Free The Dead Student by John Katzenbach Page A

subterranean subway rattle. Beside him a young woman pushing a baby in a stroller coughed. He grinned at the child and waved his hand. The child smiled back.
    Five people ruined my life. They were cavalier. Thoughtless. Selfish. Fixated on themselves, like so many preening egotists.
    Now only one is left.
    He was sure of one thing: He could not face his own death, could not even face the years leading up to it, without acquiring each measure of revenge.
    Justice, he thought, is my only addiction.
    They were the robbers. The killers.
    Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. One last verdict to go.
    The light changed and he crossed the street, along with several other pedestrians, including the woman with the child in the stroller, who maneuvered the curbs expertly. One of the things he liked the most about New York City was the automatic anonymity it provided. He was adrift in a sea of people: millions of lives that amounted to nothing on the sidewalks. Was the person next to him someone important? Someone accomplished? Someone special? They could be anything—doctor, lawyer, businessperson, or teacher. They could even be the same as him: executioner.
    But no one would know. The sidewalks stripped away all signs and identities.
    In the course of his studies on murder—as he’d come to this philosophical conclusion—he’d spent time admiring Nemesis , the Greek goddess of retribution. He believed he had wings, like she did. And he certainly had her patience.
    And so, to launch himself on his path, he’d taken precautions.
    He’d become an expert with a handgun and more than proficient with a high-powered hunting rifle and a crossbow. He’d learned hand-to-hand combat techniques and had sculpted his body so that the years flowing past would have minimal impact. He’d finished Ironman Triathlons and taken many speed-driving courses at an auto racing school. He dutifully went to his internist for annual checkups, became a health club and Central Park jogging path addict, watched his diet, emphasized fresh vegetables, lean proteins, and seafood, and didn’t drink. He even got a flu shot every fall. He studied in libraries and had became a self-taught computer expert. His bookcases were crammed with crime fiction and nonfiction, which he used to harvest ideas and techniques. He thought he should have been a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
    I have become a doctor of death.
    He continued to walk north. He wore a tailored dark blue pinstriped three-piece suit and expensive Italian leather shoes. A dashing white silk scarf was looped around his neck against the possibility of a chill breeze. The late afternoon sun reflected off his mirrored aviator sunglasses. It was a fine time of day, with fading sunlight slicing through cement and brick apartment canyons, as if picking up momentum as it made its final foray across the dark waters of the Hudson. To any passerby, he must have looked like a wealthy professional heading home from the office after a successful day. That there was no office, and that he’d merely spent the prior two hours happily walking Manhattan streets, did nothing to undermine the image he projected to the world.
    Student #5 had three different names, three different identities, three different homes, phony jobs, passports, driver’s licenses, and Social Security numbers, and fake acquaintances, haunts, hobbies, and lifestyles. He ricocheted between these. He’d been born into substantial inherited wealth; medicine had been his family’s profession, and he could trace the physicians in his ancestry back to battlefields at Gettysburg and Shiloh. His own late father had been a cardiac surgeon of considerable note, with offices in midtown, privileges at some of the city’s most prominent hospitals, and a mild disapproval of his son’s interest in psychiatry, arguing unsuccessfully that real medicine was practiced with sterile gowns, scalpels, and blood. “Seeing a heart beat