The dead student, p.33
The Dead Student, page 33
The heft of the weapon seemed almost as frightening to her as what it could do. She thought it would require a special strength to lift it up, aim it at a human being, and pull the trigger—despite all the propaganda from gun enthusiasts to the contrary. She jammed it into her satchel, told herself to forget about it, realized that was impossible, and simply clamped her mouth shut.
The two of them emerged from the ladies’ room and saw Moth standing in front of the ticket counter, staring at a line of people. His face was a little flushed and he seemed almost frozen in place, as if he’d seen a poisonous snake at his feet and was afraid that by moving he would spur a strike.
“Is something wrong?” Andy asked.
Moth shook his head slowly. He did not turn to face her, but he addressed Susan quietly: “We know he was here in Miami, right?”
Susan replied: “Yes.”
“We know he went back to Massachusetts. Had to, right? Had to set up the explosion.”
“Yes,” she replied again, only this time she dragged the word out.
“Assume for a minute that wasn’t him inside. It was some other body.”
“Okay. That’s what we think. But …”
“He’s a dedicated killer. What would another corpse mean to him?”
“Nothing. Okay. Keep going.”
“So, we know—loosely, but we know—when he had to fly back north to get there before we did.”
Susan felt a little dizzy. It wasn’t the pain or the Tylenol.
Andy Candy whispered, “We have a time line, don’t we.”
“Yes,” Moth said. “And we know where lists of names on flight manifests are kept.” He pointed at the ticket counter. “If Blair Munroe is on one of those that lists, well, dead end. Too bad. Move on. But if it’s not …”
Susan looked a little confused. So did Andy Candy.
“What are you getting at?” Andy asked.
Moth tried to maintain an appearance of steadiness, but his voice was picking up momentum. “Everyone always looks for a clear-cut link. But in my field, sometimes it’s the absence of something that is the telltale sign.”
He pointed over at the ticket counter.
“A man we know was in Miami buys a ticket to fly home. That home belongs to a man named Blair Munroe. But did Munroe call Andy? Did he tip off the police about Susan’s drug dealer? Did he threaten my aunt? Or was it someone else who boarded that plane north?” Ironic, he thought. If he hid his identity, it can tell us who he is.
I am a historian. Moth smiled inwardly. An investigator of subtlety.
42
Her appointment with her boss was not until nine the following morning, but she knew security would be on duty round the clock. It was close to midnight when she walked through the doors to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.
The security guard behind bulletproof glass was reading a Carl Hiaasen comedy and laughing. But when he saw her, he instantly grimaced. “Jesus, Ms. Terry. What the hell happened to you?” He nodded toward her cast and sling.
“Car accident,” she lied. “This is Miami. Uninsured driver, naturally. Ran a stoplight.”
“Sounds like a mess.”
“You better believe it. And you think this is bad … ,” she pointed at her arm, “… you should see my damn car. Totaled.” What she was hoping was, Please don’t look down and see a “SUSPENDED” notation by my name on your checklist. She knew to keep up the distraction. “Hey, anyone else in here working overtime for no money?”
The security guard smiled. “Yeah, a few guys are still here. The team doing that big bank fraud case and a couple of the prosecutors involved in putting those home invasion badasses away are still here. Everyone else has gone home for the night.”
“I won’t be long,” she said while continuing to smile and trying to act as if she hadn’t a care in the world. “Just need to double-check some documents before a hearing tomorrow afternoon. You know how it is: You’re sitting around at home, watching TV and chugging painkillers … ,” she gestured with her bandaged arm, “… and going over all that courtroom stuff mentally, and suddenly you think you’ve forgotten something or left something out, or I don’t know, screwed something up …”
As she said all this, she tossed her hair a bit and laughed and moved steadily toward the entranceway. Come on, she thought. Don’t check. Don’t do your job. Just be tired and bored and not paying proper attention on a totally routine night.
The guard reached down, made a notation on a clipboard that she’d entered the offices—she’d known he would do that and didn’t see any way around it—and buzzed her into the warren of offices. The sound of the electronic lock was harsh but welcome. What she counted on was that her boss didn’t check those overnight logs—or, at least, wouldn’t check them until he had a bona fide reason to.
He would probably have that reason within the next few hours.
As soon as she slipped through the doors, she ducked to the side, into a shadow next to several tall filing cabinets. The overhead lights—ordinarily relentlessly bright—were dimmed. The office was quiet, ghostly. She craned her head and thought she could hear voices coming from one wing. This made her crouch down a little more, in a movement that made her arm ache brutally. The other prosecutors in the office would know she was suspended. And, like anyone involved in the world of crime and punishment, they would be curious if they spotted her. Maybe suspicious. They will ask, “What are you doing here?” in a friendly kind of way, but this will conceal doubts. They won’t believe whatever flimsy excuse I come up with. Someone will write an email that moves up the chain and that will be that. The boss will be furious.
No. More than furious. He’s already furious. He will be some entirely new red-faced, clenched-jaw angry.
