The Dead Student (44 page)

But Massachusetts State Police investigators had no obvious reason to detain them any longer. The detectives knew there were crimes involved—but they couldn’t see what the three of them had done that broke the law.

Andy Candy had been given a particularly difficult time.

Investigators figured that she would be the weakest link. She was the youngest. She was the only one uninjured, although Moth’s burns were healing rapidly and not, it turned out, significant. Her connection to the man in the exploding trailer seemed the most tenuous. Consequently, her questioning had been harsh—ranging from the typical
“We’re your friends”
to
“We know you are lying to us and we want the truth”
to
“You understand
that withholding evidence in a murder case is a felony and do you really want to go to prison to protect your boyfriend and some suspended prosecutor?”

She’d replied: “What do you think I’m protecting them from?”

They’d persisted: “So, why are you here?”

Andy surprised herself by maintaining an irritating calm that frustrated her interrogators and sticking to her half-assed story:
“The man in the trailer maybe had a connection to Timothy Warner’s uncle’s death, which was a suicide, but questions have arisen, and we were here to try to get some answers but before we could ask any, the whole damn thing went up. I think it’s because the guy in the trailer saw the uniformed cop outside and figured it was a drug bust and he was going to prison for the rest of his life, so he blew himself away and set the whole thing on fire just to say ‘Fuck you’ to all you guys. That’s what I think. Wish I could be more help.

“Really. I do.”

But she didn’t.

Delta Air Lines upgraded them all to first class when the woman at the ticket counter saw the cast and sling encasing Susan Terry’s right arm.

They were quiet most of the flight south to Miami. Susan popped over-the-counter Tylenol with regularity, which only did a little to control the gnawing postsurgical pain. She was proud of herself for avoiding instant junkie-hood, although she would have preferred a prescription for Tylenol laced with codeine. She thought she could use the throbbing sensation in her pinned-together arm to help her through the addiction battle. Every time she
didn’t
take a narcotic it reminded her that she was sober, which on balance was a good thing. She ignored the pain shooting through her arm and the sweat dampening her forehead as best she could.

Shifting about in her seat, she looked across the aisle of the plane to Andy Candy and Moth. It was dim in the cabin; the engines droned steadily. The man next to her had dozed off. It was uncomfortable for her to move but she leaned toward them.

“Do either of you think the man that died back there was the man you’ve
been hunting?” she asked bluntly. She omitted the phrase
the man who busted me to my own boss and totally fucked up my life.

She wanted it to be him. She wanted it to be finished. She wanted to be able to go in the next night to Redeemer One and face all the other addicts and say,
“It’s over,”
and be able to reboot her life. She didn’t believe this was possible.

She was unable to see that she had blended this anonymous killer together with moving forward, regaining her position at the state attorney’s office, becoming again the hard-nosed prosecutor who used trying bad guys as a substitute narcotic. But, just as it was for the cops in Massachusetts they had left behind, everything was still in doubt. All of her training in criminal law told her there simply had to be a rock they could turn over that would expose something that might be formed into an answer—but she didn’t know how to find it.

Andy Candy didn’t immediately reply to Susan. Instead, she looked across Moth, out the window into the black sky. Its emptiness seemed a lie.

Moth looked over first at Andy, then at Susan. “I wish it was,” he said. “If it was him that would make everything easier.” He was silent, before adding, “I’ve never been that lucky.”

“Lucky?” Susan asked.

“Yeah. You have to be lucky to get simple answers to complex questions.”

This reply made Andy Candy smile.
That,
she thought,
is Moth in a nutshell.

He continued, speaking past her to Susan. “What do we do? Wait until they’ve finished that autopsy and done some DNA tests—if they even can? Suppose we never know.”

That was a possibility that terrified him. He did not know precisely why, but uncertainty seemed to him to be the sort of trigger that would pitch him back into drink.

“What will you have, young fella?”

“Scotch on the rocks and a heart filled with doubt, bartender.”

He didn’t speak this conversation out loud, but he guessed that both Susan and Andy Candy knew he was having it.

Instead, he said, “We need to find a concrete answer.” This, he realized instantly, was much easier said than done. He turned away from the others, following Andy’s gaze out into the black sky beyond the window.
Five hundred miles per hour and I’m wishing I could reach out and grab the right thing to do.

Andy saw that he was struggling. She reached out, touched his hand. At this moment, she didn’t exactly want it to be over. She did, but she didn’t.
Over
meant safety. It also meant an end to her and Moth, she thought.
He will go his way. And I will go mine. That’s the way the world works. That’s the ending always been waiting for us. That was our first ending. It will be the same for our second.

Susan leaned back. She glanced at her wristwatch. It had been ninety minutes since her last two painkillers, and they were wearing off. She signaled to a stewardess and asked for a bottle of water. She struggled to get the cap open, finally using her teeth to grip it, and took two more pills. She expected she was going to be fired in the morning, and knew there was no over-the-counter drug that would take away that particular pain.

When the trailer had exploded, Susan had lost her weapon, and it hadn’t yet been returned to her by the forensic teams processing the waterlogged and charred mess. Moth’s .357 was in her bag—she’d used her badge again to get it through luggage control—and she thought she had to return it to him. As for herself, she knew she could get another weapon in short order—obtaining firearms in South Florida wasn’t a challenge.

So after landing and before splitting up to go to their separate destinations, she and Andy went into the concourse ladies’ room to make an exchange. Neither was certain that Moth needed the weapon. He might. He might not. Andy Candy more or less made up her mind that she would keep the gun, at least until Moth was returning to Redeemer One with regularity.

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.