The campus of the University of Massachusetts-Boston is located in Dorchester right next to the harbor. Its buildings are as graceless and stolid as a medieval fortification, and on a hot, early-summer day, the brown brick walls and gray concrete walkways seem to absorb the heat. It is a plain stepsister of a school. It caters to many seeking to take a second bite at education, with an infantryman’s sensibility: not pretty, but critically important when you need it most.
I got lost once in the sea of cement, had to ask for directions, before finding the right stairwell that descended into a threadbare lounge outside a cafeteria. I hesitated for a moment, then spotted Professor Corcoran waving for me from one of the quieter corners.
Introductions were quick, a handshake and a little small talk about the unseasonably hot weather.
“So,” the professor said as he sat down and took a swig of bottled water, “How precisely is it that I can help you?”
“Michael O’Connell,” I replied. “He took two of your computer courses a few years back. I was hoping you might recall him.”
Corcoran nodded. “I do, indeed. I mean, I shouldn’t, really, but I do, which says something all in itself.”
“How so?”
“Dozens, no, hundreds of students have passed through the same two courses he took from me, over the last few years. Lots of tests, lots of final papers, lots of faces. After a while, they all pretty much blend into one generic blue-jeans-wearing, baseball-cap-on-backwards, working-two-different-jobs-to-support-themselves-through-Second-Chance-U sort of student.”
“O’Connell, though…”
“Well, let’s say it doesn’t surprise me to have someone show up asking questions about him.”
The professor was a wiry, small man, with bifocals and thinning, sandy blond hair. He had a row of pens and pencils in his shirt pocket, and a battered, overstuffed, brown canvas briefcase.
“Okay,” I said, “why doesn’t it surprise you?”
“Actually, I always figured it for a detective who would show up with an inquiry or two about O’Connell. Or the FBI or maybe an assistant U.S. attorney. You know who comes to the classes I teach? Students who quite accurately believe that the skills they will learn will improve their financial outlook considerably. The problem is, the more adept the students become, the more clear it becomes how you can misuse the information.”
“Misuse?”
“A nicer word than what the truth is,” he said. “I have an entire lecture on lawbreaking, but still…”
“O’Connell?”
“Most of the kids that choose, ah, the dark side, ” he said with a small laugh, “well, they’re pretty much what you might expect. Overgrown nerds and losers to the nth degree. Mostly they just make trouble, hacking, downloading video games without paying licensing fees, or stealing music files or even pirating Hollywood movies before they’re released to DVD, that sort of thing. But O’Connell was different.”
“Explain different. ”
“What he was, was infinitely more dangerous and more scary.”
“How so?”
“Because he saw the computer precisely for what it is: a tool. What are the sorts of tools a bad guy needs? A knife? A gun? A getaway car? Sort of depends on what crime you have in mind, doesn’t it? A computer can be just as efficient as a nine-millimeter in the wrong hands, and his, trust me, were the wrong hands.”
“How could you tell?”
“From the first moment. He didn’t have that bedraggled, slightly-amazed-at-the-world look about him, like so many students. He had this, I don’t know, a looseness to him. He was good-looking. Well put together. But he exuded a sort of dangerousness. As if he cared not one whit for anything other than some unspoken agenda. And when you stared closely at him, he had this truly unsettling look in his eyes. This don’t-get-in-my-way look.
“You know, he handed in an assignment once a couple of days late, so I did what I always do, and which I tell every class about on the first day: I marked it down one full grade point for each day late. He came to see me and told me that I was being unfair. This was, as you would probably guess, not the very first time that a student had come to me complaining about a grade. But, with O’Connell, the conversation was somehow different. I’m not sure how he did it, but somehow I was in the position of justifying what I had done, not the other way around. And the more I explained that it wasn’t unfair, the more his eyes narrowed. He could look at you the way some people might actually strike you. The impact was the same. You just knew you didn’t want to be on the other end of that look. He never threatened, never suggested, never said or did anything overt. But every instant we spoke, I could feel that that was precisely what was happening. I was being warned.”
“It made an impression.”
“Kept me up at night. My wife kept asking me, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I had to reply, ‘Nothing,’ when I knew that wasn’t precisely true. I had the sensation that I managed to dodge something truly terrifying.”
“He didn’t ever do anything?”
“Well, he let me know, one day, in passing, that he’d just happened to find out where I lived.”
“And?”
“That was it. And that was where it ended.”
“How?”
“I violated every rule I have. Complete moral failure on my part. I called him in after a class, told him I’d been mistaken, he was absolutely one hundred percent right, and gave him an A on the assignment, and an A for the semester.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So,” Professor Corcoran asked as he gathered his things together, “who did he kill?”
10
Hope was in the kitchen, working on a recipe she had never tried before, waiting for Sally to get home. She tasted the sauce, which burned her tongue, and she cursed under her breath. It just did not taste right, and she feared that she was destined for a failed dinner. For an instant, she felt a helplessness that seemed far deeper than a kitchen disaster, and she could feel tears welling up in her eyes.
She did not know precisely why Sally and she were going through such a rocky period.
When she examined it all on the surface, she could see no reason for their extended silences and stony moments. There was no real anxiety at either Sally’s legal practice or Hope’s school. They were doing well financially and had the funds to take an exotic vacation or buy a new car, even redo the kitchen. But every time one of these indulgences had come up in conversation, it had been shunted aside. Rationales were given for why they shouldn’t do one or the other. Hope thought that almost always whatever obstacle made whatever adventure impossible seemed to be raised by Sally, and this worried her deeply.