The Dead Student

This is what Moth came to understand:

Addiction and murder have things in common.

In each, someone will want you to confess:

I’m a killer.

Or:

I’m an addict.

In each, at some point you’re supposed to give in to a higher power:

For your typical murderer, it’s the law. Cops, judges, maybe a prison cell. For run- of-the-mill addicts, it’s God or Jesus or Buddha or just about anything conceivably stronger than the drugs or the drink. But just give in to it. It’s the only way out. Assuming you want out.

He never thought either confession or concession was part of his emotional makeup. He did know that addiction was. He was unsure about killing, but he was determined that before too long he would find out.

1

Timothy Warner found his uncle’s body because he woke up that morning with an intense and frighteningly familiar craving, an emptiness within that buzzed deeply and repeatedly like a loud off-key chord on an electric guitar. At first he hoped that it was left over from a dream of happily knocking back shots of iced vodka with impunity. But then he reminded himself that this was his ninety-ninth day without a drink, and he realized that if he wanted to see the hundredth he would have to work hard to get through the day sober. So as soon as his feet hit the cold floor by his bed, before he glanced out the window to check the weather, or stretched his arms above his head to try to force some life into tired muscles, he reached for his iPhone and tapped the application that kept a running count of his sobriety. Yesterday’s ninety-eight clicked to ninety-nine.

He stared at the number for a moment. He no longer felt heady satisfaction or even a twinge of success. That enthusiasm had fled. Now he understood that the daily marker was just another reminder that he was always at risk. Fail. Give in. Let slip. Slide a little.

And he would be dead.

Maybe not right away, but sooner or later. He sometimes thought that sobriety was like standing unsteadily on the edge of a tall cliff, dizzily staring down into some vast Grand Canyon while being buffeted unceasingly in the midst of a gale. A gust would topple him off, and he would tumble headlong into space.

He knew this, as much as any person can know anything.

Across the room was a cheap, black-framed, three-quarter-length mirror propped up against the wall of his small apartment, next to the expensive bicycle that he used to get to his classes-his car and driver’s license having been taken away during his last failure. Dressed only in his baggy underwear, he stood and looked at his body.

He did not really like what he saw.

Where once he’d been attractively wiry, now he was cadaverously thin, all ribs and muscles with a single poorly executed drunken-night tattoo of a sad clown’s face up on his left shoulder. He had thick jet-black hair that he wore long and unkempt. He had dark eyebrows and an engaging, slightly cockeyed smile that made him seem friendlier than he actually thought he was. He did not know whether he was handsome, although the girl he thought was truly beautiful had told him once that he was. He had the long, thin arms and legs of a runner. He had been a second-string wide receiver on his high school football team and a straight-A student, the go-to guy for help on any upcoming chemistry lab or perilously overdue English essay. One of the biggest players on the team, a hulking lineman, stole four letters from the middle of his name, explaining that Tim or Timmy just didn’t suit Moth’s frequently driven look. It stuck, and Timothy Warner didn’t mind it all that much, because he believed moths had odd virtues and took chances flying dangerously close to open flames in their obsession with seeking light. So Moth it was, and he rarely used his full first name save for formal occasions, family gatherings, or AA meetings, when he would introduce himself saying, “Hello, my name is Timothy, and I’m an alcoholic.”

He did not think his remote parents or his deeply estranged older brother and sister still remembered his high school nickname. The only person who used it regularly, and affectionately, was his uncle, whom he hurriedly dialed as he stared at his reflection. Moth knew he had to protect himself from himself and calling his uncle was pretty much the first step at self-preservation.

As expected, he got the answering machine: “This is Doctor Warner. I’m with a patient now. Please leave a message and I will get back to you promptly.”

“Uncle Ed, it’s Moth. Really had the big crave this morning. Need to go to a meeting. Can you join me at Redeemer One for the six p.m. tonight? I’ll see you there and maybe we can talk after. I think I can make it through the day okay.” He didn’t know about this last flimsy promise.

Nor would his uncle.

Maybe, Moth thought, I should go to the lunch meeting over at the university’s student activities center or the mid-morning meeting in the back room at the Salvation Army store just six blocks away. Maybe I should just crawl back into bed, pull the covers over my head, and hide until the 6 p.m. meeting.

He preferred the early evening sessions at the First Redemption Church, which he and his uncle called Redeemer One for brevity and to give the church an exotic spaceship name. He was a regular there, as were many lawyers, doctors, and other professionals who chose to confess their cravings in the church’s comfortable, wood-paneled meeting room and overstuffed fake leather couches instead of the low-slung basement rooms, with their stiff metal folding chairs and harsh overhead lights, of most meeting places. A wealthy benefactor of the church had lost a brother to alcoholism, and it was his funding that kept the seats comfortable and the coffee fresh. Redeemer One had a sense of exclusivity. Moth was the youngest participant by far.

The ex-drunks and onetime addicts who went to Redeemer One all came from the distant worlds Moth had been told over and over he was destined to join. At least, being a doctor or a lawyer or a successful businessman was what others who probably didn’t know him all that well thought he should become.

Not a drunk doctor, addicted lawyer, or strung-out businessman.

His hand shook a little and he thought, No one tells their kid they’re gonna grow up to be a drunk or a junkie. Not in the good old USA. Land of opportunity. Here we say you’ve got a chance to grow up and be president. But a lot more people end up as drunks.

This was an easy conclusion.

He smiled wanly as he added, Probably the one or two kids that actually do get told they’re gonna grow up into drunks are so motivated to avoid that fate that they become president.

He left his iPhone on the counter in the bathroom so he could hear it ring and hurried into the steaming-hot shower. Thick shampoo and blistering water, he hoped, could scrub away caked layers of anxiety.

He had half dried off when the phone buzzed.

“Uncle Ed?”

“Hey Moth-boy, I just got your message. Trouble?”

“Trouble.”

“Big trouble?”

“Not yet. Just the want, you know. It kinda shook me up.”

“Did something specific happen, you know, that triggered…”

His uncle, Moth knew, was always interested in the underlying why because that would help him decide the overarching what.

“No. I don’t know. Nothing. But this morning there it was as soon as I opened my eyes. It was like waking up and finding some ghost seated on the edge of the bed watching me.”

“That’s scary,” his uncle said. “But not exactly an unfamiliar ghost.” Uncle Ed paused, a psychiatrist’s delay, measuring words like a fine carpenter calculates lengths. “You think waiting until six tonight makes sense? What about an earlier meeting?”

“I have classes almost all day. I should be able-”

“That’s if you go to the classes.”

Moth stayed quiet. This was obvious.

“That’s if,” his uncle continued, “you don’t walk out of your apartment, take a sharp left, and run directly to that big discount liquor store on LeJeune Road. You know, the one with the big blinking goddamn red neon sign that every drunk in Dade County knows about. And it’s got free parking.” These last words were tinged with contempt and sarcasm.

Again, Moth said nothing. He wondered: Was that what I was going to do? There might have been a yes lurking somewhere within him that he hadn’t quite heard yet but that was getting ready to shout at him. His uncle knew all the inner conversations before they even happened.

“You think you can turn right, start pedaling that bike nice and fast, and head toward school? You think you can get through each class-what do you have this morning?”

“Advanced seminar on current applications of Jeffersonian principles. It’s what the great man said and did two hundred and fifty years ago that still means something today. That’s followed by a required two-hour statistics lecture after lunch.”

His uncle paused again, and Moth imagined him grinning. “Well, Jefferson is always pretty damn interesting. Slaves and sex. Wildly clever inventions and incredible architecture. But that advanced statistics class, well, boring. How did you ever end up in that? What has that got to do with a doctorate in American History? It would drive anyone to drink.”

This was a frequently shared joke, and Moth managed a small laugh. “Word,” he said, the historian in him enjoying the irony of employing teenage-speak already in disuse and discarded.

“So, how about a compromise?” his uncle said. “We’ll meet at Redeemer One at six, like you said. But you go to the lunch meeting over at the campus center. That’s at noon. You call me as you walk in. You don’t even have to get up and say a damn thing unless you feel like it-you just have to be there. And you call me when you walk out. Then you call me again when you walk into the statistics class. And when you walk out. And each time figure on holding that phone up so I can hear that professor, droning on in the background. That’s what I want to hear. Nice, safe, boring lecture stuff. Not glasses clinking.”

Moth knew his uncle was a veteran alcoholic, well versed in the myriad excuses, explanations, and evasions of everything except another drink. His personal tally of days sober was now well into the thousands. Maybe nearly seven thousand, a number that Moth believed he would find truly impossible to attain. He was more than a sponsor. He was Virgil to Moth’s drunken Dante. Moth knew his uncle Ed had saved his life and had done so more than once.

“Okay,” Moth said. “So, we meet at six?”

“Yeah. Save me a comfy seat, because I might be delayed a couple of minutes. I got an emergency appointment request for late this afternoon.”

“Someone like me?” Moth asked.

“Moth, boy. There ain’t nobody like you,” his uncle replied, slipping into a fake Southern drawl. “Nah. More likely some sad-eyed suburban housewife depressive whose meds are running low and is panicking big-time because her regular therapist is on vacation. All I am is a glorified, overeducated prescription pad waiting to be signed. See you tonight. And call. All those times. You know I’ll be waiting.”

“I’ll call. Thanks, Uncle Ed.”

“No big deal.”

But of course, it was.

Moth made the specified phone calls, each time safely bantering about nothing important for a few moments with his uncle. Moth had not thought he would say anything at the noontime meeting, but near the end of the session, at the urging of the young theology professor who ran the gathering, he had risen and shared his fears over his morning desires. Almost all the heads had nodded in recognition.

When he exited from the meeting, he took his Trek 20-speed mountain bike to the university’s playing fields. The high-tech rubberized quarter-mile track that encircled a football practice field was empty and despite a warning sign that told students to keep off unless under supervision, he lifted the bike over a turnstile gate, and after a quick look right and left to make sure he was alone, started riding in circles.

He picked up his pace quickly, energized by the clicking of the gears beneath him, the torque as he leaned dangerously into each turn, the steady accumulation of speed mixed with the high cloudless azure sky of a typical Miami winter’s afternoon. As he pumped his legs and felt muscles tightening with energy, he could sense the crave being pushed aside and buried within him. Four laps rapidly became twenty. Sweat started to burn his eyes. He could hear his breath coming harder with the exertion. He felt like a boxer whose roundhouse right has staggered his opponent. Keep throwing punches, he told himself. Victory was within sight.

When he finished the twenty-eighth lap, he pulled the bike to a sudden stop, tires squealing against the red synthetic track surface. Chances were good a campus security officer would swing by any second-he’d already pushed that envelope.

What would he do, yell at me? Moth thought. Give me a citation for trying to stay sober?

Moth lifted the bike back over the gate. Then he leisurely retraced his route to the wrought-iron stand adjacent to the science building where he could lock up the Trek and head to statistics. He passed a security guard in a small white SUV and gave a cheery wave to the driver, who didn’t wave back. Moth knew he would probably start to stink as the sweat dried after he entered the air-conditioned classroom, but he didn’t care.

Miraculously, he thought, it was turning into a small, but optimistic day.

A hundred now seemed not only attainable, but probable.

Moth waited outside a bit, right until a minute shy of six, before going inside Redeemer One and heading to the meeting lounge. There were already twenty or so men and women seated in a loose circle, all of whom greeted Moth with a nod or a small wave. A thin haze of cigarette smoke hung in the room-an acceptable addiction for drunks, Moth thought. He looked at the others. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, professor. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. And then himself: graduate student. There was a dark oaken table at the back of the room with a coffee urn and ceramic mugs. There was also a small shiny metal tub filled with ice and a selection of diet soft drinks and bottled water.

Moth found a spot and set his tattered student backpack down beside him. The regulars would easily have guessed that he was saving a space for his uncle-who had, after all, been the person who introduced Moth to Redeemer One and its high-class collection of addicts.

It was not until perhaps fifteen minutes into the meeting that Moth began to fidget nervously when there was no sign of his uncle. Something felt misshapen, a note out of tune. While Uncle Ed would sometimes be a few minutes late, if he said he was coming, he always showed up. Moth kept turning his head away from the speaker toward the door, expecting his uncle to make an apologetic entrance at any moment.

The speaker was talking hesitantly about OxyContin and the warm sensation that it gave him. Moth tried to pay attention. He thought that was a most commonplace description, and differed little whether the speaker was sharing something about morphine-based pharmaceuticals, home-brewed methamphetamine, or store-bought cheap gin. The plummeting, welcoming warmth that permeated head and body seemed to wrap up an addict’s soul. It had been true for him during his few years of addiction, and he suspected his uncle, during his decades, had felt the same.

Warmth, Moth thought. How crazy is it to live in Miami, where it is always hot, and need some other heat?

Moth tried to focus on the man talking. He was an engineer-a likeable guy, a middle-aged, slightly dumpy, bald-headed man of tolerances and stresses, employed by one of the larger construction firms in the city. The realist in Moth wondered just how many condo buildings and office skyscrapers might have been constructed down on Brickell Avenue by a man who cared more for the numbers of pills he could obtain each day than the numbers on architectural plans.

He turned to the door when he heard it open, but it was a woman-an assistant state attorney, probably a dozen years older than he was. Dark-haired, intense, she wore a trim blue business suit and carried a leather portfolio case instead of a designer pocketbook and even at the end of the workday, she looked carefully put together. She was a relative newcomer to Redeemer One. She had attended only a few meetings and said little on each occasion, so she remained largely a mystery to the regulars. Recently divorced. Major crimes. Drug of choice: cocaine. “Hello, I’m Susan and I’m an addict.” She mumbled her apologies to no one and everyone and slid quietly into a chair in the back.

When it was his turn to share, Moth stammered and declined.

The meeting ended without a sign of his uncle.

Moth walked out with the others. In the church parking lot he shared a few perfunctory hugs and exchanged some phone numbers, as was customary following a meeting. The engineer asked him where his uncle was, and Moth told him that Ed had planned to come, but must have gotten hung up with a patient emergency. The engineer, plus a heart surgeon and a philosophy professor who’d been listening in, had all nodded in the special way that recovering addicts have, as if acknowledging that the scenario Moth described was most likely true, but just maybe it wasn’t. Each told him to call if he needed to talk.

None of the people at the meeting were so rude as to point out that his earlier exercise on the track had resulted in a stale, ripe odor about him. Since he was the youngest regular at Redeemer One, they all cut Moth some slack, probably because he reminded them of themselves-just twenty years or more earlier. And everyone at the meeting was familiar with the foul scents of nausea, waste, and despair that accompanied their addictions, so they had developed tolerances for rank odors that went far beyond the norm.

Moth stood around, shuffling his feet. He watched the others disappear. It was still warm: a humid, thick blanket that made it seem like the evening had wrapped itself around him, cloaking him in tightening shadow. He could feel himself sweating again.

He was unsure when he made the decision to go to his uncle’s office. He just looked up and found himself on his bicycle, pedaling fiercely in that direction.

Cars sliced through the night around him. He had a single flashing red safety light attached to the rear wheel frame, though he doubted that it would do much good. Miami drivers have loose relationships with the rules of the roadway, and sometimes yielding to a person on a bicycle seemed either like a terrible loss of face or a task so difficult it was beyond anyone’s innate ability. He was accustomed to being cut off and nearly sideswiped every hundred yards and secretly enjoyed the ever-present, car-crushing danger.

His uncle’s office was in a small building ten blocks away from the high-end shops on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, which was only a mile or two from the university campus. After the shopping district, the road became a four-lane too-fast boulevard, with frequent stoplights, east and west to frustrate the Mercedes-Benz and BMW drivers hurrying home after work. The road was divided by a wide center swath of stately palms and twisted banyan trees. The palms seemed puritan in their upright rigor, while the ancient mangroves were Gordian knots and devilishly misshapen, gnarled with age. Each direction seemed almost encased, tunnels formed by haphazard sweeping branches. Auto headlights carved out arcs of light through the spaces between the trunks.

Moth pedaled quickly, dodging cars, sometimes ignoring red lights if he thought he could zip safely through the intersection. More than one driver honked at him, sometimes for no reason other than the fact that he was there and using up space that they believed they both needed and deserved for their oversized SUV.

He was breathing hard, his pulse throbbing, when he arrived at the office building. Moth chained his bike to a tree in front. It was a dull, redbrick building, four squat stories with an old, slightly decrepit feel to it, especially in a city devoted to modern, young, and hip. There were wide windows in the back of the office that overlooked a few side streets and the rear parking lot and a single tall palm tree and not much else. It was, Moth had always thought, a very unprepossessing place for a man so successful in his practice.

He walked around the back and saw his uncle’s silver Porsche convertible parked in its designated slot.

Moth did not know what to think. Patient? Emergency?

He hesitated before going up to the small suite. He told himself that he could simply wait by the Porsche and sooner or later his uncle would emerge.

Something important must have come up. That appointment he said was going to make him late at Redeemer One. Something far more serious than a new prescription for Zoloft. Maybe mania. Hallucinations. Loss of control. Death threats. Hospital. Something. He wanted to believe the story he’d told a few minutes earlier to his fellow Redeemer One regulars.

Moth took the elevator up to the top floor. It creaked and jerked a bit on the fourth-floor landing. The building was silent. He guessed that none of the dozen other therapists in the building were working late. Few of them used secretaries-their clientele knew when to arrive and when to leave.

His uncle’s top-floor office had a small, barely comfortable waiting room with out-of-date magazines in a rack. In an adjacent larger room, Uncle Ed had space for a desk, a chair, and an analyst’s couch, which he used much less frequently than he had a dozen years earlier.

Moth quietly entered his uncle’s office and reached for the familiar small buzzer just by the door. There was a friendly handwritten sign taped above the buzzer for patients: Ring twice nice and loud to let me know you have arrived, and take a seat.

That was what Moth intended to do. But his finger hesitated over the ringer when he saw the door to his uncle’s office ajar.

He moved to the door.

“Uncle Ed?” he said out loud.

Then he pushed the door open.

This is what Moth managed:

He stopped himself from screaming.

He tried to touch the body, but the blood and greasy viscous brain matter from a gaping head wound splattered over the desk and staining his uncle’s white shirt and colorful tie made him pull his hand back. Nor did he touch the small semiautomatic pistol dropped to the floor next to the outstretched right hand. His uncle’s fingers seemed frozen into a claw.

He knew his uncle was dead, but he couldn’t say the word dead to himself.

He called 911. Shakily.

He listened to his high-pitched voice asking for help and giving his uncle’s office address, each word sounding like it was some stranger speaking.

He looked around, trying to imprint everything in his memory, until all that he absorbed exhausted him. Nothing he saw explained anything to him.

He slumped to the floor, waiting.

He furiously held back tears when he gave the policemen who arrived within a few minutes a statement. Then he gave a second statement an hour later, repeating everything he had already said, to first-names-only Susan, the assistant state attorney in the blue suit whom he had seen at Redeemer One that evening. She did not mention that as she passed him her business card.

He waited until the medical examiner’s half-hearse, half-ambulance arrived and he watched as two white-suited technicians loaded his uncle’s body into a black vinyl body bag, which they placed on a stretcher. This was routine for them, and they handled the body with a practiced nonchalance. He caught a single glance at the red-tinged hole in his uncle’s temple before the body was zipped away. He knew he was not likely to ever forget this.

He replied “I don’t know” when a tired-sounding police detective asked him, “Why would your uncle kill himself?” And he had added, “He was happy. He was okay. His problems were all behind him. Like way behind him.”

He had abruptly asked his own question of the detectives: “What do you mean he killed himself? He wouldn’t do that. Absolutely no way.” Despite his insistence, the detective seemed unmoved, and didn’t reply. Moth had looked around wildly, knowing something was telling him he was right.

He turned down the assistant state attorney’s offer of a ride home. He stood outside in the waiting room while crime scene analysts perfunctorily processed the office. This took several hours. He spent that time trying to make his mind go blank.

And then, when the last flashing light from all the police cruisers clicked off, he descended into a maelstrom of helplessness and without thinking about what he was doing, or perhaps thinking it was the only thing remaining he could do, Moth went hunting for a drink.

2

You’re a killer.

No I’m not.

Yes you are. You killed him. Or her. But you did it. No one else. You, all alone, all by yourself. Killer. Murderer.

I didn’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not really.

Yes you could. And you did. Killer.

One week after her abortion, Andy Candy lay in the fetal position, curled up in pink frills and pastel throw pillows on her bed in the small room in the modest home where she had grown up. Candy wasn’t her actual name, but a playground rhyme used since her birth by her once-doting, now-dead father. His name had been Andrew, and she was supposed to be a boy and named after him. Andrea had been the best at-the-hospital compromise her folks could arrive at when presented with a girl baby, but Andy Candy it had been ever since, a constant reminder of her father and the cancer that had stolen him prematurely, a weight that Andy Candy carried permanently.

Her last name was Martine, pronounced with a slightly frenchified tone to it, a family acknowledgment of ancestors who had come to the USA nearly 150 years earlier. Once Andy Candy had dreams of traveling to Paris as an homage to her ancestry and to see the Eiffel Tower and eat flaky croissants and sweet pastries and maybe have an affair with an older man in a sort of New Wave romance. This was just one of many pleasant fantasies about what she would do as soon as she graduated from the university equipped with her shiny new English Literature degree. There was even a colorful travel poster on the wall of her bedroom showing a quite stunning hand-holding couple walking next to the Seine in October. The poster underscored the simplistic Paris Is for Lovers travel agency vision of the city that Andy Candy believed absolutely had to be true. In reality, she did not speak French, indeed no one she knew spoke French, and other than a high school trip to Montreal for a theater presentation of Waiting for Godot she had never been anywhere special. She had never even heard the language spoken out loud by anyone other than a teacher.

But, in any tongue, Andy Candy was now in pain, in tears, in utter despair, and she continued to argue with herself, one second a hand-wringing supplicant, forlornly pleading for forgiveness, the next haranguing herself, like something more than a housewife kitchen scold, more even than a zealous prosecutor: a cold-blooded, dark-hooded, and relentless inquisitor.

I had no choice. None. Really. What could I do?

Everyone has a choice, killer. Many choices. It was wrong and you know it.

No it wasn’t. I had no alternative. I did the right thing. I’m sorry sorry sorry, but it was the right thing.

That’s so easy, murderer. Just so-o-o-o easy. Who was it the right thing for?

For everyone.

Really? Everyone? Are you sure? What a lie. Liar. Killer. Liar-killer.

Andy Candy hugged a worn toy teddy bear. She pulled a handmade quilt decorated with red hearts and yellow flowers over her head, as if she could shut away the fury of the argument. She could feel two parts warring within her, one whiny and apologetic, the other insistent. She wished she could be a child again. She shivered, sobbed, and thought that by hugging a stuffed toy animal she could somehow shed years, travel backward to a time when things were much easier. It was as if she wanted to hide in her past so that her future couldn’t see her and hunt her down.

Andy Candy buried her head into the toy’s fake fur, and she sobbed, trying to muffle her voice so she couldn’t be heard. Then, gasping slightly, she held the stuffed animal over one ear and cupped her hand over the other, as if trying to block the sound of the argument.

It wasn’t my fault. I was the victim. Forgive me. Please.

Never.

Andy Candy’s mother fingered a crucifix hanging around her neck, then touched middle C on the piano keyboard. She held her fingers out over the ivories in much the same way that Adrien Brody did in her favorite movie, The Pianist, and without making a sound, shut her eyes and played a nocturne from Chopin. She did not actually have to hear the notes to listen to the music. Her hands rolled above the array of glistening keys like whitecaps upon the ocean.

At the same time, she knew that her daughter was sobbing uncontrollably in the back bedroom. She could not actually hear these sounds either, but just like the Chopin, the notes were crystal clear. She sighed deeply and rested her hands in her lap, as if a recital had finished and she was awaiting applause. The Chopin faded, replaced by the concert of sadness she knew was playing in the back of the house.

Shrugging briefly, she spun about on the bench. Her next student wasn’t due for at least a half hour, so she knew she had time to go to her daughter’s side and try to comfort her. But she had attempted this many times already over the last week, and all her hugs and back rubs and hair stroking and softly spoken words had merely ended in more tears. She had given up on being rational: “Date rape isn’t your fault…” And sensitive: “You can’t punish yourself…” And finally, practical: “Look, Andy, you can’t hide here. You’ve got to start pulling yourself together and facing life. Bringing an unwanted child into this world is a sin…”

She didn’t know if she believed this last statement.

She looked over to the frayed living room couch, where a half-pug, half-poodle, a goofy-looking golden-colored mutt, and a sad-eyed greyhound were all assembled, eagerly watching her. The three dogs had that What’s next? How about a walk? look about them. When she made eye contact, three tails of different shapes and sizes started wagging.

“No walk,” she said. “Later.”

The dogs-all rescue dogs adopted before his death by her husband, a softhearted veterinarian-continued to wag, even though she knew they just might understand the reason for the delay. Dogs are like that, she thought. They know when you’re happy. They know when you’re sad.

It had been some time since anyone would have used the word happy to describe the house.

“Andrea,” Andy Candy’s mother said out loud, in a tired tone that reflected nothing but futility. “I’m coming.” She said this, but she didn’t budge from the piano bench.

The phone rang.

She thought she should not answer it, although why she could not have said. Instead, she reached out for the receiver and at the same moment looked over at the three dogs and pointed down the hallway to where she knew her daughter was suffering. “Andy Candy’s room. Right now. Try to cheer her up.”

The three dogs, displaying an obedience that spoke to her late husband’s ability to train animals, jumped from the couch and scrambled down the hallway enthusiastically. She knew if the door was shut, they’d bark and the pug-poodle hybrid would get up on his hind legs and start to paw frantically in Let me in insistence. If it was ajar, the mutt, the biggest of the three, would shoulder the door aside and they would all make a beeline for her bed. Good idea, she thought. Maybe they can make her feel better.

Andy Candy’s mother spoke into the phone. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Martine?”

“Yes. Speaking.”

The voice on the other end seemed strangely familiar, although a little uncertain and perhaps shaky.

“This is Timothy Warner…”

A surge of memory and a little pleasure. “Moth! Why, Moth, what a surprise…”

A hesitation. “I’m, umm, trying to reach Andrea, and I wondered if you could give me her number at school.”

A brief silence filled the air when Andy Candy’s mother didn’t instantly reply. She made a mental note that Moth, who wore his own nickname proudly, had often used her daughter’s actual name in past years. Not always, but frequently he had employed the formal Andrea, which had elevated his status in the eyes of Andy Candy’s mother.

“I heard about Doctor Martine,” he added cautiously. “I sent a card. I should have called, but…”

She knew he wanted to say something about colon cancer death, but there was nothing really to say. “Yes. We got it. It was very thoughtful of you. He always liked you, Moth. Thank you. But why are you calling now? Moth, we haven’t heard from you in years!”

“Yes. Four, I think. Maybe a little less.”

Four of course went back to shortly before the day her husband died. “But why now?” she repeated. She wasn’t sure whether she needed to be protective of her daughter. Andy Candy was twenty-two years old, and most people would have considered her a grown-up. But the young woman sobbing away in the back room seemed significantly closer to a baby this day. The Moth she had known a few years back wasn’t much of a threat, but four years is a long time, and she didn’t know what he had become. People change, she thought, and she’d been surprised by the out-of-the-blue voice on the other end of the line. Would a call from her daughter’s first real boyfriend help her or hurt her right about now?

“I just wanted…” He stopped. He sighed, resigned. “If you don’t want to give me her number, that’s okay…”

“She’s home.”

A second brief silence.

“I thought she’d be finishing up the semester. Doesn’t she graduate in June?”

“She’s had a setback or two.” Andy Candy’s mother thought this was a neutral enough description to describe a sudden, unplanned pregnancy.

“So have I,” Moth said. “That’s sort of why I wanted to speak with her.”

Andy Candy’s mother paused. She was listening to an equation in her head. More than something mathematical, it was a musical score to accompany runaway emotions. Moth had once played major chords in her daughter’s life, and she wasn’t at all sure that this was the right time to replay them. On the other hand, Andy Candy might be legitimately furious when she discovered that her once-upon-a-time boyfriend had called and her mother had blocked the conversation out of some misguided sense of protection. She did not know exactly how to respond and so she came up with a mother-safe compromise. “Tell you what, Moth. I’ll go ask her if she will speak with you. If the answer is no, well…”

“I’d understand. It wasn’t like we split on the best of terms anyway, all those years ago. But thank you. I appreciate it.”

“Okay. Hold on.”

If I promise to never ever ever kill anything or anyone again, will you leave me alone? Please.

Don’t make a promise you can’t keep, killer.

The dogs were suddenly crowding Andy Candy just as they had been ordered. They tried to get to her face under the covers, nosing aside pillows and blankets, eager to lick away her tears, irrepressible in their dog-enthusiasm. The Inquisitor within her seemed to lurk back into some inner shadow as she was besieged by snuffling, odorous, pawing demands for attention. She cracked a small smile and stifled a final sob; it was hard to be miserable with affectionate dogs nudging against her, but at the same time it was hard not to be miserable.

She didn’t hear her mother at the door until she spoke. “Andy?”

Instant, automatic reply: “Leave me alone.”

“There’s a phone call for you.”

Bitter, expected answer: “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“I know,” her mother replied gently. Hesitation. Then: “It’s Moth. Of all people to call now…”

Andy Candy inhaled sharply. In milliseconds she was flooded with memories, good, happy ones vying against sad, tortured ones.

“He’s on the phone, waiting,” her mother repeated unnecessarily.

“Does he know…” she started, but she stopped because she knew the answer to her question: Of course not.

This was one of those moments, Andy Candy instantly understood, where if she said No or Get his number, I’ll call him back or Tell him to call me sometime later, whatever reason he had that made him call her right then would evaporate and be lost forever. She was uncertain what to do. The rush of her past captured her like a strong current pulling her away from the safety of the beach. She remembered laughter, love, excitement, adventure, some pain and some pleasure, then anger and a different kind of heartsick depression when they’d split up. My first high school love, she thought. My only real love. It leaves a deep mark.

A large part of her said: Tell her to tell him, “Thanks but no thanks. I have more than enough pain in my life right now, if you please.” Tell her to say I just want to be left alone. No other explanation is necessary. Then just hang up. But she did not say this, or any of the thoughts that reverberated around within her.

“I’ll take it,” she said, surprising herself, pushing herself up, scattering dogs to the floor, and reaching for the phone.

She lifted the receiver to her ear, then stopped and stared fiercely at her mother, who immediately retreated back down the hallway and out of earshot. Andy Candy took a deep breath, wondered for an instant whether she could speak without letting her voice crack, and finally whispered softly, “Moth?”

“Hi, Andy,” he said.

Two words, spoken as if from miles and years away, but both distance and time collapsing in an instant, racing together explosively, almost as if he were suddenly standing in the room beside her, stroking her cheek. She raised her free hand reflexively, as if she could actually feel his against her flesh.

“It’s been a long time,” she said.

“I know. But I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” Moth replied. “Lately, I guess, even more. So, how have you been?”

“Not so good,” she replied.

He paused. “Me neither.”

