by Vera Kurian
“You seen Will?” someone asked. Annoyed, Charles looked to his right into the dumb, earnest face of Chad, the president of SAE. His arms were so ropey with muscle that there wasn’t a shirt on earth that didn’t look tight on him.
“He left early,” Charles said.
The group divided into the cars and headed back to campus. Kristen tended to fall asleep during car rides, which left him with some privacy to think. His Jaguar purred comfortably as he wound back toward DC. Had he heard Chloe right? Did she say the word rape or tape? She definitely mentioned a video. The reference to being twelve? And the white-hot rage as she lashed out with the geode. Charles had seen the violence just when it was at its precipice—he could have stopped her by calling out, but had been too interested to see what would happen next. She had hit Will hard with an extremely dense object—someone stronger, someone like Chad, could have easily killed a person with a single blow with that rock. She could very well have killed him.
But why?
Did Will rape her? Charles glanced over at Kristen, as if the thought alone would wake her. But she was nestled against the car window, the rainbow of autumn-colored leaves blurring with movement behind her. Charles didn’t know Will well. He was friends, in a generic sense, with a lot of the brothers, but his only close friend from SAE was Derek. They had been friends since freshman year when they had both pledged. He hadn’t wanted to, but it had been his father’s frat. Charles had overlapped in the frat house with Will for one year, but had then moved out of the disgusting house and off campus to an apartment more his style as soon as he was able to.
Will was a nondescript bro, not even interesting enough to be as unlikable as Chad. He drank beer and said dumb shit, and would probably end up working in finance and marrying someone he called a whore behind her back. Do I think he raped a twelve-year-old? Charles considered the question.
Would Will get a girl drunk and have sex with her? Yes, Charles thought, he probably would, although he had no specific evidence to suggest Will ever had. Would Will get a girl drunk and have sex with her even if she were saying no or trying to fight him off? Maybe? And if either of those hypotheses were true, was it that far-fetched that he would have raped a twelve-year-old?
What he really wanted to do was ask Dr. Wyman. Of course, it would be phrased all in hypotheticals. It seemed very Chad-like—embarrassingly earnest and well-intentioned—to be honestly engaged at something as woo-woo as therapy, but Wyman was the only person he could have this sort of conversation with in-depth. No judgment that Charles didn’t understand something he was supposed to understand. A genuine interest in reframing the question in a way Charles could grasp.
When they got back to DC, he dropped Kristen at her house and then headed to the psychology department. It was Sunday and Wyman wouldn’t be there, but Charles had to complete an exercise by Monday at noon and he’d rather get it done now.
The exercise was part of a series using virtual reality. The VR felt surprisingly immersive. In the virtual world he would sometimes interact with one or two other people in a conversation, or they tried to solve a problem, or they would talk about something personal. Then something would shift—the perspective would change, and he would be the other person, looking back at the avatar he had just been. The experiment then measured his emotional responses. Wyman told him this trained him in the skill of perspective taking. That if he could start by seeing himself through others’ perspectives, that this could train him in the art of switching to see things from others’ perspectives. Charles was not sure he was getting any better at it, but it would be a good skill to master. That was the sort of stuff that got him in trouble with Kristen.
He parked in the space reserved for the Dean of Social Sciences (he could almost always get away with this) but then met a strange sight once he got out of his car. The double doors to the psychology department were locked with an oversize padlock and chain. Bright yellow crime scene tape crossed the doors.
Annoyed, Charles pulled out his phone. With the psychology department off-limits, Charles figured he would instead check up on Will again, then text Chloe the results. As he headed to the house Will shared, he flipped through the Metro section of the Washington Post on his phone to see if there was anything to explain the crime tape he had seen—nothing. On Twitter there was one post of the chained doors with a bunch of question marks around it. Several people commented with questions, but one person said, I heard a guy got brained to death.
At Will’s house, Charles was once again stymied—the door was locked and no one was home. Given that it was Sunday, it wasn’t unreasonable that Will would be over at the SAE house. He headed there next, returning the nervous smiles from two girls walking in the opposite direction. “No, he was totally like bled to death—everyone’s talking about it,” one of them was saying.
The SAE house was its standard self: messy, odorous, filled with people who should have something better to do. Two guys were trying to figure out if they could play Ping-Pong but with the ball on fire. Charles thought this a questionable endeavor.
When he got midway up the stairs he could see Will half-sticking out of the hall closet. He was rooting around, throwing stuff, flustered. “Hey, I just wanted to see if you were all right,” he called.
Will froze. “I’m good,” he said, looking at Charles pointedly. It was the sort of look that said, Go away.
Charles jogged down the steps, helped himself to a bottle of beer from the fridge and went outside to sit on one of the lawn chairs. He opened WhatsApp and texted Chloe, I talked to him in the morning and he acted like he couldn’t remember anything. But just now spotted him at the frat house looking for something pretty hard. (he doesn’t live here anymore)
Almost instantly, the little ellipses that indicated the other person was typing appeared. Whatever she was, Chloe typed slow. Charles leaned forward, hunched over the phone.
