by Vera Kurian
“I got in trouble at work today. I was supposed to lock up and I did and they think I didn’t.”
“Maybe you forgot.”
“No!” she shouted. “I know I did because I’m OCD. I lock it and have to touch it five times to make sure.”
“Maybe one of the five times you accidentally unlocked it.”
“Aha!” She poked his chest. “I have a fail-safe. Part of the ritual includes walking away and coming back to double-check it—twice.”
Well, that seemed thorough. She probably had locked the door. Then someone else had come in with their own key, or broken in, and accidentally left the door open afterward. “Maybe someone took your keys,” Charles suggested.
“No. I always have them.”
“Always?”
“I mean, except at the gym, but I lock them in my locker.”
Lockers weren’t that hard to open, he reasoned. Adelei’s head was bobbing. “Did you drink the green punch?” he asked.
“Yes. No. Is there something in it?”
“Everclear. Grain alcohol.”
“Ohhh.”
Charles opened his mouth, but then his phone rang, a picture of Darth Vader appearing on his screen. His father calling, probably mad or wanting Charles to appear at some boring event as evidence of good Portmont genes. He sent the call to voicemail and squeezed through the crowded house, hoping for some fresh air and the ability to think outside.
Someone had gotten into the office. If someone got into the office, what exactly would they get access to? Chloe and Andre had been able to get into the office somehow, but had been stymied by the computer. But someone tech savvy, someone like Trevor, could easily figure out how to access anything he wanted if he broke in. He could have their addresses, their parents’ phone numbers...
Charles’s eyes fell upon the black face of his smartwatch. He vaguely recalled when he signed up for the program that location data was only logged when they did a mood log. But that did mean that there was broader location data out there somewhere, much in the same way his iPhone creepily knew his favorite locations or where he liked to use certain apps. Michael had been killed while he was alone, and Kellen must have been force-fed buckshot at some opportune time with no one else around. Chloe had been attacked in Will’s basement and this same person had known that Charles was sleeping at Kristen’s the night they were broken into. Which meant that either this killer had an uncanny knack of knowing exactly when to follow someone for them to be vulnerable, or they literally knew where the panel members were at all times.
Charles immediately began undoing the strap on his watch. He could leave it on a taxicab headed somewhere. He could throw it into the Potomac or plant it on another student. He would have to answer to Wyman and Elena eventually, but he could come up with some excuse.
Just then, he saw Derek teetering across the lawn, holding a forty of Steel Reserve. “Dude! Help me with this!” Charles called to him.
Derek was the tech savvy one at SAE. He said it was easy to turn off location tracking on the watch. Only this turned out to not be exactly true, because the settings had been disabled. Drunk, Derek wobbled into the house and to his computer upstairs to hook the watch up to adjust the settings some other way. Charles watched carefully so he could tell Andre and Chloe how to do the same. He thanked Derek, then headed back toward the front of the house. He sat on the steps, took out his phone, and texted Andre and Chloe about what the RA had told him, and to disable their location tracking, including brief instructions.
Andre responded immediately with, Doing it now! but Chloe didn’t respond.
Something tugged at the corner of Charles’s mind. He had texted Chloe last night with an invite to the party and she hadn’t responded, when normally her response would have been something teasing or to demand a pull-aside to talk about the hunter. Not responding at all wasn’t like her. From his position on the stairs, Charles could see Chad sitting on the couch, feeding Adelei some much needed water. Good old Chad, the only person on earth actually attentive enough to notice that Will was missing. Will—when had been the last time Charles had actually seen him? Chloe, please tell me you didn’t do something stupid, Charles thought.
50
Elena jumped a little when a notification at the bottom of her screen popped up. She quickly clicked on the email and saw that her proposal had been accepted for the European Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Congress. “Yes!” she whispered to herself, then opened a fresh email to Mai, her fiancée. I got in to EABCT! Partially subsidized trip to Dublin next year?! She was about to click Send when she felt a strange sensation of being watched.
She turned in her chair, then with a small start saw that Trevor was standing in the open doorway of her office. Just lurking there, staring. She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. He was dressed in dark clothing and had his thumbs tucked under the straps of his book bag. How long had he been there, just looking at her? “Did you need something?” she asked politely.
That was the thing—you had to be polite sometimes when what you really wanted to be was curt. Because if you existed as a woman in the world and were anything but polite you were rude, uppity, a bitch, stuck-up, a cunt, the list went on. Lately her ability to be endlessly patient was wearing thin.
“I have an appointment with Dr. Wyman,” Trevor said quietly. Trevor had always unnerved her. She had interacted with plenty of clients who required varying degrees of treatment in her life as a grad student, but Trevor was the only one who genuinely bothered her in a personal way. She had even interviewed violent offenders in prison who seemed more sympathetic.
She smiled shallowly. “He’ll be with you shortly,” she said. She got up and closed the door as gently but as quickly as she could. Furious, she turned back to her computer and opened a new email.
Leonard,
I thought we’d agreed that I would be getting a heads-up when Trevor would be coming in for sessions. I just found him standing outside my office, and if it’s 4:20, I’m guessing he doesn’t actually have an appointment with you until 4:30.
