The dead student, p.35
The Dead Student, page 35
“They will be the fastest forty-eight hours you will ever experience, waiting for that knock on your door. And don’t try to run; it won’t do you any good. And I don’t care if you use all your uncle’s money to hire the best damn criminal defense attorney in Miami—you will go to prison. You know what happens to nice white boys doing time for murder? Use your imagination, Timothy, and after you figure the worst that can happen to you up at the state prison, multiply that by about a factor of ten, because that’s the reality.”
Another wait for a response that didn’t come.
“Please, Timothy. Don’t be stupid. You’re smart and well educated. You have a world of potential. Don’t toss it because of some silly notion of revenge.”
A smile. A shake of the head. His silence built up insistently, like a siren’s wail growing in the room. Susan allowed frustrated anger to slide into her voice, and finally she came up with the best possible argument:
“And you will take down Andy, and maybe me, too, even if I cooperate and testify against you. I’ll lose my job for sure this time, and probably my entire career. I might even be looking at jail time. But that isn’t anything compared to what will happen to Andy. Do you want to see her go to prison?”
Deep breath. Moth’s answer, simple, impossible: “No.”
More silence. Susan’s last, helpless question: “Well then?”
A lie: “I won’t let that happen. Goodbye, Susan. I will see you tomorrow at Redeemer One.”
One last effort, pivoting in a different direction: “Andy, please. Don’t let him do this.”
And Andy Candy’s immediate response: “I’ve never been any good at making Moth do anything. Good or bad. Once he makes up his mind, he’s as stubborn as a mule.”
A cliché, to be certain—but accurate.
Susan eyed the two of them. They suddenly seemed very young. “Well then, fuck it,” she said. She turned to leave, but at the door tried one last time: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Selfishly, she began to calculate her own exposure. It was significant. Conspiracy. Accessory before the fact—that was certain. Accessory after the fact—that was equally possible. A variety of criminal charges—ones she was accustomed to filing against the guilty—flooded her. She could see the entries in the criminal statutes, probably could even quote some of them verbatim if she were pressed. The lawyer within her wondered if she should quickly write up a warning and have the two of them sign it—some sort of statement that absolved her of any criminal responsibility. This was unfeasible, she thought, especially when Moth repeated, “Goodbye, Susan,” and held the door open for her.
She wanted to strike out, slap sense into him. Grab him by the shirt and give him a jolt of reality. She did not do this. Instead she exited, and as the door closed behind her, she felt more alone than she ever had before.
Moth took the driver’s license picture for Stephen Lewis of Angela Street in Key West and went to his computer. Whatever information he could unearth about this man was a few clicks away. His fingers hovered above the keyboard, but what he said was, “She’s right, you know.”
“Right about what?” Andy Candy responded, although she knew.
“All of it,” Moth said. “The risks. The dilemma. The reality. I shouldn’t go around fooling myself.” This was said without conviction.
He paused before adding, “And us. She was right about that. Andy, I can’t ask you for anything else. You need to leave now. Whatever happens, it has to be me, alone. Susan talked about potential … the future … not throwing it all away—pretty much every argument you would expect her to make. And every argument made much more sense than what I have in mind. Christ, I don’t even know if I can do it. She was right about that, too.” He shook his head. “I just have to try.”
Andy Candy realized that good sense should absolutely dictate what she did next. She also realized it would not.
“Moth,” she said in a low voice, “I’m not leaving you now.” This, she knew, was both the best and worst thing she could have decided to do. There are all sorts of rights that are wrong and wrongs that are right, she thought, and this is obviously one of them. She did not know which category she meant.
