by Vera Kurian
I stared at him. Then it couldn’t have been Will who attacked me.
“Why did you ask me about that? Did something happen last night?”
I said nothing.
He shoved his phone into his pocket, balanced the Frostee on the trash can and stepped forward to examine my face before I could move away. “Are you wearing cover-up?”
“Someone beat the shit out of me,” I admitted, too exhausted to think of a lie. I thought about Yessica’s closed door. His eyes widened. “I assumed it was Will, but it can’t be, not if he was at the pledge thing. But whoever it was, look for a guy with a stab wound.”
“Are you being serious?”
“There’s blood in my pee.”
“What?” I turned around and pulled up my shirt, exposing my back. The bruise had deepened to a livid purple color. Water dripped into the sink. I almost cried out when he touched me—the injury was tender and his hand was cold from the Frostee. He moved his hand up the bruise and I closed my eyes, holding on to the stall door. I hate to admit it, but somewhere between the pain and sensitivity, I felt a jolt of interest between my legs. I thought of the way he looked when he played the piano.
I heard him step back and I pulled my shirt down and turned around. “Then this is really happening,” he said grimly. I washed my hands, nodding. “Then let’s get you a stun gun.”
We got back into the car and headed out on the highway. He took off his sunglasses and drove too fast. I closed my eyes, loving how the open windows made the wind whip through my hair. The air had that autumn smell of creosote.
“I’ve never been to a Wendy’s,” I said over the wind, wanting to change the subject.
“What?!” He took a slug of his Frostee, the hollows that appeared in his cheeks suggesting that it was thick.
“My parents hated that place for some reason. They had a thing against it, so we never went there.”
“What a strange thing to have a hatred for.”
“What’s the big deal about Frostees? Everyone’s always talking about them.”
“I already said I’m not sharing.”
I made eyes at him for a good stretch of the 395 where traffic had slowed to a near stop.
Then he looked at me, laughed, and handed over the waxy cup. As I took a sip I couldn’t help but think about how my lips were now wrapped around the same straw his own lips had just been touching—a kiss by association. For a split second he looked right into my eyes as I sipped from it. The wind fluttered a lock of my hair, getting into my face. Charles leaned over, smiling, and tucked the hair behind my ear.
23
Andre stood at the landing halfway up the stairs to the sixth floor. A knot stood in his throat. It was quiet in the psychology department—almost 11 p.m.—and he hadn’t meant for it to get this late. He was supposed to turn in some forms to Wyman’s office, but there were classes and discussion sessions and it felt like he was already falling behind...but also he hadn’t been there since the incident. It’s fine, he told himself. They cleaned everything up. The police haven’t contacted me again, so they probably already made an arrest. In truth, no one seemed to know what was actually going on with the investigation, but this didn’t stop students from spreading various “facts” he heard from students with supposed connections to MPD, Adams, or even the FBI.
Andre hooked his thumbs under the straps of his book bag and slowly moved up the remainder of the stairs, edging toward Wyman’s office. As he slid the packet into the slip of darkness under the door, he imagined something terrible going on inside. But the packet was delivered with no drama. He had just turned to leave, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, when the phone slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. As he stooped to pick it up, something caught his eye. Halfway down the hall, there was a door he hadn’t noticed before. On the ground in front of it sat something small and white—upon closer inspection it was a fat little rectangle of paper. He picked it up, then contemplated the door. If you were inside an office and didn’t have a key, but wanted to leave the door unlocked for yourself, one way of doing that would be to block the lock with a little packet of paper like this. Curious, he put his hand on the knob and discovered that the door was not fully embedded in the jamb, but only closed enough to look closed.
He hesitated, his heart pounding. In a movie, this would be exactly the part where he and Sean would be yelling at the screen. He edged his head in, trying to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He had seen this back part of Wyman’s office from the inside before—a jungle of filing cabinets and a mess of stacks of books and old journals. Did someone break into the office? Who had jammed up the door?
Andre stepped inside silently, pulling the door closed behind him. Then he heard a sound—someone shuffling through papers from somewhere inside the office. He crouched slightly, then edged his head around the corner to look down the main throughway of the office.
“Freeze,” said a stern voice, and a blinding white light shone on his face.
Andre’s stomach jumped. He immediately thought of the police, Deever’s smug face. He held his hands up.
“Keep your hands up.”
The bright light turned off. Andre blinked, for a moment seeing green instead of what was actually in front of him. Slowly an image materialized. A girl, not a cop. A girl about his age, dressed all in black. She was holding not a gun but either a Taser or a stun gun—Andre never knew the difference. He put his hand on his chest and told himself to breathe.
The girl gestured at him with the weapon. “You’re in the program,” she said matter-of-factly.
Stunned, he saw then that she, too, had a smartwatch on. Not an unreasonable assumption, considering they were both breaking into the same office, although really Andre hadn’t meant to. Andre had feared this moment—meeting one of these real psychopaths. They could be dangerous, or see straight through his bravado. But Wyman hadn’t. This gave him a modicum of confidence.