“Why have you called?” she asked. It surprised Andy Candy to be so brusque. She thought it wasn’t like her to be direct and forceful, although she understood she might be completely wrong about that. And just hearing her onetime boyfriend’s voice filled her with so many mingled feelings she wasn’t sure how to respond; but she was alert to the idea that one of these feelings was pleasure.

“I have a problem,” he said. His voice was slow and deliberate, which also wasn’t exactly like she remembered Moth, who was more impulsive and filled with devil-may-care energy. She was trying to detect who he’d become since she last saw him. “No,” he contradicted himself. “I have more than a couple of problems. Little ones and big ones. And I didn’t know where else to turn. I don’t have a lot of people I trust anymore, and I thought of you.”

She did not know if this was a compliment. “I’m listening,” she said. She thought this was inadequate. She needed to say something stronger to get him to continue. Moth was like that. A little nudge, and he would open up wide. “Why don’t you start with-”

“My uncle,” he said quickly, interrupting her. Then he repeated himself: “My uncle.” These two words seemed accented with some despair and weighted with some ferocity that resonated. “I trusted him, but he died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Andy Candy said. “He was the psychiatrist, right?”

“Yes. You remember.”

“I only met him once or twice. He wasn’t at all like anyone else in your family. I liked him. He was funny. That’s what I remember. How did he…?” She didn’t have to finish the question.

“It wasn’t like how your dad passed away. He didn’t get sick. No hospitals and priests. My uncle shot himself. Or that’s what everyone thinks. Like my whole tight-ass family and the damn cops.”

Andy Candy said nothing.

“I don’t think he killed himself.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Then how…”

“Only one other possibility: I think he was murdered.”

She was silent for a moment.

“Why do you think that?”

“He wouldn’t kill himself. That wasn’t him. He’d overcome so many problems, something new-if there was something-wouldn’t faze him. And he wouldn’t have left me all alone. Not now, no way. So, if he didn’t do it, someone else had to.”

This wasn’t really an explanation, Andy Candy realized. It was more a conclusion based on the flimsiest of ideas.

“It’s up to me to find the person who killed him.” Moth’s voice had grown rigid, cold, and tough, barely recognizable. “No one else will look. Just me.”

She paused again. The conversation wasn’t at all what she’d expected, though she didn’t know what she had expected in the first place.

“Why, how…” she started, not really expecting answers.

“And when I find him, I have to kill him. Whoever he is,” Moth said. Unexpected ferocity. Not call the cops or even just do something about it, something vague and indistinct and actually appropriate. Andy Candy was shocked, astonished, instantly scared. But she didn’t hang up.

“I need your help,” Moth said.

Help could mean many things. But Andy Candy rocked back on her bed, as if she’d been pushed hard and slammed down. She wasn’t sure she could breathe.

Killer.

Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

3

He picked a place to meet that seemed benign.

Or, at the minimum, wouldn’t evoke something from their past or say something about what he anticipated for their future-if there was any to be had. He rode a bus and fingered a picture he had: Andy at seventeen. Happy, looking up from a burger and fries. But this memory was crowded aside.

“Hello. My name is Timothy. I’m an alcoholic. I have three days sober.”

“Hi Timothy!” from the gathering at Redeemer One. He thought the entire group appeared subdued but genuinely glad he was back amidst them. When he had sidled awkwardly into the room at the start of the meeting, more than one of the regulars had risen from their chairs and eagerly embraced him, and several had wrapped him in condolences that he knew were sincere. He was sure that they all knew about his uncle’s death and could easily imagine what it had pushed him into. When called upon to testify, for the first time he had the odd thought that perhaps he meant more to all of them than they did to him, but he did not know exactly why.

“Three whole damn days,” he repeated, before sitting down.

Moth put his ninety hours of recent sobriety into a mental calendar:

Day One: He woke up at dawn collapsed on the red-dirt infield of a Little League diamond. He had no recollection of where he’d spent the greater part of the night. His wallet was gone, as was one of his shoes. The stench of vomit overcame everything else. He was unsure where he found the strength to unevenly stagger the twenty-seven blocks back to his apartment, once he’d figured out where he was. He limped the last blocks on a sole torn raw by the sidewalks. Once inside, he stripped off his clothes like a snake shedding a worthless skin and cleaned up-hot shower, comb, and toothbrush. He tossed everything he’d been wearing into the trash and realized that it was two weeks since his uncle died and he had not been home in all that time. He was mildly grateful for the blackout that prevented him from realizing what other baseball diamonds he’d slept on.

He told himself to climb back onto the wagon, but spent the entire day in his darkened apartment hiding, physically sick, stomach twisted, day sweats turning to night sweats, afraid to go outside. It was as if some sultry, seductive siren was awaiting him, right past his front door, and she would lure him into a trip to the liquor store or a nearby bar. Like Odysseus from antiquity and legend, he tried to rope himself to a mast.

Day Two: At the end of a day spent raw and shaking on the floor by his bed, he finally answered a succession of calls from his parents. They were angry and disappointed, and probably concerned, as well, although that was harder to discern. They had left messages and it was clear they knew why he’d disappeared. And they knew where he’d disappeared to. Not specifically. They didn’t need to know the exact addresses of the dives that welcomed him. And he’d learned that he’d missed his uncle’s funeral. This detail had pitched him into an hour-long sobbing jag.

He was a little surprised, when they’d finished talking, that he hadn’t gone out for a drink. His hands had quivered, but he was encouraged by even that small show of addiction-defiance. He had repeated to himself a mantra: Do what Uncle Ed would do, do what Uncle Ed would do. That night, he shivered under a thin blanket, although the apartment was stifling hot and the air moist and humid.

Day Three: In the morning, as his pounding headache and uncontrollable shakes started to diminish, he’d called Susan the assistant state attorney who had given him her card. She didn’t sound surprised to hear from him, nor did she think it unusual that he’d waited so long to call.

“It’s a closed case, or nearly closed, Timothy,” she had gently informed him. “We’re just waiting on a final toxicology report. I’m sorry to have to say this, but it’s designated a suicide.” She did not say why this detail made her sorry, nor did he ask. He had weakly responded, “I still don’t believe it. May I read the file before you put it away?” She had answered, “Do you really think that will help you?” It was clear that her use of the word help had nothing to do with his uncle’s death. “Yes,” he said, with no certainty. He made an appointment to come to her office later in the week.

After hanging up, he’d returned to his bed, stared at the ceiling for over an hour, and decided two things: return to Redeemer One that night because that would be what his uncle wanted for him; call Andy Candy because when he tried to come up with the name of anyone in the entire world who might listen to him and not think he was a half-grief-crazed drunken fool running his mouth irrationally, she was the only remaining candidate.

Matheson Hammock Park was an easy bus ride for Moth. He sat in the back row with the window cracked open just an inch or two so he could pick up the scent of hydrangeas and azaleas carried on the slippery midday heat, without compromising the steady cool wheeze of the bus’s air-conditioning. There were only a couple of other folks on the bus. Moth saw a young black woman-he guessed Jamaican-wearing a white nurse’s outfit. She had a dog-eared paperback Spanish Language Made Easy study book in her hands. Moth could see her lips moving as she practiced the language that was nearly essential to working in Miami.

At his feet, Moth had a plastic bag with a large media noche sandwich for them to share, some bottled water, and a fizzy lemonade drink that he recalled Andy Candy had liked on their other picnic-type excursions to South Beach or Bill Baggs State Park on Key Biscayne. He could not remember ever taking her to Matheson Hammock, which was, in no small way, why he had chosen that location. No shared history in this park. No memory of lips grazing, or the silky sensation of young bodies touching in warm water.

Love dreams were best forgot, he thought.

He did not know whether Andy Candy would actually show up. She had said she would, and she was probably the most honest person he knew, now that his uncle was dead. But the realist in him-a very small part, he inwardly conceded-had doubts. He knew he had been cryptic and obtuse and probably a little scary on the phone, with his sudden talk of murder.

“I wouldn’t come meet me,” he whispered to himself above the sound of the bus engine’s slowing for his stop. He rose and pushed himself into the bright early afternoon sun.

He stuck to a wide path that paralleled the entrance drive into the park. More than one jogger cruised past him beneath the cypress trees that shaded the route. He ignored the coral rock building, where a young woman sold tickets and maps and which had a large “Florida’s Disappearing Habitat” sign out front, with pictures of how squeezed for territory all the native animals were. He paused near a stand of palm trees that edged up against Biscayne Bay, where a young Latin American couple were going through a wedding rehearsal. The priest was smiling, trying to relax everyone by making jokes, which neither mother seemed to find even remotely funny.

Moth waited at the end of the parking lot on a bench that had a single palm that shaded it. He could hear high-pitched laughter from the tip of the park, where a wide, shallow man-made lagoon created a special place for small children to play. The nearby beach seemed to glow silver in the strong sunlight.

He was going to pull out his cell phone, check the time, but stopped himself. If Andy Candy was late, he didn’t want to know it. He thought, There’s always a risk in counting on someone else. Maybe they don’t come. Maybe they die.

Closing his eyes for a moment against the glare, he counted heartbeats, as if he could take the pulse of his emotions. When he opened his eyes, he saw a small red sedan come into the lot and pull into a space near the back. Like many cars in Miami, it had tinted glass, but he caught a glimpse of blond hair and knew it was Andy Candy.

Before she was out of the car, he was on his feet. He waved, and she waved back.

Faded jeans on her long legs and a light pastel-blue T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in an informal ponytail, the way she typically put it when going jogging or swimming. When she spotted Moth, she slipped off her dark sunglasses. Moth’s eyes took her in, trying to see similarities and changes all at once. With each step she took closing the distance between them, he could feel a surge of some runaway feeling gathering within him.

Andy Candy almost stopped in her tracks. Moth seemed thin to her, as if his already-lithe body had somehow been shaved away by the years since high school. His tangled hair was longer than she remembered it and his clothes seemed to hang reluctantly from his body. She had not known what she would say; she was unsure whether she should kiss him, give him a small hug, maybe just shake his hand, or perhaps do nothing. She didn’t want to hesitate, nor did she want to seem eager.

She steadily crossed the parking lot. Not fast. Not slow, she told herself.

He stepped forward, out of the palm’s shade. Wave. Smile. Act normal, whatever that is, he told himself.

They met halfway.

He started to lift his arms to embrace her.

She leaned forward, but held her hands out in front of her.

The awkwardness resulted in a semi-touch. Their arms went to each other’s elbows. They kept a little distance between them.

“Hello, Moth,” she said.

“Hi, Andrea.”

She smiled. “Long time.”

He nodded. “I should have…” he started, but stopped.

She shook her head. “You know, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I thought you’d just go your way and I’d go mine, and that was it.”

“We had some memories together,” he said.

She shrugged a little. “Teenage memories. And that’s all, I figured.”

“More than teenage,” he said. “Some were pretty adult.” He smiled.

“Yes. I remember those, too,” she said. She added a small, disarming grin.

“And now here we are,” he said.

“Yes. Here we are.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I bought a little food and something to drink,” Moth said. “How about we find one of the picnic tables and talk there.”

“Okay,” she said.

The first thing he said when they arrived at a shaded table was, “I’m sorry I was so, I don’t know, on the phone…”

“You were scary. I almost didn’t come.”

“Half a sandwich,” he said. “The fizzy drink is for you.”

She half-laughed. “You remembered that. I don’t think I’ve had one of these since…” She stopped. She didn’t have to say when we were together for him to understand it. She pushed the sandwich toward him. “I had lunch already. You eat it. You look like you could use it.” Her tone had a tinge of toughness.

He nodded, acknowledging the accuracy in her statement. “But you’re still beautiful. Even more beautiful than…” He stopped. He did not want to remind her of their breakup, although seeing him would do little else.

She shrugged. “Don’t feel beautiful,” she said. “Just a little older.” Again, she smiled, before adding, “We’re both older now.”

He took a bite from the sandwich and she continued to stare at him. He thought her look was a little like a funeral parlor director eyeing a newly arrived corpse for a suit of in the coffin clothes.

“What happened to you, Moth?” Andy Candy asked.

“You mean…”

“Yeah. After we broke up.”

“I went to college. Studied hard. Got really good grades. I graduated with high honors. Wouldn’t go to law school like my dad wanted. I got started on a graduate program in American History because I didn’t know what else to do. Kind of useless, I guess from his point of view-examining past events-even if it’s something I love doing…”

He stopped. He knew his curriculum vitae wasn’t what she was asking about. “I got into trouble with alcohol,” he said quietly. “Lots of trouble. I’m what shrinks like my uncle call a binge drinker. Started as soon as I left home. It was like walking a tightrope. Step one: keep up the grades; Step two: get drunk; Step three: write an A paper. Step four: get very drunk-you get the idea.”

“And now?” she asked.

“That sort of trouble never leaves you,” he said. “But it was my uncle Ed who was seeing me through. Putting me in a better place.”

Sometimes a single piercing look is as good as a question. That was what Andy Candy used to make Moth continue.

“And he died. I found his body.”

“He killed himself. That’s what you said, but-”

He interrupted her. “That’s exactly what I don’t believe. Not for one fucking instant.”

The sudden obscenity was like a window onto some anger that Andy Candy didn’t remember in him. She saw Moth look up into the pale blue sky before continuing.

“It’s what I told you on the phone: He wouldn’t leave me alone. Partners. That’s what we were. We had an agreement. I don’t know, maybe you could call it an arrangement. A promise. It was convenient for both of us. He’d stay sober helping me. I’d stay sober helping him by letting him help me. It’s hard to understand unless you’re a drunk. I’m sorry that doesn’t make sense, but there it is.”

He was a little embarrassed describing himself as a drunk, no matter how accurate. He looked over at Andy Candy. She was no longer the girl from high school who had taken his virginity in losing hers. The woman in front of him seemed like the work of an artist who had taken the few lines that sketched out a teenager and added color and shape to create a full portrait.

Andy Candy nodded. She was struck by the notion that it was altogether possible that there was no one in her life she knew better than Moth, and no one who was more a stranger.

“And now?” she asked. “Now you want to kill some mysterious someone?”

Moth smiled. “It does sound ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

Andy Candy didn’t have to reply to this question, either. She was not smiling.

“But I’m going to.”

“Why?”

“It’s a matter of honor,” Moth said, making a small Elizabethan sweeping gesture. “It’s the least I can do.”

“That’s stupid,” Andy Candy said. “And overly romantic. You’re not a cop. You don’t know anything about killing.”

“I’m a fast learner,” Moth replied.

Again there was a little bit of silence. Moth rotated slightly so he could look out over the water.

“I didn’t expect you to understand,” he said. What he wanted to say was, This is a debt and I’m going to repay it and I don’t trust anyone else-especially not some cop or the court system. He did not say this out loud; he thought he should, then told himself he shouldn’t.

Andy Candy looked over to the same distant blue waves. “Yes you did,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.” She started to stand up. Get out of here. Leave right now! The voices shouting within her were like a schizophrenic’s unbidden commands: powerful, undeniable. Walk away right now. The Moth you loved once is gone.

“Andy,” he said cautiously, “I didn’t know where else to turn.”

Andy Candy lowered herself back onto the bench. She took a long sip of the sweet fizzy lemon-flavored drink.

“Moth, why do you think I can help you?”

“I don’t know. I just remembered…” He stopped there. She watched him turn to the water, then to the sky. She reached out her hand, then abruptly withdrew it. He must have seen the motion, because he pivoted back toward her and put his hand on top of hers. For an instant, she looked down at their hands. She could feel electric memory right through her skin. Then she pulled her hand out of his.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, quietly, almost a whisper.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“I don’t want anyone to touch me ever again,” she said. These words spilled from her lips, half-despairing, half-angry. She was suddenly afraid that she would start crying and that everything that had happened to her would burst to the surface. She could see Moth trying to comprehend what she was saying.

“I shouldn’t have anything to do with you,” she added. The words were harsh, but they softened as she spoke them. “You broke my heart.”

Moth shook his head. “I broke my own heart, too. I was stupid, Andy. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want an apology,” she said. She inhaled sharply and slid into an organized, officious tone. “This is clearly, unequivocally a mistake. You hearing me, Moth? A mistake. But what is it you want me to do?”

“I lost my license. Can you drive me a couple of places?”

“Yes. I could do that.”

“Come with me while I talk to a couple of people?”

“Yes. If that’s all.”

“No,” he said slowly, “there’s one other thing.”

“Okay. What?”

“The minute you think I’m completely crazy, tell me. Then walk away forever.”

This was the only thing he knew he had to say to her and the only thing he’d practiced on the bus ride over to the park.

She paused. A part of her insisted, Say that right now-get up and leave and don’t look back. Andy Candy felt like she was sliding down a steep shale rock slope, losing control. She looked at Moth and thought she should do this for him because once she had loved him with fervent teenage intensity and helping him now would be the only way to truly end all the leftover feelings that had lodged within her.

“Finish your sandwich,” she said.

4

Eat the gun, she thought.

Not without permission.

Hell, you don’t need anyone else to make that decision, no matter what the rules might be. Just eat the gun.

Susan Terry looked across the table at the public defender, who was seated next to his client, a lanky, scared-looking, seventeen-year-old inner-city man-kid who had been caught with a pound of marijuana in his knapsack on his way to classes in his senior year of high school. Beneath the pound of grass was a cheap.25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, of the sort that once upon a time had been called a Saturday Night Special, a phrase now in disuse because in Miami, like every other American city, every night could be a Saturday night.

The public defender was a former nice-guy classmate from law school who had simply landed on the opposite side of the criminal justice assembly line. A decade ago, they had shared a successful moot court argument together, as well as some blow, and Susan knew he was now overworked and overwhelmed. If she were going to cut anyone a break, it would be him. And in Miami, a pound of weed really wasn’t a substantial amount, especially in a city that in its heyday had seen tons of cocaine seized.

For a moment, she paused, her eyes scanning the arrest documents and initial court pleadings, while her ears absorbed and ignored the near-constant cacophony of angry voices and slamming metal barriers that filled the county jail. A constant music of despair.

The kid had been riding a bicycle. The arresting cop’s lame explanation for stopping him and searching him was that he was steering the bike “erratically.” That, she thought, could accurately describe any teenager riding a bicycle. It might hold up in court. It might not.

And the cop had made another mistake: He had pulled the kid over a block outside the “drug-free” designation of the school district. Twenty-five more yards and the kid would be destined for the state penitentiary no matter how much legal flexibility Susan Terry might have mustered.

More likely, she thought, the cop spotted the backpack and had a bad feeling about it and didn’t want to wait. And it turned out he was pretty much right.

She and her former classmate both knew this. In her head she was preparing a legal-search-and-seizure argument, just as she knew he was.

The kid had a good record at school. A community college future. Maybe the state university if he just pulled up his grades in math and continued on the basketball team. He had a part-time job flipping burgers at McDonald’s and an intact family-father, mother, grandmother all living at home with him. And, most important, he had no prior arrest record-an astonishing detail growing up in the middle of Liberty City.

But the gun-that was a real problem. And why was he taking it to school?

Eat it, she told herself again. The kid’s got a chance.

Eating the gun was prosecutor slang for dropping the mandatory minimum three-year sentence in Florida for anyone who used a gun in the commission of a felony. The prosecutor’s office used the requisite prison term as a cudgel to force guilty pleas, dropping this part of the charge sheet at the last possible legal minute.

The phrase meant something very different to clinically depressed police officers and PTSD-suffering Iraq War veterans.

“Sue, give us a break here,” the public defender said. “Look at the kid’s record. It’s real good…” She knew that her onetime classmate didn’t get many clients with actual “good” records, and he would be eager-no, probably desperate-to find a positive outcome. “… And I don’t know about that cop’s search. I can make a pretty strong case that it was a violation of my client’s rights. But anyway, he goes away now, and he’ll be right back here in four years. You know what will happen in prison. They’ll teach him how to be a real criminal, and you know what he’ll do next will be something a helluva lot worse than a half-key of low-grade dope that really ought to plead down to a misdemeanor.”

Susan Terry ignored the public defender and stared at the teenager.

“Why’d you have the gun?” she demanded.

The teenager stole a sideways glance at his lawyer, who nodded to him, and whispered, “This is all off the record. You can tell her.”

“I was scared,” he said.

This made partial sense to Susan. Anyone who had ever driven through Liberty City after dark knew there was much to be frightened of.

“Go on,” the public defender said. “Tell her.”

The teenager launched into a halting story: street gangs, carrying the marijuana-one time only-for the thugs down the block so they would leave him and his little sister alone. The backpack and the gun were for the person who was supposed to move the grass.

She wasn’t sure she believed it. There were some truths, maybe, she was sure. But in its entirety? Not damn likely.

“You got names?”

“I give you names, they’re going to kill me.”

Susan shrugged. Not my problem, she thought. “So what? Tell you what: You talk to your lawyer. Listen to what he tells you, because he’s the only thing standing between you and the complete ruin of your life. I’m going to call in a detective from the urban narcotics task force. When he gets here-I’m guessing maybe about fifteen minutes-you get to make your decision. Give up all the names of the motherfuckers on your block dealing drugs and you get to walk out of here. Gun or no gun. Keep your mouth shut, and it’s see yah later, ’cause you’re going to prison. And whatever your momma was hoping you’d grow up to be simply ain’t going to happen. That’s what’s on the table in front of you right now.”

Susan slid effortlessly into tough-girl edginess as she spoke. She particularly liked using the word motherfucker because it generally shocked defendants when it fell from the lips of someone so attractive.

The teenager squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. The basic, routine, day-to-day inner-city existential dilemma, she thought. Fucked one way. Or fucked the other.

Her classmate absolutely knew what her little hyper-harsh performance meant. He had his own variations on the same stage that he used from time to time. He clasped his arm around his client in a friendly, reassuring I’m the only person in the entire world you can trust grip, but at the same time he said to Susan, “Call your detective.”

Susan pushed away from the table. “Will do,” she said. She smiled. Snake smile. “Call me later,” she told the lawyer. “I have an appointment right now I don’t want to be late for.”

Andy Candy thought, What am I doing here? She wanted to say this out loud-maybe even scream it, high-pitched and near-panicked-but kept her mouth shut. She was seated beside Moth in the security area outside the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. He was bent forward at the waist with his hands on his knees, drumming his fingers nervously against his faded khaki pants.

Moth had said little in the drive over to the state attorney’s office, a modern, fortress-like edifice adjacent to the Metro Miami-Dade Justice Building, a sturdy, nine-floor courthouse that was no longer modern but was too young to be antique and had many of the same qualities as a factory slaughterhouse-an endless supply of crimes and criminals on a conveyor belt. They had passed through wide doors and metal detectors, ridden escalators and finally arrived at the security area, where they waited. The comings and goings of lawyers, detectives, and court personnel kept up a steady buzzing, as sheriff’s officers behind bulletproof glass hit the electric entrance system. Most of the people arriving and departing seemed familiar with the process, and almost all seemed in an I can’t wait hurry, as if guilt or innocence had a timing clock attached.

Both Andy Candy and Moth straightened up when a burly thick-necked guard with a holstered 9mm pistol called his name out. They produced identification.

The cop gestured at Andy Candy. “She’s not on my list here,” he said. “She a witness?”

“Yes. Assistant State Attorney Terry wasn’t aware that I would be able to bring her along,” Moth lied.

The guard shrugged. He wrote down all of Andy Candy’s information-height, weight, eye color, hair color, date of birth, address, phone, Social Security number, driver’s license number-searched her pocketbook thoroughly, then once again made the two of them walk through a metal detector.

A secretary met them on the other side. “Follow me,” she said briskly, stating the obvious. She led them through a warren of desks filling a large central area. The prosecutors’ offices surrounded the desks. There were small name placards by each door.

They each spotted “S. Terry, Major Crimes” at the same time.

“She’s waiting,” the secretary said. “Go on in.”

Susan looked up from behind a cheap gray steel desk cluttered with thick files and a nearly-out-of-date desktop computer. Behind her, next to a window, was a whiteboard with lists of evidence and witnesses arrayed beneath a case number written in red. On another wall there was a large calendar, updated with mandatory hearings and other court appearances underscored. A single window, which overlooked the county jail, let in a weak shaft of light. There was little in the way of decoration other than a few black-framed diplomas and a half-dozen mounted newspaper articles. Three of them were illustrated with Susan’s black-and-white picture. It was an austere place, dedicated to a single purpose: making the justice system work.

“Hello, Timothy,” Susan said.

“Susan,” Moth replied.

“Who is your friend?”

Andy Candy stepped forward. “Andrea Martine,” she said, shaking the prosecutor’s hand.

“And why are you here?”

“I needed some help,” Moth answered for her. “Andy is an old friend, and I hoped she could give me some perspective.”

This, Susan immediately realized, was probably not precisely true, nor completely untrue. She didn’t think she needed to care. She fully expected a short, somewhat sad, somewhat difficult conversation, and then her involvement in the uncle’s death would be over. She gestured the couple into chairs in front of the desk.

“I’m sorry about this,” she said. She reached down and produced a brown accordion file. “I was on duty the night your uncle died. It’s office policy that whenever feasible, an assistant state attorney be called to possible homicide scenes. This helps with the legal basis for chains of evidence. In your uncle’s case, however, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t a homicide from the get-go. Here,” she said, pushing the file toward Moth. “Read for yourself.”

As Moth began to open the file, Susan turned to her computer. “The pictures aren’t pretty,” she said briskly to Andy Candy. “There are copies in the file, and here, on the screen. Also the police report, the forensics team report, and autopsy and tox examinations.”

Moth began to pull sheets of paper from the file. “The toxicology report…”

“His system was clean. No drugs. No alcohol.”

“That didn’t surprise you?” Moth asked.

Susan responded slowly. “Well, in what way?”

“If he had fallen off the wagon after so many years, maybe then he would have been in such despair he shot himself. But he hadn’t.”

Susan again replied cautiously. “Yes. I can see how you might think that. But there was nothing in any tests that indicated anything other than a suicide. Stippling on the skin indicated the gunshot was from close range-pressed up against the flesh of the temple. The placement of the weapon on the floor was consistent with being dropped from your uncle’s hand as the force of the shot pushed him down and sideways. Nothing was taken from the office. There were no signs of any break-in. There were no signs of a struggle. His wallet, with more than two hundred dollars in cash, was in his pocket. I personally interviewed his last patient of the day, who left shortly before five p.m. She was a regular and had been seeing your uncle weekly for the last eighteen months.”

She pulled out a notebook. “Detectives also interviewed every other current patient, his ex-wife, his current partner, and some of his colleagues. We could find no evidence of any overt enemies and no one suggested any.” She flipped past a couple of pages in the notebook. “A check of his financials showed some stress: He owed more on his condo than it is currently worth-nothing new in Miami-but he had more than enough in stocks and investments to cover being upside down. He wasn’t a gambler owing some huge nut to a bookie. He wasn’t into some drug dealer for a small fortune. I wish he’d left a lengthy note, which would have been helpful. But there was one additional thing that contributed to our thinking…”

Moth’s eyes were traveling haphazardly over words on pages as Susan spoke. He looked up. His mouth opened as if to say one thing, then he shifted about and said another.

“What was that?”

“He wrote two words on his prescription pad.”

“What…”

“ ‘My fault,’ ” Susan quoted. “It’s in the photo of the desktop,” Susan said. “Do you recall seeing it when you found the body?”

“No.”

She handed a photo across the desktop to Moth, who studied it carefully.

“Of course, we can’t tell when he wrote it. It could have been there all day, maybe even a week. It might have been in response to worrying about you, Timothy, because, after all, you called him several times throughout the morning and afternoon-we pulled all his phone records. But it indicated to us a kind of suicidal apology.”

“It doesn’t look right,” Moth said sharply. “It looks like it was scribbled quickly. Not like something he ever meant for anyone to see,” Moth added stiffly. “It could mean something else, right?”

“Yes. But I doubt it.”

“You said his last patient was at five p.m.?”

“Yes. A little before, actually.”

“He told me he had another. An emergency. Then he was supposed to meet me…”

“Yes, that was in your statement. But there was no record of another appointment. His calendar had someone coming in the next day at six p.m. He probably just mixed them up.”

“He was a shrink. He didn’t mix things up.”

“Of course not,” Susan said. She tried to limit the condescending tone in her voice. What she didn’t say out loud was, Well, he damn straight mixed something up, because he wrote down “My fault” before shooting himself. Maybe not mixed up. Maybe just fucked up.

Susan looked over at Andy Candy. She had been silent, staring at a crime scene eight-by-ten glossy color close-up photo of Moth’s uncle facedown on his desktop, blood pooling beneath his cheek. She’s getting an education, the prosecutor thought.

Andy Candy had never seen this sort of picture before, other than on television and movies, and then it had seemed safe because it was unreal, a fiction made up for dramatic purposes. This picture was raw, explicit, almost obscene. She wanted to be sick, but she could not pull her gaze away.

“I’m sorry, Timothy, but it is what it is,” Susan said.

Moth hated this cliché. “That’s only if it is what it is,” he said, his voice stretching taut. “I still don’t believe it,” he said.

Susan waved her hand over the documents and pictures. “What do you see here that says something different?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I know how close you were to your uncle. But depression that can cause suicide is often pretty well concealed. And your uncle, given his experience, his training, and his prominence as a psychiatrist, would know this-and how to hide it-better than most.”

Moth nodded. “That’s true.” He leaned back in his seat. “So that’s it?”

“That’s it,” Susan said. She did not add, Unless someone somewhere comes up with something completely different that says I’m totally wrong so I’m forced to change my mind, which sure as hell isn’t going to happen.

“May I keep this?”

“I made copies of some of the reports for you. But Timothy, I’m not sure they will help you. You know what you should do,” she said.

Susan answered the question that wasn’t asked. “Go to a meeting,” she said. “Go back to Redeemer One.” She smiled. “See? The others there even have me calling it by the nickname you invented. Go there, Timothy. Go every night. Talk it out. You’ll feel much better.”

She smiled, trying to be gentle, but it wasn’t hard to feel the cynicism in her advice.

Moth silently collected the package of picture copies and reports that Susan Terry had prepared for him. He took a few moments to examine each picture, letting each one crease his memory, almost as if he could flow into the image and find himself back in his uncle’s office. His hand shook a little and he paused as he stared at a photograph of the gun next to his uncle’s hand. He started to say something, then stopped. He rapidly flipped through the pictures, until he came to a second one. He stared hard, then shuffled the photos quickly until he came to a third. He took the three pictures and spread them out on Susan’s desk. He pointed at the first: gun on the floor; outstretched hand.

“This is what I remember,” he said. His voice was ragged and dry. “Like, no one moved anything?”

“No, Timothy. Crime scene specialists never move anything until it is photographed, documented, and measured. They’re really cautious about that.”

Then he pointed at the second picture.

Desk. Bottom drawer. Open perhaps an inch and a half.

“This picture… Like nothing was changed?”

Susan craned her head over. “No. That’s the way they found it.”

A third picture.

Desk. Bottom drawer. Wide open.

A.40-caliber black matte semiautomatic pistol resting beneath some stray papers, encased in a tan leather sheepskin-lined sheath.

“And this…” The words were posed as a question.

“I opened that drawer myself,” Susan said. “With the technician taking pictures. That’s the spare handgun your uncle had registered. He purchased it a number of years ago, when he was doing pro bono therapy at an inner-city clinic in Overtown. He was going in the evenings. A pretty rough area. Not surprising that he toted a handgun to those sessions.”

