The Dead Student (46 page)

Susan pounced.

“I have a list of names from the TSA. I need to pull state driver’s licenses on each of them.” She motioned toward her arm in the sling. “It’s so hard for me to type into the damn computer right now …”

“Oh, I’ll do it,” said the secretary. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. Is this part of your investigation?”

“Of course,” Susan said.
The boss’s lie about an investigation seemed to be all over the office. Helpful.
She smiled. The secretary would have access to all the law enforcement databases around the nation. “Boy, would I ever appreciate it.”

She handed the secretary the list Andy Candy had created. Now all she had to do was avoid being fired in the next few seconds.

She switched back and forth between concoctions and contradictions effectively, rapid-fire.

“I know what you told me, but it was a closed case where questions had cropped up, and with the sort of addiction problems I’ve experienced, lingering job-related issues can really trigger some of the behaviors I’m working my way through,” she told her boss. She let words race through
her lips, wanting to be persuasive, which required speed, but not wanting to sound manic, hopped up, or strung out. This required more performance on her part.

“The young people I was with, they were involved in the case and had raised some possibly legitimate doubts about our investigation.” She looked over at the head of Major Crimes, searching his face for clues that what she was saying was having an impact. A frown. Raised eyebrows. A nod. A shake of the head. She barreled forward, hoping.

“I knew that you hate it when people have questions after some case has been officially closed, so, really it was intended to be therapeutic on my part. You know—quick trip up to speak with the potential witness. Get a statement. Rewrap the case up nice and tight, no holes anywhere. End of story …”

She noted a rueful smile. Her boss knew all about
no holes
and
end of story
and how unlikely that was. She persisted: “… Get back into the rehabilitation cycle. Back in time to make my meetings and see a counselor, just as you requested.”

Now she shrugged.

“Look, I had no idea the guy I went to see was running some sort of backwoods, low-rent, small but dangerous meth manufacturing site in his old trailer, and when he saw us coming, thought that he was being busted and decided to go out in some sort of blaze of glory—like that guy on television did. Jesus, could have killed us all, but we were lucky and the local cop I was with was damn good—maybe ought to consider him for down here on our investigative staff …”

Every word she spoke was calculated to convert something murderous into something benign. She was particularly pleased with her suggestion that she was trying to make sure a mistake hadn’t been made in a case. Like any top prosecutor, her boss was sensitive to anything in his domain that might devolve into a front-page news story that had the word
incompetent
implied somewhere in it close to
his
name.

“I know, boss, this all sounds like a major-league fuckup, and I’m not denying that it is, but my intentions were good …”

He believed that.

It surprised her.

He didn’t change her status—other than to warn her that there could be no more incidents that got in the way of her rehabilitation program. She knew this was a sincere threat.

Thin ice that just got thinner.

But as long as she didn’t move too quickly, she wouldn’t plunge through into freezing waters.

As Susan was on her way out, back to what her boss assumed was the process of getting sober and straight, the secretary handed her a large envelope. She fingered the collected pages inside, almost as if they would burn a hole through the paper until they reached the killer.

44

Susan resisted the temptation to rip open the envelope instantly, waiting until she returned to Moth’s apartment.

She was oddly formal as she dropped it on the desk. “Okay, Mister Warner. Here is the information you requested.” She saw Andy Candy blanch slightly, not all of the blood draining from her face, but a good deal of it. The contents of the envelope, Susan realized, ranged from utterly irrelevant to extremely dangerous. Opening it had the potential to set them on a course that there might not be any walking away from. She realized—as the oldest person and the only real professional in the room when it came to crime and punishment—she needed to point this out.

“You sure you want to look at this?”

Moth hesitated. “That’s what all this has been about, right?”

“Right. It’s just that up to now no one has broken any laws—maybe stretched them a bit, I’ll admit, but actually done something that I, or someone exactly like me, could successfully prosecute in a court of law? No. I don’t think so. Not yet.”

“There’s a
but
coming, isn’t there?”

“Yes. Open that envelope and then do what you’ve been saying you’re going to do, well, that’s a different thing altogether, isn’t it? ‘Conspiracy’ is a word that comes to mind.”

Susan used the same tone of voice that she’d employed when Moth first came to her office.

Moth didn’t answer. He just stared at the envelope.

Susan softened her tone—which contradicted much of the harshness in what she was saying.

“Look, Timothy, I know what you’ve said you want to do, but have you really thought it through? I don’t think you’re a criminal—and I don’t think you want to become one, either. But you’re about to. Shouldn’t we try to find some alternatives now?”

“
Alternatives
almost got us all killed,” he replied.

“I just want you to consider—” Susan started, but Moth interrupted her.

“Isn’t that all we ever do, Susan?” he asked quietly. “Every day. Is this the day we stay sober? Or is this the day we fail?”

Now it was Susan’s moment to remain silent.

“I am tired of being who I am,” Moth added. “I want to be someone different.”

Moth’s hand shook a little as he reached for the envelope, and it wasn’t the sort of quiver that he was familiar with: the morning after a night-long bout with the bottle. He looked over at Andy Candy, who seemed frozen in position, because what had once been intellectual, a challenge, a puzzle spread out on a table in a thousand pieces waiting to be fitted together, was now something different. “Andy,” Moth said quietly, “I see what Susan’s driving at. This just might be that
totally crazy
moment we talked about. If you want to leave, right now would be a good time to walk out the door and not look back.”

Saying this nearly nauseated him. A montage of grim futures flooded him.
She walks, I’m alone. She stays, and what are we doing?

Thoughts pummeled Andy Candy.

Go, go, go, go,
she thought. Then:
No way.

She disagreed with herself:
You’re being stupid. So? What’s new? Been stupid from the start. Why stop now?

