by Vera Kurian
She looked like she wanted to be done with them, but then Andre said, “It’s just frustrating to think some of John’s ideas will never come to fruition. He was brilliant, even as a student.”
Mira said, “I’m not saying there isn’t a copy actually.”
“Oh?” Chloe said.
“John and I had a storage unit—his mom paid for it. After he passed away, I was in such a state I just didn’t want to deal with anything, really. I had my brother dump a lot of our stuff in there, basically clothes and school stuff and old furniture.”
“You still have the unit?”
“His mom never stopped paying for it and I’ve never drummed up the energy to go clear it out.”
Andre had no idea where she was headed but he jumped in. “If you think the dissertation might be in there, what if we cleaned out the unit for you in exchange for having a look?” She seemed skeptical, but intrigued.
“Basically, you’ve been wanting to pack it up and drop it off at Goodwill, but never have the time—” Chloe gestured to her pregnant belly “—and you don’t want to just throw it all out because that’s such a waste, am I right?”
“Yeah...there’s nothing really of value in there, like IKEA furniture. Actually, you might know students who’d want some of it.”
“We can have it cleaned out in a week. I can send you a picture when we’re done so you know to close out the account.”
“Tell you what...you have a deal.”
* * *
They had a few hours until it would get dark, so they sprang for a cab to the storage unit facility. There didn’t appear to be any sort of office—they could just take the key Mira had given them and head to Unit 345. The lock protested, but then gave, and with a great lurch they managed to get the rusty door to roll upward.
Mira hadn’t been exaggerating when she said junk—there was barely room to walk. Boxes, furniture piled up, heaps of clothes on the floor. There was also no overhead light so cell phones would have to suffice.
“Let’s triage,” Chloe said. “For all we know, the hunter will figure out we came here and burn the whole place down if we try to come back.”
We better not have been followed, Andre thought, it suddenly seeming very clear that they were in an isolated location with not even an attendant at the storage facility.
Where would the good stuff be? Not with the clothes or jumbles of furniture. They scoured stacks of boxes on opposite sides of the unit. One looked promising—it contained several books about psychology, but nothing resembling a dissertation. He found several thick binders and, feeling a jolt of excitement, he realized they contained handwritten notes. He crouched on the floor of the unit and flipped through them, but only came across equations he didn’t understand. Then a test: Multivariate Statistics Final Exam. “Chloe, this is grad school stuff.” She abandoned her box and grabbed the one next to his.
Andre pawed through old textbooks, study guides, a FAFSA form, then pulled another box forward. He paused—behind it was a cheap bookshelf, one shelf bending under the weight of reams of paper and stuffed binders. Two binders were stuck together, and when he pried them apart, he was holding a loose-leaf copy of “Toward a Greater Understanding of Sexual Violence in Psychopathic Men.” He held it up, Chloe hissed triumphantly and they stuffed it into his book bag. Andre desperately wanted to plant his ass on the floor and start reading, but they only had about half an hour of daylight left. The last place he wanted to be if the hunter made an appearance was a dark, abandoned storage unit. He hadn’t brought his baseball bat; he had worried that Mira would see it. But he did have his knife.
Chloe sat cross-legged on the floor, making three piles. “These look like draft articles, and I think these might be clinic notes. Do those binders look any good?” Andre flipped through one, and the moment he saw the words sexual deviance, he erred on the side of caution and shoved it into his bag. He took a liberal approach to taking things, figuring that it was better to take more and sort it out later. Chloe, however, was getting too engrossed, actually reading stuff.
“Come on, it’s going to get dark soon,” he warned her. His bag was getting too full. Andre unclasped a binder and pulled out the contents, adding it to his collection. The light outside was starting to take on that dusky look of sundown. He began to stuff things into Chloe’s bag as she pored over a single notebook. Once that, too, was packed, he was annoyed to see that she hadn’t moved at all.
“Chloe. It’s getting dark. We gotta go.”
“You need to look at this.” She handed him a typed list. It consisted of about fifty unfamiliar names with dates and checks or question marks written next to each. What was this? Andre wondered, a chill moving up his back. He knew they should get going but he couldn’t resist—he pulled up Wikipedia on his phone and looked up CRD, Chloe leaning over his shoulder as he thumbed to the part where the names of all his victims were listed. Or, at least, his official victims.
There was no overlap between the list of names they held and the list of victims. Every date on their sheet of paper was in 2008, two years after CRD had been killed by lethal injection by the state of Virginia. Chloe met his eyes, and he knew she was wondering the same thing: if they had just found a list of fifty or so new victims, murders committed by somebody else after CRD had already been executed.
52
Safe at class, said the text from Kristen.
Good—miss you, Charles responded. Through his car window, he looked into Cathedral Coffee. It was now the sweet spot after lunch but before people would want their afternoon coffee. It had been surprisingly easy to find out where Megan Dufresne worked. She had posted a brief video of her pouring a latte, making a dove shape with the milk, and Charles had Googled coffee shops until he had matched the logo on her apron. Charles called the shop pretending that he had found a lost student ID of someone named Megan and a coworker told him that of course he could stop by to return it, and that Megan could pick it up on Thursday.
