Never Saw Me Coming

by Vera Kurian

  I chanced a look at Reek. He was flushing. “Uh, that you looked good in it.”

  “Oh.”

  I couldn’t get any more information out of him. I wanted to ask him about what Charles had told me—that Will had been looking for something at SAE—but there was no way to ask that without drawing unwanted attention to myself. But as soon as Charles had texted me that, I had mentally celebrated. Will had the video somewhere—he wouldn’t look for something he didn’t still have. Soon it would be mine.

  We washed our hands and I scrubbed professionally, pretending I was a surgeon. “I’m starving. Do you want to go to All Purpose for pizza? Some of us are meeting in a couple hours.”

  “No, thanks,” he said, glancing at the biohazard bag where we had deposited the remains of our piglet.

  “Your loss,” I said, popping my earbuds in.

  I had one last task to complete before dinner. I headed to Hallbreck, a sophomore dorm on the south end of campus. It was easy to just slip in because there was a crowd outside talking about some murder TV show.

  I lingered outside the communal bathroom, pretending to text, until two girls exited. I waited till they were back in their rooms before I went in, jamming a rubber wedge underneath the door so no one would walk in on me.

  Indeed, the communal showers were heavily decorated with scraggly hairs: long hair, pubes, coils of all colors. I put on the disposable surgical gloves I had stolen from Bio lab and took out a clean Ziploc. With a pair of new tweezers, I carefully picked out a dozen or so hairs and sealed them into the bag for safekeeping. I then went to Thresher, another dorm, the men’s locker room at the gym, and a local YMCA to repeat the process. In the YMCA I nabbed not only some hair but an even bigger prize: a used tampon. DNA city—and none of it mine. That was for Phase Four, which involved a lot of moving pieces, but the main thing I had to concentrate on was Phase Three: Get the Video. And from what Charles has said, Will was already in the process of locating it.

  16

  There was a moment that day, for a period of about two hours, where Andre Jensen entirely forgot that he had held his hands over a hemorrhaging neck wound as a man died before his eyes. He forgot about the police and their questions, weird thoughts of Wyman and the CRD Killer and all the things that made him not a normal college student, and for a moment he was hardly an individual at all.

  He was an eye. He was someone documenting the course of history. His new camera felt warm in his hands from being tightly gripped. The huge crowd of protestors moved down Pennsylvania Avenue like a swarm of humming bees. Andre, perched on top of a mailbox, snapped away, hoping that somewhere within the bunch was the shot that could land him on the front page of the Daily Owl. Too skittish to directly ask Dee, Marcus had brought it up for him, and he was told sure, send anything along, and if it was good it would get published. Here was a shot of a girl with her mouth wide open, her fist in the air. Dozens of shots of clever signs. It was the biggest protest Andre had ever seen in person and it was astounding to think that it would be dwarfed in size by the one coming up in October.

  He snapped a picture of a toddler being carried on his father’s shoulders, the child holding a sign that said Civil Rights Are Human Rights! What had sparked this particular protest was the announcement that the Justice Department was going to roll back investigations into mortgage companies and landlords that discriminated against minorities. Andre held on to his camera carefully as he jumped down from the mailbox. He snapped a few more pictures as he walked toward campus, heading to where his friends said they would meet afterward. He felt good being in a huge crowd even though they were all strangers—it felt safe and entirely separate from his day-to-day life.

  A dozen or so people were already at the Black Students’ Union, descending upon a snack table that had been set up. Marcus, a bright red bandanna tied around his neck (in case of tear gas, although this protest seemed to be pretty mild), nodded in his direction. Parched, Andre took a Coke, but the moment the soda hit his tongue, he remembered the Homicide Office and a wave of nausea hit him. Suddenly the good feeling was gone and he did not want to be around anyone, friends or no.

  For the past few days, the attention the murder had drawn had made him feel even worse. Everyone wanted to be sympathetic while also hearing the juicy story, and some wanted to give unqualified legal advice, including dire warnings that the police would pin it on him—as if he hadn’t thought of that himself. Deep down, some irrational part of him wondered if his being a witness wasn’t some terrible payback for the fraud he was committing. He imagined himself getting carted away in cuffs, a phone call to his mother that made her collapse. He imagined an alternative scenario of the true murderer getting caught, Andre exonerated, only to have a grim group of administrators show up at his door with questions about how he had gotten into Adams. What would happen then? Was what he had done technically illegal? How could anyone prove whether or not he had answered any of those questionnaires honestly?

  Andre slipped out the side door of the Union, and without thinking dialed his parents’ landline, just wanting to hear their voices, the boring sameness of their home life. His father picked up almost immediately. “Pooh! They said on the news some boy got murdered at Adams!”

  Hello to you, too. “Uh, yeah.”

  “That school isn’t safe!”

  “Come on, people get murdered in DC every day. It was some meth thing.”

  “A drug deal?”

  How did he get trapped in this conversation when what he had wanted was the soothing sound of his father laughing at some dumb dad joke, Isaiah somewhere in the background being a jackass, the soft chastising of his mother? Instead, he was cutting the call as short as possible, saying he was about to lose reception as he headed up the elevator in his dorm.