He assumed a more relaxed posture and looked at her as if almost bored. “You, too?” They regarded each other, cagey. If what he understood about psychopaths was right, either she wouldn’t care that he was technically doing something wrong, or she would use it against him.
“What’re you doing in here?” she asked.
“You left the back door open.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said defensively.
He held up the nub of paper. “Cute trick.”
She cocked her head. She was probably here because she wanted to look at her own file, or steal smartwatches or money. No harm, no foul—they could both promise to keep a secret and part ways. Suddenly she raised the stun gun and it emitted a frightening zapping sound as a bolt of electricity appeared between the two prongs. “Let me ask you a question,” she said, stepping forward.
Andre willed himself to not step back. To focus his eyes calmly on her face. “Yeah?”
“Michael Boonark—that name familiar to you?”
He was shocked, but he bit back any expression. “Absolutely. I almost saved his life, did you hear?”
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
“Someone skewered him like a fondue shrimp. I found him and was practically saving his life, but then these EMTs showed up and fucked it up.”
“You’re the guy who was the witness?”
“Yup. I didn’t even get a reward or anything.”
Wyman’s computer behind her made a noise—she barely glanced at it. “What about the night of the thirteenth?”
“The thirteenth?”
“Two people from our program have been killed in the past month. Michael on the sixth, and another guy, Kellen, on the thirteenth.”
Holy shit. Andre had heard some story—apparently not a true one—that the MRI death had been a frat prank gone horribly wrong. All sorts of stories were flying around. Then he realized the suspi
cious way she was looking at him. “Wait—you think it was me?”
“If there are seven psychopaths on campus, and only a small number of people who know who they are, the list of suspects isn’t that long,” she said impatiently.
“I’m the key witness to Michael’s murder. I tried to save him!”
Her eyes narrowed. “Sure—you ‘helped’ him. That happens to put you at the right place at the right time.”
“You think the police aren’t interested in arresting a Black guy who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time? They took all this forensic stuff off me—they already know I’m innocent.” She blinked. “What was the other one—the thirteenth? I need my phone, but I can prove where I was.”
He reached slowly for his phone while keeping an eye on her, then quickly began opening apps. There were Snapchats galore of him at a party at Marcus’s house that day, straight through the night, all the way till 7 a.m. breakfast plates at the Florida Avenue Grill.
She didn’t lower the stun gun. “You could have taken those at some other time and just posted them. Gives you a nice alibi.” She stepped forward again.
This girl had a blank look in her eyes. A look that made him think of a child idly pulling the wings off a fly. Sweet Jesus. He opened his photo album. “Except they’re all time and date stamped here.” Thank God for the shallow documentation of life required by social media. She snatched his phone and looked through it, then seemed conflicted.
“Get undressed. If it wasn’t you, you won’t have a stab wound anywhere on your body.”
This made fuck-all sense, but Andre was not going to disobey a batshit crazy girl holding a deadly weapon. He pulled off his sweatshirt, T-shirt and jeans, and tried not to shiver as she shined her flashlight over his body. It felt like the world’s weirdest doctor’s appointment.
Finally, the bright light disappeared and she handed back his phone, tucking the stun gun into the back of her jeans. He forced himself to laugh as he pulled his clothes back on. “Is that what you’re doing here, investigating these murders or whatever?” he asked.
She hesitated, then said yes. “I’m Chloe,” she said.
“Andre,” he said.
“We should help each other,” she whispered, her tone entirely different, now conspiratorial. “There’s seven of us,” she said, holding up seven of her fingers. Then she put two down. “Two dead. Then me and you.” Three fingers remained. “This one,” she said, pointing to her middle finger, “I sort of know and I’m not sure about him. We could work together.”
Oh, hell no, was his immediate thought. He wanted nothing to do with this girl—but then he hesitated. For all he knew, maybe she already had a wealth of information. Hell, she had already gotten into Wyman’s office on her own. While she could prove useful, he was also frightened. With all his research, he knew just how dangerous psychopaths could be, and being in her proximity risked her finding out that he wasn’t one.
“What should I help you for? I got my own problems,” he said. Andre wondered when the night watchman would be making his rounds.
“You’re not thinking straight—your problems are the same as my problems. Wyman’s students are being killed,” she said. “Whoever is hunting us, I got into a knife fight with them. They could have killed me. I’m pretty sure I stabbed them, though.”
Suddenly the bodily inspection made sense. Someone was trying to kill the panel students? Now there was a whole new layer to the how-far-in-over-his-head thing for Andre. He hadn’t even yet hit the part where he had fully comprehended that he had watched a man get murdered, and now he was supposed to contemplate that the same thing might happen to him. And here was this psychopath girl looking at him, expecting him to make rapid-fire decisions with the same impulsivity that she would. “Why are you here, then, exactly?” he whispered.
“I’m trying to pull patient files,” she said, gesturing with her head back toward Wyman’s desk.
She was already steps ahead of him, and this wasn’t something he could figure out on his own. “We share all information,” he said finally.
