The Dead Student (30 page)

26

Before heading for the South, Student #5 rode the subway down to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and took a long walk. He ended near Mott Street, at the edge of Chinatown where it blends into Little Italy, creating a confusing mishmash of cultures on streets crowded with delivery trucks, open-air markets, and tidal flows of people. It was a fine morning, sunny and mild—a turned-up collar on his suit coat and a white silk scarf were all he needed to stay warm. He stood out a bit—in his expensive suit and tie, he looked like a hedge fund manager. He was surrounded by folks wearing jeans, work boots, and hooded sweatshirts with sports teams’ logos, but he enjoyed this distinction.
I’ve come a long ways.
This was a nostalgic walk for Student #5. It was where he’d first moved years earlier after being released from the hospital, and where instead of trying to return to medical school he’d performed the identity legerdemain he enjoyed now.

A horn blasted. High-pitched Asian voices argued over the price of live fish swimming in dingy gray tanks. A yuppie couple with two children in a high-tech stroller pushed past him.

Lots of life,
he thought. Vibrancy everywhere.
But it was where I went to die.

This sort of sentimentality was unusual for Student #5—but not unheard-of. He sometimes felt weepy when watching a trite rom-com. Some novels pitched him into spells of depression, especially when favorite characters were killed off. Poetry often made him pensive in an uncomfortable way—although he continued to read it, and actually subscribed to
Poets & Writers
magazine at his Key West house. He had developed techniques to rid himself of unwanted emotions when they occurred—changing
Love Actually
or
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
on his Netflix queue to
300
or
The Wild Bunch.
He would replace misty eyes with gore. With novels and poetry, whenever he felt bubbling emotions he would set the words aside and exercise furiously. With sweat running down his eyes and his biceps aching from exertion, he was less likely to think about Elizabeth Bennet’s nineteenth-century problems with Mr. Darcy and instead focus on his own death designs.

He stopped outside a nondescript redbrick building on Spring Street—one of seemingly millions of similar buildings in the city. A part of him wanted to go up and ring the buzzer for number 307, and ask whoever was living there now what they had done with his furniture, his clothes, and every knickknack, kitchen item, and art piece he’d put in that apartment—and then abruptly left behind. He doubted that the tenants were the same after decades—but curiosity threatened to consume him.

Leaving his artwork had distressed him a little, but he had known how critical this was. He’d always been handy with a pencil or paintbrush as a child and it was something he’d returned to in the hospital.
Express yourself,
they’d told him.
It’s part of getting better.

It was also a window into who he was. Every brushstroke, every penciled line on a page makes a statement. Draw a flower, and maybe they think you’re getting better. Draw a knife dripping blood, and you were likely to be locked up another six months. Or until you were smart enough to start drawing flowers.

Because he understood these things, he had made absolutely sure that
everyone in the hospital—doctors, therapists, ward nurses, and security personnel—and everyone in his family knew how important his drawings and paintings were to him. That way, when he abruptly left those things behind, it would say something critical to the people who came to search for him—whether they were family, police, or even some dull and dogged private eye. “He’d never leave his artwork behind.”

Yes I would.

He remembered the day he’d disappeared into his new existences. He’d left everything, along with a precisely drawn map showing every street he might travel and noting three good places to throw himself into the East River. Bridge. Dock. Park. At the top of the map he’d scrawled,
I can’t take it any longer.
He’d liked that phrasing. It could mean almost anything, but it would be taken just one way.

People want to believe in the obvious, even when something is a mystery. They want rational explanations for aberrant behaviors, even when these are elusive and difficult to pin down.

So, it had been simple:
Leave behind a couple of clues that point in the same direction, so that even without a body, they would all reach the same conclusion—two plus two equals four; he’s dead.

Especially when it isn’t true. And he was proud of his self-control: Not once since he’d left the apartment had he picked up brush and paint and indulged his sense of artistry.

The doorway beckoned him. He started toward it, then forced himself to stop. He thought:
This is like looking at the place where I was born and where I died.

The street hadn’t changed all that much with the passing of years. There was a new Starbucks on the corner, and what was once a deli was now a high-end boutique selling women’s clothing. But the dry cleaner mid-block was the same, as was the Italian restaurant three doors down.

Student #5 slowly reached into his suit pocket and removed the pictures of Andy Candy and Timothy Warner.
They were babies when I lived here,
he thought.
Up to now, the people I’ve killed, I knew. Not really fair,
he thought,
to kill without familiarity. That would make me little more than
some punk sociopathic criminal.
He quickly listed some of the diagnostic criteria for
antisocial personality
in his head: failure to conform to social norms; impulsivity; reckless disregard for safety; consistent irresponsibility; lack of remorse.

Not me,
he reassured himself—although he wondered about that last category, a thought that brought a grin to his face.

27

Andy Candy was pushing some papers around on her makeshift workspace in Moth’s apartment. She stacked them in a neat pile in front of her before clicking a few keys on her laptop computer. A four-paragraph story arrived on her screen. It was from the
New York Post
and dated slightly less than two years after one member of Study Group Alpha was asked to leave medical school:
Police Seek Missing Med Student in River.

Another couple of clicks bought up another story, this from the archived obituaries of the
New York Times
:
Plane Crash Claims Life of Surgeon and Wife.

She highlighted a single statement near the bottom of the story detailing a private plane being piloted by the surgeon that landed fatally short on a rural strip near the family’s vacation home in Manchester, Vermont. The highlighted sentence read:
Doctor Callahan and his wife left no immediate survivors. Their only son disappeared five years earlier in an apparent suicide.