“If I had a future,” Moth said slowly, “it was because Uncle Ed provided it for me. And we turn all this over to the cops—and the killer will just disappear again. Maybe he has another identity somewhere. Maybe he has ten. And sure enough, no matter how much pressure Susan brings, and how many FBI flyers go out, they won’t find him. People disappear in the USA all the time. It’s a big headline when some guy who’s been gone for ten, twenty, thirty years accidentally gets caught. Sixties radicals disappeared for years. How about that guy, the Boston mobster? His face was on every post office wall and FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list and it was still decades before anyone found him. And that was pretty much blind luck. This guy—our guy—doesn’t seem like the sort that allows for either luck or accidents in his life.”
Andy Candy wanted to be practical.
“He will kill us, Moth. I know it. Maybe not today or tomorrow—but someday. When he feels like it.” This, she knew, was a truism. Saying it out loud added a layer of panic onto her fear. “Jesus,” she said, but this wasn’t a prayer.
Moth nodded in agreement.
“So, is there a plan?” she asked. She thought for a moment, Maybe we’ll be lucky and he won’t be in Key West. Then she contradicted herself: Maybe that would be unlucky.
“Yes,” he replied, as he turned to the computer to do some research. Then a qualification in drawled-out slang: “Kinda.”
46
Islamorada to Tavernier, then on to Long Key, Grassy Key, touching the Everglades, all the way down to Key West, the Overseas Highway meanders through close to seventeen hundred different islands. The view is spectacular: the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other—all glistening in sunlight, a hundred separate shades of blue waters. What Moth liked was the famous Seven Mile Bridge—which actually wasn’t 7 miles long, but just shy at 6.79. It carried a name that was deceptive, that seemed both true and false at the same time. It was nearly seven miles, so why not call it that?
Andy Candy drove. It was late in the afternoon, but the traffic wasn’t bad. She was cautious, not only because the highway that shifted from four lanes to two and cut through shopping malls and marinas is dangerous, but because if a Monroe County sheriff’s officer were to pull them over in a routine traffic stop, it could ruin everything.
In a backpack in the backseat they had some clothes that Moth had carefully selected, along with the fully loaded .357 Magnum. They had a battered baseball hat, some sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed straw hat favored by old ladies afraid of the sun.
It wasn’t much of a kit for murder.
They might have appeared to be a young couple heading for a snorkeling trip, maybe parasailing, or a sunset cruise. They weren’t. What they didn’t look like was a pair of killers.
They stopped near Marathon Key. While Moth went into a liquor store, Andy Candy found a damp, muddy spot in a corner of the parking lot. She took out some of the clothes Moth had packed and proceeded to rub them in dust and dirt, beating them up as much as she could. She glanced around, making sure that no one saw what she was doing. She looked a little like some ancient impoverished crone doing the wash by hand—only in reverse. She wished there were some stink—dried sweat, urine, fecal matter, maybe skunk scent—that she could add to the mix.
When she looked up, she saw Moth approaching. He had a plain brown sack, and she heard two bottles clank together.
“Never thought I’d do that again,” he said. He tried to install confidence in his voice, but Andy thought it seemed shaky. She was unsure whether this was because of the liquor Moth held in his hands and everything it promised it might do to him—or because of the plan, which seemed to promise to do something else.
It hadn’t quite worked out the way he thought it would.
Student #5 poured himself a cold beer and squeezed a freshly sliced lime into it, trying to postpone the sensation that had crept over him that morning and persisted through the day: He was suddenly bored.
Sunshine. Tourists. The laid-back, island lifestyle. He wasn’t sure at all whether he fit. “Damn it,” he said to no one.
He took his beer, a half-eaten bag of chips, and sat in his well-appointed living room. It was dark inside—Key West, which honors the sun religiously, is designed so that there are deep shadows; it keeps things cooler in the oppressive summer months. Combined with the constant soft hum of the central air-conditioning and the cool maroon Spanish tiles, it created a subtle quiet within his home.
