Never Saw Me Coming

by Vera Kurian

  “Is he dangerous?” Andre whispered when they got into the elevator.

  “Who, Charles?” Chloe smoothed her hair. “I don’t know. You shouldn’t see him without me there. He’s hot and cold.”

  Andre chewed at the nub on the inside of his cheek. Given the apartment building, he was already picturing the guy from American Psycho. He had bought a small knife at a thrift store on 14th and it sat in its sheath hidden under his shirt. “Any matches?” Andre asked, trying to keep anxiety out of his voice. In between their schedules, they had only had the opportunity to do two stakeouts. One of the students they hadn’t been able to identify with facial recognition software and the other turned out to be a football player named Orvel Hines, who had been out of town at a rehab clinic during the time of both murders. Chloe said she would keep trying with the unidentified photo.

  She shook her head. “We shouldn’t say anything about the stakeouts in front of Charles. He knows more information than us about the program, the names of more senior people. We can get him to tell us, then verify it on our own. Also, you need to distract him for a couple minutes so I can snoop around his apartment.”

  It seemed like a lot of machinations to Andre, but he supposed he was supposed to love machinating. They took the elevator to the top floor, then walked to a closed door, behind which Andre could hear piano music. Chloe gave a shave-and-a-haircut knock, the piano music stopped, then a white guy flung the door open. He was surprisingly cheerful for someone who was supposed to be worried about being murdered. “Charles Portmont,” he said, offering his hand. He seemed older to Andre, like a banker or something.

  Andre introduced himself and tried to saunter in the same way Chloe did, but in a more masculine way. Charles’s apartment was not standard college fare—the sad poster of a half-naked woman, empty beer cans. There was a spacious living room decorated with modern sensibilities, large enough to accommodate a black baby grand piano without making the room cramped. The overall look of the apartment was nice, but profoundly strange for someone their age.

  Charles got beers from the fridge and glasses from the freezer. “I told Kristen my little friends were coming over and she made us a cheese plate.”

  Andre looked down at the thing on the coffee table. It was a piece of slate with chunks of different cheese, a smear of some sort of jelly, little toasts. “Who’s Kristen?” he asked.

  Charles came over, pointing to a framed photograph on the wall. Despite the fact that he was wearing jeans and a Choate Swimming T-shirt, something about him seem weirdly formal. In twenty years, he could easily play the evil businessman in a movie. “My girlfriend,” he said smugly, pointing at the picture, which featured him with his arm around a girl who was somewhere between hot and beautiful.

  Chloe had come up behind them, silent as a snake. “Kristen had that picture framed and hung it, didn’t she?”

  Charles frowned at her in a way that suggested she was right. There was some tension buzzing between the two of them that Andre didn’t understand. “Beer?” Charles offered him. The smile was a millimeter too wide. He opened the beer in front of Andre and poured it into a glass—it had to be safe. Chloe was already drinking hers. Andre took a tentative sip of the bitter brew.

  Chloe wandered to the piano, resting her beer glass on the top. Charles quickly moved to slip a coaster under the glass, frowning again. Chloe lifted the lid covering the keys to slowly eke out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” an octave lower than it should have been while Charles stared at her, perfectly still. Andre watched them from across the room, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. They were the charming white couple who claimed their car broke down in front of your house in a home invasion movie. Of course you let them in, because surely they weren’t dangerous...

  “Yeah, that’s not creepy at all,” Charles said.

  “Creepy? I’m the one who organized this as a goodwill gesture despite your being an ass.” She turned to Andre. “I told him about our run-in, and that I basically cleared you of the murders. Which means I’ve effectively weaned down our suspect list.” This she directed more at Charles. She sat on the sleek leather couch, taking out her journal. “We have two main items on the agenda,” she said.

  Charles sat, casting an amused glance from her to Andre. He wants me to like him, Andre realized, and for us to be against Chloe.

  “Wyman,” Chloe said. “We have some very interesting revelations about Wyman.” We? Andre wondered. She had sounded pretty skeptical the last time they spoke about it. He chose his seat carefully, sitting on the floor across from Chloe and Charles, reasoning that made it seem like he was not intimidated by them at all. Was the cheese safe to eat? It looked good.

  “You think that Wyman is a serial killer?” Charles asked, smiling. Why was he smiling? He took a leisurely sip of his beer, then rested an ankle on his opposite knee, wiggling his foot. “Well, we can move straight to number two on the agenda. I’ve done some research on Wyman and there’s no need for you to harass him,” Charles said.

  “What research?” Andre asked.

  “I’ve known Wyman for three years.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes. “I was thinking of following him home at the end of the day so we can find out where he lives. We—”

  “I’ve already done that,” Charles said, satisfied with himself. “Last year. I wanted to see what his wife looked like. He caught me, though. It was funny—he led me in a full block circle. I didn’t realize it, then he confronted me.”

  “What did he say?” Andre asked, not being able to help being fascinated, despite the fact that Charles was putting on a show.

  “He wasn’t surprised. I got the impression that patients had tried to poke around his personal life before. But I found out he lives at Foggy Bottom. I had one of my dad’s guys search his house for anything suspicious two days ago.”

