by Lis Wiehl
Dani had observed the student parking lot, a virtual fleet of Mercedes Benzes and Audis and BMWs. She’d also seen the St. Adrian’s shuttle around town, a white van that took students into town and back. Tinted windows had always given the van a sinister aspect, she thought.
“You were meeting Logan at Starbucks?” Phil asked.
Amos nodded.
“So he picks you up and then what?”
“We drove to his house.”
“Was anybody else in the car with you?”
“Terence and Parker,” Amos said.
“But you didn’t know them very well.”
“No.”
“What were they doing?”
“Smoking marijuana,” Amos said. “And drinking.”
“Did you have any?”
“I had a beer,” Amos admitted, looking shamefully at Dr. Ghieri. “But I don’t do drugs.”
“So why were you going to this party?” Phil asked. “What kind of a party did you think it was going to be?”
“I wasn’t really sure,” Amos said. “Kind of wild.”
“Wild in what way?”
“Well,” Amos said, struggling. “Logan said there would be girls there.”
“There usually are at parties,” Phil said. “So it was a mixer?”
Amos squinted. Dani couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard anybody call a party a mixer.
“Did Logan say there was going to be anything different about this particular party?” Dani asked.
“Yes,” Amos said. He looked at Dr. Ghieri, who nodded. “He said he thought there would probably be some skinny-dipping in the pool.”
“Swimming naked?” Phil said.
“Yes,” Amos said. “That’s generally what people mean when they say skinny-dipping.”
“That’s what you meant by wild?” Phil asked. “Things were going to get a little crazy?”
“Yes, sir,” Amos replied.
“Why were things going to get crazy?” Dani asked. “Did you have the impression that Logan was going to put something in the punch? Maybe GHB or roofies?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Amos said.
“Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid and Rohypnol,” she told him. “Date rape drugs.”
“No, ma’am,” Amos said. “I mean, Logan didn’t tell me what he was putting in the punch. But I knew it had something in it. That’s why I didn’t drink any.”
“So he was going to drug these girls,” Dani said. “And you went to the party to take advantage of them.”
“No,” Amos said.
“Then why?” Dani asked.
“Just to see what happened,” Amos said.
“So you weren’t going to participate,” Dani said. “You just wanted to watch. Did you stop to think that might be wrong?”
“That’s why I left,” Amos said. “At first I thought maybe it was just going to be sort of harmless.”
“When did you realize it wasn’t?”
“I’m not sure,” Amos said. “Maybe it was the music.”
“What were they listening to?” Phil asked, leaning closer to the boy.
“Fanisk,” Amos said. “Panzerfaust. Stuff like that.”
“I’m not familiar with those bands,” Phil said.
“Pro-white,” Dani said. “Neo-Nazi hate music. Who was listening to that music?”
“Everybody,” Amos said. “But it wasn’t like they agreed with it. They were making fun of it. The music itself was pretty good. It was just the words that were idiotic.”
“Too hard-core for you?” Phil asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you heard of something called a passage party?” Dani asked him.
“No,” Amos said.
“Was anybody talking about that at the party?”
“Not to me,” Amos told her.
She couldn’t be sure, but if she had to guess, she’d say he was telling the truth.
“Did you talk to Julie at the party? How did she seem?”
“We talked a little,” Amos said. “She seemed to be having a good time. I think she was pretty wasted by the time I left.”
“And when was that?”
“Around twelve thirty.”
“Weren’t you supposed to be back on campus before midnight?” Phil asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“So why didn’t you leave sooner?”
“I was trying to get somebody to give me a ride,” Amos said. “People said they would give me a ride but then they didn’t, so I decided I’d better walk back.”
“Has this been called to your attention?” Phil asked Ghieri.
“Amos’s off-campus privileges have been suspended,” Ghieri said. “Which is one reason why he was unable to meet with you elsewhere. We do not make exceptions to our rules. Many of our students come from situations where they have … high levels of autonomy. From wealth or power or privilege. Some, for whatever reason, feel that rules don’t apply to them, or that everything is fungible. Part of what we offer here is a very firm, very clear structure.”
“I get that impression,” Phil said. “I know what you mean. I’d tell my kids when to go to bed and they’d always wait until two minutes before bedtime to do something they absolutely had to do that took half an hour.”
“That kind of behavior is not tolerated at St. Adrian’s,” Ghieri said. “Those who compare us to a boot camp are not misinformed. Many of the same principles apply.”
“Dani?” Phil said. “Do you have any other questions?”
“Just one,” Dani said, returning to Amos. “And this may be something you couldn’t possibly answer, but did you have any sense that any of the people at the party had any reason to dislike Julie? Any reason why somebody might want to hurt her?”
Amos thought.
“Not really,” he said. “I think Logan thought she was sort of … weak.”
“What do you mean, weak?”
“She kept telling him how much she liked his house and all his stuff,” Amos said. “Like she’d never seen any of it before. Logan would make stuff up, like that his golf clubs used to belong to Tiger Woods, and Julie believed him. She was pretty gullible.”
“So he thought she was lower class?” Dani said. “And sort of held her in contempt?”