  He pretended to be asleep when Sean came home, ignoring Sean’s sighing and complaining about the soreness of his feet, then his loudly eating Crunch ’n Munch before he finally fell asleep. If Sean got kicked out of Adams, Andre reasoned, he would “take a gap year” and then somehow be at a place like James Madison or UVA once things were arranged. He wasn’t annoying about it, but Sean had been his high school salutatorian and little things, small things, like the fact that Sean knew how to ski and that he had a brand-new PlayStation, made it clear that Sean’s life contained more possibilities.

  When it became apparent that Andre was too buzzed to doze off himself, he got up, went to his desk and opened his laptop. Watching that student—Michael—die had become a bone stuck in his throat, something that irritated and couldn’t be removed. He had been following the news and not heard anything about the culprit being caught. Was it just a coincidence, or did the murder have something to do with the psychopathy program? Exactly how dangerous were the other students in the panel study, and how likely was Andre to run into them? If he hadn’t already, that is. Something had been gnawing at Andre. Wyman seemed like a nice, well-intentioned man. He was interpersonally warm every time Andre interacted with him, but the murder on top of the CRD connection had begun to make him have doubts.

  What if Wyman was all in on this program, something that brought him professional success and grant money, and he had everything staked on proving that the students who went through his program walked out the other side as model citizens. What if he was wrong and, worse still, what if he knew he was wrong?

  Wyman’s official Adams webpage was terse. Leonard Wyman, subfields: abnormal psychology, psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder, cognitive behavioral therapy. Nothing about the Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study. Why was there nothing about the program? Yet when Andre searched the archives of the National Institutes for Health grant database, Wyman was listed as having a massive multiyear grant—clearly this had to be the panel study.

  Andre went to the top of his browser and typed in “scholar.google.com.” Wyman had publications listed, but none of them gave any
hint of “I am running a secret program for psychopaths” or “I’ve defended a truly unredeemable madman for some inexplicable reason.” His articles had titles like “Recidivism and Moral Reasoning in Psychopathic Populations: An Exploration of the Stress-Diathesis Model” and “The Neurosemantics and Moral Reasoning of At-Risk Populations.”

  Andre searched for criminal records and came up with nothing. He tried every combination of Wyman + CRD—the killer’s real name and other monikers—but that didn’t come up with anything he hadn’t seen already.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “Agh!” Andre slammed his hand on his desk. “Sean! Do not do that to someone who just—who just—”

  “Oh, right, sorry. I was worried about you.” He sat on the end of Andre’s bed. “I mean, you have to worry about your roommate when he’s up late at night after witnessing a murder, looking up shit about serial killers.”

  Andre rubbed at his eyes. “Can I tell you something crazy if you promise to keep it a secret?”

  “Hold on.” Sean left, then returned with his box of Crunch ’n Munch. “Proceed.”

  “You’ve heard of the CRD serial killer?”

  “Obviously. I’ve seen that TV movie four times.”

  “He has something to do with this school. There’s this psychologist at Adams who was part of the case. He’s the only person who ever interviewed CRD, but he’s never talked about it—I’ve looked.”

  “He’s at Adams?”

  “He’s a full professor in the psychology department. You know—ten feet from where I saw that guy get murdered.”

  Crunch. “You think a tenured professor murdered an undergrad steps from his office?”

  “What difference does it make if he has tenure?”

  “I mean, you can’t get fired if you have tenure.”

  “No, he doesn’t seem like a murderer, but it’s a big coincidence. I think he’s hiding something.” Andre hesitated—he wasn’t about to start telling Sean about the panel study. But it wasn’t hard to imagine how things could have gotten out of control. Wyman trying to manage one of his psychopaths, a current or former student, only to have them kill someone. Would he report them to the police or be in such denial about his own program’s success that he couldn’t see the possibility? Or would he instead want to protect the student or program? “Here’s the thing I don’t get—this guy is ostensibly an expert on studying psychopaths. Like people that don’t have a conscience or empathy. During CRD’s trial he argued for clemency. He kept saying, ‘This guy isn’t a monster. He shouldn’t get the death penalty.’”

  “Huh...” Sean thought about it. “I mean, the justice system is just so fucked with racism and classism, but Christ, CRD...”

  “The one time I’m like, All right, that guy should get fried, is when you hear about guys like CRD or Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy,” Andre added.

  “So why don’t you just ask him about it?”

  “Are you crazy? Like ‘Remember this really high-profile case that you never talk about...can you just go into detail about it with me, a complete stranger?’”

  Sean shrugged. “You’ll never get answers if you don’t ask questions.”

  A week ago, it had seemed like he was running a scheme with potentially serious consequences: losing his scholarship, maybe getting kicked out of school. But now, after seeing that guy die in his arms, it felt a lot more like a life-or-death situation. It could have been him who had been stabbed. Was he safe participating in the study? What if the culprit knew he was a witness, or even got mad that Andre had tried to save Michael’s life? He had read in an article once that psychopaths sometimes got fixated on real or perceived grievances and could hold grudges for years. “I don’t know. I might work up the nerve. I’m trying to find out as much as I can about his connection to CRD. It feels connected to this murder somehow.”