Charles entered the coffee shop, which was empty except for some laptop trolls and Megan rearranging pastries with a bored expression. It was bizarre to look at her: she had the same exact facial structure as Emma—perhaps a bit healthier looking, and her auburn hair was stylish. The twins literally looked like before and after makeover pictures. “Hello,” he said. Megan looked up but her eyes didn’t register the look girls often got where they immediately found him attractive.
“What can I get you?”
“Actually, I was hoping you could help me. You’re Megan Dufresne, right?” She looked instantly suspicious but didn’t deny it. “I’m a friend of your sister’s.” She didn’t believe him. More specifically, she didn’t believe that her sister had friends. “Well, sort of. I’m her TA. I’ve been worried about her.” Her brow furrowed. “She hasn’t been at class and she missed our last appointment.” Charles had no idea if Emma was actually missing classes. The only thing he could glean from her Instagram from the past week is that she had visited the arboretum and the botanical gardens over by the Capitol, probably to hunt insects to take portraits of.
“Emma doesn’t cut classes,” Megan said.
“I know—that’s why I was worried. Do you think her behavior has been strange lately?”
Megan picked up a rag and began to move it slowly over the counter, even though there was nothing to wipe up. “Strange, how? What class do you TA?”
“Preenlightenment Thought. I noticed—” here he tried to affect a look of discomfort “—I saw some bruising on her arm last month. On the thirteeth actually—I remember specifically because that’s my birthday. I didn’t think anything of it until she started missing classes later. Maybe something happened to her around then?”
She blinked. “And what business of yours would that be?”
He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “As a teacher, I’m a mandated reporter. If I thought someone w
as harming her, I would have to report it, or talk to her. I—I should have said something at the time, because I know she doesn’t talk to a lot of people. She had sort of opened up to me, you know?” Even her body language had turned defensive—her arms folded across her chest, her legs in a stubborn stance. “She came to my office hours a lot,” he added. “She was interested in doing an independent study—”
“On what?”
“Photography as a form of visual ontology. It’s not like I could ever see Emma harming anyone, getting into a physical altercation, so I worried that someone might be harming her.” This was the whole point of his meeting with Megan, and he uttered it as if it were supposed to be a throwaway thought. He watched Megan’s reaction carefully for the confirmation he wanted. That the notion that Emma harming anyone was ridiculous. He would have his confirmation that Emma had nothing to do with any of this, and he could move on to closing in on Trevor.
But instead, Megan looked down at the rag, a furrow in her brow. He had planted a small seed of doubt, one that he didn’t think would be viable. She was just there, on the verge of saying something important. “Mr...?”
“Highsmith,” he said, pulling the name from nowhere. She looked up, her eyes narrowing a fraction. The suspicion had turned back on.
“Mr. Highsmith, I can check in on my sister, but we’re a private family, and there’s no need for you to insert yourself.”
53
“Help me,” Yessica said, looking through her bureau for inspiration for a costume.
“Your fault leaving it till the last minute. We could walk to CVS and rustle something up,” I said.
“We can come up with something better. A cat, maybe?”
“You’re depressing me. Girls always have the same dumb costumes,” I said, rooting through my makeup drawer. “Sexy witch, sexy nurse. Be something original—sexy hurricane!” I said, holding up a wad of fraying cotton balls, thinking of the most recent hurricane, which a few states were still cleaning up from. The look on her face said no. “Too soon?”
“You’re weird.” She held up a chunky eyeliner and sniffed it. “What are you going as?”
I had sold some textbooks I found in the library to scrounge up the money for my costume. I was going as Clark Kent and had blown most of the money on a Superman bustier. I planned to wear it under a white button-down shirt, half unbuttoned, with my black skirt and my fake eyeglasses. I had a black hat and heels to match, but most importantly, a small messenger bag carrying my essentials: a reporter’s notebook, my phone, my stun gun, and switchblade.
“Get your ass in gear!” I admonished as I got dressed. Yessica was still standing there, chewing on a fingernail as she examined her closet. “I have to get there early, but I’ll see you at the party.”
* * *
The Adams Halloween Ball was being held at Fathom Gallery in Logan Circle, close to campus. I wanted to get a lay of the land because even though I had friends going, I was flying solo tonight.
I was tired of this game of cat and mouse, and wanted to be able to confront my attacker face-to-face. I had posted several things on Instagram, making it clear I would be at the ball getting drunk. Trevor might show, or Emma, and I was going to be ready. It could come to a physical fight, or there was my vial of a new liquid solution: a high dose of codeine, dangerous with alcohol, and liable to make you very sleepy if not dead. Maybe Trevor was a master hacker, but he was clearly awkward around girls. I could see him readily accepting a drink from me, planning how he would get me later in the night, oblivious that I was getting him right then.
The Undergraduate Student Association had rented out the whole place, which had three main areas. The DJ was in the main gallery, its glossy wood floors emptied of furniture so people could dance. The brick walls, painted white, had neat lines of framed artwork. Beyond that was an outdoor garden, which had been strung with pumpkin lanterns. On the second floor was a small penthouse where the music wasn’t so loud and most of the food was placed.