  “Your dad has guys?” Andre asked.

  “My dad is wealthy and has had death threats made on him by environmentalists. Anyhow, they went through his things while Wyman was at work.”

  “Prove it,” Chloe said, agitated.

  Charles turned to the side table next to the couch. He picked up a paperweight—a geode sliced in half—and retrieved a sheaf of papers that he handed to Chloe, who had her lips pressed together. Andre moved over to look at the report with Chloe. It cataloged things that were in Wyman’s house, his IT setup, the contents of his garage and even what was inside his washing machine. But this person, Andre realized, wouldn’t necessarily know to look for CRD stuff.

  Chloe dropped the sheaf impatiently and Andre picked it up. “How do I know you didn’t write this?”

  Charles sighed. “I can show you the email.” He opened up his laptop and showed her the email, adding personably, “His name is Mercer, my dad’s guy. He does all kinds of stuff.”

  “Well, Andre and I aren’t eliminating Wyman from the mix,” Chloe said. She nodded to Andre, and he gave an abbreviated version of the Wyman-CRD connection. He watched Charles’s expression carefully—there was a sort of blankness to him in general, and since they had arrived, his expression was somewhere between amused and smug. But the more Andre talked, the more Charles looked increasingly, genuinely, bewildered—this was a real expression of emotion; the amused patina was intentionally worn.

  “Basically, Wyman was linked to a high-profile serial killer, and these murders just happen to start on the twentieth anniversary of CRD’s killings,” Andre finished. “So maybe it’s a copycat killer, or one of the students in the program or something—”

  “Or both,” Chloe interrupted.

  “I think Wyman knows more than he’s saying and maybe he’s worried that it’s one of the students in the program.”

  “I’ve known Wyman for years and he’s never mentioned anything about CRD,” Charles said.

  “Why would he, dum-dum?” Chloe retorted. “Why would he tel
l you anything about his life?”

  “What I’m saying is, don’t harass the man. I know—”

  “You know a bunch of stuff you’re not telling us,” Chloe accused. “Just tell us the names of the other people in the program.”

  “I don’t know anyone else in the program,” Charles said, his eyes wide. She almost jumped out of her seat. “I never said I did,” Charles said, bewildered. “I can try to find out.” Here he flashed a smile. “Elena likes me.”

  Chloe ignored him and spoke to Andre. “We need to consider the alternative. That none of this has anything to do with the program. It might just be that random people are getting killed—”

  “And two of them just happen to be in the program?” Charles interrupted.

  “Because you’re only looking at people who are like you. For all we know, there might have been a bunch of other people killed, but we’re only focused on the Adams ones.”

  “Actually, that might be true,” Andre agreed. “I can start making a database of unsolved murders for the past year.”

  “The other thing is that we each need to have a security plan,” Chloe said.

  Charles opened a little cabinet inside the coffee table and withdrew a black case. He opened it, showing off a pistol. Of course he has a gun, Andre thought. “Here’s my security plan. What’s yours?” he asked Chloe.

  “Besides my collection of weapons,” she said without a hint of humor, “I have my recently installed security system. What about you?” she asked, turning to Andre.

  “I got stuff,” Andre said shortly. His “stuff” was his knife, a baseball bat under his bed and mace he had bought at CVS. The safety-in-numbers lifestyle made it hard to get his schoolwork done because he was forced to socialize, but what was he supposed to do?

  “What, exactly?” Chloe asked him.

  “Why should he tell you?” Charles interrupted. “We’re all adults—we can all take care of ourselves.”

  “I can’t have one of us get killed, and it hardly helps that you won’t tell me what you know.”

  “What do you care—so long as you don’t get killed?” Charles was watching her carefully.

  Chloe snorted. “How am I supposed to get into med school if Adams becomes famous for this?” She put her hands to her head, frustrated, and announced that she was using his bathroom.

  Here, Andre realized, was supposed to be his time to distract Charles. But before he could even think of anything to say, Charles was leaning forward, the Cheshire cat look gone from his face, replaced with a more serious one as he looked intently at Andre. “Listen to me. You need to be careful with her. Don’t tell her much about your life, don’t let her find out where you live.”

  “Why?” Andre whispered back, his heart pounding. He had already mentioned which dorm was his in passing.

  “Why do you think? She’s dangerous.”

  29

  Day 25

  My problems were compounding. Stealing Will’s hard drive had turned into a dead end. I was also no closer to ensnaring Charles to be obedient to my cause—he was still playing cat and mouse, trying to make it seem like I was crazy to Andre. Third, and most pressing, was the serial killer.

  I found myself at my desk wondering, once again, if Charles was a murderer instead of getting my homework done. But he was the one who had warned me about the murders, he drove me to buy a weapon and, most importantly, he’s protective of the other students in the program for no good reason—kind of bizarre for a psychopath. I couldn’t picture him stabbing someone to death in a frenzy—he wouldn’t want to get blood on his shirt—and I couldn’t imagine him doing anything as deranged as feeding someone buckshot. And unless he was a very good actor, I knew he was at least a little afraid of me.

