He looked around. The entire point of being in that room right at that moment was to leave deception and dishonesty behind.
“It’s not there. Not for Ed. Not in the last few days. Not in the last few weeks. Not in the last few months or years. That leaves only one logical conclusion. It’s the same one I reached the minute I sobered up after his death.”
He looked around.
“I need help.”
When he said help, it was as if the room stiffened. Everyone was familiar with the sort of help that the meetings typically offered. But Moth was asking for something different.
The meeting slipped into silence. Susan Terry tried to assess the responses of the other addicts in the room to Moth’s declaration.
“So, you tell me,” Moth said cautiously, “where do I look for a killer?”
Again there was silence, but it was broken when the engineer leaned forward.
“When did he start drinking? I mean, really drinking…”
“About three years after he launched into his bad, dumb-ass marriage. He thought he needed a cover-up, or maybe he thought he could not be gay if he was married and he was lying to himself and everyone else about who he was. His practice was starting up, and things should have been great, except they weren’t…”
“So,” the engineer said, “that was when he started to kill himself.”
This was a harsh assessment. But accurate.
“And then,” the engineer continued, “he stopped trying to kill himself and came here.”
“That’s right,” Moth said.
The philosophy professor half-stood, then sat down and spoke in a determined voice, waving his arms theatrically to underscore his points. “If you go back-to when Ed first became a drunk like me or you or most of the people here-well, why would someone need to kill a person who was doing it to themselves so efficiently?”
A murmur of agreement.
“So, the only way a homicide makes sense today is if the reason for it transcends Ed’s drunken days. Sobriety, his life now-all that accomplishment and success-that has to be an affront. A challenge. I don’t know, but for someone, it had to be a lot more than just wrong,” the professor continued.
“Not a robbery. We know that. Not a suicide. That’s what you’re telling us. Not a family dispute or a sex thing. No triangle of jealousy. Those have all been ruled out. Not money or love. They’re off the table. What does that leave you?”
The dentist raised his hand to interrupt. He seemed excited as he rubbed his hands together.
Moth turned to him. He was a slight fellow, with a terrible comb-over and like many in his profession, well versed in suicide. Now he was nodding his head up and down fiercely, and he blurted out: “Revenge.”
“That’s what I was driving at,” said the philosophy professor.
Susan Terry sat ramrod-straight in her chair. Everything she heard seemed half-crazy, half-criminal. She thought she should shout out, tell everyone they were being stupid, it was a closed case and they shouldn’t let their imaginations run away with them, shouldn’t let Moth’s imagination push their own into fantasy.
There were dozens of warnings, denials, objections she wanted to scream. Why are you all being so stupid? She glanced over at the dentist. He was smiling, and now he was shaking his head, but not in the way one does if he disagrees-more as one does when he sees some great irony. “I read a lot of mystery books,” he said. There was a little laughter, then silence crept into the room again.
“So do I,” said the professor finally. “I just don’t let the other department faculty know.”
There was another low series of voices as the folks at Redeemer One bent heads together. Revenge wasn’t a word anyone had ever uttered in that setting.
“But for what?” Moth asked.
Again there was silence. Then the well-coiffed lady banker-lawyer spoke softly.
“Who did your uncle hurt?”
They all knew that the lists of people they had hurt were extensive for each of them. But quiet dominated the room.
The lady lawyer lowered her voice, but everyone at Redeemer One could hear her clearly: “Or maybe,” she said slowly, forming a sentence into what Moth believed was a question, “he did something worse?”
14
Standing beside his next victim had been intoxicating.
Risky-but well worth the thrilclass="underline" like driving a car too fast on a wet highway, feeling the wheels slipping against the pavement, then magically regaining purchase.
Student #5 was back in Manhattan, at his own desk, less than five hours after watching the newly well-armed Jeremy Hogan pull out of the gun shop parking lot. Sometimes, he imagined, murder seems predestined. It was serendipity that I saw my target exiting his home, good fortune I was able to follow him unobserved, blind luck that he chose to go to the gun store, and then beating the greatest of odds when I stood within arm’s reach and went unrecognized.
He smiled, nodding his head. This death will be special.
He loved the danger. Connect more, he insisted to himself. Even if every time raises the threat of detection.
He had to stop his hand from reaching for his telephone, gathering the small attachment that electronically altered his voice, and dialing Doctor Hogan’s number.
Wait. Savor.
Rocking back in his seat, then standing and pacing about his apartment, clenching his hands together, then releasing them, shaking his wrists, as if he could loosen his body, Student #5 warned himself not to get carried away.
Stick to the plan.
