with unfounded confidence. “Just like all of us will overcome all the demons and flaws that brought us here to this place tonight.”

Susan looked around. No one disagreed with the professor. In fact, she thought, the room was filled with a certain revival-tent kind of
Praise Jesus!
passion.

“Timothy is our responsibility,” the professor said. “Like it or not.” He put these last words at Susan like daggers.

“Just as he has been there for us, we have to be there for him,” the professor added firmly. “That is what coming to Redeemer One is all about. This is where we are safe with our problems, where we support each other. So, tonight, I think Redeemer One and what it means for all of us goes well beyond the walls of this room.”

“Damn straight,” said Sandy the corporate lawyer. “Well put.” The professor took a deep breath, paused to adjust his eyeglasses, and licked his lips. “If he comes out of this alive, then we must figure out how to protect him.”

This was greeted with nodding heads.

“We have some resources,” the professor added.

“Resources?” Susan blurted.

“Yes,” he replied, turning abruptly toward her and pointing directly at her. “You, for one.”

Susan did not know how to answer. Sandy rose to her feet and interjected rapidly: “Either you are a part of this gathering or you are not. What happens here is recovery. What happens out there … ,” she waved toward the door, “… is not. It seems to me that you need to make up your mind. Are you an addict or an ex-addict?”

Susan hesitated.

“Do you want to ever come back here again?” Sandy asked.

Susan’s mind churned. She had not considered this question.

Fred the engineer rose to his feet, standing shoulder to shoulder with the professor, reaching over and taking Sandy by the hand. “For starters,” he said, wry grin on his face, “I think we can all agree on one thing …” He slowed his delivery, staring hard at each member of the gathering before looking for a long time at Susan Terry. “If someone—like a policeman—were to ask, I think we’d all say that Timothy was here with us tonight.”