She hesitated. She was struck with a sense of loss—the steel desks and closed offices surrounding her were spartan and colorless, but they were more her home than her own apartment was. It was the place where she’d felt both happiest and most stressed, a place of anxiety and accomplishment. All the contradictions that rippled through her were as painful as the throbbing in her arm.
Then—almost as rapidly as they’d flooded her—she dismissed every sensation, reenergized her focus, and, staying low, crept through the area toward her office. Carpet muffled any sound her running shoes might have made. She listened to her breathing, hoping it was even, although it seemed labored.
She was stealing something this night.
Her name was still on the door. This reassured her. She prayed that none of the locks had been changed. They would be after she was fired, she knew. But when her key opened the room, she breathed a sigh of relief.
She thought she was not exactly a break-in artist or a midnight robber. But what she was doing was certainly a violation of her agreement with her boss, and bordered on the criminal.
She wondered if some clear-eyed prosecutor would look at what she had done and see felonies. Probably. Maybe. Possibly. She did not know. She asked herself: Would I? She knew the answer to that was yes. But fear mixed with determination to create an odd concoction that could be summed up with an obscenity: Fuck it. All she knew was that she was swept up in something and that right at that hour in the middle of the night it was up to her to discover an answer.
Finding a killer—that might just possibly keep her job safe.
Everything she had done and was about to do would seem like a small price—if she was successful. She didn’t want to imagine the alternative. Disbarred. Arrested. Prosecuted.
And worse: humiliated, knowing that she had been powerless to prevent a killer from walking away scot-free.
Susan closed the door to her office quietly behind her. She didn’t turn on the overhead light, but in the small glow from the city that crept through her window, she could see around the barren space. Everything is empty, she thought. The only way to fill it back up was to do what she was doing. She moved behind her desk and booted up her computer. Law enforcement access. She said another small prayer that her log-on and password hadn’t been compromised by her suspension. When the computer screen came to life, she was relieved—although a part of her was dismayed by what she considered genuinely sloppy security.
She hit a few keys. Each click! sound on the keyboard made her shift about nervously, hoping she wasn’t heard.
A Transportation Security Administration site came up.
She knew there would be no hiding that it was Susan Terry seeking information. Each keystroke and password was uniquely hers, as solid a bit of evidence as a signature on a page, and eventually it would be traced to her. Any competent investigator would find out what and where and when she was looking for this information. She could run any “erase disk” program she liked and she knew it would be fruitless. When it came to computer technology, investigators were way ahead of any capability she possessed.
She didn’t really care, but she knew this put a clock on everything she was doing. She could feel it ticking inexorably. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. A minute. An hour. A day. How much time did she have to find a killer?
Susan bent toward the computer screen and whispered, “God damn it, Timothy Warner, I sure as hell hope you’re right. It would be nice to lose my entire career doing the right thing for a change, even if it is totally illegal.”
This was funny, she thought. Gingerly she removed her right arm from the sling.
For an instant she imagined herself to be a criminal seeking another criminal.
She typed rapidly, one-handed sometimes, sometimes overcoming the pain of forcing her right arm forward so she could move more quickly through the electronic police worlds.
Moth watched Andy Candy sleep.
He was slumped into his desk chair. His computer was open in front of him. Andy’s bag was nearby, and he knew the .357 Magnum was inside, but for the time being he left it alone.
He knew she was exhausted. Once, years earlier, after some truly sweaty teenage coupling, she had abruptly fallen asleep beside him. They had been in the backseat of a car—a cliché, he knew, but it was where they’d found privacy that night. She was naked and he’d spent the minutes she dozed trying to memorize every curve and fold of her body. He’d watched her then just as he did now. He thought they had no chance to continue together, that the only thing linking them now was something dark and murderous, and that eventually there would be light shining on the two of them and they would split apart again. It made him sad, and anxious. He didn’t know if he could bear losing her again—which didn’t seem a very mature way to feel. But he felt crippled by all that being adult had brought into his life. Drink. Hopelessness. Near death. Salvation through his uncle. He wondered if avenging his uncle’s murder—it seemed an almost Napoleonic notion—would cost him Andy’s presence.
He guessed it would. This caused him to shift in his seat. He wished he could join her in the narrow bed, but he was waiting.
The email counter on the computer made its electronic sound.
That will be her, he thought. He wondered if he should awaken Andy. He knew he could use her way of seeing things. But he let her sleep. Just a little longer. He opened up the first email:
No Blair Munroe.
20 possible flights. Some connecting.
Sending all lists.
Meet you at 7 your place.
He hesitated, then started to open all the attachments and move them to his desktop.
Another email beeped.
He opened it immediately.
It read:
Dead?
I don’t think so.
It was a Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles driver’s license picture of Blair Munroe, blown up to fill the page.
He printed the photo out and held it in his hands.