She hit Send right away. She texted Mai and worked for two more hours, wanting to make sure that she wouldn’t be leaving until well after Trevor was gone. It was dark outside by the time Elena poked her head out of her office. Leonard’s door was open and the office was dark. Elena gathered her things and headed outside.
Architecturally, the psychology building was beautiful with its turrets and old windows, but in the darkness of night, bathed by the yellow light of streetlamps, it was creepy. Luckily, Mai was early and soon a Honda Civic turned onto the street and came to a stop. “You won’t believe Leonard,” Elena said as soon as she closed her door.
“What?” Mai asked, her dark eyes wide. “I got you a celebratory snack,” she said, putting a paper bag with an empanada inside it on Elena’s lap. A woman after her heart, Mai understood that Elena was always ravenous and sometimes hangry after work, which occasionally spoiled plans to cook a nice meal together.
“I specifically asked Leonard to give me a heads-up any time this one particular client is coming in.”
“Oh, the creepy one?”
Trevor had proven himself to be significantly more difficult in sessions with Elena than with Leonard last year, which, much to her secret relief, had led to Leonard deciding that either he would see Trevor alone, or they would see him together. Trevor had spent much of his sessions with Elena smirking, attempting to ask personal questions or trying to impress her with his intelligence about everything. Leonard had explained the change to him in person, and Elena could only hope that it hadn’t made Trevor angry somehow. She had caught him lingering once or twice around the office since then. “Yeah. And of course he forgot. I mean, he was really nice when I first brought it up, but he always forgets because he just can’t see it.”
“Yeah,” Mai said. �
�It’s kind of hard to explain your girl spidey sense.”
“I mean, hello, it’s in The Gift of Fear. When I say this person makes me uncomfortable, can you just take me seriously? I said it because I meant it!”
“Did they find out who left the lab unlocked?”
When they had first met at a grad student mixer, Elena’s research had been something that made her seem cool to Mai, who liked true crime and never missed an episode of Dateline. But reality hit when their relationship became more serious and Mai started asking if Elena’s field of study could actually invite danger into their lives.
“One of the RAs. Probably an honest accident, but with everything going on, everyone’s on edge. Well, I have news on that front.” Elena paused to bite into the empanada, which was a salteña, her favorite.
The sounds of sirens blaring could be heard from down the street. Mai sighed loudly as two policemen on motorcycles appeared, holding out their arms to stop traffic. When there was a motorcade the police always arrived suddenly to block off traffic to make way for the parade of armored sedans and limos—you were never sure who was inside or how long you’d be waiting.
“We’re going to be sitting here awhile.” She twisted one hand into her black fauxhawk, a look Elena could never pull off. Elena broke the empanada in half and offered it to Mai, who took it gratefully. “If you have gossip, tell me slow and sensually.”
Elena snickered. “It’s good news actually,” she said. And indeed, it was—hearing it had released an enormous weight off her shoulders. “A little bird told me that they’re close to making an arrest for the two students who got killed.”
“Wait, what? What bird?”
“Leonard is friends with one of the detectives. He came to his office today, and I could sort of hear them talking through the wall.”
“But your office isn’t next to his.”
“Okay, so I put a cup against my ear and put it to the door,” Elena admitted.
Mai started laughing. “That actually works?”
“It does. Sort of, anyway. It looks like it was a drug thing and they’re close to making an arrest.” What she could not say, but wanted to, was how tense the past few weeks had been, particularly with Leonard.
Elena thought two students in the program being killed was too much of a coincidence but Leonard never did—he assumed that high-risk behavior put people in situations that were inherently dangerous and psychopaths just happened to be attracted to high-risk behavior. They had had a few conversations about what the other students in the program should be told, but Leonard always overruled her. If he was going to ignore her concerns, then Elena was absolutely going to eavesdrop on private conversations with a detective. The confidentiality of the program dictated that she couldn’t relate everything she knew to her fiancée—who of course didn’t know that Michael and Kellen were part of Elena’s panel—which had put her in a bind of lying when normally she would never lie to Mai.
“That’s a relief,” Mai said, her mouth full. They both watched the parade of police cars, sirens blazing, drive by, to be followed by more motorcycles, then sleek, anonymous-looking black cars. Elena smiled, feeling light for the first time in weeks.
It was terrible to have such a blow happen to the program, to not exactly know what had happened and to not entirely feel safe sitting in her office. She could push aside that image of Kellen lying on the floor in his own blood and tell herself that this was the tragic consequence of a series of bad life decisions—exactly as Leonard had said. With the case wrapping up, life would inevitably move on, and everyone could breathe a sigh of relief.
What she could never tell anyone—not Mai or Leonard—especially not now, because she’d be too embarrassed, was the tiny intrusive thought she had had on more than on occasion. Now it felt foolish to even think about it, but there had been a moment two weeks ago when she had been working at her computer, doing data analysis, and a thought popped into her head: Could it have been Trevor? She had no evidence to suggest that Trevor could have killed Michael and Kellen, and no evidence that he even knew them. They were both the kind of guys that Trevor would never hang out with—the type of guys he would even hate (although the bar for being hated by Trevor was quite low).