For the first time in years, Student #5 actually felt alone. For so long, he had lived with the people lined up to be his victims. Now they were gone. It was like losing friends and companions. He felt the urge to open a window to the heat and street noise—although any sounds would be distant. Student #5 lived directly across from the Key West cemetery. The real estate agents’ standard joke: Quiet neighbors. One hundred thousand people buried yards from his front door—or so the estimates went; no one was certain how many actually rested there.
He stretched out on a Haitian cotton couch and pressed the beer glass to his forehead. He felt a twinge of anger. Should have seen this coming. What sort of psychologist are you?
He frowned. Shifted in his seat. Tried to find a comfortable position, but was unable. Berated himself. “Where were you on the first day of basic shrink training?” he said out loud. “Absent without leave? Not paying attention? Did you think there was nothing left for you to learn?”
It was the simplest of emotional equations, he thought, and one he should have anticipated. The fantasies about what he would do with his life had merely been tinder to help obsessive fire take light. The real business of his life had been revenge—years of dedication, devotion to a single ideal, perfecting his craft. And now all of that was gone, along with all the intellectual stimulation and intensity of planning that had accompanied it.
He felt a little like the old white-haired geezer on the first day of a forced retirement, after decades of going in to the same office every day, sitting at the same desk, drinking the same cup of coffee, eating the same brown-bagged lunch, same time, same job, hour after hour, year after year.
“God damn it,” he said out loud.
For him, no Thank You plaque, no framed picture signed by everyone, no nice but cheap retirement watch. No clap on the back from his boss, no firm handshake from the young guy who would replace him at half the cost. No tears from the more emotional of his coworkers.
“Damn,” he repeated. The geezer in his mind’s eye would shoot himself. Pronto. This he knew. “Son of a bitch,” he said. He prided himself on being a cold-eyed realist about both himself and murder, but he was depressed. And lost.
The last few weeks had been filled with energy—first as he tormented The Nephew, The Girlfriend, and The Prosecutor. That had been flat-out fun. Challenging and amusing.
Then creating his exit from one of his lives—that too had been artistry. Not only had it set him free, but it had been an exercise in imagination. And it had worked—each piece fitting together like the shuffling of a deck of cards by a professional card shark.
He had arrived in Key West invigorated, ready to embrace his new life. And almost instantly had slid into a void. From the moment he’d seen the back of Jeremy Hogan’s head explode to this one, nothing had been what he’d imagined.
Student #5 didn’t want to read trashy novels or watch soap operas on television. He didn’t want to fish or sail or swim or do any of the touristy sorts of things that brought folks to the Keys. He suddenly hated the crowds of cruise ship visitors with loud voices in different languages jamming the streets, and the high-priced huckstering that went along with catering to the money that arrived daily. Everything he’d expected to embrace had soured.
“So, what is it you want to do, now that you’re footloose and fancy-free?” he asked himself sharply. “Now that you’ve entered—retirement?” He made this last word sound like an obscenity. He paused. He whispered his answer:
“Kill.”
Then in a louder voice: “All right. Makes total sense. But who?” A smile. This question was a bit of a joke. “You know who.”
An entirely new set of challenges. After all, he thought, who poses a threat? Who can steal your life from you? He knew the real answer to this question was No one because of the way he’d established his different identities. But the mere notion that someone might be dangerous to him after all he’d accomplished felt intoxicating. He began to calculate in his head.
The Girlfriend—that won’t be too hard. Young women are always doing stupid things that make them vulnerable. The key question will be when to strike. One year? Two? How long before her natural sense of safety and stupid overconfidence truly kick in and make her ripe?
This was intriguing. Student #5 instantly moved on to Timothy Warner in his head.
The Nephew—he’s a drunk, but he won’t slide so quickly into a false sense of safety. Still, he’s young, and he’s weak, and that will obscure whatever precautions he might take when he’s sober.
The Prosecutor …
He smiled. “Now, there’s a challenge,” he said out loud. “A real challenge. She’s complicated—but when all is said and done, addiction or not, she’s still a member of law enforcement, and they guard their own carefully. Planning her death will take effort. Bigger risks, no?”