“Something like that,” Amos replied. “But like you said, it’s not really something I can answer. It was just an impression.”
“I think we’re done here,” Phil said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thank you for speaking with us, Amos.”
When he offered his hand, Amos shook it without changing his expression.
Dani expected to find Tommy in the waiting room, but the room was vacant. Dr. Ghieri asked them to wait there while he found out where Tommy had gone. Phil asked Ghieri for directions to the men’s room. It left Dani, momentarily, alone with Amos, who seemed to hesitate, unsure if Ghieri had told him to stay or if he was free to go. Dani saw it for the opportunity it was, a chance to befriend him.
“So you do your studying at Starbucks?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” he said.
“I’m not sure if I’ve seen you there,” Dani said. “I go there in the morning, usually. When it’s mostly real estate agents and mommy bloggers.”
“I’ve seen you before,” Amos said, looking Dani squarely in the eye and holding her gaze. “Next time I see you, I’ll buy you a venti vanilla soy latte and we can commiserate about what it’s like to be orphans.”
Dani felt a sudden falling sensation, as if she were sinking and spinning, spiraling downward, weak in the knees. She tried not to show how stunned she was. How did he know these things about her? He was smirking, but his eyes revealed no mirth. She saw instead a cold malevolence that made her take a step back.
He turned and walked slowly down the hall without looking back.
Dani’s legs felt heavy, as if she could hardly move. Time seemed frozen, and when she tried to take a breath, there was no air to breathe, until sh
e was able to unblock her throat and inhale. By then, Amos was gone.
31.
Tommy was in the campus security office when Dani and Phil found him. He was glad to see her, though she looked slightly paler than usual. The detective looked about as annoyed as he always looked. Tommy explained briefly that the groundskeeper who’d asked to see his pass had detained him when he couldn’t produce one. Tommy had apologized profusely and said he was unaware of the restrictions, other than to keep off the grass. In the car, headed back down the long drive to the main gate, they passed a pair of groundskeepers trimming a hedge.
“They don’t call them guards, but that’s what they are,” Tommy told the others.
“I leave you alone for five minutes … ,” Dani said. “What were you doing, anyway?”
“Actually, I was trying to get arrested,” Tommy said. “I wanted to see the security office, but I didn’t think they were going to show it to me if I asked. This whole place is lousy with hidden cameras. I think I saw at least thirty simultaneous feeds on the monitors.”
“Why?” Dani asked as Phil braked to allow the wrought iron gates to swing open.
“I wanted to see what system they were using,” Tommy explained. “Campus wireless is Avanti, but the security program is Eyeline Pro with all Dell servers hardwired and firewalled against the outside, but not internally.”
A security camera followed them as they passed through the gate.
“For example,” Tommy said, pointing at it.
“And you learned all this how?” Dani asked.
“The head of security was a football fan,” Tommy said. “I told him I needed to install some sort of surveillance system at my house. Which I don’t, because the investment banker I bought the house from had one installed after he figured out he was laundering money for a Mexican drug lord.”
“What was your impression?” Phil asked Dani. “Normal kid? Abnormal?”
“Amos seems to have a fairly high opinion of himself,” Dani said. “Narcissistic. Probably to overcompensate for a reciprocally low shame-based sense of self. People with traumatic childhoods often grow up thinking that deep down inside, they really are the bad person their parents told them they were, the kid who deserved to be hit.”
“You got that from just now?” Phil asked.
“I got a pretty clear sense of internal conflict,” Dani said.
Tommy handed her his phone with a set of earbuds plugged in and showed her the video he’d made of Amos. When she got to the part where Amos asked Tommy if he’d felt glad after the fatal hit, her mouth dropped open.
The look she gave him told him she agreed—something was very strange about Amos.
Very strange and very wrong.
“The ME says he’s going to have the labs back from Quantico tomorrow afternoon,” Phil said before dropping Tommy off. “Let’s get together tomorrow and see where the FA is at.”
“Forensic analysis,” Dani explained to Tommy.
“Am I invited?” he asked.
“I’d like you there,” she said.
“I’m going to go talk to Carl,” Tommy told Dani. “You feel like meeting me at The Pub later to reconnoiter?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said. “Probably. I have to meet with Willis Danes. Old friend of my parents. Call me.”
“You okay?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “Unraveled might be a better word.”
He would tell her about the frog that didn’t jump another time.
32.
When she used her phone to log onto the Friends of Julie Leonard Facebook page, Dani found she wasn’t the only one who was scared. On one post, at one thirty in the morning, a fourteen-year-old girl had said: I’m too scared to get to sleep. Is anybody out there?
Three other kids had answered her, kids who also should have been sound asleep.
Dani scanned down the list of people who’d joined the group.
“Where are you?” she said out loud. “I know you’re enjoying this. It must make you feel very important to scare little girls.”
She wasn’t surprised when she couldn’t find any of the kids from the party on the list. If the killer was lurking on the Facebook page, he—or she—probably would have created an avatar.
She sent an e-mail to Stuart Metz:
Stuart,
Have you checked to see if all of the 3,183 people who’ve joined Friends of Julie Leonard are real people? The killer may be using a fake name. Just a thought.