Andy kept bringing up entries from various websites—including a New York State Surrogate’s Court declaration of death for one Robert Callahan
Jr. It was a determination five years after the disappearance of the son, and it preceded the plane accident by six weeks. As best as she could tell from the paperwork, the parents had sought to have their son declared legally dead. She guessed this had something to do with estate planning, but she couldn’t be certain. She imagined that the plane crash too was murder, but in this case she couldn’t see how. She had discovered an FAA report on the crash that blamed it on inexperience and pilot error. Robert Callahan had obtained his pilot’s license only four weeks earlier and promptly gone out and purchased a single-engine Piper Cub.

She rolled her eyes over all the windows open on the computer screen and thought,
Dead, dead, dead. It’s all about death.

“What do we know?” Andy Candy asked.

Moth leaned over, took a few minutes to read over what she’d put up on her screen. “We know who. We know why. We know a little bit of how, if not precisely. We know when. We have all sorts of answers,” Moth replied deliberately, almost defiantly.

“What does it add up to?” Andy Candy asked firmly.

She knew the answer to this question:
everything and nothing at the same time.

Moth considered this question for a moment or two before offering a reply that almost made it seem he could hear her thoughts: “I don’t think we should ask that quite yet.”

“Well,” she said, gesturing toward the words collected on the screen, “what we do know is that the person we’ve identified as your uncle’s probable killer reportedly died a quarter century or so ago, like right when you and I were being born, even if his body was never found. So unless he’s some ghost or zombie, he’s probably not someone we can just go
click, click, click
and find. So much for that
Find Your Classmates
website. I mean, to get that declaration from the state, somebody had to do some research and come up empty. Papers had to be signed and notarized and made all official.”

She looked over at Moth. She wanted to do something sensitive, like touch him on the arm, something reassuring. But instead, she rocked back
and forth in her seat, and said, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. Except he isn’t, is he?”

Moth nodded. His only comment was, “Andy, how hard is it to disappear in this country?” And then he answered his own question. “Not very.”

Andy Candy tapped on the computer screen with her index finger.

What are we doing?

She had another frightening thought:
How many people does Edmond Dantès kill along the road to revenge?

And then a worse thought:
It will never end.

The word
end
filled her like a heavy meal. It was electric in her head—
end, end, end
—and so she turned it around and used it in her next statement.

“That’s the end, Moth,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

Ghost killer,
she thought. For an instant she had the same sensation that she’d had in Jeremy Hogan’s house.
Run! Get away!
She pictured the doctor’s body on the floor, the puddled blood, the destroyed head. She believed that she had shut away the most terrible images into some distant spot, as if she had not seen these things happen, and that they actually took place in some realm that was neither real nor dream.

Unsettled, unsure, she tried for certainty. “It’s over, Moth. I’m sorry. It’s over. We’re at a dead end.”

The words she chose were not all that dissimilar to those he’d used and regretted, years earlier, when they broke up.

High school heartbreak: He was excited, heading off to college. She had two years to go before doing the same. Long phone call. Apologies. Tears. Sick in the stomach with emotions. Then emptiness, followed by some anger. “I never want to see you again!” Of course, that was a lie.
When Andy thought back on the end of their romance, it seemed so mundane and unexceptional that it almost frightened her.

“Dead end,” she repeated.

Moth, barely hearing anything Andy Candy was saying, felt trapped. Facts, details, connections—all the underpinnings of everything that had
driven him to this point were arrayed in front of him, either on Andy’s computer, in notes, in articles, or in their own recollections. The burgeoning historian within him knew that the time had arrived to piece it all together in a coherent way and turn it over to the proper authorities.

This was precisely what a responsible, reliable, not alcoholic or drug-addicted individual would do—look at all they’d done, take some pride in what they’d uncovered, give themselves a pat on the back, and then walk away, leaving it in the hands of professionals. Then they could look forward to the day it all landed in court, or perhaps the day they were interviewed by some heavy-handed reality-based television show that hyper-focused on cold crimes. Nancy Grace would have a field day. It would no longer be about his uncle’s murder. It would become a part of lowbrow culture: a news story.
“Determined young students uncover thirty-year trail of murder and revenge! Footage at eleven!”

This thought stabbed him. He looked up and saw that Andy Candy had rotated back toward the computer screen.

I’m going to lose it all,
he realized.
Andy. Uncle Ed. Sobriety.
Everything seemed tied together, knotlike.

But what he said contradicted everything he felt: “You’re right, of course, Andy.”

He dragged more words from a dark spot within him. “I think we should put it all together, everything we’ve found out, and I’ll take it to Miss Terry. I’ll hate doing that. I mean, I got into all this because it was up to me to get to the truth of Uncle Ed’s murder …” His voice trailed off, then returned with energy. “That would be the right thing to do.”

“You’ve done a lot,” Andy said.

“Not enough.”

“And you know the truth,” Andy Candy said.

“You think that’s adequate?” Moth asked, sounding very much like some professor.

“It will have to be,” Andy replied.

Neither of them believed this.

“Okay. Susan Terry,” Moth said. “She will know what the next step is.”
He did not trust Susan Terry. He did not even like her. But he did not see an alternative, because he realized that if he had said something else to Andy Candy right at that second, then the moment that he’d feared from the beginning just might arise. It was one thing to say,
I’m going to kill
when he didn’t know whom he was talking about. It was a different thing to say that now.