Moth stared, hoping he could see killer in the eyes, the shape of the jaw, perhaps the cut of the hair or the turn of the lips. But there was nothing that obvious or helpful. He shuddered, thought he should awaken Andy to show her, but then realized it could wait. If this was the man he had to kill, there was no sense in rushing her into the crime. She could have a few more minutes of innocent sleep, he thought.
43
Moth fell asleep a couple of hours before dawn. He lifted a pillow from his bed and lay down on the carpet beside Andy Candy. He had some odd thought about modesty and not disturbing her before stripping down to his underwear and shutting his eyes.
Andy, on the other hand, awakened just as the first rays of morning light crept into the apartment. She saw Moth on the floor beside her, rose, and stepped over him gingerly. She made some coffee as quietly as she could and splashed some water on her face in the kitchen sink, then went to the computer and read everything that Moth had been working on. She saw the information sent by Susan that he had printed out and then picked up the driver’s license picture of Blair Munroe, going through many of the identical thoughts that Moth had processed just a few hours earlier. Then she took her coffee and sat down at the desk to examine flight passenger lists.
The first thing she did was rule out any women’s names.
Then she cleared any obvious couples. Goodbye Mister and Missus Last Names Alike.
“You don’t have a wife, do you?” she whispered to the photograph. “No common-law Bonnie and Clyde spouse cokiller at your side?” She paused, letting these questions hang in front of the computer screen, before mouthing her own answer: “No. I didn’t think so. You started out a loner and you’re going to end up one, too.” She understood that she was speculating, and that she didn’t really know much about murderers, although she no longer felt like a naïf in this particular school of understanding.
You’ve learned something about killing, haven’t you? she said to herself.
The Transportation Security Administration lists on the desk in front of her included dates of birth. Anyone too young or too old was immediately removed from her consideration. She used a fifteen-year age window, thinking that the man they were hunting could be anywhere in that range. The photo on the driver’s license had an indistinct quality to it; the man had a slippery look, and might be any of several ages. He was certainly older than her and Moth. Older than Susan Terry.
Ed’s age, she realized. Or damn close to it.
The possibilities were narrowed.
Single men. Traveling alone. Aged forty-five to sixty.
She continued to quietly speak to herself: “Were you pretending to be a businessman finishing up some important deal? A tourist tired after catching a bit of illicit South Beach action? Or maybe a dutiful son returning home after visiting elderly relatives in one of the high-rises in North Miami? What did you want to show the world you were, because you weren’t showing us even a little bit of the truth, were you?”
She drew lines through names she eliminated. By the time she was finished her own list was narrowed down to right around two dozen men traveling north alone who fit the modest profile she’d established.
One of those names, she realized, was either a charred body in a trailer in a forgotten little town in Massachusetts, or a killer luxuriating in newly found freedom.
Her money was on luxury.
We were close, but we weren’t really close enough for you to kill yourself, were we? Questions resounded in her head. You were clever enough to plan other people’s deaths. Why couldn’t you plan your own? She imagined murders taking place on a stage in front of her. Like an actor, the killer they sought took a bow and exited to thunderous applause. Stage left.
Moth stirred. She looked up. He was moving stiffly. “Morning,” Andy Candy said brightly. “There’s coffee.”
Moth grunted. He lifted himself to his feet and disappeared into the bathroom. A hot shower and vigorous toothbrushing cleared away some of the fogginess of too much tension, not enough sleep, and growing anxiety. When he emerged, Andy eyed his wet hair.
“I think I’ll do that as well. Is there a dry towel?”
He nodded.
“Look at this while I shower,” she said, pushing her list of names toward him.
Moth sat with his coffee cup, examining Andy’s list but listening to the noise from the bathroom, working hard to not dwell on every memory of her naked form. It was a morning, he believed, like any old married couple might have, with only one small distinction: A little conversation. Clean up. Some hot coffee. A modest pace to get the day going. Start to plan to murder someone.
It had been some time since he’d felt the revenge energy that had dominated him when he’d pulled a semblance of his life together after his uncle’s death. But staring down at the list, it stirred within him again.
“Where are you?” he asked each name on the list. This question was followed by, “Who are you?” and finally, “How do I find you?” Each question was whispered in a lower, rougher tone.
Susan Terry hesitated before knocking on Moth’s door. She recalled that a few days earlier she had stood in the same spot, gun in hand, ready to shoot him because in a coked-up near frenzy of confused thoughts, she believed it was the history student–drunk who had called the police on her and thoroughly screwed up her carefully balanced life.
She shrugged and knocked.
As Moth opened the door, without a greeting she simply said, “I don’t have much time. I have to be on the carpet in my boss’s office at nine. We need to figure out the next step before then, because I think I’m going to be out on my ass at nine-zero-one.”
Moth steered her toward the desk, where piles of papers—everything accumulated over the weeks since his uncle’s death—were haphazardly strewn about. He saw Susan glance at the mess and frown. He pushed Andy’s list to her just as Andy emerged from the shower, running a brush through damp hair.
“One of these, I think,” he said. “It’s what Andy came up with, going through all the stuff you sent. At least, maybe he’s on this.”
