“If the police had not come along when they did,” Davis said in an interview, “I wouldn’t be here now.”
Davis could not explain what made Hoffman, a former mentor, commit such a heinous crime.
“I guess there are things we just never know about people, even those closest to us,” Davis said.
His comments were echoed by Angelique Rogers, 48, a West Haven College political science professor who went public about an affair she’d had with Kenneth Hoffman four years earlier.
“She was the one,” Paul said to himself. “She was the one coming out of his office.”
“I can’t stop wondering, all this time later, how close I came to meeting the same fate as Jill and Catherine,” Rogers said. “Did Kenneth think I had betrayed him at some level, too, by not leaving my husband?” She said Hoffman had not made the same demands of her that he reportedly had of the two women he killed.
(Rogers and her husband have since divorced. She still teaches at West Haven.)
Hoffman himself seemed at a loss to explain his actions.
When asked how he could have slit the throats of the two women, Hoffman reportedly shrugged and said, “Who knows why anyone does anything?”
Paul read the story through a second time. It raised as many questions as it answered. Why did Hoffman make such strange demands of the two women? Expecting them to stop having sex with their own husbands? Seriously? Why invite them to the house together, allow them to meet each other? Okay, they might have already known one another through college functions, but why put them together like that, at his house? What was the point? He must have known from the beginning what he was going to do, but why kill both of them? What had snapped in Kenneth’s mind?
And a minor question the story failed to address was that typewriter. The reporter mentioned that Kenneth put it in the car, but not what he had done with it.
At least, where that question was concerned, Paul had a pretty good idea. His memory of events that night had taken time to come back to him, but while recovering in Milford Hospital he did tell the police about Kenneth’s side trip into that industrial plaza to throw something into a Dumpster.
He never heard anything more about it after that. He supposed if the police had found it, they would have used it in building their case against Hoffman, had he not confessed and pleaded guilty. But it was more likely that by the time Paul remembered what he’d seen, the Dumpster had been emptied and the typewriter was in a landfill somewhere.
“I’m sorry about this.”
Kenneth’s voice, in his head, again.
“No, you’re not,” Paul said. “You never were. Not for a goddamn minute. The only thing you’re sorry about is that you got caught.”
Paul heard the front door open downstairs.
“Paul?”
Charlotte was home. It wasn’t unusual for her to pop by through the day, especially if her evening was going to be taken up with showings.
“Up here!” he shouted. “In the think tank!”
He heard her walking up the steps. No, not walking. More like running.
“Paul?” she said again, her voice on edge.
Paul got up out of the computer chair and went back into the kitchen in time to see his wife reach the top of the stairs.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
“Who’s that guy parked across the street, watching the house?” she asked.
Five
After lunch, Anna White sat at her desk, opened her laptop, and made some notes from her three Friday morning sessions.
Her first visitor was a retired X-ray technician who was having a hard time getting over the death of her dog. It had darted out into traffic, and the woman blamed herself. Anna understood why that was making it difficult for the woman to move on. Anna’s second client of the day, Paul Davis, was making some headway. Anna was not yet entirely sold on his idea of writing about Kenneth Hoffman, but he might be onto something. She wasn’t going to tell him not to do it. If Paul believed the exercise would help his recovery, she wasn’t going to discourage him.
And then there was Gavin Hitchens.
She had her work cut out for her where he was concerned.
He said he wanted to get better, and she wanted to believe that was true, but she had her doubts. She knew the young man was not being entirely open with her. She didn’t know that he was outright lying to her, but he was definitely holding things back.
At least he wasn’t denying the basic facts about what had gotten him into trouble.
Sitting in a coffee shop, he’d taken from the table next to him the unwatched cell phone of a distracted babysitter and used it to call the father of a soldier who’d died in Iraq. Gavin claimed to be the dead son. Told the dad he’d faked his death so he wouldn’t have to return and face the father he hated so much.
Gavin didn’t even know the man. He’d seen his name in a newspaper story. He thought it would be fun.
What he hadn’t counted on was the surveillance camera.
When the call was traced back to the woman who owned the phone, she swore she hadn’t made it. Besides, the caller had been male. She knew she’d been at the coffee shop at the time. Police recovered security camera footage that showed Gavin grabbing the woman’s phone when she wasn’t looking, then tucking it back under her purse when he was done with the call.
Gavin had tried to dismiss his actions as a “prank,” but the authorities didn’t see it that way. A look into Gavin’s history revealed other, possible “pranks.” Sneaking into an elderly woman’s home and hiding her cat in the attic was one.
Anna had been trying to get Gavin to search within himself to understand why he perpetrated such cruel hoaxes. He’d been quick to blame a sadistic, unloving father.
Gavin had spun a pretty good tale of abuse and belittling. His father had mocked him for things he was good at (high school theater, sketching, playing the flute) and ridiculed him for things he was not (football, baseball, pretty much anything sports related). His nicknames for Gavin included “flower fucker” and “Janice.” Gavin’s dad figured if you didn’t know how to rebuild an engine block or throw a left hook at somebody in a bar, you were some kind of cocksucking faggot. (Putting that flute in his mouth, Gavin’s father maintained, was a clue.)
“I don’t know why he hated me so much,” Gavin had said in one of their earlier sessions. “Maybe he had low self-esteem. He could have been haunted by how he was mistreated by his own father.”
When patients started tossing around phrases like “low self-esteem,” Anna suspected them of trying a little too hard.
But Gavin’s story didn’t end with his childhood.
At nineteen, he left home. Four years later, his mother killed herself after downing a bottle of sleeping pills. Three years after that, Gavin’s father was diagnosed with liver cancer, and leaned on his son to move back home and look after him.
Gavin conceded to Anna that he saw it as an opportunity to exact some revenge.
He’d hide his father’s reading glasses. Put his pills in a different medicine cabinet. Leave his slippers out on the deck when it rained. Change appliance settings so that when his father made toast it came out burned. Unplug the heating pad Dad sat on as he watched TV.
One time, he added laxative to the old man’s soup, and removed the toilet paper from his father’s bathroom.
“I know it was wrong,” Gavin told her sheepishly. “I think maybe, after he died, I couldn’t stop. I had to find others to torment.”
Maybe there was something to all this business with his father, Anna thought, assuming the story he told was true. She had checked some of the details — the mother’s suicide, the father’s liver cancer — and they’d turned out to be true. But the story seemed a little too pat, Gavin’s excuse too convenient.