  Sean peered over his shoulder. “Maybe he wrote a case study about it or something?”

  “So far I haven’t found anything. Maybe he signed a gag order or something?”

  Sean shook his head. “Maybe Wyman never published anything about it, but you can still look for the next best thing. Who would have been talking about it nonstop at the time? His graduate students.”

  17

  As soon as the elevator doors opened on Floor G2, Elena frowned. The lights were off. In front of her, the linoleum floor of the second-level basement reflected back the pale red light from the emergency exit sign down the hallway. Why was the power out?

  She sighed. Time on the MRI didn’t come cheap—it cost close to two million dollars and was shared between the Psychology Department, the Neuroscience Consortium, and the Biology Department. She walked down the hallway, her Toms making soft sounds that seemed amplified in the darkness. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness, making out the familiar doorways of offices and supply rooms.

  Hopefully Kellen was able to finish his session before the power cut out. He had been scheduled for a scan an hour ago and the RA running him, Belle, was smart enough to know to call if something went wrong.

  She turned a corner and paused, looking down a long hallway at the flickering beam of an emergency light starting to die. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “Hello!” a voice near shouted.

  She gave a short scream, nearly dropping the laptop she was carrying under her arm. Charles was behind her, his grin white in the darkness. “Not funny!” she chastised him, annoyed.

  Charles seemed to find her response amusing. “I forgot you’re scared of the dark. Peace offering?” He propelled a Starbucks cup toward her.

  She slurped suspiciously. “How many pumps of hazelnut is in this, four?”

  His smile got bigger. Clearly he wanted something. “I’m early for my session and I brought coffee, and you can’t even put the lights on?”

  She sighed. “Come on. Let’s see what happened.” They began to walk toward the room where the scanner was.

  “Well, everyone’s talking about the murder,” Charles said. Elena looked at him in her peripheral vision. Sometimes Charles had a strange affectation, like he had watched too many movies about how WASP-y rich kids were supposed to behave. Why was he wearing a button-down and a vest in the middle of the day? He had his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Yes,” she said simply. She was not supposed to talk about Michael—not with anyone, especially not with any of the other patients. She had been advised this both by the police and by Leonard. Elena herself was still in denial—it couldn’t possibly be that less than thirty feet from her office a boy who wasn’t even old enough to drink legally had been stabbed to death. Right on campus. A patient she had known for three years!

  “It’s so awful,” he baited. For a split second, Elena wondered if Charles could possibly know that Michael was also in the program. Was he just being gossipy, or did he actually know?

  They rounded a corner and Elena stopped short. Charles bumped into her. “It’s definitely off,” she said, realizing what was missing. The MRI was normally a constant hum of noise—when you got closer to it you could hear a steady wooo-wooo-wooo sound. Charles strained to hear something, his head cocked to one side.

  Then Elena heard something else.

  A muffled cry. A moaning sound. A cold chill wrapped around her stomach. She knew she should walk toward the sound—someone could be hurt—but she really didn’t want to see.

  Charles cut in front of her. Of course, she thought, he doesn’t know better. He was heading toward the L-shaped room they called the Control Room, the place where she or the RAs would sit manning the scanner. A glass pane separated it from the MRI room itself.

  She didn’t want to know what was in that control room, but she forced her feet to move. When she got there, Charles was leaning forward, hands on knees, talking to someone.

  Belle sat on the floo
r, under the desk, grasping her knees to her chest. She was shaking, eyes glazed, face wet with tears. “Are you cold?” Charles asked. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Belle pointed with one wavering hand behind them.

  Elena looked through the glass into the MRI room and saw someone on the ground. She could see only their feet. She pushed past Charles, stepping into the room.

  At first, she couldn’t fathom the scene. Someone lay on the ground in a pool of blood, their body contorted at strange angles. Several bloody bits were on the floor, and when she looked up, she saw spots of blood on the scanner.

  She looked back at the body, her heart jumping. “Oh my God, it’s Kellen.” She reached for him, ignoring Charles, who had come up behind her and shouted for Elena not to touch the body. She pressed her finger against Kellen’s neck—and felt nothing.

  “Oh my God.”

  Charles crouched down, his expensive loafers carefully positioned away from the blood. He looked from the MRI machine to the bits scattered on the ground.

  “What—what are those?” Elena asked.

  “Buckshot. The little metal bits they put in shotgun shells.”

  Images flashed through Elena’s mind. The active shooter situations were so common on the news that she couldn’t even keep them straight. Adams even had an active shooter alert that went to the cell phones of the entire student body.

  Charles stood up, his hands on his hips. He didn’t look upset so much as interested.

  “Act normal!” Elena snapped, unable to help herself.

  Charles started, realizing the impression he was giving. “It sounds like you’re upset.”

  Elena nearly screamed at him. That was verbatim something Leonard had taught him. Repeat people’s emotions back to them as if you understood. Fake it till you make it. His stupid lack of fear could have deadly consequences.