Susan paused. “But he quit that work some time ago. Kept the gun, though.”

“Didn’t use it, I guess.”

“Timothy, lots of people in Miami own more than one handgun. They’ll keep one in their glove compartment, one in a briefcase, one in a handbag, one in a bedside drawer… You know that.”

Moth started to speak, stopped, started a second time, stopped, stared at the pictures, leaned back.

“Thank you for your time, Susan. I will see you at a meeting,” he said abruptly. He turned to Andy Candy. “I’m an alcoholic,” he said bitterly, as he gestured toward the prosecutor. “But Susan likes cocaine.”

“That’s right,” Susan said coldly. “But not anymore.”

“Right,” Moth replied. “Not anymore. Right.”

Andy Candy was a little unsure what this last exchange meant.

“I guess we’ll be leaving now,” Moth said.

They all shook hands perfunctorily and Andy Candy and Moth exited the office. He didn’t acknowledge the secretary. Instead, as soon as they passed through the outer door to Susan Terry’s office he seized Andy Candy’s wrist and started to walk quickly, pulling her along as if they were terribly late to a meeting instead of having just finished one. She could see his lips were set, and his face seemed stiff, like a frozen mask.

Through the office, out through security, down the elevator, back through the passageway next to the building metal detectors, out into the sunlight, across the street, until they stood in front of the older courthouse building.

Moth nearly dragged Andy Candy the entire way. She had to almost jog to keep up with him. He said nothing.

Outside, they were hit by a burst of sunlight and heat, and she saw Moth crumble a little-as if struck with a sudden punch-as he stopped in his tracks at the bottom of a wide flight of entry stairs. Trees and foliage had been planted by the access, to give the place a less severe look. This was unsuccessful.

The two of them were quiet for a few moments. In front of them, an old, wizened maintenance man with a water hose and a large push broom was cleaning up what Andy Candy thought was the oddest-looking mess by the curb to the street. She could see feathers and a streak of red-brown on the gray cement. The maintenance man swept up the material into a pile, used a shovel to dump it into a wheelbarrow, then turned on the hose and started to spray the area.

“Dead chicken,” Moth said.

“What?”

“A dead chicken. Santeria. You know, the religion that’s like voodoo. Someone has a court case inside, so they hire a brujo to come sacrifice a chicken in front of the courthouse. Supposed to give them good luck with a jury, or make some judge cut their sentence or something.”

Moth smiled and shook his head. “Maybe we should have done the same.”

Andy Candy tried to speak softly. She figured Moth was still devastated by his uncle’s death and she wanted to be kind. She also wanted to get away. She had her own sadnesses to deal with and she felt caught up in something that bordered on crazy and emotional when she thought that what she needed more than anything was something rational and routine. “So, that’s it?” she asked. She knew he would understand that she wasn’t talking about a dead chicken on the steps to the courthouse.

She saw Moth’s lip quiver. She thought, Better help him get through the next bit. Get him to go to that meeting. Then disappear forever.

Moth said, “No.”

She didn’t reply.

“You saw the pictures?”

She nodded.

He turned toward her. He had paled a little or else the bright sunlight had washed some of the color from his skin.

“Sit at a desk,” he said stiffly.

“Sorry, what?”

“Sit at a desk, just like my uncle did.”

Andy Candy plopped down on the steps, then stiffened her back, holding her hands out like a prim secretary. “Okay,” she said. Moth instantly sat next to her.

“Now, shoot yourself,” Moth said.

“What?”

“I mean, show me how you would shoot yourself.”

Andy Candy felt like she was sliding under the surface of a wave, almost as if she was holding her breath and looking through darkening waters as she sunk down. The argument within her-forgotten in the return of Moth to her side-suddenly resounded. Killer! she heard in her head. Maybe you should kill yourself?

Like a poorly trained actor in some forgettable local production, she formed two fingers and her thumb into the shape of a gun. She lifted it to her temple theatrically. “Bang,” she said quietly. “Like that?”

Moth mimicked her actions. “Bang,” he said, just as softly. “That’s what my uncle did. You could tell from the pictures.”

He hesitated. Andy Candy could see pain in Moth’s eyes.

“Except he didn’t.” Moth held his finger-pistol to his temple. “Tell, Me, Andy, why would someone reach down, start to open a desk drawer where he had a gun that had been there for years, maybe pull it partway open, and then suddenly decide instead to use the other gun that was on the desk in front of him.”

Andy tried to answer this question. She could not.

Moth pantomimed the actions again. Reaching down. Stopping. Reaching onto a desktop. Raising a pistol.

“Bang,” he said a second time. A little louder.

Deep breath. Moth shook his head. “My uncle was organized. Logical. He used to tell me that the most precise people in the world are jewelers, dentists, and poets, because they worship economy of design. But next in line are psychiatrists. Being a drunk was sloppy and stupid and he hated that part of it. Recovery for Ed meant examining every little action, understanding every step… I don’t know, being smart, I guess. That’s what he was trying to teach me.”

Anger mingled with despair in his voice.

“What makes sense about bringing two guns to a suicide.”

He paused before he took the two-fingered mock pistol from his temple and pointed it out in front of them, as if he was taking aim at heat waves above the parking lot. “I’m going to find him and kill him,” Moth said bitterly. The him in his threat was a ghost.

5

“I’m really concerned,” said Student #1. “No, way beyond concerned. I’m really worried.”

“No shit,” said Student #2.

“Why don’t you add scared out of your mind to that particular algorithm,” said Student #3.

“And precisely what do we do about it?” asked Student #4. He was trying to remain calm because everything about the situation seemed to warrant an approach closer to panic.

“Actually, I think we’re totally fucked,” Student #1 said with resignation.

“Do you mean academically fucked, emotionally fucked, or physically fucked?” asked Student #2.

“All the above,” Student #1 replied.

They were seated in a corner of a hospital cafeteria, around simmering cups of coffee. It was midday, and the cafeteria was busy. From time to time they looked nervously about.

“Dean’s office. Campus security. Maybe we go to Professor Hogan, because he’s the resident expert on explosive personalities and violence. He’ll have an idea what we can do,” Student #2 said. She was a hard-edged former nurse in an ICU who had taken night school classes and relied on her fireman husband to watch over their two small children while she battled her way through medical school. “I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna let this situation get any more out of control. We know this is illness. Schizophrenia. Paranoid type. Maybe manic depression-it’s one of those. Maybe intermittent explosive disorder. I don’t know. So there’s a real diagnosis to be made. Whoop-de-do. We just have to take some action before we’re all caught up in a mess that impacts our careers. And it’s dangerous.” Her pragmatism was uncomfortable for the three other members of the psychiatry study group, who were eager to train themselves in the ability to not leap to conclusions and not draw hasty opinions about behaviors, no matter how bizarre and frightening.

“Yeah. Great plan,” said Student #1. “Makes sense until it’s us that gets hauled before the faculty board for a clear-cut academic transgression. You can’t just call in the hounds on another student without a firm abso-fucking-lutely solid case. And this sure as hell isn’t plagiarism or cheating or sexual harassment.” Student #1 had seriously considered law school instead of medicine, and had a literal bent to his thinking. “Look, we’re just speculating here, about the exact illness and about what just might happen, no matter how dangerous it seems, because all predictions are just bullshit. And you can’t turn another student in to administrators just because you think they just might do something terrible and because their behavior is off-and-on erratic, maybe delusional and fits into all these categories that we know about because we just happen to be studying them right now. It’s not evidence-based. It’s feelings-based.”

“Anybody in the group not have those feelings?” Student #2 asked cynically. No one answered that question.

“Anybody not feel in danger?”

Again the group remained silent. Coffee was sipped.

“I think we’re screwed,” Student #3 said after a long moment. He reached to the chest pocket on his white lab coat. A week earlier he had finally given up smoking, and this was a reflex action. The others noted it-as they were all honing their skills at observation. “And I agree with both of you. But we have to do something, even if it means taking a risk.”

“Whatever it is we do, I’m not getting an official reprimand. I don’t want something going into my permanent record. I can’t afford it,” Student #2 said.

“Your permanent record won’t mean shit, if…” Student #1 blurted out. He didn’t need to complete his sentence.

“Okay, right…” Student #2 continued. “Well, then I say we go to Professor Hogan for starters, because that’s the least provocative thing we can do.” Her voice cracked a little. “And we go to see him right damn fast. Or, at least one of us does.”

“I’ll go,” said Student #4. “I’m getting an A from him. But you will all have to back me up if he calls you in to confirm what I tell him.”

Heads nodded rapidly. They were all jumpy, nervous-any sudden noise from elsewhere in the cafeteria caused them to shudder. The routine clatter and clank of dishes, the occasional burst of conversation from another table-none of this faded benignly into the background as it usually did. They were all worried that Student #5 was going to walk through the door at any minute, gun in hand.

“I need a list,” Student #4 said. “Everyone write down accurate assessments about frightening behaviors. Be as detailed as possible. Names. Dates. Places. Witnesses, and not just that moment where we all saw him strangle that lab rat for no fucking reason. Then I’ll take all that stuff and see Professor Hogan.”

“As long as there’s no delay,” Student #1 said briskly. “You guys know as well as I do that when someone’s on an edge, they can tumble pretty fast. He needs help. And we’re probably helping him out by going to Professor Hogan.”

The others stared at the ceiling and rolled their eyes. “Probably,” Student #1 repeated.

“Probably. Sure,” Student #3 said.

No one actually believed they were helping their fellow student in the slightest, but speaking this lie out loud was reassuring. They all knew that really what they wanted was to protect themselves, but no one was willing to voice this.

“We’re agreed, then?” Student #4 said.

Glances across the table as the members of the group eyed one another for support. “Yes,” times four.

“All right. I’ll see Professor Hogan tomorrow morning before his lecture,” Student #4 said cautiously. “You will all need to get me your lists before then.” This assignment seemed simple. They were students accustomed to hard work, note taking, and outlining under deadline. Doing patient assessments came automatically to them, and this assignment seemed little different. Then Ed Warner glanced at a clock on the wall. “It’s April first, 1986,” he said, “April Fools’ Day. That will be easy to remember. It’s two-thirty in the afternoon and all four members of Psychiatry Study Group Alpha are in agreement.”

Andy Candy lingered a few strides behind Moth as he surged down the hallway toward his uncle’s office-only to stop short when he saw the yellow police tape sealing the entrance. There were two long strands with the ubiquitous black “Do Not Enter” message. They created an X that crossed in front of the office plaque: “Edward Warner, M.D. PhD. P.A.”

Moth raised a hand, and Andy Candy thought he was going to tear away the security tape.

“Moth,” she said, “you shouldn’t do that.”

His hand abruptly flopped to his side. His voice sounded exhausted. “I need to start somewhere,” he said.

Start what? she thought, then felt that perhaps it was wiser not to answer her question.

“Moth,” she said as gently as she could, “let’s go get something to eat, then I can drop you at your place and maybe you can think all this over.”

He turned to his onetime girlfriend and shook his head. “When I think, all I get is depressed. When I get depressed, all I want to do is drink.” He smiled wryly, just a light rise at the corners of his mouth. “Better for me to keep going, even if it’s in the wrong direction.” He raised a finger and touched the police tape. Then he reached for the door handle. It was locked.

“Are you going to break in?” Andy Candy asked.

“Yes,” Moth replied. “Fuck it. Truth somewhere. And I’m going to start knocking down every door.”

She smiled, although she knew that forcing the door was wrong, and probably illegal. This sounded very much like the Moth she’d once loved. He would combine psychological with practical with poetic in a stew of action that to her was like honey, sweet and endlessly attractive, but sticky and probably destined to make a mess.

But as he started to reach for the tape, behind them down the hallway another door opened, and they both turned to the sound. A slightly dumpy, dark-haired, middle-aged man tugging on a blue blazer emerged. When the man saw them, he stopped.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “There’s no entry there.” His accent was tinged with Spanish.

“Going inside my uncle’s office,” Moth replied.

The man hesitated. “Are you Timothy?” he asked.

“In the flesh,” Moth replied aggressively.

“Ah,” the man said, “your uncle spoke of you often.” He moved toward them, extending his hand. “I am Doctor Ramirez,” he said. “My practice has been next to your uncle’s for, oh, I don’t know how many years now. I am so sorry for what happened. We were friends and colleagues.”

Moth nodded.

“I did not see you at the funeral,” Doctor Ramirez continued.

“No,” Moth replied, and with a fit of nervous honesty that surprised Andy Candy, he added, “I went on a bender.”

The doctor looked noncommittal. “And now?”

“I hope I’m back under control.”

“Yes. Under control. This is difficult. Sudden great emotional blows. I have had many patients in treatment for years, and then the unexpected topples them when they least expect it. But you know, your uncle was very proud of the sobriety the two of you shared. We would often go to lunch between patients, and he would speak with great pleasure and obvious pride about your progress. You pursue a doctorate in history, I believe?”

The doctor had a half-lecturing way of talking, as if every opinion he voiced should be immediately rendered into a life lesson. In some people, this might have been pretentious, but in the almost roly-poly psychiatrist, it seemed welcoming.

“Working on it,” Moth said.

They were quiet for an instant, before Doctor Ramirez said, “Well, should you want to speak about matters, my door is open.”

“That is kind of you,” Moth replied. This was a psychiatric act of grace-I know you are troubled and the best I can offer is an ear. “I might take you up on that.” Moth thought for a moment, before asking, “Doctor, your office is right next door. Were you there when my uncle…”

Doctor Ramirez shook his head. “I did not hear the gunshot, if that is what you are asking. I had left already. It was a Tuesday, and your uncle was routinely the last person on the floor to leave on Tuesdays. Typically a few minutes before six. On Mondays, I have a late patient. Other days, some of the other psychiatrists on the floor stay a little late. There are only five of us with offices here, so we always try to keep each other’s schedules in mind.”

Moth seemed to process this.

“So, if I had come up to you and asked, ‘What evening is my uncle alone on this floor?’ you, or anyone else, would immediately have replied, ‘Tuesday,’ right?”

Doctor Ramirez gave Moth an appreciative look. “You sound like a detective, not a history student, Timothy,” he said. “Yes. That is correct.”

“Can I ask a personal question, Doctor?”

Doctor Ramirez looked a little surprised, then nodded. “If you like,” he said. “I do not know if I will be able to answer.”

“You knew Uncle Ed. Did you think he was suicidal?”

Doctor Ramirez thought for a moment, his face marked by a processing of memories and suspicions. Moth recognized this. It was a quality his uncle had, a psychiatrist’s need to assess the impact of what he would say, why he was being asked, and what was really behind the question, before responding.

“No, Timothy,” he said cautiously. “There were no overt signs of depression that I saw that suggested suicide. I told this to the police who questioned me. They seemed dismissive of my observations. And the mere fact that I noticed nothing does not mean they didn’t exist, and that Edward didn’t do a better job of hiding them than others might. But I saw nothing to alarm me. And we had lunch the day before his death.”

He paused, then pulled out a pad and rapidly wrote a name and address down. “Ed saw this man many years back. Perhaps…”

The doctor then reached down into his pants pocket, removed a set of car keys, and sorted through them. He deliberately removed one key from the chain and with an exaggerated, theatrical motion, dropped it to the carpeted floor. “Ah!” he said, with a grin. “The spare key I have to your late uncle’s office door. I seem to have misplaced it.”

Then the doctor gestured at the door. “If you are going to break in, would you wait until I leave? I would prefer not to be too much of an accomplice here.” He laughed a little at his obvious lie. “I’m sorry,” he said, slightly apologizing, his tone turning both sad and cautious. “I do not know what you will find inside, but perhaps it will help you. Good luck. I do not ordinarily turn my back on people seeking answers. You can slip the key under my door when you are done.”

Doctor Ramirez turned to Andy Candy, made a small, polite bow, and then retreated down the hallway and disappeared into the elevator.

Moth and Andy Candy sat uncomfortably side by side on the couch that his uncle had used for his few remaining psychoanalytic patients. Behind them was a large multihued photograph of an Everglades sunset. On another wall was a bright, abstract Kandinsky print. One wall had a modest bookcase-medical texts and a copy of The Fifty-Minute Hour. There were three framed diplomas near the desk. But there was little that said much about the personality of the man whose office it was. Andy Candy suspected this was by design. Moth was staring at his uncle’s solid oaken desk, an edgy intensity in his gaze.

“I can’t quite see it,” he said slowly. “It’s like it’s right there, and then it fades away.”

Andy Candy was caught between trying to guess what Moth was eyeing and trying to imagine what he would do next.

“What are you trying to see?”

“His last minutes.” Moth suddenly stood up. “See, he’s sitting there. He knows he’s supposed to meet me and it’s important. But instead he takes the time to write ‘My fault’ on a prescription pad, reach for a gun that wasn’t the one he’d owned for years, and shoot himself. That’s what the cops and Susan the prosecutor want to say happened.”

Moth paced around, approaching the desk, maneuvering past a single armchair for nonanalytic patients. He nearly choked when he saw the dried maroon bloodstains on the beige carpet and the wooden desktop. When he spoke, his voice was a little shaky. “Andy, what I see is someone in that chair, with a gun. Making my uncle do…” Moth stopped short.

“Do what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

Andy Candy stood up. “Moth, we’ve got to leave,” she said softly. “Every second you stay here, it’s just going to make it harder for you.”

He nodded. She was right.

Andy Candy made a small wave toward the door, as if to encourage Moth to lead the way. But suddenly an idea occurred to her. She hesitated a second before speaking.

“Moth,” she said slowly, “the police and Miss Terry-they would have to be certain this wasn’t a killing, right? Even with the gun right there on the floor next to your uncle. So, first thing, they would check out all the usual suspects. The usual suspects, just like the movie name. That’s what she said they did: They went over his patient list-probably his ex-patient list, too-talked to friends, neighbors, see if he had any enemies, right? See if there was someone threatening him. They made sure he didn’t owe money to gamblers or drug dealers. That’s what she said, right? They would have ruled out all sorts of things before coming to their conclusion, right? Right?”

She repeated this last word with an icy determination.

“Yes,” Moth said. “Right and right.”

“So, if it is what you think it is and what they don’t think it is, we have to look in the places they didn’t look,” Andy Candy said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

She was a little surprised at her logic. Or antilogic. Look in the places that don’t make sense. She wondered where this idea had come from. She gestured toward the door again.

“Time to leave, Moth,” she said cautiously. “If there really was a killer in this room like you said, sitting right there, then they sure weren’t going to leave something behind that would make the cops suspicious.”

Her practicality astonished her.

6

Two conversations. One imagined. One real.

The first:

“He’s holding us all back. We want to get rid of him.”

“Well, file a complaint with the dean. But clearly your fellow student is in emotional trouble.”

“We don’t care how much trouble or stress or difficulty-whatever you want to call it-he’s caught up in. So he’s sick. Big fucking deal. Screw him. We just want him out, so that our own careers aren’t compromised.”

“Of course. That makes complete sense. I’ll help you.”

If it had actually taken place that way it would have made sense for everyone except one person.

And the second:

“Hello, Ed.”

First, a moment of confusion: expecting one person but getting someone very different. Then speechless. Jaw-drop.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

The speaker already knew the answer because it was evident in the sudden recognition in Ed Warner’s eyes.

Then he had slowly and quite deliberately removed his gun from an inside jacket pocket and pointed it across the desktop. The gun was a small.25-caliber automatic loaded with hollow-point bullets that expanded on contact, made a mess, and were preferred by professional assassins. It was the sort of weapon favored by frightened females or uneasy home owners who imagined it would keep them safe from midnight criminal invasions or run-amok zombies, but which probably would do neither. It was also a favorite of trained killers, who liked a small, easily concealable weapon that was easy to maneuver and deadly at close distances.

“You didn’t think you’d ever see me again, did you, Ed? Your old study group partner here to visit.”

It had gone more or less like the others. Different but the same-including the moment he had written “My fault” on a notepad on Ed’s desk and then walked out.

One of the things that had astonished Student #5 was how preternaturally calm he’d grown over the years as he’d perfected the act of killing. Not that he precisely thought of himself as a killer in the usual sense of the word. No scarred face and prison tats. No street thug wearing baggy jeans and a cockeyed baseball cap. No cold-eyed professional drug dealer’s hit man who could wear his psychopathology like others wore a suit of clothes. He did not even consider himself to be some sort of master criminal, although he did feel a slight conceit in how he’d honed his abilities over the years. Real criminals, he believed, have some fundamental moral and psychological deficit that renders them into who they are. They want to rob, steal, rape, torture, or kill. Compulsion. They want money, sex, and power. Obsession. It’s the need to act that drives them to commit crimes. Not me. All I want is justice. He considered himself to be closer in style and temperament to some sort of classical avenging force, which gave him significant legitimacy in his own imagination.

He stopped at the corner of 71st Street and West End Avenue and waited for the light to change. A taxi jammed on its brakes to avoid a man in a shiny new Cadillac. There was a quick squeal of tires accompanied by an exchange of horns and probably some obscenities in several languages that couldn’t penetrate closed windows. City music. A bus jammed with commuters wheezed out pungent exhaust. He could hear a distant subterranean subway rattle. Beside him a young woman pushing a baby in a stroller coughed. He grinned at the child and waved his hand. The child smiled back.

Five people ruined my life. They were cavalier. Thoughtless. Selfish. Fixated on themselves, like so many preening egotists.

Now only one is left.

He was sure of one thing: He could not face his own death, could not even face the years leading up to it, without acquiring each measure of revenge.

Justice, he thought, is my only addiction.

They were the robbers. The killers.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. One last verdict to go.

The light changed and he crossed the street, along with several other pedestrians, including the woman with the child in the stroller, who maneuvered the curbs expertly. One of the things he liked the most about New York City was the automatic anonymity it provided. He was adrift in a sea of people: millions of lives that amounted to nothing on the sidewalks. Was the person next to him someone important? Someone accomplished? Someone special? They could be anything-doctor, lawyer, businessperson, or teacher. They could even be the same as him: executioner.

But no one would know. The sidewalks stripped away all signs and identities.

In the course of his studies on murder-as he’d come to this philosophical conclusion-he’d spent time admiring Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution. He believed he had wings, like she did. And he certainly had her patience.

And so, to launch himself on his path, he’d taken precautions.

He’d become an expert with a handgun and more than proficient with a high-powered hunting rifle and a crossbow. He’d learned hand-to-hand combat techniques and had sculpted his body so that the years flowing past would have minimal impact. He’d finished Ironman Triathlons and taken many speed-driving courses at an auto racing school. He dutifully went to his internist for annual checkups, became a health club and Central Park jogging path addict, watched his diet, emphasized fresh vegetables, lean proteins, and seafood, and didn’t drink. He even got a flu shot every fall. He studied in libraries and had became a self-taught computer expert. His bookcases were crammed with crime fiction and nonfiction, which he used to harvest ideas and techniques. He thought he should have been a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

I have become a doctor of death.

He continued to walk north. He wore a tailored dark blue pinstriped three-piece suit and expensive Italian leather shoes. A dashing white silk scarf was looped around his neck against the possibility of a chill breeze. The late afternoon sun reflected off his mirrored aviator sunglasses. It was a fine time of day, with fading sunlight slicing through cement and brick apartment canyons, as if picking up momentum as it made its final foray across the dark waters of the Hudson. To any passerby, he must have looked like a wealthy professional heading home from the office after a successful day. That there was no office, and that he’d merely spent the prior two hours happily walking Manhattan streets, did nothing to undermine the image he projected to the world.

Student #5 had three different names, three different identities, three different homes, phony jobs, passports, driver’s licenses, and Social Security numbers, and fake acquaintances, haunts, hobbies, and lifestyles. He ricocheted between these. He’d been born into substantial inherited wealth; medicine had been his family’s profession, and he could trace the physicians in his ancestry back to battlefields at Gettysburg and Shiloh. His own late father had been a cardiac surgeon of considerable note, with offices in midtown, privileges at some of the city’s most prominent hospitals, and a mild disapproval of his son’s interest in psychiatry, arguing unsuccessfully that real medicine was practiced with sterile gowns, scalpels, and blood. “Seeing a heart beat strongly-that’s saving a life,” his father used to say. His father had been wrong. Or, if not wrong, he thought, limited.

He considered the name he’d been born with to be a sort of slave name, so he’d left it behind, discarding it along with his past as he’d shifted trust funds and stock portfolios into anonymous overseas accounts. It was the name of his youth, his ambition, his legacy, and then what he thought of as his abject failure. It was the name that he’d had when he’d first plunged helplessly into bipolar psychosis, been ousted from medical college, and found himself in a straitjacket on the way to a private mental hospital. It was the name that his doctors had used when they treated him, and the name that he’d had when he’d finally emerged-allegedly stabilized-only to survey the wasteland that his life had become.

Stabilized was a word he held in contempt.

Exiting the clinic where he’d spent almost a year, even as a young man he had known he had to become someone new. I died once. I lived again.

So, from the day of his release, through each year that passed, he was careful to always take the proper, daily psychotropic medications. He scheduled regular six-month, fifteen-minute appointments with a psychopharmacologist to make certain that unexpected hallucinations, unwanted mania, and unnecessary stress were constantly kept at bay. He was devoted to exercising his body and was just as rigorous in training his sanity.

And this he’d accomplished. No recurrent swings of madness. Levelheaded. Solid emotionally. New identities. Constructed carefully. Taking his time. Building each character into something real.

On 121 West 87 th Street, Apartment 7B, he was Bruce Phillips.

In Charlemont, Massachusetts, in the weather-beaten double-wide trailer on Zoar Road with the rusted satellite dish and cracked windowpanes that overlooked the catch-and-release trout fishing segment of the Deerfield River, he was known as Blair Munroe. This was a literary homage that only he could appreciate. He liked Saki’s haunting short stories, which gave him the Munroe-he’d reluctantly added the e to the author’s real last name-and Blair was George Orwell’s actual last name.

And in Key West, in the small, expensively reconditioned 1920s cigar-maker’s house he owned on Angela Street, he was Stephen Lewis. The Stephen was for Stephen King or Stephen Dedalus-he changed his mind from time to time about the literary antecedent-and the Lewis was for Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson.

But all these names were as fictional as the characters he’d created for them. Private investment specialist in New York; social worker at the VA hospital in Massachusetts; and in Key West, lucky drug dealer who’d pulled off a single big load and retired instead of getting greedy and hauled in by the DEA and imprisoned.

But curiously, none of these personae really spoke to him. Instead, he thought of himself solely as Student #5. That was who he had been when his life had changed. That was who had systematically repaired the immense wrongs so thoughtlessly and cavalierly done to him as a young man.

Still walking north, he took a quick left to Riverside Drive so that he could steal a look from the park across the Hudson toward New Jersey before the sun finally set. He wondered whether he should stop in a grocery over on Broadway to pick up some prepackaged sushi for dinner. He had one death that he had to carefully review, assess, and analyze in depth. A postmortem conference with myself, he thought. And he had one more death to consider. A premortem conference with myself. He very much wanted this last act to be special, and he wanted the person he was hunting to know it. This last one-he needs to know what’s coming. No surprises. A dialogue with death. The conversation I wasn’t allowed to have so many years ago. There was both risk and challenge within this desire-which gave him a sense of delicious anticipation. And then the scales will finally be balanced.

He smiled. Murder as talk therapy.

Student #5 hesitated at the corner of the block and stole a glance toward the river. Just as he’d expected, a shimmering slice of gold from the sun’s last effort creased the water surface.

Out loud he said to no one and everyone: “One more.”

As always, as was his custom with all his plans, he intended to be surgically meticulous. But now he was giving in to impatience. No lengthy delays. We have saved this one for last. Get to it and set your future free.

7

The Doctor’s First Conversation

The saleslady showing Jeremy Hogan through the nursing home was filled with bright and cheery descriptions of the many features available for residents: gourmet meals (he didn’t believe this for a second) served either in one’s apartment or in the well-appointed dining area; modern indoor pool and exercise suite; weekly first-run movies; book discussion groups; lectures by formerly prominent professionals who now made their homes there. She coupled this bubbly enthusiasm with more sobering lists of à la carte medical care available-did he need a daily injection of insulin?-a dedicated, well-trained, twenty-four-hour nursing staff, rehabilitation facilities located on site, and quick and easy access to nearby hospitals in the case of a real emergency.

But all he could think of was a simple question, which he did not ask: Can I hide here from a killer?

In the deeply carpeted corridors, people were relentlessly polite, swooping past him on motorized scooters or moving slowly with walkers or canes. Many “Hi, how are you?” and “Nice day, isn’t it?” inquiries that no one really expected to be answered with anything other than a fake friendly smile and a vigorous nod.

He wanted to reply: “How am I? Scared.” Or: “Yes. It’s a nice day to possibly get killed.”

“As you can see,” the saleslady said, “we’re a lively crew here.”

Doctor Jeremy Hogan, eighty two years old, widower, long retired, a lanky onetime basketball player, wondered if any of the lively crew were armed and knew how to handle a semiautomatic pistol or a short-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun. He imagined he should ask: “Any ex-Navy SEALS or Recon Marines living here? Combat vets?” He barely listened to the saleslady’s final pitch, outlining the many financial advantages that accompanied moving into the “deluxe” one-bedroom apartment with the desultory second-floor window view of a distant tangled stand of forest trees. It was only “deluxe,” Jeremy decided, if one considered polished aluminum rails in the shower and a safety intercom system to be riches.

He smiled, shook the saleslady’s hand, told her he’d get back with her within the next few days, wondered about the misshapen fear that possessed him to make the urgent appointment for the tour of the home, and told himself that death couldn’t be worse than some kinds of life-no matter what sort of death came visiting.

He expected his to be painful.

Maybe.

And he believed it was closing in on him rapidly.

Maybe.

The part that concerned him wasn’t only the threat at the end. It was the pillar on which the threat was built:

“Whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean by ‘fault’?”

“Tell me, Doctor, whose fault is it?”

“Who is this, please?”

The curious thing, he told himself as he drove away slowly from the nursing home, is that you spent much of your career in and around violent death, and now, very possibly facing it yourself, it seems like you don’t have a clue what to do.

Violence had always been an interesting abstraction for him: something that happened to other people; something that took place somewhere else; something for clinical studies; something that he would write academic papers about; and primarily what he talked about in courtrooms and classrooms.

“I’m sorry, Counselor, but there is no scientific way to predict future dangerousness. I can only tell you what the defendant presents psychiatrically at this moment. How he will respond to treatment and medication or confinement is unknown.”

This was Jeremy Hogan’s standard witness stand response, an answer to a question that was invariably asked in the times he’d been called upon to testify in a court of law as an expert. He could picture dozens-no, hundreds-of defendants seated at benches, watching him carefully as he rendered his opinions about what their mental state was when they did what they did that brought them to that courtroom. He remembered seeing: Anger. Rage. Deep-rooted resentment. Or, sometimes: Sadness. Shame. Despair. And the occasional I’m not here. I will never be here. I will always be somewhere else. You cannot touch me because I will always live in some place within me that is locked away from you and only I have the key.

And although he knew that maybe the person seated across from him wouldn’t even notice him droning away under cross-examination, he also knew that maybe the person seated across from him would hate him forever with a slowly building homicidal fury.

Maybe was a word he was intimate with.

