The Dead Student (21 page)

Can you wear discouragement like a suit of clothes?
she wondered, because she could see it written all over Moth’s face. Another dead end.

The abrupt thought arrived within her unbidden:
Don’t let him give up. It will kill him.

So before Moth could say anything, she said, “Okay, on to medical school. That makes more sense to me anyway.”

Moth used an efficient lie.

My uncle has passed away and I’m trying to reach out to his classmates at medical school to let them know about his death and possibly help contribute
to an educational fund at the university, which he was eager to establish. It’s in his will.

Andy Candy duplicated this falsehood at the Miami hospital where Ed Warner had done his residency in psychiatry.

The dual calls resulted in a helpful list provided by an alumni office secretary of 127 names, along with e-mail addresses and some medical practice websites. Ed had subsequently joined a group of first-year psychiatry residents in Miami.

The two sat next to each other in a study carrel in the main library at Moth’s graduate school. They each had a laptop computer open and easy Internet access.

“Lots of names,” Andy Candy whispered. There were other students working nearby, and anything spoken was hushed. She grabbed a piece of scrap paper and wrote down:
surgeons, internal medicine, radiologists—killers?

Moth took his pen and drew a line through each subspecialty and then wrote
only shrinks
. He understood this actually made no sense, from the historian’s perspective. A proper assessment of any era precludes no factors, and he guessed that an orthopedic surgeon could be a killer as readily as a dermatologist. But it made the most sense to focus on Ed’s profession.
A good historian,
he thought,
starts close and works outward.

He wrote:
Match Day.

Andy Candy nodded. The medical school had provided a list of where each graduate had been matched for their residencies. Ed’s name was near the end with the abbreviation
psych
following it. She went back, listed thirteen other names that were designated the same way and the hospitals they were sent to train at. Ed was the only newly minted doctor to be sent to Miami.

She took six. He took seven. They started a Google search on each name. Odd bits of information came up—practices, awards, fellowships, a driving–under-the-influence arrest, a divorce that landed in court.

But these details didn’t interest them.

What did show up made Andy Candy want to shout out loud, but that would have aroused everyone in the library.

She’d turned toward Moth and seen that he was rigid, ramrod-straight, next to her. His face had paled a little and she saw his fingers quivering above the keyboard of his laptop.

“What are the odds …” he’d whispered so softly she could barely hear him, as he turned the computer toward her and pointed, “that out of fourteen names, four are already dead?”

Low,
she thought.
Impossibly low. Improbably, incredibly, unbelievably low.
Andy Candy stifled her desire to scream and wondered if it should be:
homicidally low.

17

A Third Conversation

Jeremy Hogan had spread a deadly array of weaponry on the dining room table: shotgun, handgun, boxes of ammunition, the fireplace poker, a selection of kitchen carving knives, a six-battery black steel flashlight that he thought could effectively double as a club, and a ceremonial replica of a Civil War–era cavalryman’s sword that he’d been given after a speech fifteen years earlier at a military college in Vermont. His subject that day had been post-traumatic stress disorders in victims of crime. He wished he could remember what he’d said. He wasn’t sure whether the sword was sharp enough to actually penetrate skin, although it might be intimidating if he waved it around.

He practiced loading and unloading the revolver, and then the shotgun. He wasn’t quick, sometimes fumbling the rounds, and he feared he would shoot himself in the foot or leg. When he ejected one live cartridge from the 12-gauge’s magazine, it fell to the floor and rolled underneath an antique sideboard. It took him a few minutes to extricate it, finally using the
ceremonial sword, still in its tasseled scabbard, to reach to the back. The cartridge and the sword came up covered with dust.

Mid-morning, he constructed a makeshift target, stuffing an old shirt with rags, frayed towels, and rolled-up newspaper. He added some kindling wood from the fireplace to give the target heft and retrieved a broken dining room chair from the attic to prop it all up. He took the target outdoors, across his flagstone patio, into the yard that led to thick deer-infested forest and onetime farmers’ fields that stretched behind his house. It was not lost on him that he was putting the chair in the middle of the landscape his dead wife had once loved to paint in vibrant watercolors.

After retrieving the weapons from inside, he paced off a ten-yard distance and squared up. Handgun first. He raised the weapon, realized he’d forgotten his earplugs on the table inside, put the gun down on the damp grass (hoping the moisture wouldn’t harm it), trotted back inside and fitted the ear protection, then went back out again and assumed the firing stance the gun store owner had demonstrated. He thought he got it right. Two hands on the weapon, feet slightly apart. Knees slightly flexed. Weight on the balls of his feet. He bounced a little, trying to find the right position, one he’d be comfortable in. The gun store owner had emphasized this.

Deep breath. Odd thought:
How can I be comfortable if I’m facing someone who wants to kill me?

He fired three rounds.

All missed.

Maybe this is too great a distance,
he considered
.
He moved several yards closer.
I mean, isn’t he likely to be only a few feet away? Or maybe not. What sort of Wild West shoot-out do you think is going to happen?

Jeremy pursed his lips together, held his breath again, took significantly more careful aim, and fired the remaining three rounds. The gun jumped and bucked in his hand like an electric current, but this time he managed to control it a little better.

One shot winged the shirt collar, one missed, and the third smashed into the center, knocking the target over.

Good enough,
he told himself, knowing that this was a lie.