  But one thing at a time. It was time to move forward with Will to a new tactic since the hard drive had been a bust. I turned over the steps that lay ahead of me in my head.

  Search home.

  Hard drive.

  Social engineer—friends? Charles only knew so much—but Chad was another option. I took out my phone and shot off another flirty text to him. We had been back-and-forthing a little. He just might be the strange nexus between my two problems: Will and our little hunter. Chad lived in the frat house and probably knew a lot of what went on there. He could also be another student in the program who fit murders in between Crossfit sessions.

  Phone. As in, Will’s current phone, which I was about to go get. It was escalating things, but it was time to escalate, with the two other options being more extreme.

  Execute hard ball. This part of the plan I had started over six months ago, but I definitely wanted to leave it as a last resort to get the video, and to set up as my final lure for Phase Four.

  Let go. I was starting to face the fact that I might not get the video back. If Day 0 rolled around and it still wasn’t mine, I was still going to kill Will. I worried that it would forever nag me, the video floating around somewhere in the bowels of the dark web, people laughing at my humiliation the way they did that night. But at some point you have to accept that you can’t have it all.

  When I left the dorm that morning, few people were up. Lacrosse practice was about to start on the far end of campus and would last for two hours. I jogged, my knapsack flapping against my back. The locker room for the lacrosse team was located in the Blagden Athletic Center, a separate gym that the rest of us plebes didn’t have access to.

  I made a sad look wash over my face as I opened the glass door. An older man was manning the front desk, watching ESPN.

  I came up to him, my eyes brimming with tears. “Hi, I called earlier?”

  “Hmm?” he said, looking at me. He sat up when he saw my face. “I didn’t talk to anyone.”

  “I called earlier? Asking if anyone found an engagement ring?”

  “Oh, no, sweetie, I don’t think so.”

  The tears were threatening to burst out. “I looked everywhere. I know I had it the last time I showered here. I remember because I twisted it and wondered if it was loose and I should have—”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and look for it? I’ll take your name down, in case someone finds it.” Sniveling, I left a fake name and the number for the nearest Duccini’s Pizza and, at his insistence, went back to look for it in the locker room.

  Except it was the men’s locker room I headed for. Luckily there was no one in there. It was a labyrinth but I found the section with several pennants for Adams Lacrosse hung up. Each player had their name affixed to their lockers. I withdrew my jumbo-size lock cutter ($29.95 at Home Depot) and snapped Will’s lock and three others. Will would know soon that it was me, but at least this would give me a few hours to make the entire team think one of them was pranking the others.

  It only took me a second to find what I was looking for: a sleek black iPhone, a full three models newer than his old phone but that didn’t matter. I could get into his iCloud with it. I went out the back entrance and began to walk toward Will’s house. His phone wasn’t set to require a thumbprint. Was Will’s password the month and year of his birthday? Yes, of course it was. I paused at a street corner as I opened his photos. All neatly cataloged by time. Everything that was synced to his iPhone went back two years, but not beyond.

  Motherfucker. It wasn’t there.

  I bit the inside of my cheek and seethed as I continued walking, still searching the phone. I wanted to know if he had any other victims, but his pictures were mainly dumb college things. There were some naked and seminaked girls but they appeared to be college-aged.

  Will would go from practice to Economics class wondering who had stolen his phone. I went straight to his house, barely even checking around before I started to shimmy up the drainpipe, my adrenaline surging. This time the window was closed and locked. I found a chunk of cement on the roof and smashed the window. There would be no doubt. Will
would know I had been here. Will would know that I’m crazy. I almost wanted him to come home at that moment, because this time I was ready. In the back of my mind, I was mad at Will because I got attacked in his basement, even though I knew logically it hadn’t been him. That person deserved to be punished. They deserved to feel threatened.

  I swung inside, then kicked the broken glass in front of me as I walked to Will’s room, now identifiable by a C Quiz I found on the floor. Will’s bed was unmade, a sad thing with dingy sheets, the fitted sheet half torn off, no duvet. I drew a smiley face on the phone with lipstick and placed it on the center of the bed.

  I wandered through the house, knocking shit over, turning the stereo on high volume, pouring orange juice out on the kitchen floor. I went out the front door, leaving it wide open. Sometimes you have an itch and you just have to scratch it. I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep a smile from sneaking out as I thought about what Will’s dumb face would look like once he saw what I’d done.

  All I wanted now was to be at home taking a shower, ridding myself of any of Will’s dust mites that might have clung to me searching for a more desirable host.

  He would be paranoid that I had done something to his phone, installed spyware or collected all his pictures or email. Making him crazy was good enough for now. I had considered actually installing spyware on his phone, but the last thing I needed was for the police to find it on his phone and then link it back to me.

  Just as I crossed in front of the muffin shop by his house, my watch buzzed with a mood log. I sighed and ignored it, waiting until I was halfway across campus to do it so my location would be logged away from Will’s house. I hoped that my contribution to science was deeply appreciated because the mood logs were starting to lose their novelty. I used the drop-down menu to indicate my current activity: Research.