He had a less formal delivery that he employed in the classroom with medical students delving into forensic psychiatry: “Look, boys and girls-we can believe that all the relevant factors exist that will keep this patient or that patient on a path of violence. Or, conversely, a path where he or she responds rapidly to what we can offer-medication, therapy-and we wonderfully defuse all those violent, dangerous impulses. But we are not equipped with a crystal ball that allows us to see the future. We make, at best, an educated guess. What works for one subject might not work for another. In forensics there is always an element of uncertainty. We may know, but we just don’t know. But never say that to a family member, a cop, or a prosecutor, and never under oath in a courtroom to a judge and jury, even though that’s the only thing-and I really mean the only thing-those folks want to learn.”

The students hated that reality.

At first, they all wanted to be in the business of psychiatric fortune-telling-a detail he often jokingly insulted them with. It was only after time spent on a few high-security wards listening to widely varying degrees of paranoia and wildly unmasked impulses that they slowly came to understand his classroom point.

Of course, you arrogant fool, you taught them about limitations but never believed you had any yourself. Jeremy Hogan wanted to laugh out loud. He liked to inwardly mock himself, to taunt and tease the younger self that lived in his memory.

You were right a bunch. You were wrong a bunch. So it goes.

He pulled out of the driveway, leaving the nursing home behind in the rearview mirror. Jeremy was very cautious driving. A patient left, right, left look as he merged onto the street. He stuck tenaciously to the speed limit. He was devoted to using his lane change blinker. He braked well in advance of stop signs and never ran a yellow light, much less a red one. His sleek, big black BMW would easily have topped 135 mph-but he rarely asked the car to do anything except meander along at a boring and leisurely pace. He sometimes wondered if the car was secretly angry with him, or frustrated deep in its automotive soul. Consequently he infrequently used the car, which still, after ten years, had a new-car sheen and extremely low mileage.

Usually he employed an old battered truck he kept beside the ramshackle barn at his farmhouse for his occasional forays out for the few groceries he needed. He drove the truck in the same elderly-gentleman manner, but because it was haphazardly dented, its red paint was faded, it rattled and creaked, and one window would go neither up nor down, this style seemed more appropriate to it. The BMW is like I once was, he thought, and the truck is like I am now.

It took him an hour to get back to his farmhouse deep in the New Jersey countryside. That New Jersey even had countryside came as astonishing news to some folks, who imagined it as a paved parking lot and twenty-hour-busy industrial park adjacent to New York City. But much of the state was less developed, acres of rolling, deer-infested green space that sported some of the finest corn and tomato crops in the world. His own place was only twenty shady minutes outside of Princeton and its famous university, set back on twelve acres that abutted miles of conservation land that a century earlier had been part of a large, working farm.

He had purchased it more than thirty years ago, when he was still teaching an hour away in Philadelphia and his wife the artist could sit on the flagstone back patio with her watercolors and fill their home and the collections of wealthy folks with gentle landscapes. Back then the house had been quiet, a respite from his work. Now it wasn’t a sensible house for an old man: too many things frequently breaking down; too narrow and steep a stairway; too many overgrown lawns and runaway gardens that constantly needed tending; old appliances and bath fixtures that barely worked; a tired heating system that was far too cold in the winter and far too hot in the summer. He’d routinely fought off the developers who wanted to buy it, tear it down, and build a half-dozen McMansions on the acreage.

But it had been a place that he’d loved once, that his wife had loved as well, where he’d spread her ashes, and the mere notion that there just might-or might not-be a psychotic killer stalking him didn’t seem like a good enough reason to leave the place, even if he couldn’t get up the stairs without his knees delivering piercing arthritic pain.

Get a cane, he told himself.

Get a gun.

He pulled into the long gravel drive that led to the front door. He sighed. Maybe this is the day I die.

Jeremy stopped and wondered how many times he had driven up to his home. It’s a perfectly reasonable place to make a last stand, he thought.

He looked around for some telltale sign of a killer’s presence-an inspection he knew was completely ludicrous. A real killer wouldn’t leave his car parked out front, adorned with a “Murder 1” license plate. He would be waiting in a shadow, concealed, knife in hand, ready to spring. Or hidden behind some wall, drawing down on him with a high-powered rifle, placing the sight squarely on his head, finger caressing a trigger.

He wondered whether he would hear the bang! before dying. A soldier would know the answer to that question, he believed, but he knew he wasn’t much of a soldier.

Jeremy Hogan breathed in deeply, and extricated himself from behind the wheel. He stood by the car, waiting. Maybe this is it, he thought.

Maybe not.

He knew he was caught up in something. Periphery or center? Start or end? He just didn’t know. He was ashamed of his frailty: What were you thinking, going to a nursing home? What good would that do you? Did you think that by accepting how old and weak you’ve become it would hide you? “Please, Mister Killer, don’t shoot me or stab me or whatever you plan to do to me because I’m too old and will probably kick the bucket any day now anyway, so no need to trouble yourself with actually killing me.” He laughed out loud at his absurdity. There’s a strong argument to make to a murderer. And anyway, what is so great about life that you need to keep living it?

He made a mental note to call the saleslady and politely decline the purchase of the apartment-no, he thought, prison cell.

He wondered how much time he truly had. He’d been asking himself this question every day-no, every second-for more than two weeks, since he’d received an anonymous phone call one night around ten, shortly before his usual bedtime:

“Doctor Hogan?”

“Yes. Who is calling?” He had not recognized the caller ID on the phone and figured it was some cause or political fund-raiser and he was prepared to instantly hang up before they even got their noxious pitch started. Afterward, he wished he had.

“Whose fault is it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean by ‘fault’?”

“Tell me, Doctor: Whose fault is it?”

“Who is this please?”

“I’ll answer for you, Doctor Hogan: It’s your fault. But you were not alone. The blame is shared. Bills have been paid. You might examine recent obits in the Miami Herald.”

“I’m sorry, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.” He was about to angrily hang up on the caller, but instead he heard:

“The next obit will be yours. We will speak again.”

Then the line went dead.

It was the tone, he thought later, the ice-calm words next obit that told him the caller was a killer. Or-at the least-fancied himself to be. Raspy, deep voice, probably, he imagined, concealed by some electronic device. No other evidence. No other indication. No other detail he could point to. From a forensic, scientific point of view, this was a stupid, utterly unsupported seat-of-the-pants conclusion.

But in his years as a forensic psychiatrist, he’d sat across from many killers, both men and women.

So, upon later reflection, he was certain.

His first response was to be defensively dismissive, which he knew was a kind of foolish self-protective urge: Well, what the hell was that all about? Who knows? Time for bed.

His second response was curiosity: He picked up his phone and hit the “call back” feature. He wanted to speak with the person who’d called him: Maybe I should tell him that I have no idea what he’s talking about but I’m willing to talk about it. Someone is at fault? For doing exactly what? Anyway, we’re all at fault for something. That’s what life is. He did not stop to think that the caller probably wasn’t interested in a philosophical conversation. A disembodied electronic voice instantly told him that the number was no longer in service.

He’d hung up the phone, and spoken out loud: “Well, I should call the police.” They will just think me a cranky, confused old fool, which might be what I am. Jeremy Hogan did know one thing: All his training and all his experience told him that there was only one purpose behind making a call like that. It was to create runaway uncertainty. “Well, whoever you are, you’ve managed that,” he said out loud.

His third response was to be scared. Bed suddenly seemed inappropriate. He knew sleep was impossible. He could feel light-headedness, almost a dizzy spell as he stared at the telephone receiver. So he went unsteadily across the room and sat in front of his computer. He breathed in sharply. Even with his stiff-fingered, arthritic clumsiness on keyboards, it had not taken him long to find a small entry in the obituary section of the Miami Herald website with the headline: Prominent Psychiatrist Takes Life; Services Set.

It was the only obit entry that Jeremy thought could be even remotely connected to him-and that was only by shared profession.

The name was unfamiliar. His initial reaction had been, Who’s that? But this was rapidly followed by: Some former student? A onetime resident? Intern? Third-year medical school? He did some age-math in his head. If the name on the web page was one of his, it had to be from thirty years earlier. He felt a surge of despair-those faces who’d attended his lectures, even those who’d sat in his smaller seminars so eagerly, were pretty much all lost to him now; even the good ones who had gone on to importance and success were hidden deep in his memory.

I don’t get it, he thought. Another shrink a thousand miles away kills himself and that has something to do with me?

8

Moth did more than a hundred sit-ups on the floor of his apartment, followed by a hundred push-ups. At least he hoped it was a hundred. He lost count in the rapid-fire up and down. He was half-naked-boxer briefs and running shoes but nothing else. He could feel the muscles in his arms twitching, about to give way. When he thought he could not coax one more push-up from his arms, he lay flat on the floor, breathing hard, his cheek pushed against the cool polished hardwood. Then he gathered himself, stood, and ran in place until sweat began to crowd his vision and sting his eyes. He listened to ’80s hard rock on his iPod-Twisted Sister, Molly Hatchet, and Iggy Pop. The music had an odd ferocity to it that matched his mood. Uncompromising power chords and relentless cliché-driven vocals crashed through his doubts. He believed he needed to be as determined as that sound.

As he lifted his knees, trying to gain speed without leaving his position, sneakered feet making slapping noises, he kept an eye on his cell phone, because Andy Candy was supposed to pick him up mid-morning so they could go to the first of the three meetings he’d scheduled for that day.

These were not meetings like the one he’d attended at Redeemer One the night before. These were interviews. Job interviews, he thought, except the job I want is hunting down a murderer and killing him.

Moth stopped. He bent over gasping, grabbed his boxers, and sucked in some stale apartment air. He felt dizzy and shaky, tasted sweat on his upper lip, and was unsure whether this was the alcohol being worked out of his body or the pressing need for revenge.

Moth felt weak, unmanned. He was completely uncertain whether if some well-coiffed, long-legged South Beach supermodel in a black string bikini were to walk into his apartment with an enticing look in her eyes and a welcoming gesture as she undid her bra strap, he could perform. He almost laughed out loud at his potential impotence. Drink can make you into an ancient old man. Limp. Weak. Didn’t Shakespeare write that? Then he replaced the South Beach supermodel in his mind’s eye with Andy Candy.

A rapid-fire series of memories crowded his imagination: First kiss. First touch of her breast. First caress of her thigh. He remembered moving his hand toward her sex for the first time. It had been outdoors, on a pool patio, and they were jammed together, entwined on an uncomfortable plastic lounge chair that dug into their backs but seemed at that moment like a featherbed. He was fifteen. She was thirteen. In the distance there was music playing-not rap or rock, but a surprising, gentle string quartet. Every millimeter his fingers traveled, he’d expected her to stop him. Each millimeter that she didn’t had made his heart pound faster. Damp silk panties. Elastic band. What he had wanted then was to be fast, matching his desire, but his touch was light and patient. A contradiction of demands and emotions.

In the solitude of his apartment, Moth gasped out loud. He abruptly tugged the earbuds from his head, switched off his iPod. Silence surrounded him. He listened to his short breath for a few seconds, letting the panting sounds replace his Andrea Martine memories. He told himself that he should studiously avoid quiet. No noise was a vacuum that needed to be filled-and he knew that the easiest, most natural thing to fill this gap would be the drink that would kill him.

He nodded as if agreeing with some lawyerly internal argument, kicked off his running shoes, and dropped his shorts, so that he stood completely naked, sweat glistening across his forehead and on his chest.

“Exercise accomplished,” he said out loud, like a soldier giving himself commands. “Don’t make Andy Candy wait. Never make her wait. Always be there first. Be ready.”

He still did not completely understand why she was willing to help him, but she was, so far, and this seemed the only solid thing in his life, so he believed he needed to regulate himself in a way that would keep her on board, no matter how crazy it all seemed. It was as if he could not allow her the space to actually consider what he was asking of her. Perhaps, he told himself, what we do today will give us an answer or two.

But he knew it was just as likely to be fruitless. “I need to know,” he said out loud, speaking in the same brusque military tone. Moth felt an urgency to get going, and he marched rapidly toward the bathroom, shoulders straight, grabbing toothbrush and comb as if they were weapons.

Andy zipped her small car around the corner, heading toward Moth’s apartment building. She saw him standing outside the entrance, waving a greeting.

It looked completely benign: a young woman picking up her boyfriend-in Miami, su novio-from the sidewalk so they could go off to the beach or the mall.

As she slowed to a halt, she wondered whether she should tell Moth what she’d done the night before at Redeemer One. She did not know whether she had been right or wrong, if it was a big thing or a little thing:

“You go ahead in. I’ll wait for you here.”

“Andy, it’ll be an hour. Maybe more. Sometimes people really need to vent…” Hesitation. “Sometimes I really need to vent.”

“No. It’s okay. I don’t mind waiting. I have a book I want to read.”

He’d looked around.

“It’s in the trunk,” she’d lied. “It’s a trashy-girls-and-sex novel. Lots of hot passion, unrequited love, and fantastic orgasms. I keep it hidden from my mom the constant prude.”

He’d smiled. “Corrupting your soul,” he joked.

“The horse is out of that barn,” she’d half-laughed.

It was perhaps the first moment of familiar banter and humor that they’d shared since he’d called her.

“Okay. I’m going in. I’ll see you in a bit,” he said. “You sure you’re okay with waiting? I know someone would give me a lift home…”

“See you when I see you,” she said, smiling.

She watched Moth get out of her car, bend down to grin at her through the window as he shut the door, then take off quickly across the parking lot. She saw him join up with two older people, a man and a woman, and enter the church. She waited a minute, then another.

Then Andy Candy exited her car.

A sticky night was dropping swiftly through the stately poinciana trees that guarded the church entrance and she started to sweat instantly. She glanced at the leaves and knew they would flower bright red. This was South Florida and there was more to the ever-present growth than swaying palms and twisted mangroves. There were huge banyan trees that looked like old gnarled men too mean to die, gumbo-limbo, and tamarind. Their roots all stretched into the porous coral rock that Miami was built on, sucking their growth from the water that filtered unseen through the earth. The trees, she thought, could live forever. Anything anyone put in the ground in Miami could grow. Sun. Rain. Heat. A tropical world, one that existed just behind all the construction, building, and development. She thought sometimes that if people took their eyes off the concrete and asphalt around them and let their guard down for just a few seconds, nature would reclaim not only the earth, but the city itself, and all its inhabitants, swallow everything up, and spit it into oblivion.

She moved to the front door, opened it cautiously, and slipped into the church. Cool air and quiet greeted her.

Andy Candy had no plan. All she had was a compulsion: She wanted to see. She wanted to hear. She wanted to try to understand.

She moved stealthily even though she knew there was no real need for caution. She knew if she simply walked into the meeting she would be greeted by everyone-except Moth. She would be welcomed by everyone-except Moth.

It was a little like sneaking up outside some home owner’s window like a Peeping Tom. She imagined herself a burglar or a spy. She wanted to steal information. The Moth she’d once loved without hesitation was different now. She had to see how.

The inside of the church was shadowy and empty; it was as if Jesus was taking the evening off. She made her way past wooden pews and podiums, beyond golden crucifixes and marble statues, under the watch of stained glass martyred saints frozen in windowpanes. Andy hated church. Her mother, who sometimes filled in for an absent organist, and her dead father had been regular Sunday service folks, and they’d hauled her to church for as long as she could remember, until the moment she’d fallen in love with Moth and abruptly refused to go any longer. She paused, looked up at one of the images in the windows-Saint George slaying the dragon-and told herself, They would hate me here anyway, because now I’m a killer. The thought made her throat dry and she tore her eyes away from the stained glass images. She crept forward until she could hear the murmur of voices down a corridor. There were some empty offices on either side of her and a small anteroom at the end. She feared her feet made loud, clumsy clunking sounds, even though the opposite was true. Andy Candy was lithe and athletic. Moth had once called her My Ninja Girlfriend because of the way she could sneak from her house after midnight to meet him without waking her parents or even rousing the dogs. This memory made her grin.

She slipped into the anteroom and saw a wide set of double doors at the rear. These opened into a larger room. There was wood paneling and a low ceiling. She glimpsed leather chairs and sofas spread around a circle at the far end of the room, and she clung to a wall and started to listen just as a round of weak applause greeted someone who’d just spoken.

She craned her head and peeked around the corner-drawing back sharply when she saw Moth stand up.

“Hello, my name is Timothy, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Timothy,” came the established response, even though he was no stranger to them.

“I have fifteen days sober now…”

Another round of applause and some exhortations: “Good going.” “Way to go.”

“As many of you know, it was my uncle Ed who first brought me here. He was the one who first showed me my problem and then showed me how to get past it.”

Andy Candy could hear the silence, as if the gathering at Redeemer One had caught their collective breath.

“You know Uncle Ed died. You know the police think it was a suicide.”

Moth paused. Andy Candy bent to hear everything.

“I don’t think so. No matter what they say, I don’t think so. You all, everyone here, you all knew my uncle Ed. He stood up here a hundred times and told you how he’d licked his drinking problem. Is there anyone here who thinks he would kill himself?”

No response.

“Anyone?”

No response.

“So, I need your help. Now more than ever.”

For the first time, Andy Candy could hear Moth’s voice start to quiver with emotion.

“I need to stay sober. I need to find the man who killed my uncle.”

These last words seemed high-pitched, as if stretched out and wrung tight before being knotted together.

“Please help me.”

She wished she could see the silence in the room, see the reactions on the faces of the people gathered there. There was a long pause before she heard Moth again.

“My name is Timothy and I have fifteen days sober.”

She retreated as she heard people begin to clap.

“How was your night?” Andy Candy asked.

“Okay, I guess. I’m not sleeping great, but that’s to be expected. And you?”

“Same.”

Moth was about to ask why but did not. He had many questions, not the least of which was why Andy Candy was home when she should have been finishing school. Moth thought he was using up his last bit of reasonable behavior by not asking Andy Candy to share her mystery. He guessed she either would or wouldn’t sometime in the future. He told himself to merely be glad-no, overjoyed-that she was helping him.

He shifted in the passenger seat. He was nicely dressed-khaki slacks, black and red striped sports shirt-and he had a student’s backpack on his lap. Notebooks. Tape recorder. Crime scene reports.

“So, where to first?”

“Ed’s apartment. Due diligence.” He smiled, before adding:

“Historians like going over and over the same thing. So retrace the cops. Then…”

He stopped. Then was a notion he wasn’t ready to explore. Yet.

9

A Second Conversation

Jeremy Hogan knew there would be a second call.

This belief was not based so much on the science of psychology as it was on instinct honed over years of trying to understand the why of crimes instead of the who, what, where, when that routinely bedeviled police detectives. If this killer is truly obsessed with me, he won’t likely be satisfied with a single call-unless he has it all planned out, and my next breath is my last. Or close to last.

He racked through his memory, picturing killers of all stripes. It was a gallery of scars and tattoos, a cavalcade of ethnicity-black, white, Hispanic, Asians, and even one Samoan-of pale men who heard voices and grizzled men who were so cold that the word remorseless seemed an understatement. He remembered men who writhed in their chairs and sobbed as they told him why they had killed and men who had laughed uproariously at death as if nothing could be a bigger and funnier joke. He could hear echoes of matter-of-fact murder reimagined as littering or jaywalking, reverberating off cinder block cell walls. He could see harsh, unshaded prison lights and gray steel furniture bolted to the cement floors. He could see men who grinned at the thought of their own execution and others who shook with rage or quivered with fear. He remembered men who’d stared at him with an undeniable longing to wrap their hands around his throat, and others who wanted a reassuring embrace and a friendly pat on the back. Faces like ghosts filled his imagination. Some names popped in and out, but most were lost in the flux of remembering.

They weren’t important.

What I said or wrote about them, that was what was important.

He took a shallow breath, almost like an asthmatic’s wheezy, near-helpless pull at the air, trying to fill stifled lungs.

He admonished himself as if speaking to himself in the third person: Once you finished your assessment and wrote your report, you didn’t think they were worth remembering.

You were wrong.

One of them is back. No handcuffs this time. No straitjacket. No injection of Ativan and Haldol to quiet psychosis. No heavily muscled armed guard in the corner fingering a truncheon, or watching in an adjacent room on a television monitor. No red panic button hidden under your side of the steel desk to protect you from being killed.

So, one of two things will happen: He will want to kill you right away, because making that first call was the only trigger he needs and he’ll be satisfied with getting on with the murder. Or he will want to talk and tease and torture you, prolong the entire performance because each time he hears your uncertainty and fear it caresses him, makes him feel more powerful, more in control-and after he has stretched the limits of your fear, then he will kill you.

He will want to do everything possible to make your death meaningful.

This obvious but subtle observation had taken him several days to reach. But once it flooded him-after his initial fears had dissipated-he knew there was only one real option left to him.

You cannot run. You cannot hide. Those are clichés. You would not know how to disappear. That’s the stuff of cheap fiction, anyway.

But you cannot just wait. You’re no damn good at that, either.

Help him enjoy your killing. Draw it out and draw him out. Buy yourself time.

That’s your only chance.

Of course, he had not decided what he might do with the time he purchased.

And so, he’d taken a few steps to ready himself for the second call. Modest steps-but they gave him a sense of doing rather than sitting around patiently while someone planned his death. He made a quick trip to a nearby electronics store to obtain an attachment to his phone, so he could record conversations. This was followed by a second trip to an office supply outlet to acquire several legal tablets of yellow lined paper and a box of Number 2 pencils. He would tape. He would take notes.

The recording device was a stick-on suction cup that picked up both voices in a telephone conversation. It attached to a microcassette recorder. The advantage to the setup was simple: It would not make the ubiquitous beeping sound that legal recordings made.

He wasn’t sure what purpose would be served by making a recording. But it seemed like it might be a wise move, and in the absence of any other forms of protection, it seemed to make sense. Perhaps he’ll make some overt, obvious threat and I can go to the police…

Jeremy doubted he would be so fortunate. He assumed the caller would be too smart. And anyway-what could the cops do to protect me? Park a cruiser outside? For how long? Tell me to get a gun and a pit bull?

He knew he had great ability to extract information from a subject. This capability had always come easily to him. But he also knew that his examinations had been after the fact-crimes had been committed, arrests made.

He understood crimes from the past. This was the promise of a crime in the future.

Predictions? Impossible.

Regardless, when he sat down at his small desk in his upstairs office, he had a feeling of confidence as he worked out some questions for that inevitable second call. This was frustrating, slow-paced work. He knew he had to do some rudimentary psychological assessments-he had to ask some questions that would ascertain that the caller was oriented to time, place, and circumstances in order to make sure he wasn’t schizophrenic and getting homicidal command hallucinations. He already knew the answer to that particular question was no, but the scientist in him demanded that he still make certain.

Rule out as many mental illnesses as you can.

But what dragged out his preparation was the realization that he was in uncharted psychological territory.

Danger assessment tools were really designed to help social service systems assist threatened wives to avoid abusive husbands. Situational context was crucial-but he also knew that he could comprehend only half of this equation: mine. The part that he needed to know was: his.

Jeremy Hogan sat in the near dark, surrounded by papers, academic studies, journal copies, textbooks that he hadn’t opened in years, and computer printouts of various web pages devoted to risk understanding.

It was night. A single desktop light and his computer screen were the only illumination in the room. He glanced outside his window to take in the sweep of inky isolation that surrounded his old farmhouse. He could not recall whether he’d left any lights on downstairs in the kitchen or living room.

He thought: I have become an old man. The steady gray fog of aging turns to deep night darkness.

This was far more poetic than he usually was.

Jeremy returned to his research. At the top of a blank sheet on one of his legal pads he listed:

Appearance

Attitude

Behavior

Mood and Affect

Speech

Thought Process

Thought Content

Perceptions

Cognition

Insight

Judgment

Under ordinary circumstances, these were the emotional domains he would probe before returning a psychological profile. Of the accused, he told himself. But now it’s me who stands accused.

There would be no way to assess appearance or anything else that required him to observe the caller in the flesh. So he would be limited to what he could detect from the caller’s tone, the specific words he used, and the way he constructed his message.

Language is key. Every word must tell you something.

Thought process is next. How does he construct his desire to kill me? Look for signals that will underscore the meaning of murder to him. When does he laugh? When does he lower his voice? When does he speed it up?

He thought of his assessment as a triangle. If language and thought were two lines, he would need to find a third. That would give him a chance.

Once you know what he is, then you can start to figure out who he is.

This is a game, Jeremy Hogan told himself. I damn well better win it.

He rocked back in his chair, twiddled a pencil in his hand, looked down at his notes, reminded himself to constantly be the part scientist, part artist he believed he was, and found that he wasn’t exactly frightened.

Curiously, he felt challenged.

This made him smile.

All right. You’ve made the first move, Mister Who’s at Fault?: a short, cryptic phone call that instantly made me panic like any damn fool who was suddenly threatened. White Pawn to e4. The Spanish Game. Probably the most powerful opening available.

But I can play, too.

Counter with: Black Pawn to c5. The Sicilian Defense.

And I’m no longer panicked.

Even if you do mean to eventually kill me.

When the phone did ring, he was deep in the mixed fog and electric dreams of sleep. It took him several seconds to drag himself from unsettled netherworld into unsettled reality. The ringing insistence of the phone seemed like it should be part of a nightmare rather than wakefulness.

Jeremy took several sharp breaths as he pivoted his feet to the side of the bed. It was cold, but it shouldn’t have been.

He inwardly screamed Composure! although he knew this was a difficult state to attain. He reached out with one hand for the phone and with the other punched a switch to “record.”

The caller ID had read “Unknown Number.” A quick glance at a bedside clock told him it was a few minutes after 5 a.m.

Smart, he thought. He will have been preparing himself for hours, building himself up, knowing he was awakening me and taking me unawares.

Another deep breath. Sound dull, befuddled. But be alert, ready.

He made his voice slow, thick with night. He coughed once as he answered. He wanted to give the impression of age and uncertainty. He needed to sound unsteady and afraid-even decrepit and weak. But he wanted to reply in the same way that he would have years earlier, a physician called in the middle of the night for an emergency. “Yes, yes, this is Doctor Hogan. Who is this?”

Momentary silence.

“Whose fault is it, Doctor?”

Jeremy shivered. He paused several seconds before replying. “I know you believe it is my fault, whatever it is. I should hang up on you. Who are you?”

A snort. As if this question was somehow contemptuous. “You already know who I am. How’s that for an answer?”

“Not very satisfying. I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything, and especially I don’t understand why you want to kill me. How long have you been-”

He was interrupted.

“I have been thinking about you, Doctor, for many years.”

The reply made him jump.

“How many years is that?”

Damn, Jeremy Hogan berated himself. Don’t be so goddamned obvious. He listened to the voice on the end of the line. It seemed rough-as if carved out of some frightening memory and sharpened to a point with a dull, rusty knife. He felt nearly certain now that the caller-killer was using some electronic voice-obscuring hardware. So rule out: accent, inflection, and tone. They won’t help you.

“If I have to die for something I allegedly did…”

He restored his own voice to something between irritation and lecture. But as he asked his questions, he listened for the responses.

“Allegedly is a great word. It has a nice, lawyerly ring to it…”

Jeremy made a note on his legal pad.

Educated.

Then he underlined it twice.

He made a second note:

Not prison-educated. Not street-educated.

He took a chance. “So, you’re either a former student or a former subject. What, did I flunk you? Or maybe I wrote some assessment for the court that you think put you away…”

Come on. Say something that will help me.

The caller did not.

“What? Doctor, you believe those are the only two categories of people that might harbor ill feelings toward you?”

The caller laughed.

“You must feel you’ve led an exemplary life. A life without mistakes. Guilt-free and saintlike.”

Jeremy didn’t have time to reply before the caller added, “I don’t think so.”

“Why me?” Jeremy blurted out. “And why am I last on some list?”

“Because you were only part of the equation that ruined my life.”

“You don’t sound like it’s ruined.”

“That is because I have been successful at restoring it. One death at a time.”

“The man who died in Miami, he was a suicide…”

“So they said.”

“But you’re suggesting something different.”

“Clearly.”

“Murder.”

“A reasonable inference.”

“Maybe I don’t believe you. You sound paranoid, a fantasist. Maybe that death was something you’re imagining you had something to do with. I think I should hang up now.”

“Your choice, Doctor. Not a wise one, for someone who has spent their life collecting information, but still, if that’s what you think will help you…”

Jeremy did not hang up. He felt outmaneuvered. He glanced down at his list of psychological domains. Useless, he thought.

“And my murder, that will make it complete?”

“That’s an inference you are drawing, Doctor.”

Jeremy wrote: Not paranoid. A sociopath?

He thought: Not like any sociopath I’ve ever known. At least-I don’t think so.

“I’ve called the police. They’re all over this…”

“Doctor, why would you lie to me? Why don’t you make it a better story: There’s cops here now, listening in, tracing this call, and they’re going to be surrounding me at any second… Isn’t that better?”

Jeremy felt stupid. He wondered: How does he know? Is he watching me? A shaft of cold fear dropped through him, and he looked wildly around the room, almost panicked. The caller’s steady mocking tones bought him back to the conversation.

“Perhaps you should talk to the police. It will give you a sense of security. Foolish, but maybe it will make you feel better. How long do you suspect that sense will last?”

“You’re patient.”

“People who hurry to collect their debts invariably settle for less on the dollar than they deserve, don’t you think, Doctor?”

Jeremy wrote down: No fear of authorities. He thought he should follow up on that.

“The cops-suppose they catch you…”

Another laugh. “I don’t think so, Doctor. You don’t give me enough credit. You should.”

Jeremy hesitated as he wrote Conceited. He shut his eyes briefly, thinking hard. He decided to take another chance, and to add a slight mocking tone in his own voice.

“So, Mister Who’s at Fault, just how much time do I have left?”

A pause.

“I like that name. It’s appropriate.”

“How much time?”

“Days. Weeks. Months. Maybe, maybe, maybe. How much time does anyone have?”

A hesitation, coupled with that same humorless laugh.

“What makes you think, Doctor, that I’m not outside your door right now?”

And then the line went dead.

10

There was irritating Muzak playing in the elevator as Moth and Andy Candy rode up to the eleventh floor. Both were nervous and the background noise rubbed their thoughts the wrong way. It was an orchestral reinterpretation of some ancient popular rock tune, and both of them hummed along briefly, neither putting a title to the sound.

“Beatles?” Andy Candy asked abruptly. She was on edge, wondering whether she might be tumbling toward obsession along with Moth. When she stole glances in his direction, it seemed as if he wore the look of a mountain climber hanging dangerously from a cliff: desperate not to fall and determined to find a way to lift himself to safety, no matter how frayed his ropes were and how loose the knots holding him in place might be. She could sense wind currents sweeping her along and wasn’t sure she should trust them.

“Yes. No. Close. Maybe,” Moth replied. “Long before our time.”

“But memorable,” she responded. “Stones. Beatles. The Who. Buffalo Springfield. Jimi Hendrix. All the stuff my mom and dad used to listen to. They used to dance in the kitchen…” Her voice trailed off and she wanted to say, And now she has to dance alone because he’s dead, but she did not. Instead, she continued, “Now they’re just Muzak.”

The music distracted Moth. He was unsure how he would react when he saw his uncle’s longtime lover. He felt as if he’d completely let everyone down and he was about to be reminded of his inadequacies and failures. But he also didn’t know where else to begin his search.