She nodded. “Are you good with computers by any chance? I was hoping his password would be something stupid like his birthday, but it’s not.” They both stood behind Wyman’s desktop, the monitor throwing a pale blue light over everything as the computer rejected a few more password attempts.
“He probably knows he has patients who would do this sort of thing,” Andre realized.
“See if you can find anything written down, or maybe he’s old-fashioned and has hard-copy files.” Chloe sat at the office chair and Andre worked around her, looking at what seemed like good hiding places for passwords: behind a framed photo of a beach, under the mousepad. Using the flashlight on his cell phone, he peered inside the desk drawers, looking for files, but mostly there were just office supplies and old journals. The top right drawer, though, held a notepad and there was some messy handwriting on the top page. Numbers mostly, but it looked more like someone doing a math problem and scratching things out than someone neatly writing down a password. Andre snapped a picture just in case and handed the pad to Chloe. “Try this, maybe?” He then moved on to the filing cabinet behind the desk. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for—maybe Wyman kept hard-copy notes of old patients. Maybe—
They both started at an abrupt sound—a peal of laughter. Voices. Elena? Then came the sound of keys jangling. Chloe shoved the notepad back into the top drawer and turned the monitor off. They both hurried toward the back of the office, squeezing outside the door just as the lights inside the office turned on.
They paused in the garish light of the hallway before hustling toward the back staircase. They didn’t stop until they burst outside in a blast of cold air. “Shit,” Chloe muttered. “He’s got better security than I thought.”
“You didn’t get anything before I got there?”
She seemed a little miffed at his asking. “You interrupted me!”
“That office has two pieces of information that we need. Who’s in the program, and who has access to all that information.”
“We can get it if we put our heads together,” she insisted. “You know what they say—two psychopaths are better than one.”
24
The closest thing to a perfect subject in the Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study was Charles Portmont. Leonard had observed him to be an intelligent young man whose narcissism worked in his favor—he liked thinking about himself, thus giving him the capacity to have insight into his own behaviors. Patients could have the best of intentions, but if they lacked insight or self-awareness, there were limitations to therapy and behavior modification programs. All the better if the client was actually motivated to change.
The Portmont family had the kind of money where the free tuition to Adams hadn’t been an incentive to come. Charles had gotten into better colleges, but had chosen Adams because of the panel study. He had admitted this in therapy, detailing how his decision to attend a third-tier liberal arts school instead of Georgetown had rendered his father apoplectic.
If a child lacked empathy, one could hardly appeal to him by saying not to hit others because it hurt them—the psychopathic child simply did not care. Wyman’s neuroscience research had even demonstrated what occurred inside their brains when they struggled to process other people’s points of view. When they were shown pictures that elicited strong emotional responses in the control population—pity, sadness—their brains indicated that they were not feeling emotion so much as thinking about how they were supposed to be feeling it, and perhaps even imitating it.
But some of Charles’s impulsiveness had successfully been curbed by his learning to apply the program’s principles. Every decision was not described in terms of its morality, but how his self-interest could be affected by the consequences. Charles wants his sister to love him because he craves affection; when Charles does things that his
sister thinks are selfish (regardless of whether or not Charles agrees they are selfish), that supply of affection is put at risk.
He had grown from a selfish boy who burned through his family’s money, wrecked cars, and indulged in controlled substances to having a relatively stable life—all because he had applied what he had learned in the program. He used his charm and ability to manipulate to find socially acceptable and legal ways to feed his needs. If he wanted to assure people of his intellectual superiority, he had better do well in school. If he wanted to avoid being disinherited, he better find constructive ways of dealing with his father. If he wanted adulation and attention, he could seek the limelight of student council president, not by acting out.
Leonard hunted for his favorite fountain pen—it was normally resting by his banker’s lamp—before finding it on the floor. He turned his notebook to a fresh page after reading his last therapy notes and looked toward the door just as Charles entered. Right on time. If you would like to talk about yourself for an hour—and what narcissist doesn’t?—you must show up on time.
Today Charles was leaning forward eagerly. “How are you doing with everything that’s been going on?” Leonard asked. They had had emergency therapy sessions for both Charles and Andre after what they both had witnessed. The first had blunted affect for the entire session; the latter seemed entirely detached. “This is an enormous amount of stress for everyone to go through, and I hope you know you can always stop by to talk.”
“It feels really...surreal. I almost can’t believe it happened even though I saw it with my own eyes.” He put his hand over his heart. “Basically his chest was open. The buckshot—what do you think happened?”
There was a hiccup, a pause in Leonard’s reaction. “If we could just have a process comment for a moment, I want to point out that your tone is inappropriate.”
“It is?”
“When someone dies, when someone finds a dead body, they would be upset. You sound more curious. Like someone sharing a gory detail from a horror movie.” More horrible than Charles even knew. Leonard certainly wasn’t going to pass on what Bentley had told him: that Kellen had had Rohypnol in his system, probably to render him compliant as he was force-fed buckshot.
