It hadn’t quite worked out the way he thought it would.
Student #5 poured himself a cold beer and squeezed a freshly sliced lime into it, trying to postpone the sensation that had crept over him that morning and persisted through the day: He was suddenly bored.
Sunshine. Tourists. The laid-back, island lifestyle. He wasn’t sure at all whether he fit. “Damn it,” he said to no one.
He took his beer, a half-eaten bag of chips, and sat in his well-appointed living room. It was dark inside-Key West, which honors the sun religiously, is designed so that there are deep shadows; it keeps things cooler in the oppressive summer months. Combined with the constant soft hum of the central air-conditioning and the cool maroon Spanish tiles, it created a subtle quiet within his home.
For the first time in years, Student #5 actually felt alone. For so long, he had lived with the people lined up to be his victims. Now they were gone. It was like losing friends and companions. He felt the urge to open a window to the heat and street noise-although any sounds would be distant. Student #5 lived directly across from the Key West cemetery. The real estate agents’ standard joke: Quiet neighbors. One hundred thousand people buried yards from his front door-or so the estimates went; no one was certain how many actually rested there.
He stretched out on a Haitian cotton couch and pressed the beer glass to his forehead. He felt a twinge of anger. Should have seen this coming. What sort of psychologist are you?
He frowned. Shifted in his seat. Tried to find a comfortable position, but was unable. Berated himself. “Where were you on the first day of basic shrink training?” he said out loud. “Absent without leave? Not paying attention? Did you think there was nothing left for you to learn?”
It was the simplest of emotional equations, he thought, and one he should have anticipated. The fantasies about what he would do with his life had merely been tinder to help obsessive fire take light. The real business of his life had been revenge-years of dedication, devotion to a single ideal, perfecting his craft. And now all of that was gone, along with all the intellectual stimulation and intensity of planning that had accompanied it.
He felt a little like the old white-haired geezer on the first day of a forced retirement, after decades of going in to the same office every day, sitting at the same desk, drinking the same cup of coffee, eating the same brown-bagged lunch, same time, same job, hour after hour, year after year.
“God damn it,” he said out loud.
For him, no Thank You plaque, no framed picture signed by everyone, no nice but cheap retirement watch. No clap on the back from his boss, no firm handshake from the young guy who would replace him at half the cost. No tears from the more emotional of his coworkers.
“Damn,” he repeated. The geezer in his mind’s eye would shoot himself. Pronto. This he knew. “Son of a bitch,” he said. He prided himself on being a cold-eyed realist about both himself and murder, but he was depressed. And lost.
The last few weeks had been filled with energy-first as he tormented The Nephew, The Girlfriend, and The Prosecutor. That had been flat-out fun. Challenging and amusing.
Then creating his exit from one of his lives-that too had been artistry. Not only had it set him free, but it had been an exercise in imagination. And it had worked-each piece fitting together like the shuffling of a deck of cards by a professional card shark.
He had arrived in Key West invigorated, ready to embrace his new life. And almost instantly had slid into a void. From the moment he’d seen the back of Jeremy Hogan’s head explode to this one, nothing had been what he’d imagined.
Student #5 didn’t want to read trashy novels or watch soap operas on television. He didn’t want to fish or sail or swim or do any of the touristy sorts of things that brought folks to the Keys. He suddenly hated the crowds of cruise ship visitors with loud voices in different languages jamming the streets, and the high-priced huckstering that went along with catering to the money that arrived daily. Everything he’d expected to embrace had soured.
“So, what is it you want to do, now that you’re footloose and fancy-free?” he asked himself sharply. “Now that you’ve entered-retirement?” He made this last word sound like an obscenity. He paused. He whispered his answer:
“Kill.”
Then in a louder voice: “All right. Makes total sense. But who?” A smile. This question was a bit of a joke. “You know who.”
An entirely new set of challenges. After all, he thought, who poses a threat? Who can steal your life from you? He knew the real answer to this question was No one because of the way he’d established his different identities. But the mere notion that someone might be dangerous to him after all he’d accomplished felt intoxicating. He began to calculate in his head.
The Girlfriend-that won’t be too hard. Young women are always doing stupid things that make them vulnerable. The key question will be when to strike. One year? Two? How long before her natural sense of safety and stupid overconfidence truly kick in and make her ripe?
This was intriguing. Student #5 instantly moved on to Timothy Warner in his head.
The Nephew-he’s a drunk, but he won’t slide so quickly into a false sense of safety. Still, he’s young, and he’s weak, and that will obscure whatever precautions he might take when he’s sober.
The Prosecutor…
He smiled. “Now, there’s a challenge,” he said out loud. “A real challenge. She’s complicated-but when all is said and done, addiction or not, she’s still a member of law enforcement, and they guard their own carefully. Planning her death will take effort. Bigger risks, no?”
He answered his own question: “Correct.” Scheming the right death for Susan Terry would be intriguing. Accident? Suicide? Overdose? Imagine all the enemies she’s made putting people in prison. This was a welcome puzzle.
He took a long swig of his beer and went to his computer. He had a small work area set up in a sparsely furnished guest room where he’d plugged in his laptop. There was a printer in a corner on the floor. He felt a surge of energy and a calming sense of purpose. Might as well get started, he told himself. Within a few seconds, he had typed in Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. He went to the public information section on its website called “Who We Are.” Then he printed out Susan’s picture, her resume, a brief biography, and a list of some of her major cases.
Something to study. Just enough to get his juices flowing and his mind working. The simple act of clicking a few keys, then listening to pages drop into the receptacle on his printer gave him the sensation that he was doing something. The full-color head shot from the state attorney’s website was the last item to emerge. Nice long, sweeping black hair. A warm and welcoming smile. Firm jaw, wide lips, and green eyes. Really quite beautiful, he thought.
“Hello-o-o, Susan,” he said with a lilt. There’s going to come a day when you will wish that you’d been blown up in my trailer.
He started to hum to himself-music that was rock-and-roll lively; he didn’t pause to wonder why this particular song had leapt into his head. It was ostensibly a love song, in truth more a sex song, but he changed the words to the chorus as he began to sing along, crudely imitating the dead Jim Morrison’s gravelly voice, as if it came from a grave only a few yards away instead of thousands of miles distant in Père Lachaise in Paris. He could hear the Doors singer: “Love me two times, I’m going away…”