The elevator made a swooshing sound as they reached their floor.

“Here we are,” Moth said. Except he knew it wasn’t where they needed to be. Andy had said to look where the police wouldn’t look-but the only places he could think to start were the same places the police had already considered. Or trampled, Moth decided.

“I’m pretty sure it was the Beatles,” Andy Candy said, stepping out. Her voice was close to fierce, although she had nothing obvious to be angry about. “ ‘Lady Madonna.’ Only screwed up completely with mushy strings and oboes and things.”

The door to Moth’s uncle’s apartment opened before they had a chance to knock. A slight man with sandy hair tinged with gray at the edges smiled at the two of them. But it wasn’t truly a smile of greeting as much as an upturn at the corners of the mouth that reflected more pain than joy.

“Hello, Teddy,” Moth said quietly.

“Ah, Moth,” the man answered. “It’s good to see you again. We missed you at the…”

He stopped there.

“This is Andrea,” Moth continued.

Teddy held out his hand. “The famous Andy Candy,” he said. “I’ve heard about you from Moth. Not much, but just enough, a few years back, and you are far more lovely than he ever let on. Moth, you should learn to be more descriptive.” He bowed slightly as he shook Andy Candy’s hand. “Come on in.” He gestured an entry. “Sorry for the mess.”

As they walked inside, they were met with a sheet of bright light. The apartment looked out over Biscayne Bay and Moth could see a huge, ungainly cruise ship slowly making its way down Government Cut like some overweight tourist, lurching past the high-end, rich folks’ playground on Fisher Island. The pale blue of the bay seemed to blend seamlessly into the horizon. The high-rises on Miami Beach and the causeway out to Key Biscayne bracketed the water world. Fishing charters or pleasure boats cut paths through the glistening bay, leaving white foam trails that dissipated rapidly in the light chop of waves. The bright sunshine poured into the apartment through floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that led to a balcony. Moth lifted his hand to shade his eyes, almost as if someone had flashed a light in his face.

Teddy saw this.

“Yeah. Kind of drove us crazy. You desperately want the view, but you don’t want to be blinded every morning by that sun coming up in the east. Your uncle tried a bunch of different shades, I mean he must have called up a half-dozen different interior decorators. He got tired of having to re-cover the couches because they would fade like in minutes. And he had a beautiful Karel Apfel lithograph on the wall that got damaged by the sunlight. Odd, don’t you think? The thing that brings us here to Miami causes all sorts of unexpected problems. At least he didn’t have to go see a dermatologist and have skin cancers cut off his face and forearms, because for years he liked to take his coffee out onto the porch every morning before heading to work.”

Moth looked away from the view toward packing boxes half-filled with art from the walls, kitchen stuff, and books.

“Actually, we liked to take our morning coffee out there.” This was said with a slight quaver. “I can’t stay here any longer, Moth,” Teddy said. “Too hard. Too many memories.”

“Uncle Ed-” Moth began.

“I know what you’re going to say, Moth,” Teddy interrupted. “You don’t think he killed himself. I have trouble believing that as well. So, in a way, I’m with you, Moth. He was happy. Hell, we were happy. Especially in the last few years. His practice was great; I mean, he found his patients to be intriguing, interesting, and he was helping them, which is all he ever wanted. And he didn’t care who knew about me-which is a big deal for shrinks, let me tell you. He was just so happy to be out, you know. We’d both known so many guys who couldn’t reconcile who they are with family, friends, their work… Those are the guys that drink themselves to death-which is what Ed was doing so many years ago-or drug themselves or shoot themselves. All the guys who get overwhelmed by a lie that becomes their life. Ed was at peace-that’s what he told me, when…”

He stopped.

“When, when, when, Moth. What a fucking lousy word.”

Teddy hesitated before continuing. “But then, Ed always had a mysteriousness about him, an inscrutability, as if there was something clicking and connecting behind his head and heart. I always loved that about him. And maybe that was what made him good at what he was.”

“Mystery?” Andy asked.

“It’s not uncommon for guys like us. Living unhappily for so long, hiding truths that should be obvious. Gives you a sense of depth, I think. Lots of self-flagellation. It’s sometimes worse than that. Torture, really.”

Teddy stopped to think for an instant, then said, “I always thought that was what we had in common and that’s what pushed both of us to drink. Hiding. Not being who you are. So, we got sober when we met and became who we really are. Armchair psychology, but that’s the way it was.”

Another pause.

“That wasn’t your story, was it, Moth?”

Andy Candy craned forward, waiting for the response.

“No,” Moth said. “I would get angry and drink. Or I would get sad and drink. I would do well and reward myself with a drink. Or I would fail, and punish myself with a drink. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether I hated me more or others hated me more, and so I would get drunk so I wouldn’t have to answer that question.”

“Ed said his brother put unreasonable…” Teddy started, then stopped.

Moth shook his head. “The trouble with binge drinking is that all you need is the simplest of excuses. Not the most complex. And that’s the problem. Psychologically speaking, of course. Same armchair you just mentioned.”

Teddy pushed a stray lock of hair out of his eyes.

“More than ten years,” he said, turning to Andy Candy. “We met at a meeting. He got up, said he had one day, then I got up, said I had two dozen, and afterward we went out for coffee. Not very romantic, is it, Andy?”

“No. It doesn’t sound that way.” She nodded. “But maybe it was.”

Teddy laughed weakly. “Yes. You’re right. Maybe it was. By the end of the evening we weren’t two drunks nursing lukewarm lattes, we were laughing at ourselves.”

She glanced at a wall. A large black-and-white photo of Ed and Teddy, arms casually tossed across each other’s shoulders, was the only thing remaining. There were other hooks, but what photos they held had been removed.

Moth was fidgeting slightly, shuffling his feet. He was afraid his voice would crack, especially if he allowed himself to look around again and see his uncle’s life packed into boxes.

“Where do I look, Teddy?” Moth asked.

Teddy turned away. He rubbed his hand across his eyes.

“I don’t know. But I don’t exactly want to know. Maybe I did at first. But not now.”

This surprised Andy. “You don’t want…” she started, but Moth interrupted:

“Tell me something I don’t know about Uncle Ed.”

His voice was edgy and demanding.

“That you don’t know?”

“Tell me a secret. Something he hid from me. Tell me something different from what the cops asked. Tell me something that you don’t understand, but seemed odd. Out of place. I don’t know. Something outside the understandable, ordinary world that wants Ed’s death to be a nice, neat, sorry, too bad suicide.”

Teddy looked away, out the doors and over the expanse of blue waters. “You want answers…” he started.

“No. It’s not answers I’m looking for,” Moth said quietly. “If it was as simple as a single answer, it would be a question already asked. What I want is a push in some direction.”

“What sort of direction?”

Moth hesitated, but Andy Candy jumped in: “A direction of regret.”

Teddy looked askance. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Uncle Ed made someone angry,” Moth said. “Angry enough to kill him and stage a suicide, which I don’t think is all that hard. But it will have to be someone from some life that we don’t expect, not the life we all knew Ed was leading now. Ed had to know-on some level, somewhere, that there was someone, somewhere, out there…,” Moth pointed beyond the picture windows, “… gunning for him.”

Teddy paused, and Moth added, “And why would he keep a gun in his desk and then use some other gun?”

“I knew about that gun-the one he didn’t use.”

“Yes?”

“He was supposed to get rid of it. I don’t know why he didn’t. He said he would, took it with him one day like years ago, and then we never spoke about it again. I just assumed he’d dumped it or sold it or even just gave it up to the police or something until the cops that came here asked me about it. I think maybe he put it in that drawer and forgot about it.”

Moth started to ask another question, then stopped.

Teddy made a gesture with his lips, as if Moth’s words were hot and he could feel them. Teddy was a small man with a delicacy that made talking about murder seem alien. “If someone was angry at Ed, you will have to keep going back in time to before I met him and we got together.”

Moth nodded.

“I wanted to help, you know. I wanted to be able to tell the cops-look at this guy, look at that guy, find me the guy who killed Ed. Bring me his damn head on a platter. But I couldn’t find anyone.”

“Do you think-” Moth started, but was interrupted.

“We talked,” Teddy continued. “We talked all the time. Every night. Over the fake cocktails we would mix up for each other-lime juice and bubbly water on the rocks in a highball glass with a little paper umbrella stuck in it. We talked at dinner and in bed. I’ve racked my memory, trying to remember any moment he came home scared, uneasy, even feeling threatened. Not once. Not one moment where I said to him, ‘You should be careful…’ If he were afraid, he would have said something. I know it. We shared everything.”

Another deep sigh and long pause.

“We had no secrets, Moth. So I can’t tell you any.”

“Shit,” Moth blurted out.

“Sorry,” Teddy said.

“So, before he met you?” Andy asked.

“I would imagine so. That’s ten years.”

“So, we can rule out the ten years you two were together, you think?” Andy persisted.

Teddy nodded his head. “Yes. Correct. But it will be hard,” he said. “You will have to go over the hidden parts of Ed’s life and go back and back.”

Moth nodded. “I’m a historian. I can do that.”

This might have been bravado. Moth considered what a historian actually does. Documents. Firsthand accounts. Eyewitness statements. All the collected information that can be pored over in quiet.

“Did he leave notebooks, letters, anything about his life?”

“No. And the cops took his patient files. Assholes. They said they would return them, but…”

“Shit,” Moth repeated.

“Have you seen his will?”

Moth shook his head.

Teddy laughed, not with humor, but in understanding. “You’d think that your dad, Ed’s big brother, would have filled you in. Of course, he’s probably pissed.”

“We don’t really talk.”

“Ed didn’t speak much to him either. They were fifteen years apart in age. Your dad was the top gun. Your dad is the big tough he-man. Full-contact sports and full-contact business. Ed was the queer.” This notion made Teddy almost giggle.

Moth heard the rapid description of his estranged father and thought, That’s true.

“Anyway, Ed was the accident,” Teddy continued. “Conception, birth, and every day from then on, that’s what he liked to say. Proud.”

Andy heard the word accident and imagined that it somehow should mean something to her. I had an accident except it wasn’t an accident, it was a clumsy, stupid mistake. I let myself get raped by some guy I didn’t even know at a party I shouldn’t have been at, but then I killed it. She turned away to regain the composure that had just slid away from her.

Moth felt himself fill with questions, but he asked only one more. “What are you going to do now, Teddy?”

“That’s easy, Moth. Try not to fall off the wagon. Even though I might want to.”

He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a plastic container of pills, holding them up like a sommelier examining a wine bottle label. “Antabuse,” he said. “Nasty stuff. Nasty drug. It’ll make me sick, and I mean really sick, if I start to drink. Never tried it before. Ed was always into We have the strength to do this ourselves-you know that, Moth. But now Ed’s gone, goddamn it to hell.”

Moth pictured his uncle, still alive, seated at his desk. Moth could see a gun in front of him, and he could see Ed reaching down to the drawer where the second gun was hidden. Makes no sense. He was going to say this but as he was about to, he saw tears in Teddy’s eyes. And Moth stopped himself.

“Sorry, Moth,” Teddy said. His voice quivered, a tuning fork reverberating with loss and sadness. “Sorry,” he said a second time. “None of this is easy for me.”

Andy Candy thought that was a significant understatement.

“Go away, Moth. I don’t want to speak with you.”

“Please, Cynthia. Just give me a minute. A couple of questions.”

“Who’s she?”

“This is my friend Andrea.”

“Is she a drunk, too?”

“No. She’s helping me out a little. She does the driving.”

“Lost your license again?”

“Yes.”

“Pathetic. Do you like being a drunk, Moth?”

“Please, Cynthia.”

“Do you have even the vaguest idea how many people you’ve hurt, Moth?”

“Yes. I do. Please.”

Hesitation.

“Five minutes, Moth. No more. Inside.”

Andy Candy was slightly taken aback by the staccato hostility in Moth’s aunt’s voice. Every word seemed spoken with black charcoal and burning cinders. She trailed a little behind Moth, who was hurrying to keep pace with his aunt, who marched through the vestibule of the house with military determination.

It was a three-story stucco home-rare enough in Miami-in a southern part of Dade County, surrounded by tall stately palms, manicured lawns, a bougainvillea-adorned walkway, and money. The flat white interior walls were crowded with Haitian art-large, wildly colorful representations of jam-packed markets, weather-beaten fishing boats, and floral designs, all with a homespun, rustic character to them. Andy knew they were valuable; folk art that was exploited in the high-end Miami art world. There were modern sculptures-carved dark woods, mostly free-form, in every corner. The corridors of the house shouted contradictions of creativity and rigid order. Everything was carefully in place, arranged precisely to look magazine-photograph beautiful, make a statement about elegance. Cynthia was dressed to blend in with the high style. She wore a loose-fitting, off-white, silken pair of slacks and matching blouse. Her Manolo Blahnik shoes made tapping sounds against the imported gray tile floors. Andy Candy thought the jewelry around Cynthia’s neck was worth more than her mother the piano instructor made in a year.

Moth politely asked, “How is the art business, Cynthia?”

Andy Candy thought the answer was obvious.

Moth’s aunt didn’t even look back as she replied. “Quite good, despite the overall economy. But Moth, don’t waste your five minutes asking me about my business.”

There was a man seated in the living room on an expensive white, handmade cotton couch. He stood up as they entered. He was a few years younger than Moth’s aunt, but equally stylish. He was dressed in a narrow, tight, shiny sharkskin gray suit, bright purple shirt, four buttons open to a hairless chest. He wore his long blond hair slicked tightly back. Andy Candy saw that the man had put white highlights in his hair, the way a fashion model might. Aunt Cynthia walked straight to his side, slid her arm under his, and eyed Moth and Andy Candy.

“Moth, maybe you recall my business partner?”

“No,” Moth answered, extending his hand, even though he did. He had met the man once before, and known instantly that he handled Aunt Cynthia’s business ledgers and sexual desires, probably with the same degree of extraordinarily cool passion and competence. Moth instantly pictured the two of them together in bed. How could they fuck without mussing their hair or disrupting their carefully applied makeup?

“Martin is here in case some legal matter should arise in the next…,” Cynthia looked down at the Rolex on her wrist, “… four remaining minutes.”

“Legal?” blurted Andy Candy.

Cynthia turned coldly toward her.

“Perhaps he didn’t bother to inform you, but Moth’s uncle and I did not split up on the best of terms. Ed was a liar, a cheat, and despite his profession, a harsh, thoughtless man.”

Andy started to reply, but then thought better of it.

Cynthia did not offer a seat to either Moth or Andy Candy as she slumped into a modern leather chair that Andy thought looked more uncomfortable than standing. Martin moved behind her, and placed his hands on her shoulders, either to hold her in place or give her a back rub. Either, Andy imagined, was possible.

“Okay,” Moth said. “I’m sorry you think that. Then I’ll get right to it…”

“Please,” his aunt said with a small, dismissive hand gesture.

“In the years that you and Uncle Ed were together, did you ever hear him say he felt threatened, or that someone might want to hurt him, or come seeking revenge of any kind…”

“You mean other than me,” Cynthia said. She laughed, although it wasn’t funny.

“Yes. Other than you.”

“I was the one hurt. I was the one he cheated on. I was the one he walked out on. If there was anyone with a reason to shoot him…”

She stopped. Then she shrugged, as if it meant nothing.

“The answer to your question is: No.”

“In all those years…”

“Let me repeat myself: No.”

“You mean,” Moth started, but she cut him off with another wave of her hand.

“I suspected there were people that he met in his secret life-the one he tried to hide from me-that maybe, I don’t know, hated themselves or him or whatever and might have been capable of pulling a gun out and shooting themselves in some drunken bout of self-pity. And sometimes I imagined when he was drinking hard, and disappeared for a couple of days, that maybe something awful had happened to him. But it wasn’t likely that some other repressed and closeted gay man that he met in some bar somewhere decided to stalk him years later. Of course it’s possible…” she said, shrugging once again to indicate with body language and tone of voice that it wasn’t actually possible. “But I really doubt it. And no one ever tried to blackmail him, because that sort of payment would have come up in the forensic analysis of his finances that I had done when we were divorced. And he never came on to some psychotic killer, like in Looking for Mr. Goodbar-there’s a book you’ve probably never heard of but was very popular once upon a time-you know, tried to hustle some guy who decided instead of fucking him to kill him. I worried about that for a little bit. But not really.”

“So, no one…”

“That’s what I said.”

“Can you think of anyone…”

“No.”

“In his profession or socially…”

“No.”

She made another dismissive wave of the hand as if she could simply sweep any uncomfortable memory aside.

“You probably misunderstand something, Moth,” she said briskly. “I have nothing against homosexuals-indeed, many of the people in my profession are gay. What angered me was that Ed lied year in, year out, every day we were together. He cheated. He made me feel as if I was worthless.”

Andy Candy heard this and wondered how anyone could get something so right and so wrong at the very same instant.

Moth paused. In that brief moment, Cynthia pushed herself up out of the lounge chair.

“So, Moth, as interesting as this little retrospective of my ex-husband’s life might be”-Andy Candy recognized this statement for the noblesse oblige sort of lie it was-“I think I’ve just about answered all your questions, or at the very least all the questions I care to answer, so it is time for you to leave. I think I’ve already been more generous than I should have been.”

Andy Candy shuffled her feet. She did not like Moth’s aunt, and told herself to keep her mouth shut, but was unable.

“What about before?”

“Before when?”

“Before you two got together…”

“He was a resident at the university hospital here. I was a doctoral candidate in art history. Mutual friends introduced us. We dated. He told me he loved me, but of course that wasn’t true. We married. He lied and cheated for many years. We divorced. I don’t recall us speaking much about our respective pasts, although if he thought there might be someone waiting around to kill him sometime in the distant future, he would have mentioned it.”

Andy knew this too was a lie. It was a lie designed to chop the conversation with the efficacy of a butcher’s knife.

“Well, who might know…”

Cynthia stared at Andy Candy.

“You want to play at amateur detective. You figure it out.”

There was another moment of quiet before Andy Candy let slide, “It doesn’t sound like you ever loved him.”

“What a stupid and childish statement,” Cynthia replied brusquely. “Do you know anything about love?”

She did not wait for an answer, but pointed toward the front entranceway.

Moth spoke quickly. “Cynthia, please. Did he ever say anything, like he was guilty about something, or something happened that troubled him, or anything that you thought was out of place or unusual or wrong? Please, Cynthia-you knew him well. Help me out here.”

She hesitated.

“Yes,” she said, suddenly brusque. “He was troubled by many things in his past, any of which might have killed him. That’s true for all of us.”

She waved her hand dismissively.

“One, two, three, four, five. Your time is up, Moth. And you too, miss whatever your name is. Martin will show you out. Please don’t call me again.”

In the car, Andy was breathing heavily, each gasp ripped from the hot air as if she’d run a race or swum underwater for a great distance. She felt as if she’d been in a fight-or, at least, what she believed a fight would feel like. She almost started to check her arms for bruises and to move her jaw as if it had absorbed a punch. She glanced toward the front of the house and saw Martin the accountant love-slave standing dutifully in the doorway to make absolutely sure they departed promptly. She resisted the temptation to give him the finger. “I wanted to slug her the whole time,” she said. “I should have slugged her.”

“Have you ever slugged anyone?”

“No. But she would have made a good first.”

Moth nodded, but seemed as if a pall had fallen over him. All he could think about was how hard and sad so many years had been for his uncle.

Andy saw the cloud gathering over Moth.

“One more stop today,” he said. “I wished we’d learned something by now.”

Andy Candy hesitated before replying.

“I’m not sure we didn’t,” she said, stringing negatives together into a positive. “I’ve got to think about it a little more, but it seems to me that she told us what we needed to know.”

Moth nodded. He stiffened in his seat.

“Bookends,” he said abruptly. “One person who loved him. One person who hated him. And then me, the person who idealized him.”

“So,” Andy Candy said with a wry smile. “Now we go talk to the person who understood him.”

Andy thought about what they’d just said. Love. Hate. Idealized. Understand. A few other words would fill out the portrait of Ed Warner that they needed.

She put the car in gear.

There are some people, Moth thought, who sit behind a desk and create an impenetrable wall of authority and there are others for whom the desk-barrier is barely there and almost invisible.

The man across from them seemed to fit in the latter category. He was an athletic man, with thinning brown hair that fell across his forehead and poked up in back in a cowlick, making him seem younger than his fifty-plus years. He had the habit of constantly adjusting his glasses on the tip of his nose. He wore a neck strap around the spectacles, so occasionally the doctor dropped them to his chest completely, made a point, then lifted them again and replaced them haphazardly, often slightly askew.

“I’m sorry, Timothy, but I don’t know how much I can help you and Miss Martine in your inquiries. Patient-physician confidentiality and all that.”

“Which doesn’t survive a patient’s death,” Moth said.

“You sound like an attorney, Timothy. That is true. But that would also mean that you had placed a subpoena on my desk, which you have not. As opposed to merely arriving here to ask questions.”

Moth realized right then he should be careful.

He also realized he had no idea what being careful would mean. So he began with the question that he’d already asked twice that day.

“Do you know of anyone, did my uncle ever mention anyone, who might hold a grudge or some sort of long-term anger-you know what I’m driving at, Doctor-that finally boiled over?”

The psychiatrist paused before answering, in much the same way that Ed Warner would.

“No. I can think of no one. Certainly not anyone that Ed mentioned in our years of therapy.”

“You would recall if…”

“Yes. Any element of a conversation that implies a threat is one that we take very good notes on, both for the obvious reason-we want to be sure of safety-and also because how people respond to either real or perceived external dangers is a crucial element of any therapeutic situation. And not to mention that we just might have an ethical obligation to inform the police authorities.”

He smiled. “Sorry. I sound like I’m giving a lecture.”

The doctor shook his head. “Let me be simpler. No. Did I imagine Ed was ever in danger? No. His risky early behavior, the drinking and anonymous, unprotected sex-that might have created something, I don’t know what. But that ended some time ago. He was here merely to understand what he’d gone through, which was a lot, as you know.”

“Do you think he killed himself?” Andy blurted.

The psychiatrist shook his head. “I have not seen him in years. But when he completed therapy, there were no suicidal indications whatsoever. Of course, as the police who came to speak with me so quickly pointed out, he would have been more than capable of concealing his emotions, even from me, although I don’t like to think so.”

This was cover your ass talk from the doctor, Moth thought.

The doctor paused again, then added:

“You knew him well, Timothy. What do you think?”

“No fucking way,” Moth replied.

The psychiatrist grinned.

“The police like to look at facts and evidence and what will fly under oath in a court of law. That’s where they routinely find their answers. In this office, and in your uncle’s, the investigation is far different. And for a historian, Timothy?”

“Facts are facts,” Moth replied, smiling. “But they slip and slide and change over years. History is a little like wet clay.”

The doctor laughed. “Very apt,” he said. “I believe so, too. But it is not so much that the facts change as much as it is our perception of them.”

The doctor picked a pencil off his desk. He tapped it three times, then started to doodle on a pad.

“He wrote ‘My fault’ on a paper…” Moth started.

“Yes. That troubled me,” said the doctor. “It’s an intriguing choice of words, especially for a psychiatrist. What do you make of it?”

“It’s almost as if he was answering a question.”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “But was it a question that had been asked or was it one that he expected to be asked.”

The doctor scratched his pencil hard against the pad, making a black mark.

“In the study of history, Timothy, how do you examine a document that might tell you something about your subject?”

“Well, context is important,” Moth said.

But what Moth was thinking was: Place. Circumstances. Connection to the moment. When Wellington muttered “Blucher or night…” it was because he understood that the battle hung in the balance at that precise second in time. So, Ed writes “My fault” because those words have a bigger context right then.

“I have another question,” Moth said.

The doctor didn’t reply, other than to lean forward slightly.

“Why would Ed own two guns. Or even one gun?”

The therapist’s mouth opened slightly. He seemed to think for a moment.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Another silence.

“That is troubling,” the doctor said. “Unlike Ed.” He seemed to think hard-as if the two weapons seemed to represent some facet of personality that he’d failed to explore. “And the note-the ‘My fault’-where precisely was that on the desk?”

Moth had not thought about this. He replied slowly, cautiously. “Just a little to the left of center. I think.”

“Not to the right?”

“No.”

The doctor nodded. He reached out, grabbed a prescription pad, held his hand over it as if he was about to write something. Then, he looked down, pointing. “But it was over here…” He gestured at the opposite side of the desk. “Perhaps that means something. Perhaps it does not. It is curious, however.”

He looked at Andy and then to Moth.

“I think you will need to be more than curious,” he said.

This statement seemed to indicate that the interview had ended, as did the doctor’s pushing back in his chair.

Andy Candy had been quiet, listening.

“If not exactly who, then what was Ed afraid of?” she asked.

The doctor smiled.

“Ah, a clever question,” he said. “Despite his education and training, like many addicts and alcoholics, Ed feared his past.”

Andy nodded.

In Shakespeare, she thought, there are Seven Ages of Man, from infancy to childhood and on to old age and extreme old age. Ed never made it to that stage and the first two are probably hidden, even for a historian like Moth. So, look to the stages where Ed became an adult.

“Do you know why he came to Miami?” she asked.

The doctor paused. “Yes,” he said. “At least perhaps in part. He spent many years fleeing from who he was, trying to escape his family, who had insisted on his medical education taking place amidst all the trappings of prestige that only the Ivy League and similar institutions provide. Timothy, I suspect, is familiar with this pressure. His marriage was the same picture-do what others expect of you, not what you want. This is not that unusual in Miami. I know we’re a great place for refugees from all over the world. But don’t you think we’re an equally good spot for emotional refugees?”

Andy saw Moth lean forward. She recognized the look. He sees something, she thought. At least, this was what she hoped she saw in his face.

11

Student #5 was on the back deck doing early morning yoga exercises when the bear walked through the rear of the yard. He froze in position so not to startle the animal, holding a pose called falling butterfly. He could feel his stomach muscles tighten with exertion, but he refused to lower himself even to the worn wooden floor. The beast would be alert to any odd noise or telltale motion.

The bear-four hundred pounds of lumbering black bear with all the grace of an old Volkswagen Bug-seemed intent on finding a fallen tree and scraping out an I’ve just awakened from winter hibernation and I’m damn hungry appetizer of grubs and beetles, then probably moving back into the thick trees and scrub brush that bordered on Student #5’s modest riverside property to find a more significant meal.

An easy shot, he thought. Just inside the house was a Winchester 30.06 deer rifle. But it would have to be a kill shot. Heart or brain. Big animal. Strong. Healthy. More than capable of running off and dying slowly in the deep woods where I couldn’t track him down and put him out of his misery. He was reminded of the U.S. Marine Corps sniper mantra: One shot. One kill.

He was tempted to lower himself to the deck and crawl to the weapon, draw a bead, and fire. Good practice.

He watched as the bear inspected and rejected a few of the rotting opportunities, wearing what Student #5 considered a look of bear-frustration coupled with bear-determination. Then, with a visible shrug that seemed to make every inch of luxurious midnight-colored fur twitch, the bear wandered off into the woods. A few bushes quivered as the animal passed by and disappeared. Student #5 thought it was as if the weak, gray, early morning light had enveloped the bear and cloaked him in fog. The dark forest that rose behind stretched for miles, though steep hills and empty onetime logging lands, now set aside for wildlife preserves. His house-actually a ramshackle double-wide trailer perched on cinder blocks with a small wooden deck built off the tiny kitchen-was barely a hundred yards from a bend in the Deerfield River, and the early day hours trapped all the cool night moisture that gathered above the waters.

He listened carefully for a few moments, hoping to catch a fading bear sound-but he could hear nothing, so he lowered himself to the deck. He breathed out sharply, thinking it was like being underwater. He looked out at the backyard area, trying to spot some residual sign of the bear’s morning intrusion, but there were none, save for a few damp streaks in the dew where paws had been set down.

He smiled.

I’m the same sort of predator, he thought, hungry, finished with hibernation, only a lot more lean and a lot more focused. And my tracks fade just as quickly as his do.

I’m the same sort of predator.

Patient.

In the kitchen behind him an old-fashioned windup alarm clock rang. End of exercise time. Student #5 lifted himself up and stretched a little bit before he hustled back inside to dress. Even in a world that bordered on ancient, where a bear was his neighbor, Student #5 prided himself on organization. If he set aside forty-five minutes for physical fitness, then forty-five it was. Not one second less. Not one more.

By mid-morning he was folding donated clothes and stacking canned foodstuffs at a combination Salvation Army outlet and attached free food pantry on the outskirts of Greenfield in a sad strip mall that featured a Home Depot, a McDonald’s, and a boarded-up space that had once housed a bookstore that had gone out of business. He volunteered at the outlet whenever he arrived in Western Massachusetts. There were pockets of poverty throughout the rural area he lived in, and the small city had been hard hit by recessions and tough economic times.

To his coworkers he maintained the fiction that he worked at the VA hospital twenty miles away making beds and emptying bedpans-but his enthusiasm and hard work habits kept anyone from asking too many questions. He was always willing to lift some heavy furniture or climb a ladder to reach higher shelves.

From time to time, Student #5 would pause in what he was doing and examine the people who came into the store. There were occasional undergraduates from local colleges looking for bargain winter clothing, and there were other young people who found “secondhand” to be chic, but for the most part there were people to whom the words hard times were worn like so many worries lining their faces. These people interested Student #5.

Shortly before his lunch break, Student #5 saw a woman enter the large, warehouse-style building. He wasn’t sure exactly what there was about her that attracted his attention-perhaps it was the seven-year-old child in tow, or the slightly confused look on the woman’s face. He watched her as she hesitated, just inside a wide set of glass doors. He thought the woman was holding her daughter’s hand to steady herself, as if the child was propping her up instead of the other way around.

He was in the men’s clothing section, hanging donated suit coats on racks, making sure that price tags were attached to the out-of-style, worn jackets and slacks. There were many odd sizes-anything in a commonplace 42 regular or long was thoroughly dated, with wide lapels and off-putting colors. The suit coats and slacks that were modern tended toward sizes that wouldn’t fit anyone save the cadaverously thin or the dangerously obese.

He watched the woman and her child go to the adjacent children’s section. He thought she was strangely beautiful-a fashion model’s high cheekbones and a haunted look in her eyes-and the child impressively cute in the irrepressible way that children manage to combine shyness with excitement. The child pointed at a colorful, pink sweater that had a dancing elephant embossed on it and the woman glanced at the price tag and shook her head.

Just the act of saying No seemed to hurt the woman.

Never thought this would happen to you, he thought. So, you are new to the world of belt-tightening and unpayable bills. Not much fun, is it?

Student #5 was about ten feet away, so he barely had to raise his voice.

“We can lower the price,” he said.

The woman turned to him. She had deep blue eyes and sandy-colored hair that seemed to him to be as untamed as the thickets behind his trailer. The child was a mirror-copy of the mother.

“No, it’s okay, it’s…” The woman’s voice trailed off into the echoes of Please don’t ask me to explain all the reasons I’m here.

Student #5 smiled and walked over to them. He held out his hand to the child. “What’s your name?”

The child tentatively shook his hand. “Suzy,” she said.

“Hello, Suzy. That’s a pretty name for a pretty girl. You like pink?”

Suzy nodded.

“And elephants?”

