The Dead Student Read online

  The Dead Student

  Also by John Katzenbach

  Red 1-2-3

  What Comes Next

  In the Heat of the Summer

  First Born

  The Traveler

  Day of Reckoning

  Just Cause

  The Shadow Man

  State of Mind

  Hart’s War

  The Analyst

  The Madman’s Tale

  The Wrong Man

  Copyright © 2015 by John Katzenbach

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Jacket design by Daniel Rembert

  Jacket photograph © Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images Author photograph by Nancy Doherty

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2337-4

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9162-5

  The Mysterious Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  15 16 17 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

  WM. SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice

  Contents

  Also by John Katzenbach

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One: Conversations Between Dead Men

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Two: Who’s the Cat? Who’s the Mouse?

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue: The Next Day and Beyond

  PART ONE

  Conversations Between Dead Men

  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 u
sed 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 o
f 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.