“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.