“It sure sounds like you have a fascinating life, Andrea. Full of possibilities. I would be so sorry to have to cut it short.”
This dialogue made him laugh out loud. But the burst of humor didn’t manage to conceal troubled thoughts that were lurking in the back of his imagination.
He read through everything, then read it all again, revisiting photos and archived materials. He looked closely at a single picture of a grinning Andrea arm in arm with a dark-haired, thin boy. No name. This picture had the caption EX beneath it.
Student #5 noted frequent use of a nickname: Andy Candy.
Interesting construction, he thought. Sort of like a porn star’s nom de sex.
He thought Andy Candy was pretty and recognized that she had a disarming smile and a lanky, sleek figure. He guessed that she was devoted to her studies and a good student. He imagined she was outgoing, friendly, not overly social but no wallflower either. She had posted pictures showing her drinking beer with friends, riding a two-person bicycle, bikini-clad on vacation dropping from the sky harnessed into a parachute towed behind a speedboat. There were pictures of her on a soccer field and playing basketball during her teenage years. There were baby pictures, with the obligatory question written beneath: Wasn’t I a beauty? She wasn’t at all like anyone he’d killed-up to this point.
One old person. Four middle-aged psychiatrists. Study Group Alpha.
But Andy Candy went into a different category. This would be a killing of choice. This would be a killing to protect your future and to hide what you have done. Uncertainty made him pause. Made him slightly unsettled. What’s she guilty of?
Student #5 eyed one particular photo. He guessed she was in her late teens when it was taken. Andy Candy was cuddling on a fluffy sofa with a mutt-and dog and girl were looking directly at the camera, cheek to cheek, each wearing a slightly skewed baseball cap from the University of Florida and a wide grin, even if the dog did look a little uncomfortable. The picture went directly into the young person’s category of “cute.” There was a joking caption underneath the picture: Me and my new boyfriend Bruno getting ready for freshman orientation Fall 2010.
Innocent, he thought.
He bent toward the computer screen. “What were you doing in Doctor Hogan’s house, young lady?” he asked, a stern schoolteacher wagging a finger under the nose of a miscreant classroom cutup. “What did you see? What did you hear? What do you mean to do now?”
He almost expected one of the pictures to answer him. “Don’t you understand what it means?” Silence filled the room. “I might just have to kill you.”
Student #5 shut down the Facebook page and turned his attention to Timothy Warner. No social network site for him-but there were other sources of information, including police records.
Timothy Warner showed up twice for driving under the influence. There was a district court adjudication-six months’ nonreporting probation and loss of license.
He found some other entries for Timothy Warner: magna cum laude from the University of Miami, undergraduate degree in American History, and the recipient of a prestigious award. This news release from the university conveniently included a picture and the information that Timothy Warner was continuing at the university to obtain a doctorate in Jeffersonian Studies.
He fixed his eyes on the picture. “Hello, Timothy,” he said. “I think we’re going to get to know each other.”
The Miami Herald website listed Timothy Warner in the “survived by” category following its obituary report on his uncle’s suicide. Some additional quick clicks on the keyboard, and within a few seconds he had addresses and phone numbers for both Andy Candy and Timothy the nephew.
Student #5 rocked in his chair like an eager sub hoping to be called to go into a game.
He knew what they looked like, and he knew where to look for them, and he believed that whatever blanks he had left on his Do I need to kill them both? list could be filled without too much trouble.
He split his computer screen and put up the picture captioned EX next to the university press release of Timothy Warner. This interested him. Did love bring them back together?
He shook his head.
More likely: death.
25
Andy Candy thought they had entered into some weird parallel universe. Where they stood, the morning sun was insistently bright. The air was warm. Gentle breezes stirred palm fronds into a rhythmic, benign dance.
And now what connected the two of them was murder.
And fear, too, she thought. But she wasn’t quite able to gather all that anxiety up into a neat package and describe it to Moth the way she had related all the details of her conversation with the West Coast psychiatrist the night before. When she told Moth all that the doctor had said, she imagined herself some sort of executive secretary of killing. Details had flooded her afterward, and she’d tried to sort through them alclass="underline" You go to a college frat house party and it becomes death. You get a call from your old high school boyfriend and it becomes death. You fly to talk to an old psychiatrist and that becomes death.
What’s next?
Too many things were conflated together inside her head. She wanted to grasp something solid, but nothing seemed quite real to her any longer.
Dead monkeys in a psych lab thirty years ago.
Was that real?
Names of dead people on a page in front of her. Accident, accident, suicide.
Were they real?
The baby she’d aborted.
Was it real?
Andy looked over at Moth. No, she suddenly thought. It’s not a parallel universe. It’s the theater of the absurd and we’re both eagerly waiting for Godot.
“Are you hungry, Andy?” Moth called out.
He was standing at a counter, collecting Cuban coffees for the two of them.
They were outside a window-front restaurant on Calle Ocho, the main thoroughfare through Little Havana, engaging in a Miami tradition: dynamiting oneself awake. A line of folks-from businessmen in dark suits to mechanics in greasy overalls-were sipping small cups of sweet, frothy, strong coffee and eating pastries. Andy Candy and Moth were both on their second cup of the brew, which they knew was more than enough caffeine to keep them going for hours.
“No, I’m okay,” she replied. She waited until he joined her on a small cement bench.
Moth did not believe he was proving to be much of a detective. His working knowledge of police work was limited to what he’d seen on television, which ranged from the incredible to the gritty with a good deal of mundane mixed in. His approach was a typical student’s: He considered reading modern cops-and-robbers fiction and wondered whether he should spend some time absorbing true-crime accounts of famous killings as well. He scoured the Internet assessing scholarly papers on DNA testing and forensic website entries describing varieties of killers. These ranged from deranged moms who drowned their children to cold-blooded serial killers.
None of what he learned seemed to help him.
Everything he’d done seemed backward. Cops start with details that create questions and get answers that paint a clear-cut portrait of a crime. I started with a certainty that has been replaced by doubt. Their approach is to eliminate confusion. Mine has only created it.