Yes I would.
He remembered the day he’d disappeared into his new existences. He’d left everything, along with a precisely drawn map showing every street he might travel and noting three good places to throw himself into the East River. Bridge. Dock. Park. At the top of the map he’d scrawled, I can’t take it any longer. He’d liked that phrasing. It could mean almost anything, but it would be taken just one way.
People want to believe in the obvious, even when something is a mystery. They want rational explanations for aberrant behaviors, even when these are elusive and difficult to pin down.
So, it had been simple: Leave behind a couple of clues that point in the same direction, so that even without a body, they would all reach the same conclusion-two plus two equals four; he’s dead.
Especially when it isn’t true. And he was proud of his self-controclass="underline" Not once since he’d left the apartment had he picked up brush and paint and indulged his sense of artistry.
The doorway beckoned him. He started toward it, then forced himself to stop. He thought: This is like looking at the place where I was born and where I died.
The street hadn’t changed all that much with the passing of years. There was a new Starbucks on the corner, and what was once a deli was now a high-end boutique selling women’s clothing. But the dry cleaner mid-block was the same, as was the Italian restaurant three doors down.
Student #5 slowly reached into his suit pocket and removed the pictures of Andy Candy and Timothy Warner. They were babies when I lived here, he thought. Up to now, the people I’ve killed, I knew. Not really fair, he thought, to kill without familiarity. That would make me little more than some punk sociopathic criminal. He quickly listed some of the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality in his head: failure to conform to social norms; impulsivity; reckless disregard for safety; consistent irresponsibility; lack of remorse.
Not me, he reassured himself-although he wondered about that last category, a thought that brought a grin to his face.
27
Andy Candy was pushing some papers around on her makeshift workspace in Moth’s apartment. She stacked them in a neat pile in front of her before clicking a few keys on her laptop computer. A four-paragraph story arrived on her screen. It was from the New York Post and dated slightly less than two years after one member of Study Group Alpha was asked to leave medical schooclass="underline" Police Seek Missing Med Student in River.
Another couple of clicks bought up another story, this from the archived obituaries of the New York Times: Plane Crash Claims Life of Surgeon and Wife.
She highlighted a single statement near the bottom of the story detailing a private plane being piloted by the surgeon that landed fatally short on a rural strip near the family’s vacation home in Manchester, Vermont. The highlighted sentence read: Doctor Callahan and his wife left no immediate survivors. Their only son disappeared five years earlier in an apparent suicide.
Andy kept bringing up entries from various websites-including a New York State Surrogate’s Court declaration of death for one Robert Callahan Jr. It was a determination five years after the disappearance of the son, and it preceded the plane accident by six weeks. As best as she could tell from the paperwork, the parents had sought to have their son declared legally dead. She guessed this had something to do with estate planning, but she couldn’t be certain. She imagined that the plane crash too was murder, but in this case she couldn’t see how. She had discovered an FAA report on the crash that blamed it on inexperience and pilot error. Robert Callahan had obtained his pilot’s license only four weeks earlier and promptly gone out and purchased a single-engine Piper Cub.
She rolled her eyes over all the windows open on the computer screen and thought, Dead, dead, dead. It’s all about death.
“What do we know?” Andy Candy asked.
Moth leaned over, took a few minutes to read over what she’d put up on her screen. “We know who. We know why. We know a little bit of how, if not precisely. We know when. We have all sorts of answers,” Moth replied deliberately, almost defiantly.
“What does it add up to?” Andy Candy asked firmly.
She knew the answer to this question: everything and nothing at the same time.
Moth considered this question for a moment or two before offering a reply that almost made it seem he could hear her thoughts: “I don’t think we should ask that quite yet.”
“Well,” she said, gesturing toward the words collected on the screen, “what we do know is that the person we’ve identified as your uncle’s probable killer reportedly died a quarter century or so ago, like right when you and I were being born, even if his body was never found. So unless he’s some ghost or zombie, he’s probably not someone we can just go click, click, click and find. So much for that Find Your Classmates website. I mean, to get that declaration from the state, somebody had to do some research and come up empty. Papers had to be signed and notarized and made all official.”
She looked over at Moth. She wanted to do something sensitive, like touch him on the arm, something reassuring. But instead, she rocked back and forth in her seat, and said, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. Except he isn’t, is he?”
Moth nodded. His only comment was, “Andy, how hard is it to disappear in this country?” And then he answered his own question. “Not very.”
Andy Candy tapped on the computer screen with her index finger.
What are we doing?
She had another frightening thought: How many people does Edmond Dantès kill along the road to revenge?
And then a worse thought: It will never end.
The word end filled her like a heavy meal. It was electric in her head-end, end, end-and so she turned it around and used it in her next statement.
“That’s the end, Moth,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what else we can do.”
Ghost killer, she thought. For an instant she had the same sensation that she’d had in Jeremy Hogan’s house. Run! Get away! She pictured the doctor’s body on the floor, the puddled blood, the destroyed head. She believed that she had shut away the most terrible images into some distant spot, as if she had not seen these things happen, and that they actually took place in some realm that was neither real nor dream.
Unsettled, unsure, she tried for certainty. “It’s over, Moth. I’m sorry. It’s over. We’re at a dead end.”
The words she chose were not all that dissimilar to those he’d used and regretted, years earlier, when they broke up.
High school heartbreak: He was excited, heading off to college. She had two years to go before doing the same. Long phone call. Apologies. Tears. Sick in the stomach with emotions. Then emptiness, followed by some anger. “I never want to see you again!” Of course, that was a lie. When Andy thought back on the end of their romance, it seemed so mundane and unexceptional that it almost frightened her.
“Dead end,” she repeated.
Moth, barely hearing anything Andy Candy was saying, felt trapped. Facts, details, connections-all the underpinnings of everything that had driven him to this point were arrayed in front of him, either on Andy’s computer, in notes, in articles, or in their own recollections. The burgeoning historian within him knew that the time had arrived to piece it all together in a coherent way and turn it over to the proper authorities.