He answered his own question: “Correct.” Scheming the right death for Susan Terry would be intriguing. Accident? Suicide? Overdose? Imagine all the enemies she’s made putting people in prison. This was a welcome puzzle.
He took a long swig of his beer and went to his computer. He had a small work area set up in a sparsely furnished guest room where he’d plugged in his laptop. There was a printer in a corner on the floor. He felt a surge of energy and a calming sense of purpose. Might as well get started, he told himself. Within a few seconds, he had typed in Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. He went to the public information section on its website called “Who We Are.” Then he printed out Susan’s picture, her resume, a brief biography, and a list of some of her major cases.
Something to study. Just enough to get his juices flowing and his mind working. The simple act of clicking a few keys, then listening to pages drop into the receptacle on his printer gave him the sensation that he was doing something. The full-color head shot from the state attorney’s website was the last item to emerge. Nice long, sweeping black hair. A warm and welcoming smile. Firm jaw, wide lips, and green eyes. Really quite beautiful, he thought.
“Hello-o-o, Susan,” he said with a lilt. There’s going to come a day when you will wish that you’d been blown up in my trailer.
He started to hum to himself—music that was rock-and-roll lively; he didn’t pause to wonder why this particular song had leapt into his head. It was ostensibly a love song, in truth more a sex song, but he changed the words to the chorus as he began to sing along, crudely imitating the dead Jim Morrison’s gravelly voice, as if it came from a grave only a few yards away instead of thousands of miles distant in Père Lachaise in Paris. He could hear the Doors singer: “Love me two times, I’m going away …”
In Student #5’s mind, it became: Kill me two times, I’m going away …
47
The last few miles, from the National Key Deer Refuge, past Stock Island’s marina and the entrance to the community college, Moth went through details in his mind. It helped him to focus on what he thought they might need—as opposed to examining what they intended to do. He thought it was almost laughable—a couple of college-age kids driving to Key West to become murderers.
The only truly good thing about their murder vacation was that he was with the only girl he’d ever actually loved and, oddly, for the first time in what seemed like years he hadn’t thought about taking a drink, even if purchasing the two bottles—Scotch and vodka—had shaken him.
Beside him, Andy Candy drove steadily, cautiously, although the closer they got to Key West, the more she believed she should swerve her small car drunkenly across the road. Anything that might draw attention to them and prevent them from doing what they intended to do. That was her rational side. The irrational—which she knew was probably the right side—forced her to remain quiet, stay in her lane, and obey every traffic signal.
They found a parking spot on a quiet street just off Truman Avenue only two short blocks from the cemetery. Her car slid into a line of typical Keys vehicles: some shiny, brand-new, and expensive—Porsches and Jaguars—the others rusted-out, battered, dented, paint-peeling, ten-year-old Toyotas covered with bumper stickers proclaiming “Free the Conch Republic” and “Recycle Now!”
Moth shouldered his small backpack, with its clothes engineered filthy by Andy, the bottles of liquor, and the gun. Together, they walked to a nearby bicycle rental store—one of the dozens that dot Key West. Reggae music was blasting away over outdoor speakers, Bob Marley singing “Every little thing’s gonna be all right.” The dreadlocked salesman happily rented them two slightly run-down but utilitarian bicycles. He also showed them where to leave the bikes, locked up, if they decided to return them later that evening. Moth had told him they were unsure whether they would be staying one day or two. Andy Candy hung in the back, trying to make herself seem small and unnoticeable. Moth paid cash.
They biked across town and went into West Marine. Moth purchased a small foghorn—the sort that is a staple on every sailboat that heads to the Caribbean out of Key West. At the Angling Company he bought a pair of the neck buffs favored by fishermen—they can be pulled up to cover head and face, or else simply keep the sun off the back of the neck. Andy Candy got a pink one and he would wear a blue one.