Dani
Will do. P.S. Davis Fish called to say we need to reschedule with Logan. No explanation offered.
Stuart
Her appointment with Willis Danes was for four thirty. She got to her office on Main Street at four and spent the half hour of downtime playing with a paper clip. Her brain had been racing nonstop for what seemed an eternity. She knew, clinically and scientifically, what her brain was doing as she batted the paper clip back and forth. She could describe in considerable detail the electrochemical parameters of mindless activity and the subsequent sense of respite, but to do so now would have defeated the purpose. Soldiers called it “the thousand-yard stare.” Her daydreaming ceased when she saw a car pull up out front.
The caregiver opened the passenger side door for Willis and escorted the blind man by the elbow. Dani met them on the porch, where his caregiver told Dani she had some errands to run and that she’d be back in an hour.
“Sorry I didn’t have time to straighten up,” Dani said. Then she caught herself, remembering that her guest was quite unaware of the piles of papers and stacks of unshelved books sitting on the floor.
“I was just going to say, this place looks like a hurricane blew through,” the old man joked.
Dani smiled, recalling how as a girl, operating on the perimeters of her parents’ dinner parties, she’d been impressed by his sense of humor and sheer joy of living, the smile he always had on his face despite the adversities he’d had to overcome. That and the fact that he was always more stylishly dressed than he needed to be, given that he couldn’t know what he looked like in the mirror. He was fond of vests and bow ties and a coffee-colored fedora that he always removed with two hands and never one, explaining to Dani that grasping the crown with one hand would inevitably cause the dents to become asymmetrical, canted toward the thumb side, while distempering the pitch of the brim. What also impressed her was the way he took his hat off when he tuned pianos but never forgot where he put it.
She led him to the wingback chair and asked if she could get him anything.
He smiled and said no. “How’s that Steinway your dad had?” he asked. “I hope you play it once in a while. Pianos are like pets. They don’t like to be neglected. I’d be happy to come by and tune it if you’d like.”
“I hardly have time to play these days,” Dani apologized, trying to recall the last time she’d sat down at it.
“So many people have electronic pianos these days,” Willis said. “It makes sense, I know. They don’t sound as good, but they’re a lot easier to move.”
“How can I help you?” she asked him, moving her office chair around to the other side of her desk to sit opposite him. She realized that most of what she’d learned about the therapist’s proper demeanor and body language was inapplicable. She hoped sitting a little closer might make up for the usual intimacy-enhancing tools and tricks. “What’s going on?”
“Well,” he said, his smile weaker now, “I guess if I knew what was going on, I wouldn’t need to talk to you. You know that line from Macbeth, in Act II, when he talks about the ‘sleep that knits the raveled sleeve of care’?”
“The balm of hurt minds,” Dani quoted, surprised that she could remember a play she hadn’t read since college. Unraveled, she’d told Tommy that very day.
“That’s the one,” Willis said. “I guess I could use a little more balm.”
“You’re having trouble sleeping?” Dani asked. “You know, there are a lot of new medications these da
ys that could help you.”
“Well,” Willis said, “I suppose we could do that. You’re the doctor. It’s not so much the lack of sleep, I guess. I’ve been having some fairly troubling dreams.”
Dani recalled the section she’d taken in abnormal psychology covering sensory impairment, but it was hardly something she felt expert in. The mind of a blind person started out the same as everybody else’s, but then what happened to it as it developed?
“What sort of dreams?” she asked him.
“Well,” he said. He paused, thinking. “I wish I knew. It’s something I have trouble putting into words. If my wife … Anyway, I can’t quite express it. Have you heard of neural plasticity?”
She had. The term referred to the way the brain adapted to injury and reorganized its functions by reassigning tasks to new neural networks. One example was how paralyzed stroke victims regained motor functions by training new parts of their brains to control voluntary muscle activity.
“What about neural plasticity?” she asked him.
“You know, when blind people dream … ,” he began. “They’ve done experiments with MRIs or CAT scans, I forget … that show that when blind people dream, the visual cortex lights up, just as it does in sighted people. Lights up when we read Braille too. Did you know that?”
“I remember reading something about that,” she said. Braille readers experienced touch as a kind of sight, her ab psych professor had said.
“They used to think it was use it or lose it,” Willis continued. “That it atrophied. Now they know that sometimes the other senses take over the part that isn’t being used. My doctor told me that’s why I have perfect pitch. And what he calls a phonographic memory.”
Dani knew that Willis had been a musician who’d played piano in jazz bands his whole life, even though he was unable to read sheet music. She knew blind people often possessed remarkable aural memory, able to recite long conversations word for word.
“Are you remembering things in your dreams?”
“Am I?” he asked. “Well … I just don’t know. That’s a good question, Dani. I knew you’d be good at this. You know, there are sounds animals can hear that we can’t hear, like those high-pitched dog whistles. And there are colors animals can see that we can’t see. Infrared and ultraviolet and even beyond that. You wonder what else we’re surrounded by that we can’t see or don’t know. So I was thinking, what if, suddenly, you could?”