I took a cat-shaped cheesecake bite and surveyed the exits of each floor. It would be hard for anyone to make a deadly move here; the space wasn’t very large and there would be people packed in tight. Then again, it was Halloween, and people would be screaming and walking around in grotesque costumes. How hard would it be to jam a screwdriver into someone’s stomach and walk away? People might even see your cooling dead body and think it was a prop.
I noticed on the gallery level that there was a glass staircase leading down to a dimly lit hallway. I went down, pushed open the door, and found a large bathroom, the kind with a dressing area with seating and a marble vanity with fancy towels, lotion, and mouthwash. When I got back upstairs, more people were streaming in.
The party was in full swing half an hour later. Someone had turned on a smoke machine and people sipped punch from sticky cups. Apoorva arrived, dressed as a cat, and Traci, dressed as a box of wine. There was some drama already going on. The boy Traci liked was supposed to be coming with the girl he was hanging out with except Apoorva had heard that they weren’t hanging out anymore. We schemed while I kept my eye on the door, examining each new costumed person as they entered.
I nursed a seltzer and did a lap. If I were a killer, I’d be wearing a mask, something that completely covered my face. I took pictures with friends from Bio, making sure to post them immediately. I spotted Chad by a table of food with a couple other SAE brothers. He was dressed in Roman garb and had his hair combed down. “Et tu, Brute?” I said.
“I’m Augustus, not Julius!” he said, exasperated. We laughed. He even had a baby Cupid attached to his calf.
“I like your costume, Supergirl.”
“I’m Clark Kent! The real deal, not the Diet Coke version.” He gave me a flirty hug, then kept his hand on my back, his expression turning more serious. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Don’t be clingy,” I teased. He thought I was still mad about the photo of me sleeping, which he kept apologizing for every time I saw him. I was mad, but not at him—and of course he had no idea of just exactly how busy I was with other activities, such as murdering his frat brother. But Chad would always be grade A in my book because he had found Will’s phone and was a decent FWB. I pressed my face to his breastplate. “I’ve just been so busy with classes.”
“So, I’ll see you soon?”
“Definitely. Let’s have another study date.” I pushed my glasses up my nose and gave him an impish look as I slipped past to get some food. A girl nearly spilled a drink on me and apologized in a voice that sounded strangely familiar. “Reek?” I asked, incredulous. He was wearing a blond wig and was dressed like a zombie cheerleader, gaunt eyes and makeup to make it look like a chunk had been bitten out of his neck. He nodded. “Damn, you’re kind of hot as a girl.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s fun to pretend.”
I danced, then frowned when I saw Charles and Kristen making their way in. The last thing I needed was Charles being nosy. I hadn’t answered several suspicious texts from him and needed to handle him carefully, now that Will was gone for good. He wasn’t wearing any discernible costume and Kristen was dressed like Wonder Woman. I avoided them, heading toward the outdoor garden. Just as I got outside I got a mood log, which I filled out.
Energetic
7
Nervous
1
Sad
1
I peered off the railing of the landing down at the street below. People in costume were crossing the street, yelping as cars beeped at them. I was talking to one of the guys from my floor when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. A robed figure in black moved across the garden. It carried a large scythe, which glinted like it was real. The figure walked strangely—almost as if it were gliding supernaturally. Then I was distracted by another figure: a guy in a suit and tie, but a full horse-head mask. But maybe not a guy—whoever they
were didn’t have a large frame. There were ghouls and animals and all kinds of costumes with enough makeup or plastic to cover faces entirely.
Without thinking, I impatiently took out my phone and snapped a picture of me looking bored. TFW you’re ready to party but the party hasn’t started yet. Prick me with a pin and maybe I’ll wake up. Come and get me, asshole.
After an hour of fairly uneventful socializing, I wondered if the killer was going to show at all. I headed to the lower floor where the dressing room/bathroom was to freshen up and loosen my bustier, which wasn’t exactly comfortable. It was quiet inside and through the door I could hear the boom of music from upstairs and people laughing. I redid my laces, which required some patience and stamina for having my arms curved around my back for an extended period of time.
I exited my stall, then noticed a figure in black standing in the middle of the dressing room in front of the sink. A Day of the Dead skeleton, its face covered in black-and-white face paint, a grim yellow flower perched behind its ear. My hand moved instinctively to my bag.
The skeleton began to dance, moving its body in strange, jerking motions like something out of a Japanese horror movie. “Yessica?”
She broke out into laughter, bending over to put her bone gloves on her skeletal knees. “I scared you, didn’t I!” I came closer to the sink to examine her makeup.
“Pretty impressive.”
“I found a how-to video,” she said as I washed my hands. “I saw your senior boo.”
“We chatted. I’ll make sure to dance with him.”
Yessica bid me adieu and left. I blotted my face with a fancy towel and sampled the blue mouthwash. Just as I was exiting the dressing room, Charles was coming down the stairs. He wore one of the two standard Charles uniforms: a suit with a skinny tie. It was slate gray and pretty unexciting for a costume party. “What are you supposed to be? An endangered species?”