She had idly wondered this based solely off a gut feeling, and now she chastised herself for her prejudice. She was glad she never related her suspicion to Leonard—he might think her unprofessional or hysterical, or lacking in some fundamental respect for her clients. Making the leap from “this person makes me feel uncomfortable” to “this person might be a murderer” was exactly the sort of narrow-minded sentiment that Wyman had spent the past few decades of his life fighting. And here, Leonard’s senior-most graduate student was indulging in that exact type of lazy thinking. She was glad she had never admitted this secret thought to anyone, and glad she was about to be proven wrong about thinking the worst of one of her clients.
51
They met at the Shaw Metro stop. Andre wore an ill-fitting blazer—one of Marcus’s—in attempt to make him look older. Chloe had more or less copied the exact way that Elena dressed and was sporting a pair of eyeglasses as she frowned at him. “You need better disguises.” As they boarded the train, Andre wondered if she had a whole wardrobe of disguises.
It had taken five carefully worded, increasingly longer letters to Mira Wale, the fiancée of Wyman’s former, and now dead, student John Fiola, the only one who appeared to have any research connections to CRD. She had not responded to Andre’s first Facebook message, nor the second that he and Chloe had painstakingly written, trying to make themselves seem like graduate students from the Wyman lab who desperately needed Fiola’s dissertation and unpublished research. Chloe ended up filching some of Wyman’s official letterhead and they wrote a formal, physical letter littered with psychology jargon, included a new fake email address, and off it went, later receiving a tepid invitation from Mira.
“Did you, um, do what Charles said?” Andre whispered after they had settled into plastic seats beside each other. The only other people in the subway car were reading newspapers or looking at their phones. He looked up at Chloe and found her giving him a look of utter disgust—Of course I did, how dare you even doubt me, that look said. Andre fiddled with his watch, double-checking that the location tracking was off. “Do you think they could have been using it the whole time? Do you think Elena and all them will notice we turned it off?”
“Tech fails happen all the time,” she said, shrugging. “Just play dumb. And don’t assume we’re safe now—I doubt it’s that hard to track any of us even without the watches. We all live on campus. It’s not that hard to find out who our friends are, what classes we take, and where we hang out. Think about everything you post on social media. Think about all the times you’re walking around—work under the assumption that you could have been followed, because whoever this is, they know what they’re doing.” As a precaution, they took a series of detours at the Gallery Place Metro station, climbing up stairways and down escalators, hopping onto one train only to change cars and hop off immediately, not wanting to risk being followed.
To Andre, it seemed that every day that passed it felt more and more likely that behind each closed door was someone about to pop out, in every dark car was someone dangerous waiting. He sat in class, trying to pay attention, but wondered if anyone was watching him. Now he slept with the baseball bat in his bed, rather than under it. He didn’t know how sustainable it all was because it was increasingly exhausting.
They got off at the Eastern Market stop and headed up the escalator. “You should do most of the talking,” Andre said.
Chloe looked up from the map on her phone, her eyes narrowed. Uh-oh. He had suggested this because making up elaborate lies made him nervous and she seemed to do it with aplomb. “People are more helpful when you’re white,” he said.
He expected her to protest that this wasn�
��t true, but instead she nodded and added, “Also, I’m pretty.”
Mira lived in Capitol Hill, on a street filled with yuppies pushing expensive strollers and signs in windows saying Hate Isn’t Welcome Here. Andre walked behind Chloe, scanning the street as they went, looking for anyone who seemed to be paying too much attention to them.
Mira’s house was a redbrick Victorian with an overgrown garden in the front. Chloe rang the doorbell with no hesitation. There was a long pause—long enough that Andre wondered if Mira forgot their appointment—but then there were shuffling sounds, and the door opened. Mira was an extraordinarily pregnant woman with glossy hair.
“Hello?” she said, sounding skeptical. She stood in the doorway, exactly in the position of someone who could easily slam the door on a salesman.
“I’m Jennifer and this is Brian—Dr. Wyman’s graduate students?” Chloe said. She even affected Elena’s tone. “Thank you so much for meeting with us. We’re fifth years—prospectuses are coming up, and we can’t seem to get our hands on John’s dissertation anywhere...?”
“So sorry about what happened,” Andre added.
Mira leaned on the doorway, rubbing her distended belly. “Your work relates to John’s?”
“We’re working with one of the same datasets,” Chloe said. “That’s why we wanted his dissertation—to see if he ran into the same problem of contradictory evidence that we did. There’s supposed to be two copies bound at the library but they’re both gone.”
“Really? That’s strange.” Her tone was exactly that of someone who didn’t really care.
“We were hoping you had a copy?”
Mira made a broad gesture, one that indicated her pregnancy, the wedding band on her finger, the house behind her, which they couldn’t see into. “That...was a whole lifetime ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Chloe said. “We didn’t mean to bring it up when you’re—you know. Busy and stuff.”