Another nod.

“Well, I promise you, Suzy, you’re the only young woman we’ve had in here in weeks that likes both pink and elephants all at the same time. We’ve had some young women who prefer pink, and we’ve had a couple who seem to like elephants, but we’ve never ever ever had someone who likes both.”

Student #5 took the sweater from the rack. The yellow price tag read “$6.” He took a large black flow pen from his shirt pocket, and crossed out the number and replaced it with “50 cents” and pushed the sweater into the little girl’s arms. Then he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his wallet. He handed Suzy a dollar bill. “Here,” he said. “Now you can buy it for yourself, because I really like elephants and I adore that color, too.”

The mother stammered, “Thanks, but you don’t have to…”

He shook his head to cut her off.

“First time here?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, it can be a little overwhelming at first.” When he used the word overwhelming he wasn’t thinking about the size of the store. “Do you think you need some groceries, too?”

“I shouldn’t, I mean, we’re fine…” She stopped abruptly, shook her head. “Groceries would be helpful,” the woman said.

“I’m Blair,” Student #5 said, pointing to a name tag on his shirt that displayed his Western Massachusetts alias.

“I’m Shannon,” the woman said. They shook hands. He thought her touch was delicate. Poverty is always soft, he thought, filled with doubts and fears. When you have a job, that’s when your grip gets firm.

“Okay, Shannon and Suzy, let me show you how to maneuver the food pantry. All the stuff there is free-if you can make a contribution, they like that, but it’s not really necessary. Perhaps sometime in the future you can come back and make a donation. Follow me.”

He leaned down toward the child.

“Do you like spaghetti?” he asked.

She nodded, ducking partway behind her mother’s leg.

“Pink. Elephants. Spaghetti. Well, Suzy, you’ve come to the right place.”

Leading the woman and child, he steered them toward the foodstuffs, found a small basket for them to place items in, and walked them down the aisles. He made sure they took two large cans of premixed spaghetti and meatballs.

“Thank you,” Shannon said. “You’ve really been kind.”

“That’s my job,” Student #5 replied cheerily. Not really, he thought.

“I’m going to get back on my feet soon,” Shannon continued.

“Of course you will.”

“It’s just things have been…” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Unsettled.”

“That’s what I would have guessed,” Student #5 said. He let a small silence prompt her next reply. It’s remarkable what a little bit of quiet can prompt, he thought. I would have been an excellent shrink.

“He walked out on us,” she said, a tinge of bitterness coloring her words. “Cleaned out the bank account, took the car, and…” She stopped. He saw her bite down on her lip. “It’s been hard,” she said. “Especially on Suzy, who doesn’t really get it.”

“Up at the registers,” he said, “they have a list of the state and local social service agencies that can help you. They have counselors. They’re really capable. See one. Talk to them. It will help, I promise.”

She nodded. “It’s been, I don’t know exactly…”

“But I do,” he said. “Stress. Depression. Anger. Sadness. Confusion. Fear. And those are just for starters. Don’t try to handle it alone.”

When they reached the register, Suzy proudly handed over her dollar bill and carefully counted her two quarters in change. Student #5 reached behind the counter and took a printed sheet of paper from a box. It listed all the numbers for help and names of therapists willing to do pro bono work. He handed it to the mother.

“Make a call,” he said. “You’ll feel better when you do.”

You always feel better when you directly address the root causes of your problems, he told himself.

At the front door, he waved as mother and daughter walked toward a bus stop.

They are the people I was once upon a time destined to help, he thought. Until all that was taken away from me.

He glanced around to make sure no one was near enough to overhear him, then he whispered out loud, eyes boring in on the disappearing pink sweater: “Bye-bye, Suzy. I hope you never come this close to a killer again.”

12

I looked like a foolish and scared old man, but that was the only choice I had.

When the phone line went dead in the middle of the night, Jeremy Hogan had assumed the man who wanted to kill him was right outside his house, and so, acting with all the crazed organization of a person who awakens to the word Fire! he’d rushed downstairs to his living room and pulled a single armchair over against a back wall to create a flimsy barricade. He had huddled behind the chair, eyeing every entrance to the room, mostly concealed from a large picture window that he’d instantly assumed would let a killer stare into his home and watch his every motion.

He’d seized a cast-iron poker from the fireplace and braced himself, ready to spring out and assault the murderer he was absolutely certain was coming through the front door at any second. He’d listened intently for a sound-a window breaking, a door lock being sprung. Footsteps. Labored, murderous, Hollywood horror film heavy breathing-anything that might tell him he was about to come face-to-face with the mysterious man who wanted him dead. In his erratic thinking, he’d believed that the killer would know how to bypass the cheap alarm system on the house and that a deadly confrontation was not only inevitable but seconds away. He’d figured he could get in a few swings with the fire poker before dying.

Go down fighting, he repeated like a mantra.

He’d stayed, terrified, frozen in position, until morning light crept in through the window and he’d realized that he was still alive and alone.

His hand was cramped. He looked down at his fingers, clutching the poker handle. They were frozen, and it was difficult to pry them loose.

The poker clattered to the floor, falling from his grip. The noise startled him, and he bent down quickly and retrieved it. He carried it with him, like some hussar with a dueling sword.

“What makes you think I’m not outside right now?”

Jeremy replayed the killer’s words. He wondered how carefully they were chosen.

How much of an expert at terror is he?

Jeremy had never experienced this sort of sudden panic before. Images of disaster flooded him: a fireman hearing the sound of ceilings collapsing; a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of debris on an empty, gray, stormy sea; a bush pilot clutching the yoke as the engines behind him cough and fail.

It all left a bitter, dry sense in his mouth as he asked himself: Did you just survive something? Or did you merely get a taste of what’s to come?

The words he formed in his head seemed to him as if he were speaking them out loud, hoarse, voice cracking, tortured.

More likely the taste, he acknowledged.

As sunlight flooded the old farmhouse, Jeremy found he was still quivering, hands shaking, muscles taut. He wanted to crouch behind every chair or couch, hide in every closet or beneath every bed. He felt like a child awakening from a nightmare, a little unsure that the sleep terrors had truly fled.

He moved gingerly across the room, an old man’s measured gait. He clung to the side of the picture window, moving a curtain back so he could peer out.

Nothing. A typical sunny morning.

He maneuvered quietly into the kitchen and stared through the windows above the sink, back across the flagstone patio where his wife would paint, over the small lawn, toward undeveloped conservation land. Each stand of trees, each clump of shrubs tangled together could conceal a killer. Everything that was once familiar and now seemed dangerous.

He asked himself: How can you tell if someone is watching you?

Jeremy did not know the answer to that question-beyond the clammy, raw, heart-racing sensation he felt inside-and he realized he’d better come up with one, and soon. He went to the stove and made himself a cup of coffee, hoping it might settle his stretched nerves.

After a moment, he lurched unsteadily back to his office, clutching his steaming cup in one hand and the fireplace poker in the other. He plopped down behind his desk, and grabbed all his papers and research and started scribbling notes, trying to recall details, wondering why they were so elusive. He was exhausted and felt oddly filthy, as if he’d been working in his garden. He knew he was pale. He knew he was sweaty. He ran a hand through tousled hair, rubbed his eyes like a child awakening from a nap.

Did you hear enough to answer another question?

He felt his backbone go rigid.

What question is that, Doctor?

The dialogue in his head echoed.

Are you about to die, or are you going to get another call?

Jeremy Hogan stayed seated. He was not aware how long he remained in place, pondering this. It was as if the open-endedness of his situation, the uncertainty of what he was caught up in was alien, foreign to him. It was like standing on a street corner in some unknown country, hearing a language he couldn’t understand, clutching a map he couldn’t read. He felt now that he was lost. He pictured the same panicked fireman that had come to his mind earlier-only this time it was his own face he saw hugging the ground, choking down breaths of air, surrounded by explosions and bursts of flames. No way out. What’s the solution?

Give up.

Or:

Don’t give up.

He asked himself whether he could find a way to stay alive, or even if he wanted to.

I’m old. I’m alone. I’ve had a good run. Done some pretty interesting things, gone to a few unusual places, accomplished much. Had some love in my life. Had some truly fascinating moments. It’s been-on balance-pretty damn good.

I could just wait and embrace this killer when he arrives.

“Hi. How yah doin’? Say, could you make this quick, ’cause I hate wasting time.”

After all, how much time would he actually be stealing? Five years? Ten? What sort of years? Lonely ones? Years where age steals more and more every passing day?

Why bother?

Jeremy listened to this conversation as if he were seated in an academic auditorium watching a debate on some esoteric subject. The cons have it; you should just die. No, the pros have it; fight to stay alive.

He took an unsteady, deep breath. It almost made him dizzy.

But this is my home, and I’ll be damned if I’ll just let some stranger…

Jeremy stopped this thought midway.

He stared at the coffee cup and fireplace poker in front of him. He grabbed the cast-iron poker, spilling the coffee. Then Jeremy stood up and swung it violently in the air in front of him, slashing away at an unseen assailant.

He imagined the weight crashing into human flesh. Coming down hard on a skull. Breaking bones. Slashing skin.

Good, he thought. But not nearly good enough. You won’t be able to get that close.

If you do, then you are probably already murdered.

He knew he needed help making a choice, but wasn’t exactly sure how to ask for it.

Two other men were walking slowly in front of a glass countertop, quietly inspecting the rows of weapons in the case. He presumed everyone coming into the store knew more than he did. On the wall hung at least a hundred rifles and shotguns, each anchored by a steel cord. Each gun seemed more lethal than the last.

It was not a big store-the few aisles were crammed with hunting clothing, predominantly in varieties of camouflage or the electric-orange hue that was designed to prevent some other hunter from mistaking one for a deer. High-tech bows and arrows were on display, along with glassy-eyed, wall-mounted deer heads. Each of the heads sported impressive antler arrays but Jeremy knew nothing about the points on the antlers, the height of the shoulders. He did know enough to find something ironic in the idea that the more prominent a deer got in his own world, the more vulnerable it made him in another.

Jeremy almost laughed out loud. This was a psychiatrist’s observation.

Stifling this inner joke, Jeremy walked up to the counter. A single clerk was stacking boxes of ammunition as he helped one of the two other customers, who hefted a wicked-looking black pistol with obvious admiration. The clerk was a middle-aged man, buzz-cut and significantly overweight, with a “USMC” tattoo prominent on a forearm the size of a ham hock. He wore a shoulder harness with a semiautomatic pistol butt protruding and a gray T-shirt that had an old National Rifle Association cliché printed on it in fading red: “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.”

“Help you with something?” the clerk asked not unpleasantly, looking up.

“Yes,” Jeremy answered. “I think I am in need of some proper home protection.”

“Everyone is in need of proper home protection these days,” the clerk said. “Got to keep you and yours safe. What did you have in mind?”

“I’m not at all sure…” Jeremy started.

“Well, you already have an alarm system on the house, right?”

Jeremy nodded.

“Good,” said the clerk. “Dog?”

“No.”

“How many folks in the house with you? I mean, kids, grandkids visit much? Wife? Does her book group meet at your place? Do you get lots of deliveries from FedEx? Just how much traffic at the front door is there?”

“I live alone. And no one visits any longer.”

“What sort of house? What sort of neighborhood? Where’s the closest police station?”

Jeremy felt as if he was being cross-examined. The two other shoppers, both now holding unloaded guns, stopped and listened in.

“I live out in the country. It’s pretty isolated. Old farmhouse near a wildlife preserve. No real neighbors to speak of, at least none within a couple of hundred yards and none that I’m real friendly with, so no one just drops by. And I’m set pretty far back from the road. Lots of trees and bushes-makes it all scenic. You can barely see my place from the roadway.”

“Whoa,” said the clerk, grinning. He half-turned toward the other two shoppers, who both nodded. “That’s not good. Not good at all.” He emphasized the last two words like a teacher might in a grade school classroom. “If the shit hit the fan-if you’ll pardon my language-you’re on your own, completely. Well, damn good thing you came in here today.”

The clerk seemed to assess Jeremy’s homestead as he would a potential battlefield. “Let’s talk about threats,” the clerk said. “What specifically do you think might happen?”

“Home invasion,” Jeremy said quickly. “I’m an old guy living alone. Pretty easy target, I’d think, for anyone.”

“Do you keep valuables or piles of cash in the house?”

“Not really.”

“Uh-huh.” The clerk nodded. “But, I’m guessing the place looks pretty nice. High- class. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a doctor,” Jeremy said. “A psychiatrist.”

The clerk made a wry face. “Don’t get many shrinks in here. In fact, don’t think I’ve ever sold a gun to a shrink. Orthopedic guys, yeah. All the time. But not one of you. Is it true you can listen to some dude talk and tell what they’re really thinking?”

“No,” said Jeremy. “That would be mind-reading.”

“Hah!” The clerk laughed. “I bet you can. Anyway, you got a nice car?” This was posed as a question.

“It’s outside. BMW.”

“Well, that’s like posting a big old neon sign outside saying, ‘I’m a rich guy,’ ” chimed in one of the other shoppers, a younger man, long greasy hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a Harley-Davidson leather jacket above jeans and a neck tattoo only partially obscured by the collar of his coat.

The clerk smiled.

“So, really what you’re saying to me, Doc, is that you live in a nice place, where you’re probably surrounded by a bunch of stockbrokers and housewives who do real estate on the side and you give off the look of someone who just might be an easy score.”

“Okay,” Jeremy said. “True enough. What do you think? A shotgun? A handgun?”

“I think both, Doc, but it’s your money. How much do you want to spend for peace of mind?”

Neck Tattoo leaned forward as if interested. The other shopper had turned away to examine other handguns.

“I think I should just listen to the professional,” Jeremy said. “Given my situation, and if cost isn’t a concern, what would you recommend?” The gun clerk smiled.

“For the shotgun, either a Remington or a Mossberg. Not too heavy. Short barrel for use in close quarters. Simple, efficient mechanism. Won’t jam. Won’t rust. Can take a lot of combat abuse.”

“I’ve got a Mossberg,” Neck Tattoo added. “It’s also got a very cool attachment for a flashlight, which is really helpful.” He didn’t say why it was helpful. This seemed obvious.

The clerk nodded. “True. Six- or nine-shot models. And, I think, to really be effective, you should pair that up with a Colt Python.357 Magnum revolver. Put in wad-cutters. Stop an elephant in its tracks. The Cadillac of handguns.”

Neck Tattoo started to speak, and the clerk held up his hand. “I know, I know. More rapid firepower with a Glock Nine or a.45.” He smiled. “But for this gentleman, I think old-fashioned, easiest to use, just point and shoot and not worry about fumbling around with a clip and chambering a round, that makes the most sense.”

The clerk turned back to Jeremy. “A lot of folks see the cops on TV or in the movies and they always use semiautomatics, so that’s what they want. But a damn good pistol, I mean, a quality gun-hell, you can drop it in the mud or use it as a hammer when you’re doing your weekend chores, and it’s still gonna work just fine. That’s what I’m guessing will fit you best.”

Jeremy followed the clerk down a flight of stairs into the basement along with the two other shoppers. There was a makeshift firing range below the store, with a pair of shooting galleries. The clerk set up the first of the other men, handing all of them ear protectors and boxes of ammunition. Within seconds, the other man was in a slight crouch, expertly aiming and then opening up with a semiautomatic pistol at a target barely forty feet away. A makeshift pulley system ran along the ceiling and there was a built-in table and a single sheet of drywall material that separated the two ranges. The rapid fire from the semiautomatic was deafening, and Jeremy adjusted his pair of ear protectors. They muffled some-but not all-of the reports.

The clerk was yelling instructions, first for the Mossberg 12-gauge, then for the pistol. Loading. Stance. Grip. He gently maneuvered Jeremy into position.

Jeremy snugged the shotgun tightly up against his shoulder. Positioning, the clerk yelled above the incessant explosions coming from the adjacent gallery, was crucial. Jeremy could barely hear, “You don’t want to fracture that shoulder!”

The clerk tugged on the pulley system and sent a black-and-white bull’s-eye target down to the back wall, in front of a pile of sandbags. Jeremy eyed the target. The shotgun, snugged up against his shoulder, felt like a sudden extension of his body, as if it was screwed into him. In that second, as his finger closed around the trigger, Jeremy felt younger, as if years had fallen from his body. He suddenly felt equal. He sighted the target, took a breath, held it as he’d been instructed, and fired.

The weapon kicked back. It was like being punched by a professional boxer, or having the wind knocked out of him. But these sensations fled when he saw that the target had been shredded.

He cocked the weapon, ejecting the spent cartridge, and fired again.

This time the blast seemed more familiar.

He pumped the action confidently, another shell clattered to his feet, and he fired a third time.

The target was almost destroyed. It hung from an old-fashioned clothespin and twisted about, even though there was no breeze in the basement firing range.

“Not bad,” Jeremy said. “Worth every penny.” He felt a little like a child emerging from a roller-coaster ride. He wasn’t sure that the clerk could hear him, so he smiled triumphantly. “Now let me try the handgun.”

The clerk handed him the pistol.

In the adjacent gallery, the shopper with the semiautomatic he had no intention of buying paused to reload. He stole a glance at the target blasted into confetti by the shotgun next to him.

Nice shot, Doctor, Student #5 thought. But you won’t get that chance. That’s not how this is going to play out.

He confidently slapped in a full clip as he had done hundreds of times before and fought off the nearly overwhelming urge to laugh out loud because the man just on the other side of the flimsy barrier hadn’t recognized him, not even when they’d stood just paces apart. The idea that he’d been able to follow his target right to a gun shop, walk in just behind him, and now was only feet away while the last man on his list uselessly fired a live weapon in the wrong direction was delicious.

You could just turn ninety degrees, Doctor, and solve your dilemma right here, right now. He raised the weapon and aimed. Of course, so could I. But that’s far too easy. He fired and clustered four shots dead center in his target.

13

The two of them were aware the toxicology report was negative. But typed words on a paper form weren’t the same as knowing firsthand. Moth had directed them to the street in front of the high-end hotel.

“Are you sure?” Andy Candy said. “I can go in, ask around. You stay here in the car.”

She suddenly believed that part of her job was protecting Moth from Moth. This was a new realization that had just taken root within her.

“No. I have to do it,” he replied.

“Okay. Then we’ll go in together.”

He didn’t disagree.

She saw that Moth was already quivering slightly when they entered the hotel’s bar. It was dark inside, low light, welcoming textures, soft jazz playing in the background, the sort of place that combined fancy with familiar, paddle fans circling slowly, mirrors, comfortable leather-bound chairs, and low-slung tables. The bar itself was a deeply polished, glistening mahogany, smooth to the touch. Rows of expensive liquors were lined up against the wall, like soldiers on parade. It was a sophisticated place, where the martinis were shaken in gleaming containers and poured into chilled cut-glass goblets with a flourish. It was not the sort of bar where one ordered a Bud Light. It was a spot where wealthy folks came after big deals and celebrated, or where sports stars bought high-priced escorts to sit behind roped-off security barriers and flash jewelry and cash, but without the hype and energy of a South Beach nightclub. Andy Candy knew immediately if she’d asked for champagne, the bottle would be Dom Pérignon.

It was-Moth told her-where Ed had nearly drunk himself to death. He had pointed the bar out to his nephew once, driving by slowly and saying, “Who really wants to die in the mud and dirt with a bottle of rotgut? Might as well go out on silks and diamonds, waving a magnum of Chateau Lafite Rothschild.”

Moth and Andy Candy were immediately out of place.

They walked up to the bar uncomfortably. Tending the bar were two young men wearing bow ties, probably a few years older than Moth, and a woman wearing a tight white cotton shirt that was cut low enough to show off an ample cleavage. One of the men rapidly approached them.

“Kind of a dress code in here, guys,” he said in a not unfriendly way. He leaned forward. “And it’s expensive. Like way expensive. Black-card expensive. There’s a pretty nice sports bar two blocks away that’s more for college-age types.”

Andy Candy leaned forward. Moth seemed tongue-tied, staring at the arrays of liquors.

“Not drinking,” she said. “Just a quick question or two and then we’re out of here.”

She smiled, trying to be as attractive and enticing as possible.

“What sort of questions?” the bartender asked, a little taken aback. “You don’t work for TMZ or some sort of gossip site, do you?”

“No,” Andy said quickly, waving her hand and shaking her head. “Not anything like that.”

“Well?”

“Our uncle…” she guessed it would be easier if she adopted Ed as a relative, “… has gone missing. Many years ago, this was his absolute number one favorite place. We’re just wondering if anyone had seen him in the last month or so.”

The bartender nodded. He was experienced at the notion of missing and what it really meant. “Got a picture?”

Moth handed over his cell phone, which was opened to a recent photo of a grinning, poolside Ed Warner. The bartender stared at it for a moment, shook his head, then gestured to the other two behind the counter. The three of them craned over the picture.

Three shrugs.

“Nope,” the bartender said.

“He would have been drunk,” Andy said quickly. She could feel Moth stiffen beside her. “A drunk psychiatrist. And probably not a quiet drunk, either.”

Again the bartender shook his head. “One of us would remember,” he said. “And one thing you really get to know back here,” he added, gesturing the length of the bar. “Faces. Preferences. Regulars. That’s part of the drill in serving up drinks. As soon as that first taste of fifty-year-old Scotch hits the lips, no one is a stranger. Even in here. And when folks have too much… Well, let’s just say we’re very discreet. But we remember.”

He smiled. “Now, about that dress code… Business casual, they call it, and you guys…”

Andy Candy took Moth by the elbow. “Thanks,” she said.

She steered Moth back through the entrance. She felt like some rehabilitation nurse helping a soldier who’d lost a leg in war take a tentative step on a prosthetic device. Moth had not spoken inside.

“I think I need to go to Redeemer One,” was all he said.

She hummed familiar lyrics: If you got bad news, you wanna kick them blues…

It was Susan Terry’s habit to arrive at Redeemer One a few minutes after each meeting had begun. This was a curiosity to her-she was doggedly punctual for any prosecutorial conference or court session. But the addiction meetings at the church triggered such complicated feelings within her that she invariably shuffled her feet outside before heading in.

Delay wasn’t her usual style.

Impulsive was.

It was the most difficult part of her addiction, she thought, harnessing desire and compulsion-just enough so that she did not indulge in the cocaine she adored, but still had some leftover ferocity for arguments in courtrooms and processing crime scenes. She sometimes wished that she could be just a little bit addicted. That might have kept her happy, married and not alone.

She stood by the door to her car. Often in Miami the first few hours of night seem weakly apologetic, as if unsure about replacing the brilliant blue skies of day. She waited a few minutes, watching the other meeting regulars enter the church doors. She was parked near the back, deep in shadows, almost hidden. The church parking lot lights stopped a good two dozen feet from where she had parked. This was antithetical thinking: Most women knew instinctively to pull in close where the lights were strong and where no lingering, faceless threat-even in a church lot-could hide. It was as if Susan enjoyed daring some ski-masked rapist to jump out of the bushes at her.

Defiance and risk were another two words that she thought fit her.

Architect. Engineer. Dentist. She watched the others heading into the meeting. Most had a quick pace, bounding up the front steps. They all were feeling the same thing, she realized: a need to release that big insistent voice held fast deep within. She kicked at some loose gravel by her feet and watched a pebble nearly strike a tiny lizard, which fled instantly into a nearby tree stump.

She had lost that morning.

Lost, of course, didn’t really describe the cascade of emotions that accompanied certain court defeats. Throughout the day she’d had the sensation that she had exited some terribly dire theater, where, as in Hamlet, everyone was dead onstage at the end. It had been the denouement of an awful case. A thirteen-year-old boy-fuzzy-cheeked, his voice barely changed-had shot and killed his father with the old man’s prized Purdey shotgun. The gun was a $25,000, custom-made-in-England weapon that was supposed to be used in the rubber boot and tailored tweed pursuit of game birds on high-roller ranches and farms set aside in Texas or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It wasn’t supposed to be used for murder.

At the family’s mansion in the exclusive, gated Cocoplum section of Coral Gables, she had been distracted by an uncontrollably sobbing wife and a terrified younger sister who kept screaming over and over in a keening, high-pitched voice, like a record needle stuck in a groove. In the chaos, Susan had failed to realize that two detectives had taken the teenager into a side room and were questioning him aggressively. Far too aggressively. They’d read the juvenile killer his Miranda rights, but should have waited until some responsible adult was able to accompany him. They did not. They’d simply launched into one of the oldest tricks in the police detective’s arsenal: “Why’d yah do it, kid? You can tell us. We’re your friends and we’re just here to help you. Your dad, he was clearly a bad guy. Let’s get it all straightened out right now, and then we can all go home…”

Right. Fat chance.

It was a fine legal line and the detectives had not just crossed it, but trampled on it.

They had seen killer. The legal system saw child.

That was the precise distinction she had been on the scene to identify and the exact problem she had been there to avoid and she had failed. Dramatically.

So a judge in circuit court that morning had tossed out the kid’s cold confession, even though one of the detectives had dutifully videotaped it. And without that confession, proving what had actually happened that deadly night beyond a reasonable doubt was going to be hard, if not impossible.

The mother wouldn’t testify against her son.

The sister wouldn’t testify against her brother.

The whole family’s fingerprints were on the Purdey shotgun.

And she knew that the high-priced criminal defense attorney engaged by the family had lined up a series of teachers, psychologists, and school friends-all of whom would happily describe in sympathetic detail the relentless terror that the dead father had brought to that house.

And then that defense attorney would tell a jury it was all an accident. Tragic. Regrettable. Sad. Terrible even. But when all was said and done, an accident.

“The father was beating the mother as he had done a hundred times before and the son tried to threaten him with the shotgun to make him stop. Defending his mother. How sweet. How noble. We’d have all done the same thing. The poor lad, he didn’t even know it was loaded, and it went off…”

A powerful argument to a deeply moved jury-who would not see the coldness in the son’s eyes, nor the glee in his voice as he described patiently hunting the father through the many rooms of the house in much the same way the father had probably used the shotgun to stalk grouse in the fields. He’d ambushed the father in the study when the mother was nowhere near.

Money can’t buy you love, Susan said to herself, echoing another song.

Especially when there’s a serial abuser involved, she thought. The dead man might have been a prominent, fabulously wealthy businessman with a big Mercedes and a powerboat tied to his private dock, on every local board, lending his name to every local good cause and needy charity-but he liked to use his fists on his family.

Fuck him.

And now the kid’s going to get away with killing him.

Fuck the kid.

And just maybe fuck me, too.

At the very least, she knew she was due a real chewing-out. At the worst, she’d be spending a couple of months handling DUI cases in traffic court.

She hated complicated crimes. She liked simple ones. Bad guy. Innocent victim. Bang. Cops make an arrest. Here’s the gun. Here’s the confession. An efficient lineup of reliable witnesses. Plenty of forensic evidence. No problems. Then she could get up in a courtroom and point her finger with all the self-righteousness of some outraged Puritan staring at an accused witch.

But even more, she hated losing, even if in losing there was some measure of justice, as there had been that day. And when she lost, especially when she’d been humiliated, she invariably felt the tug of need. Cocaine instantly replaced defeat and helped her soar back into the necessary compulsion of being a prosecutor.

When your day is done and you wanna run…

So, on this night of failure that obscured truth, she was back at the AA meeting. Susan Terry sighed, thought she’d delayed long enough, started to hum the refrain, She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie… and emerged from the shadows. “Damn it to hell,” she said out loud, still thinking of the courtroom that morning. “It was all my fault.” The words my fault made her pause, because just at that moment she saw Moth hurrying toward the front door of Redeemer One.

Moth was already speaking when Susan slipped quietly into one of the chairs near the rear of the room, hoping that no one noticed her tardy entry. It did not take her long to realize he wasn’t talking about drink or drugs.

“Hello, I’m Timothy, and now I’ve got twenty-two days without a drink…”

Soft applause. Murmured congratulations.

“And I’m more convinced than ever that my uncle didn’t kill himself. I’ve been all over his life, and there’s nothing suicidal there.”

The room grew quiet.

Moth looked around, trying to measure in the eyes of the people in the room how they would react to what he was saying. He knew he should speak carefully, render his words and phrases organized and precise. But he was unable, and feelings tumbled from him like pearls from a broken strand.

“We all know-even me, and I’m the youngest here-what has to happen in order to make that last decision. The I can’t go on any longer decision. We all know the hole you have to fall into and the one you know you can’t climb out of. We all know the mistakes that are necessary…” He emphasized the word mistakes because he knew that everyone in the meeting would understand everything that was connected to that single word. Despair. Failure. Drugs and booze. Loss and agony. He paused again. Everyone in that room had probably imagined killing themselves even if they had not precisely said the word suicide out loud. “And more than almost everyone, we know what goes into that choice.”

Moth thought that everything he said had created a slight wind in the room, like an air current, cold, direct on the face. What do I know more than anything else about my uncle? Moth asked himself. The Ed I knew hated secrets. He hated lies. He’d put them all behind him.

He looked around. The entire point of being in that room right at that moment was to leave deception and dishonesty behind.

“It’s not there. Not for Ed. Not in the last few days. Not in the last few weeks. Not in the last few months or years. That leaves only one logical conclusion. It’s the same one I reached the minute I sobered up after his death.”

He looked around.

“I need help.”

When he said help, it was as if the room stiffened. Everyone was familiar with the sort of help that the meetings typically offered. But Moth was asking for something different.

The meeting slipped into silence. Susan Terry tried to assess the responses of the other addicts in the room to Moth’s declaration.

“So, you tell me,” Moth said cautiously, “where do I look for a killer?”

Again there was silence, but it was broken when the engineer leaned forward.

“When did he start drinking? I mean, really drinking…”

“About three years after he launched into his bad, dumb-ass marriage. He thought he needed a cover-up, or maybe he thought he could not be gay if he was married and he was lying to himself and everyone else about who he was. His practice was starting up, and things should have been great, except they weren’t…”

“So,” the engineer said, “that was when he started to kill himself.”

This was a harsh assessment. But accurate.

“And then,” the engineer continued, “he stopped trying to kill himself and came here.”

“That’s right,” Moth said.

The philosophy professor half-stood, then sat down and spoke in a determined voice, waving his arms theatrically to underscore his points. “If you go back-to when Ed first became a drunk like me or you or most of the people here-well, why would someone need to kill a person who was doing it to themselves so efficiently?”

A murmur of agreement.

“So, the only way a homicide makes sense today is if the reason for it transcends Ed’s drunken days. Sobriety, his life now-all that accomplishment and success-that has to be an affront. A challenge. I don’t know, but for someone, it had to be a lot more than just wrong,” the professor continued.

“Not a robbery. We know that. Not a suicide. That’s what you’re telling us. Not a family dispute or a sex thing. No triangle of jealousy. Those have all been ruled out. Not money or love. They’re off the table. What does that leave you?”

The dentist raised his hand to interrupt. He seemed excited as he rubbed his hands together.

Moth turned to him. He was a slight fellow, with a terrible comb-over and like many in his profession, well versed in suicide. Now he was nodding his head up and down fiercely, and he blurted out: “Revenge.”

“That’s what I was driving at,” said the philosophy professor.

Susan Terry sat ramrod-straight in her chair. Everything she heard seemed half-crazy, half-criminal. She thought she should shout out, tell everyone they were being stupid, it was a closed case and they shouldn’t let their imaginations run away with them, shouldn’t let Moth’s imagination push their own into fantasy.