He set the Magnum down, walked over, and lifted the target back into position, then returned to his ten-yard firing spot. Again mimicking the position he’d been shown the day before, he snugged the shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

The blast staggered him slightly, but he saw the target absorb the brunt of the shot. The shirt shredded, some of the kindling and paper flew in the air, and the whole thing toppled backward and sideways.

Jeremy lowered the weapon.

“Not bad,” he said. “I do believe I’m becoming dangerous.”

The shotgun is better. Don’t need to be nearly so precise.

He worked the plugs out of his ears and felt a tingling in his shoulder. For a moment, he was confused, because the force of the shotgun’s explosion seemed to be echoing, and then he realized that the phone was ringing inside his house, muffled but insistent. Clutching his weapons, he hurried inside to the kitchen.

As before, the caller ID was blank.

I know who it is.

He did not pick it up. He simply stared at the receiver, as if he could see the ringing.

It went silent.

I know who it is.

The phone rang again.

Jeremy reached for the receiver, but stopped his hand.
One ring. Two rings. Three.

Most routine, ordinary callers would give up. Leave a message. Telephone solicitors don’t allow more than four or five rings before they irritatingly decide to try later.

Six rings. Seven. Eight.

When I was a child, when people had a telephone on the wall—like I do in the kitchen, or sitting on the desk; like I do upstairs—one had telephone manners. Before auto- answering machines and cell phones with an
“ignore”
button and video conferencing, before cloud data storage technology and all
the other modern things we take for granted, it was considered polite to let the phone ring ten times before hanging up. No longer. Now people get frustrated after three or four.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

The phone kept ringing.

Jeremy smiled.
I just learned something. He’s very patient.

But then, a second, chilling thought:
He knows I’m here?

How? He can’t.

Impossible.

No, not impossible.

He picked it up.
Thirteeenth ring. Was that bad luck?

“Whose fault is it?”

He’d expected that question. Jeremy took a deep breath, mustered years of knowledge, and replied rapidly.

“It’s
my
fault, of course. Whatever
it
is. Disagreeing with you on this point makes no sense. Not any longer. So … Any chance that by conceding your position, apologizing profusely, offering up some sort of mea culpa in a public forum, maybe donating a large sum to your favorite charity, I can avoid being murdered?”

His own question—a little rushed, spoken like an academic lecturer—was almost flippant, maybe even a little ridiculous. He’d thought hard about the right tone. Every decision he made was a gamble. Would sounding unafraid make his killer act precipitously? Would he live longer, be able to find a way to protect himself, if he sounded cowed, terrified? Contradictions flooded him. Which would draw out the process of murder? What would buy him the time he needed?

Clutching the phone tightly, Jeremy raced through options. Every word he spoke was a decision.

An actor on the stage
becomes
one person or another, wears his emotions outwardly as he speaks his lines.
Method acting
.
Become what you have to portray.

He breathed in sharply.

What do the poker players say? All in.

There was a slight hesitation over the phone line, then an equally slight laugh.

“If I were to say,
Yes there’s a chance
, how would you respond, Doctor?”

Jeremy could feel his entire body quivering. His fear was profound. It was almost as if he could feel the presence of his murderer in the room with him. The darkness in the man’s voice overcame all the mid-morning sunlight streaming through the windows, the benign blue sky above. Talking to this man intent on killing him was a little like descending into a shadow that enveloped him.

Do not let terror creep into your voice
.

Provoke him. Maybe he will slip.

“Well,” he said cautiously, as if he’d had time to think about his reply, “I suppose then we could have a reasonable conversation about what you would want me to do. Charities we could consider for donations. Actions I could take to try to balance this wrong you imagine I’ve done to you.”

Jeremy paused, then added, “Of course, this conversation could only be defined as
reasonable
if you aren’t some fantasy-obsessed near psychotic and all your talk and threats aren’t merely a product of your overwrought imagination. If that’s the case, I can easily prescribe some medications that will help you, and certainly recommend a good therapist you can see to work through these issues.”

He said all this in a clipped,
not amused
doctor voice.

Let’s see how you react to that,
he thought.

Another pause. A short laugh. A bemused question:

“Do you think I’m psychotic, Doctor?”

“You might be. Probably on an edge—even if you do manage to conceal it in your voice. I’d like to be able to help you.”

He won’t expect that tack,
Jeremy believed.

“You know, Doctor, you sound a little like those white-collar criminals you see on the news, who stand all contrite before a judge, all eager to serve up soup to homeless folks in a shelter instead of going to prison for the millions they stole and the lives they wrecked.”

Jeremy licked his lips. He wondered why they were so dry.

“I’m not them,” he replied.

Weak. Weak. Weak.
He berated himself inwardly.

“Really? It’s an interesting question, Doctor. Tell me this: What is the right punishment for someone who ruined another person’s life? What does one do with the person who stole every hope and dream, every ambition and every opportunity? What’s the proper penalty?”

“There are degrees of guilt. Even the law recognizes that.”

Impotent. Mealy-mouthed. Crippled.

“But we are not in a court, are we, Doctor?”

Jeremy suddenly thought he saw an opportunity.

“Did I put you in prison with an assessment? Did I testify against you in a trial? Do you think I misdiagnosed you?”

He regretted his bluntness. Ordinarily he would try to elicit answers more subtly. But the caller made that difficult.

“No. That would be too simple. And anyway, even a psychotic would probably recognize that you were merely doing your job.”

“No they wouldn’t,” Jeremy responded. He was thinking hard, trying to add each word the caller made into a picture.
It wasn’t in court. What else might it be?
He saw an answer:
Teaching.