Free The Dead Student by John Katzenbach

“Right and right.”
    “So, if it is what you think it is and what they don’t think it is, we have to look in the places they didn’t look,” Andy Candy said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
    She was a little surprised at her logic. Or antilogic. Look in the places that don’t make sense . She wondered where this idea had come from. She gestured toward the door again.
    “Time to leave, Moth,” she said cautiously. “If there really was a killer in this room like you said, sitting right there, then they sure weren’t going to leave something behind that would make the cops suspicious.”
    Her practicality astonished her.

 
     
    6
     
    Two conversations. One imagined. One real.
    The first:
    “He’s holding us all back. We want to get rid of him.”
    “Well, file a complaint with the dean. But clearly your fellow student is in emotional trouble.”
    “We don’t care how much trouble or stress or difficulty—whatever you want to call it—he’s caught up in. So he’s sick. Big fucking deal. Screw him. We just want him out, so that our own careers aren’t compromised.”
    “Of course. That makes complete sense. I’ll help you.”
    If it had actually taken place that way it would have made sense for everyone except one person.
    And the second:
    “Hello, Ed.”
    First, a moment of confusion: expecting one person but getting someone very different. Then speechless. Jaw-drop.
    “Don’t you recognize me?”
    The speaker already knew the answer because it was evident in the sudden recognition in Ed Warner’s eyes.
    Then he had slowly and quite deliberately removed his gun from an inside jacket pocket and pointed it across the desktop. The gun was a small .25-caliber automatic loaded with hollow-point bullets that expanded on contact, made a mess, and were preferred by professional assassins. It was the sort of weapon favored by frightened females or uneasy home owners who imagined it would keep them safe from midnight criminal invasions or run-amok zombies, but which probably would do neither. It was also a favorite of trained killers, who liked a small, easily concealable weapon that was easy to maneuver and deadly at close distances.
    “You didn’t think you’d ever see me again, did you, Ed? Your old study group partner here to visit .”
    It had gone more or less like the others. Different but the same —including the moment he had written “My fault” on a notepad on Ed’s desk and then walked out.
    One of the things that had astonished Student #5 was how preternaturally calm he’d grown over the years as he’d perfected the act of killing. Not that he precisely thought of himself as a killer in the usual sense of the word. No scarred face and prison tats. No street thug wearing baggy jeans and a cockeyed baseball cap. No cold-eyed professional drug dealer’s hit man who could wear his psychopathology like others wore a suit of clothes. He did not even consider himself to be some sort of master criminal, although he did feel a slight conceit in how he’d honed his abilities over the years. Real criminals, he believed, have some fundamental moral and psychological deficit that renders them into who they are. They want to rob, steal, rape, torture, or kill. Compulsion. They want money, sex, and power. Obsession. It’s the need to act that drives them to commit crimes. Not me. AllI want is justice. He considered himself to be closer in style and temperament to some sort of classical avenging force, which gave him significant legitimacy in his own imagination.
    He stopped at the corner of 71 st Street and West End Avenue and waited for the light to change. A taxi jammed on its brakes to avoid a man in a shiny new Cadillac. There was a quick squeal of tires accompanied by an exchange of horns and probably some obscenities in several languages that couldn’t penetrate closed windows. City music . A bus jammed with commuters wheezed out pungent exhaust. He could hear a distant