There were dozens of warnings, denials, objections she wanted to scream. Why are you all being so stupid? She glanced over at the dentist. He was smiling, and now he was shaking his head, but not in the way one does if he disagrees-more as one does when he sees some great irony. “I read a lot of mystery books,” he said. There was a little laughter, then silence crept into the room again.

“So do I,” said the professor finally. “I just don’t let the other department faculty know.”

There was another low series of voices as the folks at Redeemer One bent heads together. Revenge wasn’t a word anyone had ever uttered in that setting.

“But for what?” Moth asked.

Again there was silence. Then the well-coiffed lady banker-lawyer spoke softly.

“Who did your uncle hurt?”

They all knew that the lists of people they had hurt were extensive for each of them. But quiet dominated the room.

The lady lawyer lowered her voice, but everyone at Redeemer One could hear her clearly: “Or maybe,” she said slowly, forming a sentence into what Moth believed was a question, “he did something worse?”

14

Standing beside his next victim had been intoxicating.

Risky-but well worth the thrill: like driving a car too fast on a wet highway, feeling the wheels slipping against the pavement, then magically regaining purchase.

Student #5 was back in Manhattan, at his own desk, less than five hours after watching the newly well-armed Jeremy Hogan pull out of the gun shop parking lot. Sometimes, he imagined, murder seems predestined. It was serendipity that I saw my target exiting his home, good fortune I was able to follow him unobserved, blind luck that he chose to go to the gun store, and then beating the greatest of odds when I stood within arm’s reach and went unrecognized.

He smiled, nodding his head. This death will be special.

He loved the danger. Connect more, he insisted to himself. Even if every time raises the threat of detection.

He had to stop his hand from reaching for his telephone, gathering the small attachment that electronically altered his voice, and dialing Doctor Hogan’s number.

Wait. Savor.

Rocking back in his seat, then standing and pacing about his apartment, clenching his hands together, then releasing them, shaking his wrists, as if he could loosen his body, Student #5 warned himself not to get carried away.

Stick to the plan.

Every battle is won before it is fought.

Student #5 kept quotations from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on cards that he posted on a bulletin board next to his desk.

Pretend inferiority and encourage your enemy’s arrogance.

If you are near your enemy, make him believe you are far from him. If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are close.

Attack him where he is unprepared. Appear where you are not expected.

It was important not just to know what routes Jeremy Hogan traveled, the hours he kept, the behaviors he couldn’t change no matter how much he might want to, but also to be able to anticipate how the doctor might find the emotional strength to try to alter familiar patterns in an effort to elude the person hunting him down. He did not believe Jeremy Hogan would be successful at this. People rarely are, he knew. They cling to established patterns because those are psychologically reassuring. In the face of death, people glue themselves to what they know, when in fact what they don’t know is closing in on them.

These were all observations he’d gleaned from his studies. They dated back to the days when he believed he was destined to be a doctor of the mind.

Who would have thought that the psychology of killing would be so close to the psychology of help?

He had fought off the temptation to assist the old man out to his car with his brand-new collection of guns and ammunition. It would have been a friendly, neighborly offer-but Student #5 knew he had already risked enough, just in trailing the doctor to the gun store and following him inside. He’d made no effort to try to change his voice when he had asked the proprietor for a weapon to try, subtly watching to see if the word tones might trigger a memory-and then recognition-in the old doctor.

He’d seen none.

He’d expected none.

It made him even more confident.

What great camouflage age is: Add a few crow’s-feet and deepen the jowls, put in a touch of gray against the temples, wear glasses to make it seem as if the eyes are weakening-and memory deceives us.

Context, too, was important. The doctor who had betrayed him once when he was young wasn’t able to recognize that the nice adult thirty years later holding the store’s door wide for him as he struggled with his purchases was the man who was going to kill him.

Because he never considered that I would be right there at that moment.

Sometimes the best mask is no mask at all.

A sudden curiosity overcame him, and Student #5 started to rummage around in his desk drawers, until he came across a small, red-leather-embossed picture album. He flipped it open. There he was, graduating from high school, and then a similar shot-arm in arm with his parents-when he completed college. Grins of accomplishment and black academic robes. Innocence and optimism. These were followed by a couple of bare-chested beach pictures, some candid snapshots of Student #5 with girls whose names he couldn’t recall or friends that had faded from his life completely.

He felt a momentary twinge of anger.

Everyone is happy when you are normal.

Everyone hates you when you are not.

Really, they fear you, when it is you that has everything to fear. People don’t understand: As you lose your mind, you can also lose your hope.

He took a deep breath. Memory blended with sadness, which re-formed into rage, and he gripped the edge of the desk, steadying himself. He knew that when he allowed the past to intrude on what he was planning-even when it was the past that had created the need-it muddied things.

No one ever came to visit me in the hospital. It was like I was contagious.

No friends.

No family.

No one.

My madness belonged solely to me.

There were no pictures from those hospital months, and none taken after he was released. Then he flipped the pages to the picture he knew was the last in the album, but the most important. It had been taken in the quadrangle outside the building that housed the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry. Five smiling faces. Everyone wearing the same uniform: white lab coat and dark slacks or jeans. They had linked arms around each other.

He was in the center of the photo.

Were they already planning to ruin my career?

Did they know what they were doing to my future?

Where was understanding? Sympathy?

His hair was unkempt, tangled, a long mess, his look furtive behind the smile. He could see how little sleep he’d had, how many meals he’d skipped. He could see how stress was pulling him across hot coals and plunging him into freezing waters. His shoulders slumped. His chest was sunken. He looked slight, weak-almost as if he’d been beaten up or lost a fight. Madness could do that, just as effectively as cancer or heart disease.

Why did I smile?

He stared at the look on his face. He could see hurt and uncertainty behind his eyes.

This pain was truth.

Their embrace, friendly looks, wide, happy smiles, and camaraderie-those were all lies.

Student #5 removed the photo from the glassine sheaf that held it. He reached out and seized a red marker from his desktop. Holding the marker in his hand like a knife, he rapidly drew an X through each face-including his own.

He stared at the defaced snapshot, then walked swiftly into the kitchen. He found a box of wooden matches in a drawer and went to the sink and struck a light. He let the flame curl over the edge of the picture, holding it sideways, bending it so that the flame would envelop the image before he dropped it into the stainless steel basin. He watched the photo crinkle, blacken, and melt. Now, all the people in that picture are dead, he thought.

Killing is making me normal.

Then he waved his hands above the sink.

He didn’t want the smoke to set off an alarm.

15

Unsettling dreams and night sweats filled Andy Candy’s sleep.

Her waking hours-the ones spent apart from Moth-were riven with doubts. She was suddenly immersed in doing things that might be very wrong, and might be very right; it was hard for her to tell. Complicating matters for her was a residual fury that would overcome her at odd moments, when least expected, during which she would find herself picturing what had happened, trying to ascertain the exact moment when she could have changed everything.

There were times when she thought:

I died that night.

The music had been loud. Brutally loud.

Unrecognizable tunes. Incomprehensible rap lyrics that were about pimps, whores, and guns. Bass heavy, hard-driving, throbbing. Ear-splitting. So loud she had to shout to be heard even an inch or two away and her throat had become raw almost instantly. The frat house had been jam-packed. Even moving a few feet one way or the other had been difficult. The heat had been overwhelming. Sweat, slurred words, gyrating bodies, lights that flickered on and off, red lamps that glowed. Plastic glasses filled with beer or wine being passed overhead. The air was thick with cigarette and marijuana smoke, which mingled with body odors. Occasional shouts, roars of laughter like waves, even screams that might have been joy and might have been panic blended with the relentless music. Hard liquor was swigged from dozens of bottles, shared right and left, guzzled like water.

Not knowing where her date was, she’d fought her way to a side room, hoping to find a little space amidst the press of bodies so she could breathe, all the time telling herself, Get out of here now because the cops will surely be here soon, but not listening to her own good advice. The side room was also packed, but the students were jammed back against the walls, creating a small empty space in the center-like a gladiatorial arena. She’d craned her neck to see what everyone was looking at, and as she did this, she heard a wild and unrestrained moan, which was absorbed by cheers, like at a sporting contest.

In the center, a completely naked, heavily muscled boy was sitting on a steel folding chair. His legs were spread wide. She remembered he had a tattoo on one arm-the clichéd Tribal Armband favored by the kids lacking imagination, or else too stoned or too drunk to consider something original when they stumbled into the tattoo artist’s parlor. She had stared at the tattoo for a moment, before focusing on the boy’s erect organ. It was impressive, and he held it like a sword.

In front of him was a naked girl.

She was dancing, twisting her body provocatively, inches away from the boy who’d moaned.

Andy Candy hadn’t recognized her.

As muscular as the boy was, the girl-no more than nineteen or twenty-was statuesque. Flat stomach, large breasts, long legs, and a great mane of dark hair that she shook in time to some inner rhythm. She waved a bottle of Scotch in one hand, poured some of the booze down her chest, licked it from her fingers, then thrust her hips forward as if asking everyone watching to admire her sex, her shaved pubic region. The crowd cheered as she filled her mouth with liquor, then dropped to her knees in front of the boy-gracefully, Andy Candy had thought then, maybe even athletically. She lowered her mouth, letting Scotch dribble from her lips, then pulled back, teasing. The boy had moaned again, straining with his erection toward her. The girl, playing to the crowd, pointed to the erection, then to her lips, as if asking a question. A cheer went up. Cries of Yes! and Do it! thickened the air. Another frat member circled around the couple, handheld video camera in his hand, getting a close-up as she waved to the crowd like a politician acknowledging a cheering mob, then pitched forward and seemed to swallow the boy whole. This went on for a few seconds, her head moving up and down rhythmically as she fellated him, before she leapt up. She faced the crowd-about two-thirds boys, but a number of young women, too-and bowed. A performance artist. With a flourish, cupping her arms behind her head to display her coordination and strength, she abruptly turned around, and slowly lowered herself onto him.

Her face broke into a smile, and she issued a long Ohhhhh.

The young woman had turned to the frat boy with the camera and made a kissing shape with her lips. She was making love more to the crowd and camera than to the muscled boy behind her.

Each thrust, each gyration, raised another wild cheer. People started to clap in time to each up-and-down movement.

Andy Candy had turned away from the show before completion. She wasn’t a prude-she’d been to enough out-of-control parties in her college years, and she’d seen sexual spectacles before-but this night there was something in the sweaty abandon she’d seen that unsettled her. Perhaps it was the idea that what should have been intimate and private was being displayed so theatrically. She had wondered if the straining erection and the shaved sex even knew each other’s names.

When she turned away, she’d caught sight of the boy who’d ostensibly invited her to the party. He fought his way toward her, glanced over her shoulder, and caught a glimpse of the action in the side room.

“Whoa,” he’d exclaimed. “That’s intense.” His face broke into a grin.

He was a nice enough fellow, she thought, seemed polite, attentive. Sensitive, even. He’d shared his notes on Dickens with her after she’d missed the class on Great Expectations with a touch of stomach flu. He came from an expensive suburb. His father was a button-down corporate lawyer and divorced from his free-spirit mother, who now lived with her new family on an avocado farm in California. He’d taken her to dinner once, not a pizza place, but a Chinese restaurant where they’d sat and enjoyed moo shu and talked about a writing course they planned to take in the last semester of their senior year. He said he liked poetry. He’d given her a small kiss when he’d dropped her off, and asked her if she might want to go to a party that weekend. Little details-all seemingly benign, and none of which really amounted to who someone was.

“I want to leave,” she’d said.

“Yeah. No problem. We’ll get out of here. Things might be getting out of hand. But you look like you can use a bit of something strong first.”

She’d nodded.

Was that where she went wrong? No. It was going to the party in the first place.

“Here, take mine. I’ll get another. It’s too hard to fight your way to the bar.”

Mine. That’s what he’d said. But it wasn’t his. It was always for me and me alone.

He’d handed her a large plastic cup filled with ice and ginger ale mixed liberally with cheap Scotch. The same brand probably that the naked girl was drinking.

I hate the taste of Scotch. Why did I take it? Trust.

She’d ignored the first rule of college parties: Never drink anything that you haven’t seen opened and poured.

She didn’t connect the slightly chalky taste with anything suspicious, and certainly not the GHB that liberally laced the drink.

She had gulped it down.

Thirsty. I shouldn’t have been so thirsty. If I’d only taken a modest little sip, then handed it back.

The date had smiled.

Rapist. What does a rapist look like? Why don’t they wear a special shirt or have a special mark? A scarlet R, maybe. Maybe they should sport a scar or a tattoo-something so I could have known what was going to happen to me after I passed out.

“Okay,” he said. “Well fortified. You look a bit pale. Come on-I put your coat upstairs in my room. Let’s get it and get the hell out of here, maybe go get a cup of coffee someplace.”

No coffee. There was never going to be any coffee.

It took a few minutes to work their way through the throngs, and she was already dizzy by the time they reached the stairs. The music seemed to have gotten louder, all guitars and shrieks and drums pounding out a violent backbeat.

“Hey, you okay?” the nice-guy date asked midway up the stairs.

Solicitous but not surprised. That should have told her something.

“A little woozy,” she said. “Feel a little weird. Must be the heat going to my head.”

She’d slurred her words, but she wasn’t drunk. She remembered that detail afterward.

She’d steadied herself with the handrail.

“You need some fresh air,” he said. “Here, let me help you.”

Nice. Polite. Gentlemanly. Thoughtful. He said he liked poetry. He took her arm to help her, except they were heading upstairs, not outside.

She knew she needed the air.

She didn’t get any. Not for some time.

I should have turned him in. Called campus security. Filed a complaint. Gone to the police. Hired a lawyer.

Why didn’t you?

I don’t know. I was lost. I was confused. I didn’t know what happened to me.

And so, you let him off the hook.

Yes. I guess so.

This, too, she remembered: nausea overcoming her in the morning. Violent, dizzying, gut-wrenching nausea. And then again-the same sickness repeated, slightly more than a month later.

And one additional memory: the nurse at the clinic kept calling her dear as she helped her up and fitted her onto the examination table. The instruments were stainless steel, but glistened so brightly she imagined she might have to shade her eyes. They had knocked her out with anesthetics, and told her she wouldn’t feel any pain.

Physical pain, that is.

The other kind was constant.

The guilt made her cry. Less as the days went by, but she could still feel her eyes filling at what she imagined were random moments. Right and wrong blended within her into an unmanageable tension, and even if it was dissipating, it was slow to leave her. She told herself that there had to be a faster way out of the spider’s web of emotions that trapped her.

Yes, Andy Candy thought, maybe I should go back to school and kill the frat boy. Moth will help me, after we kill whomever it is he wants to kill.

That would make things even for everyone.

Moth was waiting for her outside his apartment. He looked hesitant, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something.

She pulled to the curb but Moth didn’t immediately get into the car. Instead he leaned down, and she lowered the window. A blast of hot air penetrated the car interior.

“Hey,” she said softly. “Where to today?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Then he added, “I’m not sure I’ll ever know.”

They walked. Side by side. They would have appeared to anyone to be a young couple deep in discussion, probably talking about some momentous decision, like renting an apartment together, or if this was the right time for one of them to meet the other’s parents. But a casual observer would not have noticed that as close as they seemed pressed together, they did not touch.

Andy Candy thought Moth sounded defeated. He was glum, filled with a sudden pessimism. The energy that had characterized their first days together seemed to have fled.

“Tell me,” she said softly, using a delicate tone that a current, not former, lover would employ. “What is it?”

The sun was beating down on them, but Moth’s look was overcast. They were heading into a small park, trying to find some shade beneath trees. Children were playing on swing sets and jungle gyms in a nearby exercise area. They were loud, in that unrestrained way that children having fun have, and it only seemed to make Moth’s voice sound more discouraged than it already did.

“I’m stuck,” Moth said slowly.

She had the sense to know something else was coming and she kept quiet as they walked a few more strides. Moth kicked at a dead brown palm frond that had fallen and littered the sidewalk. Then they sat together on a small bench.

When he did speak, it was like listening to a tortured soliloquy by a new professor giving his first lecture on a subject he was uncertain about.

“When a historian looks at a murder, it’s either assessing politics-when that anarchist shot the archduke in Sarajevo and somehow managed to trigger the First World War-or it’s social, like when Robert Ford gunned down Jesse James from behind while James was hanging a picture in his home. There’s a clear-eyed, cold-blooded way of deconstructing all the factors, leading to a conclusion about the murder. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Algebra of death. Even if there are eleven thousand documents that get analyzed. But Uncle Ed’s killing, it’s all backward, although maybe that’s not the right word. I see the answer-he’s dead-but not the equation that results in that conclusion. And I don’t know where to look.”

“Yes we do,” Andy Candy said slowly. She thought she should take Moth’s hand and squeeze it, but she did not. “It’s in the past.”

“Yes. Easy to say. But where?”

“What makes sense?”

“Nothing makes sense. Everything makes sense.”

“Come on, Moth.”

He hesitated. “I don’t know where to look, or how to look.”

“Yes you do,” Andy Candy said. “We’re looking for hate. Big-time, out-of-control hate. The kind of hate that lasts for years.” Will I have that hate? she wondered suddenly.

“Not out of control,” Moth said. “Or sort of out of control, but out of control after years of planning, if that makes sense.” He stopped. He laughed a little. “I have to stop using that word,” he said.

“What word?”

“Sense.”

She smiled with him. She watched him lift his eyes and stare across the park toward the frolicking children. “I’ve been thinking about when and why I drink. It’s always moments like this, where I’m unsure what to do. If I had an assignment, a paper due, a presentation, you name it, no matter how tense or stressed, then I was always okay. It’s when I got, I don’t know, unsure about things. Then I found a drink. Or ten. Or more, because you stop counting pretty fast.”

Moth laughed, but not because anything was funny. “First filled with doubt, then filled with booze. Pretty simple, Andy, if you think about it. Uncle Ed used to tell me that there are many things people can handle in life, but uncertainty might be the hardest.”

Moth turned to Andy Candy.

“What about you, Andy,” he said slowly. “Are you unsure about what you’re doing?”

She was unsure about everything, but shook her head. “You mean helping you?”

“Yes.”

Andy Candy realized both Yes and No would be the same lie. “Moth, there is nothing certain in my life right at this minute, except that maybe my mother’s dogs still love me. And probably she still loves me, although she’s leaving me pretty much alone right now. And my dad would still love me, but he’s dead. And so here I am. I’m still here.”

Moth nodded. “So where next?”

“Where can someone learn to hate you?”

Andy Candy thought right then about the frat boy. Why couldn’t she have seen that smile for what it really was? Aloud, she said, “Ed at college. Ed at medical school. Because we can’t see anyone in the present-day Ed’s life that would want to kill him except maybe his ex-wife, but she seems too tied up in Gucci to bother.”

Moth laughed. “True.” Again he paused. “Adams House,” he said. “Adams House at Harvard-that’s where he did his undergraduate work. He had two roommates. We should call them. But medical school…”

His voice trailed off, then regained strength. “I’ll have to think about that,” he said. Andy Candy stole a sideways glance at Moth. He was sitting straighter on the park bench than before and was twisting his right fist into his open left palm.

16

Susan Terry sat behind her desk tapping a pencil against a stack of files spread out in front of her. A gas station clerk shot, a pair of armed robberies, a domestic dispute homicide, and three rapes-more than enough to occupy her for weeks on end. She tossed the pencil down, watching it clatter off the desk and fall to the floor, where she left it. She stood up, went to the window, and looked out. She saw a breeze ripple palm fronds, looked up higher, eyes tracking a jumbo jet descending into Miami International Airport. She turned her gaze toward a nearby parking lot, where she hypnotically followed the route of a black Porsche making its way out to the highway. When the sports car disappeared she gripped the edge of the windowsill and began swearing under her breath-an abrupt torrential downpour of disconnected god damn its, sonofabitches, and fuck fuck fucks until she was almost out of breath.

She said out loud: “He’s got absolutely no right or reason to think the way he does.” Picturing Moth at Redeemer One made her increasingly angry. “Doesn’t he get it? Closed case. Suicide. We’re all sorry. Tough luck, kid. Put some flowers on your fucking uncle’s grave and get on with life and sobriety.”

There is something dangerous in what he’s doing, she insisted inwardly, but precisely what was so dangerous eluded her. Her experience with murder tended toward the explosive-the drug deal gone wrong, the husband or wife who suddenly decided they were fed up with being constantly nagged and coincidentally had a gun in their hand.

The dead uncle’s file was on top of some cabinets in a corner of the office. She had placed it on a cart that one of the secretaries rolled by every day, files to be filed, but for some reason had pulled it back and stuck it on top of all the homicides, robberies, and other sundry felonies crowding her schedule. Typically, hard copies of paperwork on closed cases were shredded, and electronic copies kept in some pile of bytes hidden in a computer.

For a moment, she imagined sending a homicide detective over to talk to Moth. A righteous Come to Jesus, one-sided, tough-edged conversation:

“Look, kid, stop fucking around with things you don’t understand. We were all over this case. And now it’s closed. Don’t make me come see you again. You getting what I’m saying, kid?”

She could do that, no problem. She also knew that this sort of minimally strong-arm tactic wouldn’t go over well at Redeemer One. And she ruefully acknowledged she needed that place as much as she needed anything in her life-because she didn’t have anything else in her life other than her job-even if she rarely spoke at the meetings, and tried to hide in the corners. She surprised herself by recognizing how much she needed to just listen.

“All right,” she said again, with a near-lecturing tone of voice to no one in the room. “No cops. Do your job, even though it sucks and this is a complete waste of time. Make yourself a hundred percent certain.”

She went over and retrieved the file and plopped down behind her desk.

Autopsy. Toxicology. Crime scene analysis.

All said the same thing.

She reread each detective’s interview report. Ex-wife. Live-in lover. Therapist. The detectives had also contacted everyone on Ed Warner’s current patient roster. They were thorough enough to go back a few years, even speaking with some ex-patients. She herself had read through Ed Warner’s computer files and office visit notes, searching for any telltale sign that what was obvious wasn’t. There wasn’t even an abrupt termination-some patient that couldn’t be helped or failed to pay on time-and she matched everyone who was seeing or had seen Ed Warner with his carefully notated diagnoses. One upper-class neurosis after another: lots of angst; rampant depressions; some drug and alcohol abuse. But no signs of uncontrollable rage.

And absolutely no murder.

Susan Terry hunched over, looking through all the documentation, then patiently looking through it a second time.

With the last page, she leaned back, suddenly exhausted.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nada. Zilch. Rien du tout.”

She admonished herself: “An hour you could have spent doing something worthwhile.”

The papers were strewn about her desktop, so she began gathering them, sticking all back into an accordion-style folder with “Ed Warner-Suicide” and the date in black ink. The last item into the folder was the autopsy report. She was shoving it in, along with the rest, when she had a sudden idea.

“I wonder,” she said, speaking out loud again to no one except herself. “Did they… I bet they didn’t-Jesus…”

She removed the autopsy report and flipped through it for what had to be the millionth time. The report was a combination of entries-blanks filled in on a standardized form-alongside clipped, dictated narrative: “Subject presents as a fifty-nine-year-old male in otherwise good condition…”

“Shit,” she blurted. What she was looking for was not there. “Shit, shit, shit.” Another torrent of obscenities clouded the room.

Simplest of tests.

Gunshot residue. GSR in prosecutor parlance.

A swab of the dead man’s hand. A quick chemical concoction. A conclusion: Yes. His hand displayed signs of a recently fired weapon.

Except they hadn’t done it.

Susan inwardly argued with herself.

Of course not. Why bother? The gun was lying on the floor right by his outstretched fingers. It was obvious. No need to work extra hard on something so clear-cut.

She stood up, paced around her desk twice, then sat down heavily.

Look, she told herself, it doesn’t mean anything. So they neglected one test, and not all that important a one, either. Big fuckin’ deal. Happens all the time. The preponderance of the evidence all points directly to one inescapable conclusion.

She suddenly had trouble convincing herself of this.

Susan Terry tried to make herself put the file back on the cabinet where it could wait for the secretary to take it in the morning, shred the paper, and electronically file each report away in some storage space where Susan would no longer have to think about it and it could grow whatever the modern electronic equivalent of moldy and forgotten is.

Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, she inwardly repeated. She placed the file back on her desk.

“Someone who hated Ed back in college so much he would carry a homicidal grudge over decades? Not a chance. Larry, what do you think?”

“Ludicrous.”

Moth and Andy Candy had set up a conference call with Ed Warner’s two Harvard roommates. Frederick was an investment banker in New York and Larry was a professor of political science at Amherst College. Both claimed to be busy men but had agreed to speak out of respect for their dead college friend.

“But,” Moth persisted, “didn’t he have any conflicts, arguments, I don’t know…”

“Ed’s only problem stemmed from his own inner conflicts over who he was,” said the political scientist. This was a euphemism for homosexuality. “His friends all knew or suspected and frankly, even though the times were different then, didn’t much care.”

“I would concur,” said the investment banker. “Although it was clear that if there was some element of anger, you know, something that might cause a murder, that would have come from Ed’s strained relationship with his family. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. Lots of pressure to succeed and make a name for himself, that sort of distant but insistent and often crippling demands. At Harvard, that wasn’t uncommon. Saw it all the time. And, at our age then, it led to a fairly regular type of rebelliousness or a tumble into depression.”

He paused, then added. “Should have seen our hair. And the music we listened to. And the unusual substances we ingested.”

The voices on the telephone were tinny, but filled with the flush of memory.

“Ed was no different from the rest of us,” the political science professor said. “There were some undergraduates who really struggled with the pressures at Harvard. Some that dropped out, some that got strung out, some that took the saddest way out. Suicides and attempted suicides weren’t unfamiliar events. But Ed’s issues weren’t that much more profound than anyone else’s and nothing he did spilled over into some sort of grudge-type anger like you’re hunting for.”

There was some silence, while Moth tried to think of another question. He could not. Andy Candy could see the blank being drawn on Moth’s face, and so she thanked the two roommates and hung up.

Can you wear discouragement like a suit of clothes? she wondered, because she could see it written all over Moth’s face. Another dead end.

The abrupt thought arrived within her unbidden: Don’t let him give up. It will kill him.

So before Moth could say anything, she said, “Okay, on to medical school. That makes more sense to me anyway.”

Moth used an efficient lie.

My uncle has passed away and I’m trying to reach out to his classmates at medical school to let them know about his death and possibly help contribute to an educational fund at the university, which he was eager to establish. It’s in his will.

Andy Candy duplicated this falsehood at the Miami hospital where Ed Warner had done his residency in psychiatry.

The dual calls resulted in a helpful list provided by an alumni office secretary of 127 names, along with e-mail addresses and some medical practice websites. Ed had subsequently joined a group of first-year psychiatry residents in Miami.

The two sat next to each other in a study carrel in the main library at Moth’s graduate school. They each had a laptop computer open and easy Internet access.

“Lots of names,” Andy Candy whispered. There were other students working nearby, and anything spoken was hushed. She grabbed a piece of scrap paper and wrote down: surgeons, internal medicine, radiologists-killers?

Moth took his pen and drew a line through each subspecialty and then wrote only shrinks. He understood this actually made no sense, from the historian’s perspective. A proper assessment of any era precludes no factors, and he guessed that an orthopedic surgeon could be a killer as readily as a dermatologist. But it made the most sense to focus on Ed’s profession. A good historian, he thought, starts close and works outward.

He wrote: Match Day.

Andy Candy nodded. The medical school had provided a list of where each graduate had been matched for their residencies. Ed’s name was near the end with the abbreviation psych following it. She went back, listed thirteen other names that were designated the same way and the hospitals they were sent to train at. Ed was the only newly minted doctor to be sent to Miami.

She took six. He took seven. They started a Google search on each name. Odd bits of information came up-practices, awards, fellowships, a driving-under-the-influence arrest, a divorce that landed in court.

But these details didn’t interest them.

What did show up made Andy Candy want to shout out loud, but that would have aroused everyone in the library.

She’d turned toward Moth and seen that he was rigid, ramrod-straight, next to her. His face had paled a little and she saw his fingers quivering above the keyboard of his laptop.

“What are the odds…” he’d whispered so softly she could barely hear him, as he turned the computer toward her and pointed, “that out of fourteen names, four are already dead?”

Low, she thought. Impossibly low. Improbably, incredibly, unbelievably low. Andy Candy stifled her desire to scream and wondered if it should be: homicidally low.

17

A Third Conversation

Jeremy Hogan had spread a deadly array of weaponry on the dining room table: shotgun, handgun, boxes of ammunition, the fireplace poker, a selection of kitchen carving knives, a six-battery black steel flashlight that he thought could effectively double as a club, and a ceremonial replica of a Civil War-era cavalryman’s sword that he’d been given after a speech fifteen years earlier at a military college in Vermont. His subject that day had been post-traumatic stress disorders in victims of crime. He wished he could remember what he’d said. He wasn’t sure whether the sword was sharp enough to actually penetrate skin, although it might be intimidating if he waved it around.

He practiced loading and unloading the revolver, and then the shotgun. He wasn’t quick, sometimes fumbling the rounds, and he feared he would shoot himself in the foot or leg. When he ejected one live cartridge from the 12-gauge’s magazine, it fell to the floor and rolled underneath an antique sideboard. It took him a few minutes to extricate it, finally using the ceremonial sword, still in its tasseled scabbard, to reach to the back. The cartridge and the sword came up covered with dust.

Mid-morning, he constructed a makeshift target, stuffing an old shirt with rags, frayed towels, and rolled-up newspaper. He added some kindling wood from the fireplace to give the target heft and retrieved a broken dining room chair from the attic to prop it all up. He took the target outdoors, across his flagstone patio, into the yard that led to thick deer-infested forest and onetime farmers’ fields that stretched behind his house. It was not lost on him that he was putting the chair in the middle of the landscape his dead wife had once loved to paint in vibrant watercolors.

After retrieving the weapons from inside, he paced off a ten-yard distance and squared up. Handgun first. He raised the weapon, realized he’d forgotten his earplugs on the table inside, put the gun down on the damp grass (hoping the moisture wouldn’t harm it), trotted back inside and fitted the ear protection, then went back out again and assumed the firing stance the gun store owner had demonstrated. He thought he got it right. Two hands on the weapon, feet slightly apart. Knees slightly flexed. Weight on the balls of his feet. He bounced a little, trying to find the right position, one he’d be comfortable in. The gun store owner had emphasized this.

Deep breath. Odd thought: How can I be comfortable if I’m facing someone who wants to kill me?

He fired three rounds.

All missed.

Maybe this is too great a distance, he considered. He moved several yards closer. I mean, isn’t he likely to be only a few feet away? Or maybe not. What sort of Wild West shoot-out do you think is going to happen?

Jeremy pursed his lips together, held his breath again, took significantly more careful aim, and fired the remaining three rounds. The gun jumped and bucked in his hand like an electric current, but this time he managed to control it a little better.

One shot winged the shirt collar, one missed, and the third smashed into the center, knocking the target over.

Good enough, he told himself, knowing that this was a lie.