When Andy shook her head, Moth felt an immense relief. Without explanation, she took the envelope from Moth’s hands. “Let’s see what we can see,” she said, not really trusting her voice much. “Maybe he won’t be here. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe we won’t be sure. Then we can make some decisions.”

Coming to a decision seemed to renew her confidence. She reached over and grabbed the driver’s license photo of Blair Munroe. Whether he was the dead man or not was something being determined miles away, by forensic analysts in Massachusetts. The
maybe
dead man seemed very distant. The man who had called her on the phone and pushed her into a near panic seemed much closer. She set the
maybe
dead man’s picture on the table, then opened the manila envelope. Acting a little like a television game show host, she removed one sheet of paper.

The three of them craned over the pictures as Andy Candy set them side by side.

A man from a suburb outside Hartford, Connecticut.

“No,” Susan said. “Timothy?”

“Agree. Not him.”

Another picture.

A man from Northampton, Massachusetts.

“Nope,” Moth said. “Wrong hair. Wrong eyes. Wrong height.”

“Correct,” Susan said.

A third picture.

A man from Charlotte, North Carolina.

This picture made each of them lean forward. There were some similarities, obscured by eyeglasses. For a moment, Andy Candy held her breath; then she exhaled slowly as she realized it wasn’t the man they were seeking.

“Go on,” Moth said. “Another.”

Andy thought it was a little like playing the children’s memory game Concentration, where the idea was to place all fifty-two cards in the deck
facedown, then turn them over two at a time, trying to remember where the previously exposed cards were to make pairs. She reached into the envelope and withdrew another picture.

A man from Key West, Florida.

Andy Candy gasped.

She wanted to shout. Raise her voice, let loose, keep going until she was exhausted. Instead, she simply put the remaining twenty-odd pages in the envelope aside, walked over to the sink, and drew herself a glass of water. She gulped it down, unable to tell whether it was hot or cold.

Moth was unsure how long the three of them were quiet. Might have been seconds. Could have been longer. It was as if he’d begun to slip through time. When he did speak, it seemed like his voice echoed, or else came from some distant location or some different person—a stranger.

“So, Susan,” he asked quietly, “exactly how do I get away with murder?”

Andy Candy recalled a reading from a literature class, her third year at college.
An unraped year,
she thought. Lots of seminar discussions about existential writing.
The only real choice in life is whether to kill yourself. Or not.
She tried to remember:
Was it Sartre? Camus?
It was one of those French writers, she was certain. She glanced over at Susan Terry.
Well, she’s caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, isn’t she?
This was almost a joke, and Andy stifled a smile. She didn’t dare to look over at Moth. She tried to imagine what it was like for him to look down and see the man that killed his uncle pictured on something as ordinary as a driver’s license. She felt an odd sense of things coming together, as if instead of confusion, things were slipping into place, joining up, linking into a chain. She stole a look at the killer’s photo, but in her mind’s eye it was replaced by the grinning face of the frat boy who’d fucked her, impregnated her, and abandoned her.
Kill them all,
she thought.

A small silence.

“Timothy, I cannot tell you that,” Susan Terry said.

“Can’t or won’t?” Moth asked.

Susan ignored this question. “What we should do is call my boss. Hand over everything to investigators. Let them put together a prosecutable case. Make an arrest. Complicated, sure, but possible. Come on, Timothy, don’t be dumb. Let’s let someone with expertise handle this.”

Moth paused.

“When you prosecuted murder cases,” he said slowly, “it had to occur to you as you put everything together before going into court : This factor, this piece, this bit of evidence—take any one little thing away, and the whole case would crumble. The person best able to see how to avoid arrest and going to prison isn’t the criminal, because he’s wrapped up in what he’s doing—it’s the cop or maybe a prosecutor like you, who view it all in hindsight.”

Susan Terry nodded. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a reasonably accurate statement.” She sounded like a law school lecturer.

“So it stands to reason that an experienced member of law enforcement, like you, would—intellectually speaking, of course—know where the pitfalls and fuckups really lie.”

Susan nodded. She felt a little as if she had awakened on some strange planet, where blood and death were treated like subjects for a term paper.

“All right,” Moth continued, picking up a little momentum. “Let’s speak hypothetically, then.”

It was easy for Susan to see where he was going. She didn’t stop him, although a part of her deep within was screaming for her to do precisely that.

“Hypothetically, and all together generally,” Moth continued. His voice was cold with barely restrained fury. “What are the specific areas where people screw up and get arrested for murder?”

Susan took a deep breath.
Ah, well,
she thought.
Guess I can’t hold back the tide.
“In my experience, and speaking hypothetically, naturally it’s in connections. Relationships. What links the killer to the victim? Usually, they know each other, or they have business together. What the police look for is how they intersect.”

Moth was leaning forward, almost predatory. “So the most difficult kind of killing to solve …”

“… is when the connection isn’t immediately apparent. Or remains hidden. Random. Witness-less. Obscured by something—shit, Timothy, pick whatever word you like. It’s where the motivation for the murder isn’t clear and how person A got into the same place as person B. With a gun.”

Moth was thinking fast. Susan could see things turning over in his head.

Andy Candy interjected: “You mean like some guy who stalks and kills members of a medical school study group years after whatever the hell they did was done and everyone had moved on to something else, except the killer?”

There was much cynicism in her voice. Andy could hear it, and she actually rather liked it. It was like opening the door to a refrigerated room.

Susan tried to ignore her. She talked to Moth. “Look, there are also forensic links. Don’t underestimate what police labs can do. I mean, it’s not like how it’s portrayed on television—you know, instant this and instant that and bingo, we know who a killer is. But they can match fingerprints, hair samples, DNA—you name it. They take their time, and they are reliable as all get-out. And ballistics. That science is pretty advanced.”