The Dead Student Read online

  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.