Every battle is won before it is fought.
Student #5 kept quotations from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on cards that he posted on a bulletin board next to his desk.
Pretend inferiority and encourage your enemy’s arrogance.
If you are near your enemy, make him believe you are far from him. If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are close.
Attack him where he is unprepared. Appear where you are not expected.
It was important not just to know what routes Jeremy Hogan traveled, the hours he kept, the behaviors he couldn’t change no matter how much he might want to, but also to be able to anticipate how the doctor might find the emotional strength to try to alter familiar patterns in an effort to elude the person hunting him down. He did not believe Jeremy Hogan would be successful at this. People rarely are, he knew. They cling to established patterns because those are psychologically reassuring. In the face of death, people glue themselves to what they know, when in fact what they don’t know is closing in on them.
These were all observations he’d gleaned from his studies. They dated back to the days when he believed he was destined to be a doctor of the mind.
Who would have thought that the psychology of killing would be so close to the psychology of help?
He had fought off the temptation to assist the old man out to his car with his brand-new collection of guns and ammunition. It would have been a friendly, neighborly offer-but Student #5 knew he had already risked enough, just in trailing the doctor to the gun store and following him inside. He’d made no effort to try to change his voice when he had asked the proprietor for a weapon to try, subtly watching to see if the word tones might trigger a memory-and then recognition-in the old doctor.
He’d seen none.
He’d expected none.
It made him even more confident.
What great camouflage age is: Add a few crow’s-feet and deepen the jowls, put in a touch of gray against the temples, wear glasses to make it seem as if the eyes are weakening-and memory deceives us.
Context, too, was important. The doctor who had betrayed him once when he was young wasn’t able to recognize that the nice adult thirty years later holding the store’s door wide for him as he struggled with his purchases was the man who was going to kill him.
Because he never considered that I would be right there at that moment.
Sometimes the best mask is no mask at all.
A sudden curiosity overcame him, and Student #5 started to rummage around in his desk drawers, until he came across a small, red-leather-embossed picture album. He flipped it open. There he was, graduating from high school, and then a similar shot-arm in arm with his parents-when he completed college. Grins of accomplishment and black academic robes. Innocence and optimism. These were followed by a couple of bare-chested beach pictures, some candid snapshots of Student #5 with girls whose names he couldn’t recall or friends that had faded from his life completely.
He felt a momentary twinge of anger.
Everyone is happy when you are normal.
Everyone hates you when you are not.
Really, they fear you, when it is you that has everything to fear. People don’t understand: As you lose your mind, you can also lose your hope.
He took a deep breath. Memory blended with sadness, which re-formed into rage, and he gripped the edge of the desk, steadying himself. He knew that when he allowed the past to intrude on what he was planning-even when it was the past that had created the need-it muddied things.
No one ever came to visit me in the hospital. It was like I was contagious.
No friends.
No family.
No one.
My madness belonged solely to me.
There were no pictures from those hospital months, and none taken after he was released. Then he flipped the pages to the picture he knew was the last in the album, but the most important. It had been taken in the quadrangle outside the building that housed the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry. Five smiling faces. Everyone wearing the same uniform: white lab coat and dark slacks or jeans. They had linked arms around each other.
He was in the center of the photo.
Were they already planning to ruin my career?
Did they know what they were doing to my future?
Where was understanding? Sympathy?
His hair was unkempt, tangled, a long mess, his look furtive behind the smile. He could see how little sleep he’d had, how many meals he’d skipped. He could see how stress was pulling him across hot coals and plunging him into freezing waters. His shoulders slumped. His chest was sunken. He looked slight, weak-almost as if he’d been beaten up or lost a fight. Madness could do that, just as effectively as cancer or heart disease.
Why did I smile?
He stared at the look on his face. He could see hurt and uncertainty behind his eyes.
This pain was truth.
Their embrace, friendly looks, wide, happy smiles, and camaraderie-those were all lies.
Student #5 removed the photo from the glassine sheaf that held it. He reached out and seized a red marker from his desktop. Holding the marker in his hand like a knife, he rapidly drew an X through each face-including his own.
He stared at the defaced snapshot, then walked swiftly into the kitchen. He found a box of wooden matches in a drawer and went to the sink and struck a light. He let the flame curl over the edge of the picture, holding it sideways, bending it so that the flame would envelop the image before he dropped it into the stainless steel basin. He watched the photo crinkle, blacken, and melt. Now, all the people in that picture are dead, he thought.
Killing is making me normal.
Then he waved his hands above the sink.
He didn’t want the smoke to set off an alarm.