Andy Candy nodded. “This is what we have,” she said, pointing at Jeremy Hogan’s scribbled notes. “It doesn’t seem like much. But it is, really.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He was the only professor. The others were all students. So…”
“So we know when whatever it was they were to blame for happened. We just have to find out what it was.”
Andy Candy used her most persuasive voice, the one in which she mingled a young-girl, bright-eyed innocence with the persistence of a veteran investigative reporter. No one in the current dean’s office at the university’s medical school had been on the job thirty years earlier, and they were reluctant to give out contact information for retirees.
But reluctant didn’t mean they wouldn’t. She obtained a phone number for a doctor long gone from the university.
On the fourth ring, a woman answered.
Andy quickly went through the cover story-Ed’s suicide, the memorial fund. She was halfway through when the woman interrupted.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think we can contribute.”
“Can I speak with the doctor?” Andy Candy persisted.
“No.”
This was so abrupt she was taken aback.
“Just for a minute or two.”
“No. I’m sorry. He’s in hospice care.”
The woman’s voice seemed to be coming across some vast space, and she stifled a small sob.
“Oh, I’m sorry…”
“He only has a few days, they tell me.”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s okay. It’s been expected. He’s been sick for a long time.”
Andy Candy was about to create some quick excuse and hang up. She could sense the woman’s pain over the phone line, almost as if she were standing next to her. But as Andy pawed at words, she found herself tightening, almost overcome with a sudden determination.
“Did the doctor ever speak about anything-I believe it would have been the class of 1983-anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary with the students?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It was my uncle’s class,” Andy lied. “And something happened…”
The woman paused. “What’s this about?” she demanded.
Andy Candy took a deep breath and continued lying.
“When my uncle died, he referred to some event back in his med school program. We’re just trying to find out what he meant.”
This seemed like a reasonable explanation.
“I can’t help you,” the woman said. “My husband can’t help you. He’s dying.”
“I’m sorry. But-”
“Call one of the people who went through the psych program. That program was always the most problematic of all the disciplines. More trouble for the administration than it was worth, I think. Every year there were fifteen admitted. Maybe one of them didn’t end up crazy. Perhaps they can assist you.”
And then the woman hung up.
Andy Candy looked down at her list. The distraught woman hadn’t said anything she didn’t already know-and yet, she had.
Fifteen admitted.
She counted graduates.
Fourteen graduated.
Four dead.
One missing.
Someone came in, but did not come out.
There it was, and so simple it frightened her.
Andy Candy shivered. Moth must have seen something in her face, because he bent toward her. Andy had difficulty putting what she understood in that second into some articulate statement of discovery. But inwardly she suddenly felt as close to death again as she had in the moment she saw Jeremy Hogan’s head explode and she’d screamed. She wondered whether she was doomed to spend the rest of her life screaming. Or more likely, waiting to scream.
23
Susan Terry made a point of sitting beside Moth at Redeemer One that night. When it was her turn, she declined to speak. She gestured to Moth, who also shook his head, which seemed to surprise everyone, and testifying was passed on to the engineer, who methodically outlined his latest Oxy struggle.
When the session broke up, Susan placed her hand on Moth’s arm, holding him in his seat for a moment.
“I have someone waiting,” Moth said.
“This will only take a minute,” Susan responded.
She watched as the others filed out of the room or milled over by the coffee and soft drink table.
“You’ve missed some of these meetings,” Susan said.
“I’ve been busy.”
“I’m busy too, but I’ve been here. You’re too busy to show up and talk about addiction?”
This was blunt and to the point.
“I was out of town.”
“Where?”
“North.”
“North is a big place. They have bars in the North?”
She hoped that a little sarcasm would loosen him up. Sarcasm makes people angry, and angry people shoot their mouths off. This was an equation she’d learned in her first day as a prosecutor and that she hoped would work with Moth.
“I suppose so. Didn’t go to any.”
Susan nodded. “Sure,” she said, making a single syllable sound like a dozen. Any interrogation, even the most offhanded one, relied on probing weaknesses. She was well versed in Moth’s greatest weakness, because she shared it. “So, what exactly did you do, up in the great wide North?”
“I went to see a man who knew my uncle when he was younger.”
“Who was that?”
“A retired psychiatrist who was one of my uncle’s teachers.”
“Why him?”
Moth didn’t answer.
“I see,” Susan said. “So, you’re still convinced there’s some mysterious master criminal out there?” She continued her sarcasm, trying to needle Moth into saying something concrete. She ricocheted between doubts and certainties about the uncle’s death: doubts that were her own, brand-new ones and which she wanted to disappear as readily and quickly as possible, and certainties reflected in Moth’s steadfast and, to her, completely irritating insistence.
Moth faked a laugh. “Yes,” he said. “But I wouldn’t know how to characterize him. You think there is someone-some sort of Professor Moriarty that battles Sherlock Holmes? You think that’s what I’m doing? But what happens to them? Reichenbach Falls. Anyway, in this case master criminal seems a little premature.”
He thought this was lying with truths. And he liked using the word premature.
“Timothy,” Susan said, trying abruptly to soften her tone, which was usually another effective technique, although she was beginning to believe that Moth might be immune to most routine approaches. “I’m trying to help you. You know that. I warned you that going off half-cocked on some wild-goose chase was dangerous. Tell me, in your trip north when you visited this man your uncle knew like dozens of years ago, did you find out anything?”
Moth could not stop himself. The word exploded from his lips, though it was spoken in a whisper.
“Yes.”
They were both quiet for an instant. Susan Terry shook her head, unconvinced.
“What exactly was that?” she demanded. This question was spoken in a tone that was unequivocaclass="underline" a professional prosecutor’s not subtle insistence.
“That I’m right,” Moth said.
Then he rose and walked quickly toward the exit, leaving Susan behind on the couch watching him, anger mixing with curiosity in a dangerous cocktail.
In the car outside Redeemer One, Andy Candy waited for Moth and busied herself making more phone calls.
Right about the time she thought the meeting would be winding up she dialed the number for a psychiatrist in San Francisco. He was the third name on her list of surviving graduates and seemed to be in private psychoanalytic and therapeutic practice. He had a mixture of responses on Angie’s List, half of which seemed to canonize him, and half that implied he should be indicted or imprisoned or consigned to the Seventh Circle of Hell. Andy imagined that this range would probably constitute flattery to most shrinks.