The Dead Student (45 page)

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.”

Susan eyed the two of them. There had been something utterly chaste about their connection up to that moment and she mentally sniffed the air to see if anything had changed. She couldn’t detect anything, so she ignored it. But a part of her sounded a bell of concern.

Then, as quickly, she dismissed it.
Screw it,
she thought.
Deal with what you can deal with.
She looked at the list of names.

“Single men. Traveling alone. All within the right age framework.”

Susan nodded. “You’re thinking like a cop, Andy,” she said.

Andy smiled. “Yeah. But that’s as far as I got. How do we narrow it down further?”

The three fell silent.

Moth stared at the papers, letting his eyes sweep across documents over to Susan, then to Andy Candy, then back to the piles on his desk.
What does a historian do?
he demanded of himself.
How does a historian look at bits and pieces of information and determine how events are influenced?

He breathed in sharply, a sound loud enough to make the two others turn in his direction.

“I know how,” he said.

Shot in the dark,
Susan thought as she hurried through the warren of desks toward the state attorney’s corner office.
But as far as shots in the dark go,
not a bad one at all.
Her boss’s secretary usually guarded the entrance with Cerberus-like intensity and rarely smiled, but as Susan approached, she looked up from her computer and shook her head.

“Oh, Susan, that looks painful. Are you okay?”

Susan thought joking was the best approach. Make everything seem like no big deal. “Hey, you should see the other guy.”

The secretary nodded and smiled wanly. She gestured toward the door to the inner office. “He’s waiting to see you. Go right on in.”

Susan nodded, took a step forward, then stopped. This was calculated, part of the performance. It had to be done
before
she got fired, if that was to be the outcome of the meeting.

“I wonder …” she started, then stopped. “Oh, probably won’t help, but …”

“What is it?” the secretary asked.