He set the Magnum down, walked over, and lifted the target back into position, then returned to his ten-yard firing spot. Again mimicking the position he’d been shown the day before, he snugged the shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

The blast staggered him slightly, but he saw the target absorb the brunt of the shot. The shirt shredded, some of the kindling and paper flew in the air, and the whole thing toppled backward and sideways.

Jeremy lowered the weapon.

“Not bad,” he said. “I do believe I’m becoming dangerous.”

The shotgun is better. Don’t need to be nearly so precise.

He worked the plugs out of his ears and felt a tingling in his shoulder. For a moment, he was confused, because the force of the shotgun’s explosion seemed to be echoing, and then he realized that the phone was ringing inside his house, muffled but insistent. Clutching his weapons, he hurried inside to the kitchen.

As before, the caller ID was blank.

I know who it is.

He did not pick it up. He simply stared at the receiver, as if he could see the ringing.

It went silent.

I know who it is.

The phone rang again.

Jeremy reached for the receiver, but stopped his hand. One ring. Two rings. Three.

Most routine, ordinary callers would give up. Leave a message. Telephone solicitors don’t allow more than four or five rings before they irritatingly decide to try later.

Six rings. Seven. Eight.

When I was a child, when people had a telephone on the wall-like I do in the kitchen, or sitting on the desk; like I do upstairs-one had telephone manners. Before auto- answering machines and cell phones with an “ignore” button and video conferencing, before cloud data storage technology and all the other modern things we take for granted, it was considered polite to let the phone ring ten times before hanging up. No longer. Now people get frustrated after three or four.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

The phone kept ringing.

Jeremy smiled. I just learned something. He’s very patient.

But then, a second, chilling thought: He knows I’m here?

How? He can’t.

Impossible.

No, not impossible.

He picked it up. Thirteeenth ring. Was that bad luck?

“Whose fault is it?”

He’d expected that question. Jeremy took a deep breath, mustered years of knowledge, and replied rapidly.

“It’s my fault, of course. Whatever it is. Disagreeing with you on this point makes no sense. Not any longer. So… Any chance that by conceding your position, apologizing profusely, offering up some sort of mea culpa in a public forum, maybe donating a large sum to your favorite charity, I can avoid being murdered?”

His own question-a little rushed, spoken like an academic lecturer-was almost flippant, maybe even a little ridiculous. He’d thought hard about the right tone. Every decision he made was a gamble. Would sounding unafraid make his killer act precipitously? Would he live longer, be able to find a way to protect himself, if he sounded cowed, terrified? Contradictions flooded him. Which would draw out the process of murder? What would buy him the time he needed?

Clutching the phone tightly, Jeremy raced through options. Every word he spoke was a decision.

An actor on the stage becomes one person or another, wears his emotions outwardly as he speaks his lines. Method acting. Become what you have to portray.

He breathed in sharply.

What do the poker players say? All in.

There was a slight hesitation over the phone line, then an equally slight laugh.

“If I were to say, Yes there’s a chance, how would you respond, Doctor?”

Jeremy could feel his entire body quivering. His fear was profound. It was almost as if he could feel the presence of his murderer in the room with him. The darkness in the man’s voice overcame all the mid-morning sunlight streaming through the windows, the benign blue sky above. Talking to this man intent on killing him was a little like descending into a shadow that enveloped him.

Do not let terror creep into your voice.

Provoke him. Maybe he will slip.

“Well,” he said cautiously, as if he’d had time to think about his reply, “I suppose then we could have a reasonable conversation about what you would want me to do. Charities we could consider for donations. Actions I could take to try to balance this wrong you imagine I’ve done to you.”

Jeremy paused, then added, “Of course, this conversation could only be defined as reasonable if you aren’t some fantasy-obsessed near psychotic and all your talk and threats aren’t merely a product of your overwrought imagination. If that’s the case, I can easily prescribe some medications that will help you, and certainly recommend a good therapist you can see to work through these issues.”

He said all this in a clipped, not amused doctor voice.

Let’s see how you react to that, he thought.

Another pause. A short laugh. A bemused question:

“Do you think I’m psychotic, Doctor?”

“You might be. Probably on an edge-even if you do manage to conceal it in your voice. I’d like to be able to help you.”

He won’t expect that tack, Jeremy believed.

“You know, Doctor, you sound a little like those white-collar criminals you see on the news, who stand all contrite before a judge, all eager to serve up soup to homeless folks in a shelter instead of going to prison for the millions they stole and the lives they wrecked.”

Jeremy licked his lips. He wondered why they were so dry.

“I’m not them,” he replied.

Weak. Weak. Weak. He berated himself inwardly.

“Really? It’s an interesting question, Doctor. Tell me this: What is the right punishment for someone who ruined another person’s life? What does one do with the person who stole every hope and dream, every ambition and every opportunity? What’s the proper penalty?”

“There are degrees of guilt. Even the law recognizes that.”

Impotent. Mealy-mouthed. Crippled.

“But we are not in a court, are we, Doctor?”

Jeremy suddenly thought he saw an opportunity.

“Did I put you in prison with an assessment? Did I testify against you in a trial? Do you think I misdiagnosed you?”

He regretted his bluntness. Ordinarily he would try to elicit answers more subtly. But the caller made that difficult.

“No. That would be too simple. And anyway, even a psychotic would probably recognize that you were merely doing your job.”

“No they wouldn’t,” Jeremy responded. He was thinking hard, trying to add each word the caller made into a picture. It wasn’t in court. What else might it be? He saw an answer: Teaching.

But before he could act on this idea, the caller responded with another laugh. “Well then, Doctor, I guess we have the answer to your inquiries about whether I’m a psychotic.”

Outmaneuvered. Come on, think!

Again the caller paused. “It’s interesting talking with you, Doctor. Curious, isn’t it? Relationships: father and son, mother and child, lovers, coworkers, old friends. New friends. Each connection has its own special qualities. But here, we’re in very significant territory, aren’t we? The relationship between a killer and his victim. Puts weight on every word.”

He sounds like me, Jeremy thought.

Then abruptly: Follow that.

“Your other victims-if there really are any; I can’t be sure, you know-did you create a connection with each?”

“Astute, Doctor. You challenge me to prove that I’ve killed before. That might help you figure out who I am. No such luck. Sorry. But this is what I would say: I think in any killing there are at least two levels of conjunction. There’s the level that exists that caused the need for killing. Then there is the moment of death. I would think those were arenas that you probed in your career.”

Jeremy found himself nodding.

“Have you spoken to your other victims before you killed them?”

“Some yes. Some no.”

Okay. That’s something, Jeremy thought. In some situations Mister Who’s at Fault needs direct confrontation. In others, who knows? He kept probing.

“Which situation gave you more satisfaction?”

A snort. “They were equally satisfying. Just in different ways. You would know that, Doctor.”

“Do you kill us all in the same way?”

“Good question, Doctor. Police, prosecutors, professors of criminal justice, they all like patterns. They like seeing obvious connections, being able to add details together. They favor crimes that are a little like those paint-by-numbers kits that you might give a child. Fill in blue in number 10. Red in 13. Yellow and green in 2 and 12. And suddenly what you’re painting becomes clear. I’d think you’d have figured that I’m smarter than that.”

Smarter than most of the killers I’ve met. What does that tell me?

A hesitation, then the caller added, “Keep trying, Doctor. I like a challenge. One has to think clearly if one intends to be both oblique and specific at the same time.”

Jeremy imagined a grin on the caller’s face.

“So everyone has died in a different way?”

“Yes.”

He realized that he’d gripped the phone so tightly his fingers were white against the black plastic surface. He guessed the conversation was like steering an out-of-control car down an icy hill. He was careening, sliding, trying to will the tires to regain purchase on the slick road, at the same time that hundreds, perhaps thousands of small inputs were being processed by his brain. Reason battled panic within him.

“Were all of us equally at fault?”

The caller had clearly anticipated this, because he answered without hesitation, “Yes.”

But then, after a pause, he added, his voice slipping into an almost conversational, friendly tone, “Let me ask you a question, Doctor: Suppose you agree to help rob a convenience or a liquor store with your two buddies. Gonna be an easy job. You know, wave around a handgun, collect everything from the register, and get away scot-free. No big deal. Happens every night somewhere in America. You’re sitting outside, behind the wheel, engine running, picturing what you’re going to do with your share of the cash, when you hear gunshots, and your two buddies come racing out. They tell you that they panicked and blew the store owner away. Your nice little easygoing robbery just became felony murder. You drive fast, because that’s your job, but not fast enough, because you look up and see cops behind you…”

Again a small laugh. “Now, Doctor, are you as guilty as your two buddies?”

Jeremy could feel his throat go dry. But he worked hard to process what he heard.

“No,” he said.

“Are you sure? In most states, the law makes no distinction between you in the car and your friend pulling the trigger.”

“Yes,” Jeremy said. “But…”

He stopped. He could see the point. It stifled him.

He felt frozen, as if all his knowledge and understanding and years of experience were just beyond his reach.

He felt old. He looked over at his weapons. Who am I kidding?

No, he said to himself. Fight back. No matter how old you feel. He took a deep breath. Why this story about some run-of-the-mill crime, now?

He felt an electric surge inside. That’s a mistake. That’s maybe his first mistake.

Jeremy took a deep breath and tried to capitalize.

“So, what you are now saying is that I unwittingly drove a car to a crime that others committed, and this is going to cost me my life now. You would not have used that example if it didn’t in some way mimic your own feelings. Interesting.”

This time he could feel a hesitation on the other end of the line. That struck a chord, Jeremy thought. He persisted:

“So, Mister Who’s at Fault, your point is that I should look at things I contributed to, not something I might have done exactly. That’s a difficult bar for me to reach. I mean, after all, we’re considering over five decades of experiences here. If you really want me to comprehend what I’ve done, you’re going to have to help me out a little more.”

Another pause, before the caller continued:

“More help from me will just hurry this process.”

Jeremy smiled. He had a small touch of confidence.

“That would be your decision. But it seems to me that this relationship-you and me-only works for you if I have a grasp on the why behind your desire.”

Touché, he thought.

A cold response:

“I think that’s true, Doctor. But sometimes knowledge means death.”

This time, Jeremy didn’t glibly answer.

The caller continued. Voice low, clearly electronically masked, but containing so much venom that Jeremy almost looked to his hands for the telltale wounds from a rattler’s bite.

“The ethics of violence are intriguing, Doctor, aren’t they? Almost as intriguing as the psychology of killing.”

“Yes.”

Beyond agreeing, he didn’t know what to say.

“Your fields of expertise, right, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

Words were suddenly failing him right and left.

“It’s frightening, isn’t it, being told you’re going to be murdered.”

Yes. Don’t lie.

“Yes.”

A question came to Jeremy, and he blurted it out. “Did all the others react like me?”

“Again, a good question, Doctor. Let me put it to you this way: My relationship with each death was unique.”

Jeremy thought hard, trying to anticipate the weave of the conversation. As in a tapestry, each thread meant nothing individually, but everything in unison.

“Did you tell each of us you were going to kill us?”

“A better question. The answer is: not necessarily.”

“So, you’re talking to me, but you didn’t talk to all of us before…” he paused, before adding, “you did what you did.”

This was neither grammatically correct not forensically specific.

“That’s right. But in the end, you all get the same deal. A death that belongs all to you.”

“Yes, but isn’t that true for everyone?” Jeremy replied, trying to keep his voice flat and unemotional. The same tone he used in hundreds of interviews with hundreds of killers, but which now seemed useless. “We all have to die someday.” Obvious. Stupid.

“True enough, Doctor. If a bit of a cliché. We like the uncertainty of hope, do we not, Doctor? We don’t know when we’re going to die. Today? Tomorrow? Five years? Ten years? Who knows? We fear that moment when some date is set, whether we’re in our cell on death row or in some oncologist’s office, when he looks at our latest scans and test results and frowns-because whether we hear it from the warden of the prison or the warden of disease, suddenly a date has been set. In life we embrace certainty about so many things. But when it comes to ourselves, and the moment we have to die, well, uncertainty is what we prefer. Now, I’m not saying it isn’t possible to come to grips with that death date. Some patients and prisoners manage. Religion helps some. Surrounding oneself with friends and family. Maybe even creating a bucket list. But all those things simply obscure that gnawing sensation within, don’t they?”

Jeremy knew he was supposed to answer, but could not. He did concede inwardly, Well, that’s where my fear comes from. He’s right about that.

He suddenly turned and grabbed his revolver off the kitchen table, as if it could comfort him. It seemed heavy and he was unsure whether he had the strength to lift it and take aim. In the same instant, he realized he’d neglected to reload it. He looked around wildly for the box of ammunition and saw it all the way across the room, sitting on a table where he couldn’t reach it.

Idiot.

But he did not have enough time to berate himself further.

“You think you can protect yourself, Doctor. You can’t. Hire a bodyguard. Go to the police. Tell them about the threats. I’m sure they will be interested… for a time. But eventually, you will be back on your own. So, maybe build a fortress. Run to some forgotten, hidden place. Try to give yourself some hope those ways. All wastes of time. I will always be beside you.”

Jeremy spun around. He can see me! Then he shook his head. Impossible.

Or, maybe it isn’t.

Nothing was ordinary. Nothing was as it should be. He could hear his own breath getting shallow, sickly. I’m dying he thought. I’m being killed by fear.

The voice on the phone interrupted his thoughts.

“I have enjoyed talking with you, Doctor. You are much more clever than I ever remembered, and I’ve said things I probably shouldn’t have. But all good things must come to an end. You should prepare yourself, because you don’t have much time left. A couple of hours. Maybe a day or two. A week, possibly.”

The caller hesitated.

“Or maybe it’s a month. A year. A decade. All you need to know is that I’m on my way.”

Jeremy interjected. His voice was high-pitched, almost girlish. “Tell me what the hell you think I did.”

Another small silence, before the caller replied, “Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.”

Jeremy blurted out, “When?” But this question went into a dead line.

The phone was silent. It was almost as if the man was a ghost, or Jeremy had been the dim-witted, naïve-rube subject of a Las Vegas magic trick. Poof. Disappeared.

“Hello?” he asked. This was a gut reaction. “Hello?”

Why had disappeared from Jeremy’s lexicon. That was it, he thought. No more calls. What did I say?

He listened to the quiet. Even knowing his killer was no longer there, Jeremy repeated what had become the only relevant question: “When?”

And finally a third time, very softly, more for himself than for the man coming to kill him: “When?”

18

One, two, three, four…

“No answer.”

“Keep trying.”

“Okay.”

Five, six, seven…

“No answer. I don’t think he’s home.”

“No answering machine. That’s weird. Keep trying.”

Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve…

“Where-” Moth started.

“I didn’t think you would call again.” The voice edgy, near anger, fully strained.

“Doctor Hogan?”

Pause.

“Yes. Speaking. Who is this?”

Clipped words. Curt tone. Moth stammered his response, surprised to be talking, taken aback by the intensity of the disembodied voice.

“My name is Timothy Warner. I’m sorry to disturb you at your home but this was the number I got. I’m seeking some information about my late uncle. Ed Warner. He was a student of yours many years ago. He took your lecture course on forensic psychiatry.”

Another pause. Silence crept across the phone line, but it was the sort of silence that was filled with hidden, explosive noise. Moth waited. He thought he should say something, but the distant doctor spoke slowly.

“And now he’s dead,” Jeremy Hogan said.

“Yes,” Moth blurted out. A single word, but one that carried so much surprise that, watching him, Andy Candy imagined that he’d heard something shocking. Moth’s face seemed to freeze.

“It’s not my fault,” Jeremy Hogan said slowly. “None of it was my fault. At least, I don’t think so. But apparently it was. Whatever it was.”

My fault made Moth stiffen in his seat. His throat was suddenly dry and he waved his hand almost like someone trying to reach out and touch something that was just beyond his grasp. He looked toward Andy Candy and nodded, signaling something to her that made her own pulse accelerate, and she too leaned forward in her seat.

“You remember my uncle?”

“No,” Jeremy replied. “Perhaps I should, but I do not. Too many classes, too many students, too many grades and recommendations and test scores and classroom talks. After all those years, the faces all blend together. I’m sorry.”

“He became a really good therapist.”

“Not my field. Now look, young man, what did he do? What was he to blame for?”

This question was spoken with urgency.

“I don’t know,” Moth answered. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“And his death,” the old psychiatrist started, “what can you tell me about his dea-?”

“He committed suicide, or, at least that’s what the police believe,” Moth interrupted, speaking too fast.

“Yes. I know. In Miami. I read about it.”

“Why did you-?”

“Someone told me to read his obituary.”

“I’m sorry. Someone told you? Who?”

Jeremy hesitated. In a situation that seemed already beyond bizarre, this call from a dead psychiatrist’s nephew seemed to fit right in place.

“I don’t exactly know,” he said slowly.

Moth felt like the phone in his hands was red hot.

“My uncle…” he started, words picking up momentum, “I think he wasn’t a suicide. I think he was killed.”

“Killed?”

“Murdered.”

“But the paper said…”

“The paper was wrong.”

“How do you know that?”

“I knew my uncle.”

Moth said this with so much conviction that it defied doubt.

“And the police think…”

“They also say suicide. Everyone says suicide. That’s the official word. I say faked.”

Another pause.

“Yes,” Jeremy Hogan said, choosing his words cautiously. He was drawing connections in his head. Suicide made little sense. Murder made complete sense. “That would make things significantly clearer. I believe you are correct.”

Moth fumbled, trying to think of what to say next. It was as if questions were choking him like hands around his throat. He needed to ask, but couldn’t spit out words. Many voices had suggested he was on the proper track, but none had carried any proof or authority. This voice seemed different. It had weight.

“Perhaps we should speak in person,” Jeremy Hogan added. His voice had changed, suddenly pensive, soft, and almost regretful. “I do not know what your uncle and I shared, but something linked us together. Can you come up here? You will have to hurry, because I’m expecting to be murdered soon, too.”

She barely said a word to her mother, but took the time to rub some dogs’ ears and affectionately scratch some dog throats. Then Andy Candy went to her room, found a small suitcase, and threw clean underwear and a few toiletries into it. She had no idea how long she would be gone. She found jeans and sweaters and a warm coat. It wasn’t like packing for school, or packing for a vacation. She had no idea what packing for a conversation about killing required.

“You’re going someplace-”

“Yes. With Moth. Shouldn’t be long.”

“Andy, are you sure-”

She interrupted for the second time. “Yes.” She knew she should say much more, but every aspect of her sudden trip north suggested much wider, more difficult talks, which she was unwilling to have. So she adopted a laconic, curt, angry-teenager tone that she hadn’t used in years and that didn’t invite her mother in. For a moment she wondered which was the real Andy Candy. Who are you?-the most common question for people her age. Answers, however, are tricky. Happy. Sad. Possessed. She added up all the rapid changes she had gone through in the past weeks. The Andy Candy who was outgoing, quick to laugh, friendly, and eager to join in all sorts of activities had been closeted away. The new Andy Candy was bitterly quiet and absolutely unwilling to share details.

“Well, at least tell me where you’re going,” her mother said, exasperated.

“New Jersey.”

Hesitation. “New Jersey? Why…”

“We’re going to see a psychiatrist.” This was a statement of fact that was wrapped in a lie, she thought.

Another hesitation. “Why would you go all that way to see a psychiatrist?” her mother asked. Plenty of psychiatrists in Miami. Doubt was riveted to her voice.

“Because he’s the only person left who can help us,” Andy replied.

Her mother did not ask, nor did Andy volunteer an answer to the obvious question: Help with what?

19

A Fourth Conversation, Very Brief

The key to all his killings was deceptively simple: no recognizable signature.

Ed Warner’s death had been a clever puzzle to plan. Finding a way to be seated across from him in conversation had been the clear choice, but still required cautious design. It mimicked a typical therapeutic session. The only difference had been that the handshake at the end had been replaced by a close-range gunshot-an idea he’d stolen from the forty-year-old movie Three Days of the Condor. Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, and Max von Sydow. He suspected that no modern cop, not even one who liked slightly dated adventure flicks, had seen it. But Jeremy Hogan presented different problems.

I told him far too much.

He’s not stupid. But he will be unsure what the next step he can take might be.

Act before he can act.

Winchester Model 70, 30.06 caliber. Weight 8 lbs.

Five rounds 180-grain ammunition.

Leupold 12X scope.

Effective range: 1,000 yards.

But he knew that would be a military-trained sniper making an extraordinary kill shot, compensating for wind, atmosphere, humidity, and the flattening trajectory of the bullet over the terrain.

Exceptional range: 200 to 400 yards.

That would be a highly skilled and experienced big-game hunter. A shot to boast about.

Typical range: 25-50 yards.

This would be a weekend-warrior type, falsely persuaded about his hunting prowess, fantasizing he was some new-day Davy Crockett descendant, armed to the gills with expensive equipment that got used maybe a couple of times a year and spent the rest of its time locked in a closet.

The doctor was the last death on his agenda. He was unsure whether he’d done enough to make it ring true. He feared coming so far over so many years, only to fall emotionally short. That’s the biggest danger, he told himself. Not arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, and being shunted off to prison to await a date with an executioner. Far worse would be failure after coming so far.

“That’s a strange thought for a killer,” he said out loud, as he rolled this notion over in his mind.

The only answer lay in the last act.

He returned to the busy task of preparing. Duffel bag. Camouflage clothing, including a carefully constructed ghillie suit that he thought rivaled those he’d seen professional soldiers create. Heavy boots with a distinctive waffle tread, a complete size too small-he’d cut extra space in the toes. Backpack with emergency headlamp, entrenching tool, water bottle, and PowerBar. All these items had been transported from his trailer in Western Massachusetts-where they didn’t attract attention the same way they would in New York City.

Student #5 paused and picked up a hand-drawn map of the interior of Jeremy Hogan’s house, along with an hour-by-hour schedule of the doctor’s daily routine. He wondered: Does he know he goes to the bathroom at the same time every morning? Does he realize he sits in the same chair in the living room to read or watch the few television shows he likes? British comedy-dramas on PBS, naturally. He also sits in the same position at his desk, and in the same place at the dining room table when he eats his microwaved dinner. Does he see that? Does he have any idea how regular his routines are? If he did, he might be able to save his life. But he doesn’t.

Each routine was a possible killing moment. Student #5 had considered each moment from this perspective.

Gutting knife. Disposable cell phone. He double-checked the weather report, examined the GPS track he’d established, and for the third time went over the time the sun set in the West and calculated how many meager minutes of light he would have between death and total darkness.

Like any good hunter, he thought.

He used an old deer-jacking, out-of-season trick: a small salt lick placed a week earlier in a tiny forest clearing. He was deep in a wooded area, a little over a mile from Jeremy Hogan’s home through rough but manageable territory. Though it was early in the afternoon, damp cold seeped into his clothing, but he knew that once he started moving he would warm rapidly. He remained motionless, downwind from the salt lick, concealed by camouflage, rifle snugged up against his cheek, barrel resting on deadfall to steady his shot. From time to time he would fiddle with the adjustment screws on his scope, making sure the image was clear and the crosshairs were perfectly aligned.

He was lucky this day. Only ninety minutes had passed when he caught the first movement through the thick branches.

Shifting his weight ever so slightly, he readied himself.

Solitary doe.

He smiled. Perfect.

The deer moved cautiously into the open space, lifting its head to pluck scent or sound from its world, alert to potential threats, but unaware that Student #5 was drawing a bead.

Death memories distracted him and he forced himself to concentrate on the deer moving tentatively toward the salt lick.

“I want to help you,” Ed Warner had said.

“You missed your chance. I needed help when we were young. Not now.”

“No,” the psychiatrist had persisted, voice a little unsteady with tension, “it’s never too late.”

“Tell me, Ed,” Student #5 had persisted, “how will you explain this? What will it do to your practice when the world knows that you couldn’t even prevent an old friend from killing himself right at your feet?”

A wonderful lie he’d designed.

He had stood up then, his gun placed up against his temple, pre-suicide. It was persuasive theater. Student #5 knew that Ed Warner would read all the body language, hear the hoarse tension in his voice, and the picture he would create in his mind was that his onetime classmate meant to kill himself in front of him right at that moment, just as he’d promised. Shakespearean drama. Or maybe Tennessee Williams. Student #5 had moved around the side of the desk, closing in on his target. He had rehearsed the necessary movements a thousand times: finger on trigger, bent over slightly; then, suddenly, before Warner could recognize what was truly happening, shove the gun directly against the psychiatrist’s temple.

Head shot.

Squeeze.

And fire.

He fixed the crosshairs on the deer’s chest. He imagined he could see it rising and falling with each hesitant breath. It was wary. Afraid. It had every right to be so.

Heart shot.

Squeeze.

And fire.

The deer’s carcass was still warm, and a small trickle of blood dripped down his jacket. Sixty pounds, he thought. Hard. Not impossible. You trained for this moment.

Before slinging the body over his shoulders, Student #5 had used a small folding entrenching tool to cover up the remains of the salt lick. Then, following a trail through the woods that he’d trudged several practice times carrying a heavy backpack to simulate a dead deer, he set out for Jeremy Hogan’s house. Light was just beginning to shallow up and flatten out, but he believed he had enough left. It would be close, but manageable.

Killing was like that, he reminded himself. It was never exactly as precise as one hoped for nor as sloppy as one feared.

His slung rifle bounced uncomfortably against his backside as he maneuvered through thickets and deadfall. He wished he could’ve brought a machete to clear some of the tangled bushes away, but he didn’t want to leave an obvious path through the woods that some crime scene expert might identify. He knew he was leaving tracks, but the mis-sized boots-cramped and painful as they might be-created imprints that seemed haphazard and erratic. This was important.

The sky above was sullen gray, thick with clouds and the threat of cold rain. This was good. Rain would help cover any signs of his presence.

A thorn tugged at his pants leg.

He was breathing hard. Exertion. Weight. Excitement. Anticipation. He told himself to slow down, be careful. He was getting closer.

When Student #5 spotted the location he’d selected, he forced himself to hesitate with every step. No abrupt, attention-seizing motion.

Stealthily, he moved to the very tree line.

He kept his eyes on Jeremy Hogan’s home, perhaps forty yards of ill-kept lawn from the edge of the forest.

He’s there. He’s inside. He’s waiting, but he doesn’t know how close he is.

Student #5 lowered the deer carcass from his shoulders just at the last tree before civilization and grass took over.

The body thumped against the soft ground.

He made sure that the carcass appeared as it did when he’d first shot it. A collapsed-in-death deer. Not a carefully arranged deer.

Crablike, crouched to lower his profile, he backed away from the deer shape, carefully maintaining his sight line, letting the scrub brush and foliage hide him. Perhaps twenty yards back into the forest he stopped at an old oak tree. Right at his shoulder height there was a notch where a branch had broken off. It formed the perfect shooting position.

The forest in front of him created a tunnel-like window straight to the house. No stray limbs that might deflect his shot ever so slightly and throw it off. The dead deer on the ground was directly in the path his bullet would travel.

He lifted the rifle and eyed down the scope.

He hesitated, inwardly asked himself:

What will the cops see?

A simple answer:

A murder that isn’t a murder at all.

Student #5 reached for his throwaway phone.

He was so focused that he did not hear the car pulling to the front of the house, and from where he was poised he could not see it.

Jeremy Hogan was at his desk, feverishly writing notes on a yellow legal pad. Every snatch of conversation, every impression, anything that might help discover who Mister Who’s at Fault might be. He scrawled words across the page, disorganized and hurried and lacking all the scientific precision he’d developed over the years. He had no idea what might help him, so every random thought and observation flooded the pages.

He looked up only when he heard the car come down his drive.

“That’s them. Got to be,” he said out loud.

Jeremy glanced out the window and saw a young couple exit the nondescript rental car.

He smiled. “She’s beautiful,” he whispered. It had been a long time since he entertained a young woman as striking as the one hesitating in his driveway. He had the odd thought that the young woman was far too pretty to talk about murder.

Grabbing the yellow legal pad, he jumped up and hustled to the front door.

Neither Andy Candy nor Moth knew what to expect when the door swung open. They saw a tall, lanky, white-haired man, clearly both pleased and nervous as they greeted one another.

“Timothy, Andrea, delighted to meet you, though I fear the circumstances are problematic,” Jeremy Hogan said rapidly. With a small wave, he ushered them into the house. There was a small, awkward moment.

“This seems very nice,” Andy Candy said, just being polite.

“Lonely and isolated, alas,” Jeremy replied. “All alone now.” He looked over at Moth, who shifted, unsettled.

“I suppose we should get right to it,” the doctor continued. He held up his legal pad, filled with notes. “Been trying to get organized, so we’d have a place to begin. Sorry it all seems so confusing. Let’s go into the living room and sit.” Before they could agree, the phone rang.

Jeremy stopped. The corner of his mouth twitched.

“He’s called me,” Jeremy said slowly. “Several times. But I don’t think he will call again. Our last conversation…”

His voice faded, as the phone continued to ring.

The old psychiatrist turned to the young couple.

“Odd,” he said. “Ironic? The phone is either a killer or some damn fund-raiser for yet another worthy cause.”

He pushed his notes to Andy Candy.

“Wait here,” he said, leaving them in the entry.

They watched as he walked into the kitchen and stared at the caller ID on the phone. It read Anonymous. His first instinct was to ignore it, but instead he picked up the phone.

Student #5 sighted down the rifle barrel.

He heard Jeremy’s voice: “Yes?”

Now there was no more need to conceal his voice with an electronic scrambler. He wanted the doctor to hear the real him.

“Now, Doctor, listen very carefully,” he said slowly.

Jeremy gasped. Surprised. He felt frozen in position.

In the crosshairs of the scope, Student #5 could see Jeremy’s back. He adjusted slightly, keeping the phone to his ear, finger caressing the trigger.

“A history lesson. Just for you.” As he’d expected, Jeremy didn’t reply. “A couple of decades ago, four students came to you and wanted your help in getting the fifth member of their study group dismissed from medical school because they thought he was dangerously crazy and threatening their careers. They wanted to sacrifice him so they could get ahead. You did their bidding. You were the enabler. The facilitator. I was the person who suffered. It cost me everything. What do you think it should cost you?”

Jeremy stammered. His words were misshapen. Incomprehensible. The only word that he was able to choke out that made any sense was, “But…”

“The cost, Doctor?”

Student #5 knew Jeremy would not respond.

He had thought hard about what he would say. Ending with that question had a specific design: It would hold the doctor in position, confused, hesitant.

“That’s a fine blue shirt you’re wearing, Doctor.”

“What?” Jeremy asked.

A poor choice for a final word, Student #5 thought.

He dropped the cell phone to the soft earth at his feet, steadied his left hand against the rifle stock.

He took a single breath, held it, and gently pulled the trigger.

Familiar solid recoil.

Red mist.

The immediate death thought: All these years and now I’m free.

The only thing that surprised him was the sudden piercing scream that followed. There should have been deep silence marred only by the fading echo of the rifle’s report. This unexpected noise troubled him-but he still had the internal discipline to pick up the cell phone, make a quick check of his surroundings for any telltale evidence he might have left behind, and start his rapid retreat through the darkening woods. His first few strides were accompanied with the belief: It’s over. It’s over. Then each subsequent step was marked by the whispered Bob Dylan song lyric to carry him away: It’s all over now, Baby Blue.

And then a last word that fed his fast pace: Finally.