Ok, was all she wrote. He cocked his head to one side. That’s it?
she added.
“Dude!” someone called loudly. Charles looked up and saw Derek jogging toward him, his fuzzy black hair looking extra fuzzy—he had clearly not showered. “Did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
Derek climbed into the chair beside him. “Some guy got killed last night! In the psychology department!”
“I was just there! That’s why there’s police tape everywhere?”
Derek nodded. “No one knows the whole story, but apparently some freshman was there and tried to save him.”
“Who died? Anyone we know?”
“Michael Boonark?”
“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Charles said. How tawdry. He wondered how fast everything would be cleaned up. He still had that assignment to do.
14
Leonard answered the door almost as soon as Detective Bentley rang the bell. He had not seen Bentley for some time, and so it didn’t seem strange for the two men to embrace. He had known Bentley’s father and remembered when the detective had been a child zooming all over Leonard’s Foggy Bottom rowhouse. Decades later Bentley would follow in his father’s footsteps to become a police officer, then a detective.
Another man, presumably Bentley’s partner, gave them a look of impatience. “Please come in,” Leonard said, leading them to the living room. Bentley stood in front of the leather recliner, which faced the fireplace, and shook his head with amusement.
“Damn, you still have this chair. I remember climbing up on it.”
“Good things last the test of time,” Leonard said, smiling sadly as he sat on the couch. The circumstances of them meeting again were not happy.
Leonard had consulted with the MPD for the past thirty years, starting with the elder Detective Bentley, and this relationship had helped him get approval from the school and its IRB—institutional review board—to host the Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study at Adams. Catch the ones w
ho could be saved while they’re young, he had argued, and they would never live a life of crime. MPD had already referred several young people to the program—ne’er-do-wells in their eyes—but kids who Leonard recognized were clearly bright and not a risk to other students. Several had gone through the program to become productive members of society: husbands and wives and parents, a lawyer and a CPA, even the owner of a small business.
“This is my partner, Deever.”
Leonard nodded and gestured for them to sit. Normally they would have met in his office, but now his intellectual sanctuary was a crime scene. “I’m absolutely devastated,” he said, rubbing at his tired eyes. “I don’t understand who would do this.”
“We were hoping you might have some idea,” Bentley said. “Did Michael talk about having problems with anyone lately? Did he have money issues? Drugs?”
“Michael drank as much as your typical college student. Came from a middle-class family and had no secret gambling addiction or anything. I can’t see why anyone would want to harm him.”
“Who has keys to these experiment rooms?”
“Only me, my graduate student—Elena, I understand you talked to her already—and our more senior research assistants. Students in the program can only get inside when they have an experiment scheduled—their smartwatch can unlock the door.”
“So with Michael’s diagnosis, did he act out in ways that made him enemies? People he’s crossed?” Bentley asked.
Leonard shook his head, for the first time in two decades suddenly craving a cigarette. “Michael had actually improved quite a bit since he started the program. A couple of quibbles with his roommate over dishes and whatnot—nothing serious. Kirby Gurganus,” he said, anticipating the next question. “That’s the roommate. Also a junior.”
“This program Bentley tells me you’re running,” Deever said. Leonard instantly didn’t like his tone. “You invite a bunch of psychopaths to the same school so they can wreak havoc on a bunch of innocent undergrads? How does this make sense?”
“Funny, it seems that someone has wreaked havoc upon one of my psychopaths. These are students who we are teaching to adopt moral codes and to manage their maladaptive behavior.”
“Still—why bring them here?”
“These students are in intensive treatment. If there are eight thousand undergraduates here, about three hundred of them are probably psychopathic—they just never got diagnosed. My kids are students who want a better life and whose families are invested in their improvement.” Deever looked unimpressed.
“So, he’s been in this study for three years,” Deever said, starting a new thread. “You must know a lot about his psychology.” Deever, Leonard realized, was exactly the sort of man who, when he found out you were a psychologist, smirked and asked if you were psychoanalyzing him. “What’s going on in inside his head? What can you tell us about his character?”
Leonard hesitated, feeling a strange pull to respect Michael’s privacy, but then remembering that Michael was no longer alive, and that the boy had been murdered. “He was misanthropic, but not in a way that wasn’t social. He read a lot, fancied himself a poet. He wanted to dazzle people but... My patients are often drawn toward manipulative behavior, and maybe Michael would have preferred to be that way, but his attempts at manipulation were pretty heavy-handed... They didn’t always work.”
“There’s something else we should probably talk about,” Bentley said. “There was an eyewitness to the attack, another student who called 911 and tried to administer first aid. He was on the list of names you gave me.”
Leonard was stunned. Buried within the pages and pages of consent forms was a small clause that indicated that students in the program who had criminal records would have their names turned over to the police. It had been a concession and a goodwill gesture he had had to make in convincing the school to host the panel study. “Andre or Kellen?” he asked.
