Murder is almost always about the past-but this was also about the future. It had been easy to lie on his bed in the darkness, thinking. Kill him kill him kill him.
Now that he’d arrived at the kill him moment, Moth realized that everything he’d done had brought him to this spot-but not beyond. He remembered Susan Terry’s warning: Can you pull that trigger?
I think so. I hope so.
Maybe.
And this was a problem that had now frozen his gun hand into an unmanageable, unmovable block. He took a deep breath and aimed down the sight on the barrel, squinting his eye a little, training the gun on the killer’s chest. Then he asked: “Why did you kill my uncle?” Get that answer, he thought. The answer will tell you what to do next.
Moth slid directly into a maelstrom of uncertainty. The man across from him doubtlessly could have told him that this was a poor realm for killing.
Obscenities and fury finally started to dwindle in the air around Susan Terry, like the final spent drops of a hard rainstorm. She stayed quiet until the atmosphere in Redeemer One turned into a sullen silence. “Well,” she finally said, “nothing to do except wait and see what happens.”
Waiting, she knew, was bordering on a felony. The right thing to do would be to immediately notify authorities. It was also the wrong thing to do. Susan was maneuvering on a razor’s edge of legal culpability. She didn’t even want to think about moral culpability.
“So, you propose-based on your legal education, familiarity with Timothy and understanding of the situation he’s in, and all other relevant factors-we all just sit around and see what happens?” asked the philosophy professor in his didactic fashion.
“I suppose you could put it that way,” Susan replied.
The professor stood up just as he would have had he been starting his addiction testimony, except that this time he addressed the gathering differently. “That is simply unacceptable,” he said. Then he added, “Does anyone disagree?”
A low murmur filled the room: indiscernible words that amounted to a single no.
“If we cannot help Timothy do whatever he is doing tonight,” the professor continued, “then we must help him when he survives.”
Sounds of assent filled the room.
“And I believe he will survive,” the professor continued, his voice ringing with unfounded confidence. “Just like all of us will overcome all the demons and flaws that brought us here to this place tonight.”
Susan looked around. No one disagreed with the professor. In fact, she thought, the room was filled with a certain revival-tent kind of Praise Jesus! passion.
“Timothy is our responsibility,” the professor said. “Like it or not.” He put these last words at Susan like daggers.
“Just as he has been there for us, we have to be there for him,” the professor added firmly. “That is what coming to Redeemer One is all about. This is where we are safe with our problems, where we support each other. So, tonight, I think Redeemer One and what it means for all of us goes well beyond the walls of this room.”
“Damn straight,” said Sandy the corporate lawyer. “Well put.” The professor took a deep breath, paused to adjust his eyeglasses, and licked his lips. “If he comes out of this alive, then we must figure out how to protect him.”
This was greeted with nodding heads.
“We have some resources,” the professor added.
“Resources?” Susan blurted.
“Yes,” he replied, turning abruptly toward her and pointing directly at her. “You, for one.”
Susan did not know how to answer. Sandy rose to her feet and interjected rapidly: “Either you are a part of this gathering or you are not. What happens here is recovery. What happens out there…,” she waved toward the door, “… is not. It seems to me that you need to make up your mind. Are you an addict or an ex-addict?”
Susan hesitated.
“Do you want to ever come back here again?” Sandy asked.
Susan’s mind churned. She had not considered this question.
Fred the engineer rose to his feet, standing shoulder to shoulder with the professor, reaching over and taking Sandy by the hand. “For starters,” he said, wry grin on his face, “I think we can all agree on one thing…” He slowed his delivery, staring hard at each member of the gathering before looking for a long time at Susan Terry. “If someone-like a policeman-were to ask, I think we’d all say that Timothy was here with us tonight.”
No one said anything, but each member of the group at Redeemer One stood up, even the priest.
Andy Candy wanted to sit, or maybe lean up against a wall, perhaps even lower herself to the hardwood floor and close her eyes. At the same time, she wanted to run in place, do sit-ups and push-ups, leap into the air or find a piece of jump rope and use it while singing some childhood exercise rhyme: “Blue bells, cockle shells, easy Ivy over”… She was exhausted and energized, terrified, yet calm.
She moved stealthily through the kitchen and saw nothing but kitchen. Into the bathroom, seeing nothing but bathroom. It was a small house, barely larger than an apartment, with only two bedrooms down a windowless corridor. She opened closets; the only one that held anything was in the master bedroom, and it contained just a minimal amount of clothing on hangers. She took some tissue paper and used that to cover her fingers as she opened drawers and poked around. A killer’s underwear, T-shirts, and socks. She didn’t know whether the tissue would prevent her from leaving any traces of her presence behind. She doubted it, but amateur hour that it was, she could think of no other approach.
Andy didn’t want to be scared, but every minute that passed, fear grew within her-not just because they were lingering in a killer’s home, but because she could find nothing that said anything about who the man seated in his favorite chair in the living room actually was.
She hadn’t exactly known what to expect. Perhaps a closet filled with weapons? A wall of paintings devoted to killers, from Caligula to Vlad the Impaler through John Dillinger and Ted Bundy? She had no idea what she was searching for, although she knew her search was somehow necessary. She ransacked her memory, going to movie images, popular novels, television and theater, but couldn’t recall anything actually set in murderers’ houses that displayed items that unequivocally stated who they were and what they did. Please, there must be something. It wasn’t like expecting to see law books on a lawyer’s desk, or medical texts lining the walls of a doctor’s office. There was no architect’s diploma and certificate on the wall. There wasn’t even a restaurant menu hung up prominently.
The last room was set up as a guest room. Did killers invite friends to stay over? She stepped inside quietly. There was a futon with a bright multicolored print cover, a small desk, and a chair. It was sparse, almost monastic. She was about to turn away when she noticed the laptop computer. There’s something, she thought. She looked around and saw a wireless printer stuck in a corner on the floor. There were a few stray sheets of paper next to it.
She approached these objects as if they were sharp-edged and dangerous.
“Why did I kill your uncle? What makes you think I did?”
“Don’t screw around. Just tell me the truth.”
“You believe I’m capable of murder, but not capable of lying to you?”