Playing Dead

PROLOGUE

Thirty Years Ago

He buried Jessica White’s body in the vast open space on the west end of Stanford University.

He hadn’t meant to kill her. She’d been intoxicated, but coherent. He pretended to be tipsy, but in truth he’d replaced his beer with a nonalcoholic variety he kept in his room. He needed to be in control.

They fucked like animals and he couldn’t climax. He’d had this problem before, knew what had to be done to bring relief. She laughingly agreed to “play the game,” as she called it. But tying her to the floor spread-eagled was no game to him.

She was beautiful. Long, lean body, round tits, perky nipples, dark hair spilling around her.

So he had closed his eyes, wanting to remember the woman who had loved him, who had taught him everything about sex.

Bridget had seduced him when he was twelve. Told him what to do, what she liked, made him do things he didn’t want to. But he’d loved her. Loved her breasts. If she’d just let him suck her breasts, he would have been happy.

She knew he liked it, and only let him touch them when he finished his other duties. She said only young men made her feel good. Only young men like him.

The week before he graduated from eighth grade he went to her house like he did every Wednesday after school. He waited for her in the backyard. Leaving together would have been unseemly, she always said. After all, she was the principal.

He waited and waited and then heard laughter from inside. He walked around to her bedroom window and saw her with another boy. He was smaller and younger and had no pubic hair.

Bridget had told him last time he was getting too old.

She let the boy-a kid who’d transferred midyear and was a grade younger-touch her breasts. Like she’d done when she first brought him to her house. It was only later, after she hooked him, that she denied him until he satisfied her. Until he hurt her.

Outside her bedroom window, he hated her.

He went back late that night. Snuck into her bedroom. He wanted to kill her, but he loved her so much. She needed him.

She was expecting him.

“I saw you watching. I’m sorry we can’t see each other anymore. You’re leaving for high school in the fall. But I’ll give you something to remember me by.”

Then she hurt him and he thought he would die.

After that, he couldn’t have sex like a normal person. He watched porn movies, he spied on his father and stepmother while they did it-quick and fast. Later, he spied on his hypocritical father when he learned about the young mistress.

He tried to re-create that urgent copulation with Jessica, but it hadn’t worked. It never would.

He didn’t even realize he’d strangled Jessica until he climaxed and collapsed on top of her. She wasn’t breathing. He stared in shock at her neck, saw the bruises, the thumb impressions so deep they had to have crushed her larynx.

He looked at his hands as if he didn’t recognize them as his own. They had been around her neck, his thumbs pushing, but he didn’t remember.

He wasn’t a murderer. It was an accident, just a terrible accident. Who would believe it? Jessica’s wrists and ankles were red and chafed, probably from straining while she suffocated. No one would believe that she’d allowed him to tie her up. That he’d just gotten carried away. That’s what happened, things got out of hand because she wanted him so bad. She’d asked him to tie her up. She’d begged him to do it rough, saying she liked it that way. It was all her fault. Sick bitch.

So he waited a few hours until everyone in the fraternity was drunk or passed out, then brought his car around to his ground-floor window, taking Jessica out that way instead of through the door.

No one had seen them together. Jessica had made a big production about leaving the party earlier-she didn’t want her ex-boyfriend to know she was going to screw someone in his own fraternity. Then she climbed in through his window and. . she died.

He drove to the west end of the campus into the rolling hills toward the Dish, a radiotelescope built a couple years back. When he could drive no further, he walked along a jogging path with a shovel he’d taken from the fraternity basement. He veered off the path about twenty-five yards, shielded by trees and shrubs, until he found soil soft enough to dig.

He was stronger than he looked, which surprised anyone who decided to pick on him. Digging the grave gave him time to clear his mind, to focus on the task at hand, and to formulate answers to any questions he might be asked regarding Jessica’s disappearance. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming back to his room because her ex was insanely jealous. She lived nearby, in an off-campus sorority. She had walked to the fraternity.

If she had told anyone about meeting him, he’d lie. He’d lied most of his life. He was good at it. He’d brought all her personal effects and tossed them into the grave, along with the ropes he’d used to bind her. He’d go back and make sure there was nothing of her in his room, not even a hair. He was a neat, orderly person. No one would be surprised if he deep-cleaned his room Sunday morning.

He had to move her body from his car to the grave. Not yet dawn, the quality of night was changing almost imperceptibly. He didn’t have much time.

He’d wrapped her body in a wool blanket. As he removed her from the trunk, her body was stiff and difficult to bend. Rigor mortis. It hadn’t even been six hours! He pulled her out, falling backward and dropping her body in the dirt. Jessica rolled out of the blanket, stiff legs bent at an awkward angle from the time spent in his trunk.

Frustrated and angry at himself for his clumsiness, he pushed her back onto the blanket and carried her like a baby to the grave. He dropped her in and quickly shoveled dirt over her. Seeing her dead again had unnerved him. He wanted to get back home as quickly as possible. He needed to shower.

Relieved upon finally finishing the unsavory task, he returned to the fraternity his father had insisted he join. He was to continue the proud family legacy. “You’ll major in biology, enroll in the premed program, then you can choose your discipline. Surgery would be the smart decision.” As if he wasn’t smart enough to figure out his father wanted him to follow in his big, fat footsteps.

He had no desire to go into medicine. He’d tell his father to go to hell. Someday. He should have done it a long time ago.

No one was awake when he returned just as the sun crept over the horizon. He went to the bathroom, locked the door, and flipped on the light.

Something was caught in the buttons of his shirt. He pulled at it, inspecting it carefully. Slightly greasy, what on earth. .

He bit back a scream. It was her skin! Jessica’s skin had come off in a chunk on his buttons. What other parts of the dead bitch were on him that he couldn’t see?

He stripped and jumped under scalding hot water in the shower, scrubbing his body over and over until he was red and raw. Images of Jessica rising from the grave, her skin sloughing off in greasy chunks of flesh, haunted him.

Before anyone woke, he scrubbed down his room twice with the strongest cleansers he could find. Removed anything, seen or unseen, that said, “Jessica White Was Here.” Then he tried to sleep, but his heart was beating too fast. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Jessica rise like a zombie from the grave.

He went to the kitchen and made himself a hearty breakfast. He was famished. When he was done, he felt so much better.

It’s over.

Though he’d killed Jessica only hours ago, the event seemed surreal, as if he’d been an observer of the brutal act, not a participant.

When he returned to his clean room, he saw a note on his bed. Something was wrong.

It was a plain white card in a blank white unsealed envelope. He slowly removed the card.

We know what you did last night.

Something else was in the envelope. He poured it into his hand.

Dirt. And a single earring.