“Andre Jensen.”
The poor boy—after already having seen so much death at a young age. Andre in his first session had been incredibly reticent, giving sullen one-word answers and asking about Leonard’s background as if he didn’t believe that he had the proper training. “How did he respond?”
“Kid’s pretty shook up. He tried to stop the bleeding when it happened, and when we got him to the station to get a statement, he kept implying that maybe it wouldn’t have happened if he knew better first aid.”
Leonard could barely digest this nugget of information before Deever interrupted his partner. “Big coincidence that another one of your students just happened to be in the same area at the same time. What can you tell us about this guy?”
“How is it a coincidence at all? Two students in the same program hosted at the psychology department would repeatedly visit that location,” he replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “I can’t see Andre doing something like this, if that’s what you’re asking. He got mixed up with some foolishness when he was fourteen or fifteen, but nothing like a precursor to murder.”
“Anything violent?”
“Technically assault, but more the ‘I’m going to beat you up after school’ variety. Joyriding, vandalism.” Deever was writing furiously. To Leonard, it was clear that joyriding and the occasional fight were not at all in the same class as murder. “Detective, why would he help Michael and call 911 if he did it?”
Deever shrugged. “With half a dozen sociopaths running around here, you can’t think I’m going to overlook that fact when there’s a murder.”
“Psychopath,” Leonard corrected. “And I hope you don’t overlook anything because my student was murdered.”
“The smartwatches they wear—you collect location data on them?” Deever pressed.
“The smartwatches log location data all the time much the way a smartphone does, but in accordance with our privacy rules, we only keep locational data for the moments when they submit a mood log and discard the rest.” Leonard checked on his computer. “Andre submitted one at eight-thirty from around this location,” he said, writing down the geocoordinates, which he pointedly handed to Bentley.
Bentley said they would probably be in contact again and both men stood up to leave. Deever left the room first, heading out the door toward their unmarked car, which was parked illegally on the street. Foggy Bottom’s tiny historic district was sandwiched between the Watergate Complex and the sprawling campus of the George Washington University. Strange to think that all the chaos and anger toward the government during those Watergate years seemed to be happening all over again. Bentley touched Leonard’s arm gently. “You all right?”
Leonard shook his head. “I know it isn’t rational, but it’s like history repeating itself. Me, you as a stand-in for your father, the crime scene tape.” He blinked, looking out into the night where an ambulance siren was warbling. “I don’t like to think back to those days.”
“It’s just one murder. And we’re going to nail this guy. Trust me.”
15
Day 43
Reek seemed surprised when I made a beeline for him when we were told to pick Bio lab partners. “Hi,” he said nervously, tucking his ash-colored hair behind his ears as I claimed the lab stool next to him. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Come on, this is pure biology.” In front of us was a dissection kit, complete with a pan, scalpel, forceps, and scissors. I had been looking forward to lab—dissections are the best part of the class.
“It’s just...that smell,” he added, looking pale.
The smell was formaldehyde. But also, it may have been Reek, because SAE was not allowing him to shower for the next week. I didn’t mind either smell, because I’m going to be a doctor, and because Reek might have useful information about Will.
The TA came around and gave us each a plastic bag with a fetal pig inside. Even with surgical gloves on, Reek was squeamish. I cut
open our bag and drained the formaldehyde. Our piggy was cute with its little face, mouth open and tongue sticking out.
The lab stations were far enough apart that I could go on a fishing expedition with Reek without anyone noticing. He seemed happy to let me take the lead on the dissection while I made mild gossip with him about the party. He knew who had hooked up with who, was impressed with Charles’s house and his hot girlfriend (oh, please), but never made any mention of Will and his little accident. Good—his presence and absence hadn’t really been noted, then.
“Who’s Charles’s girlfriend, again?” I asked, making a long incision down Babe’s belly. Key to getting the Charles situation under control was knowing as much about him as possible.
“Kristen Wenner?”
“How long have they been going out?” I asked. The inside of the pig was all different shades of gray. Dead-looking pinkish gray, sodden-intestine gray. I would be great coming up with the names for shades of paint.
“Two years.”
Two years? Didn’t he want to test the waters and play the field a little?
I fished some more, both literally and figuratively, removing the baby pig’s organs one by one, pulling from Reek all the information he had. He had been pretty drunk, too, and had limited observations about the party.
“Chad was giving you the eye,” Reek said as he watched me remove the pig’s liver.
“I didn’t meet a Chad.”
“You know, SAE Chad.”
“Sorry, my mind’s drawing a blank.”
He seemed surprised. “He said something about your dress.”
I concentrated on the gray organs in front of me. I poked the pig’s tongue with my scalpel, thinking about the flecks of blood on my pink cocktail dress, now long gone after being stuffed into a dumpster outside a Popeye’s. “About my dress?” That dress hadn’t been cheap, and I looked good in it. What a waste.