Never Saw Me Coming

by Vera Kurian

  “Oh.”

  “What has Kristen said?” The blank look on his face told Leonard what he wanted to know. A nonpsychopathic person would have cringed or looked sheepish or guilty. “Charles, you didn’t tell your girlfriend that you discovered a dead body?”

  “How could I! She would just do what you did now and...”

  “And what?”

  Charles looked down at his shoes. “Maybe she’d be like grossed out if I didn’t have the right response. I mean, I don’t care about the murders. Am I supposed to pretend I do?”

  “What do you find more upsetting, having this conversation with Kristen, or the death itself?”

  “It depends—are the killings connected? People are saying all kinds of things.”

  “I’m not really at a liberty to talk about it.”

  “Why, are the police talking to you?”

  “I’m not really at a liberty to discuss that, either.”

  Charles sighed, sinking down into his chair and tilting his head to the ceiling. “I don’t know... I’m avoiding her a little because she’s talking about it like everyone else is.”

  “Kristen has shown an incredible amount of understanding about your diagnosis.”

  “Right, but I’d have to lie to her, and lying is bad. So first, I have to fake my feelings, and then I have to pretend that I don’t know something that I do—that both those guys were in the program.”

  Leonard’s pen froze over his paper. How could Charles possibly know that? Had he been snooping? Flirting with an RA—who would most definitely have to be fired. Or was he simply making a guess based on proximity? And now trying to confirm it based on Leonard’s reaction to the accusation. It was also entirely possible that the accusation was an intended red herring to move away from a topic that made Charles uncomfortable. “You and Kristen have told each other than you love each other. Do you think her love for you is conditional upon meeting some standard of ‘normal’?”

  His brow furrowed and Leonard could practically see the thoughts churning through his mind. Kristen had been an important development in Charles’s life, a key curb on his bad behavior. He had been so excited when he had met her, an attractive, interesting girl he had great chemistry with—and yet he had been so fearful that he would do something to screw it up. It was true that Kristen had been patient, but there was a limit to everyone’s patience. “I don’t want her seeing that side of my life.” Charles shifted in his chair. “I was thinking, if I did tell her, how would she respond?”

  “What do you think that would look like, Charles?”

  “She might get...mad or disgusted. And then it would be a whole thing because she’d be scared. If two people in the program were killed, and I’m in the program, then something could happen to me, and she’d be worried. She might think, Why am I even dating this guy who has all these problems?”

  Leonard had to withhold any facial expressions. Sure, the topic was horrible, and again Charles was fishing for confirmation about the victims being in the program, but what was happening was remarkable. Charles had gotten increasingly better at perspective taking, imagining how Kristen would feel. Of course, in true psychopath form, for him it took shape like chess gamesmanship.

  “I have no reason to believe it has anything to do with the program.” The police had a more likely lead: both boys had dabbled in drugs, and there were only so many drug dealers with connections to campus. It was sad to consider, but Leonard had to admit that he had seen drugs destroy the lives of many people, often when they were young and seemed to have so much more living to do.

  “Is that what the police said?”

  “As I told you earlier, I can’t discuss anything the police have said because of the active investigation. I understand you’re upset—”

  Charles sharply exhaled, a look of cold annoyance on his face, making it apparent that it was not Kristen that had made him upset, but that his manipulation of Leonard to get more information had failed.

  He wasn’t, after all, Leonard reminded himself, a perfect subject. There was no such thing.

  25

  Day 32

  It was my third time searching Will’s hard drive, and I still hadn’t found anything. It was easy to connect each hard drive to my computer and access their files. I was quickly able to discern that the first hard drive was Cordy’s. I then concentrated on Will’s. First, I indexed everything by date, then searched every possible combination of file tags for videos. Of course there was a lot of porn. Dumb videos of animals and stupid internet challenges. Pictures of Will and his family on vacation. Their golden retriever, Mockey, who I remember. He’s probably dead now.

  I helped myself to one of Yessica’s frozen Snickers and gnawed while I worked. Not only was I looking for my video, but I also wanted to make sure there weren’t videos or pictures of other girls. I did see a few naked pics, but they looked to be my age and of course I couldn’t tell how he had gotten them. I had no intention of doing anything but a complete search, but after a couple hours, I was happy to have a break.

  Andre and I were meeting at the computer lab and he had insisted that the meeting would occur at 2 p.m. on the dot. My discovery of Andre had been an interesting and important development. For one, I knew with a high degree of certainty that he wasn’t the killer. In comparison, my faith in Charles wasn’t as high. He was, after all, the one who had told me that the coast was clear to go to Will’s that night. I had already scoured the internet. Charles hadn’t posted anything that night, but apparently he had gone to Zaytinya for dinner. Kristen had posted pictures of him and so had other friends who had been there. It seemed unlikely that Charles had convinced both his girlfriend and a bunch of her friends—including two he wasn’t even friends with on social media—to pretend they had all gone out to dinner on the same night. He had seemed genuinely surprised at my injuries in the bathroom—maybe even angry. Surely he was thinking about the very real risk that he could be next.

  Anyway—about Andre. I would get him firmly on my side. I needed allies, not that I should ever put my guard down. Andre had vaguely hinted that he had figured out information about the murders that he would tell me about at 2 p.m. Good—the more he already knew, the less work for me, and more time for me to devote to what I was supposed to be concentrating on in the first place. Will.

  When I got to the computer lounge, I saw that Andre was already in there, his back to me. He wore a bright red shirt like a target and didn’t notice me sneaking up behind him to see what he was doing. I got a good look at his screen to make sure it wasn’t anything sketchy—it was. Apparently, he was a football fan. It was kind of crazy that he was a psychopath. He was young looking for a freshman, and when he smiled he had dimples. What kind of psychopath had dimples? But I had to remind myself that anyone could be one of us and just because I knew he wasn’t the killer didn’t mean I could actually trust him.

  “Ready?” I said, sitting next to him. “What’s your secret information?” Luckily there was only one other person in the lab, sleeping by one of the printers, so we had privacy.

  “Tell me everything you know first,” Andre said. Of course he asked me to go first. I was going to refuse just based on principle, but then he withdrew a baggie of peanut-butter-filled pretzels from his book bag. He offered some, which I took, even though we weren’t supposed to eat in the computer lab.

  I related what I knew about Kellen’s death, which was very little, then told a story about how I had been attacked in a dark alley rather than telling him that I was snooping in Will’s basement—there’s such a thing as being too honest.

  “Who’s the other guy in the program who you know?” he asked.

  “Charles Portmont. He was with Elena when they discovered Kellen’s body.” I took out my phone to find a picture of him. “If you see him around campus, be careful.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t hi
m.”

  “I’m almost certain...but he’s a liar. Don’t believe anything he tells you about me.”

  Andre stared at me evenly. “What would he tell me about you?”

  “Lies. He just likes to mess with people.”

  “But he told you the two dead guys were in the program—what if that was him just fucking with you?”

  Good—Andre was no fool. “I believed him because he seemed genuinely concerned for his own safety. He thought I did it. I don’t know how he knew they were in the program, but he’s a junior. It’s possible he knows everyone in the study.”

  “Everyone but me,” Andre added.

  I shrugged. “Like I said, don’t trust him until we figure this out.” I pulled out my journal and pen set. “Tell me everything about Michael’s murder, by the millisecond.”

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “I’m really into bujo. Bullet journaling? It’s a way of organizing information.” I made a timeline of that evening and Andre helped me fill it out. He wasn’t entirely organized in his recounting of the facts, but he could remember tons of details from that night. He just couldn’t ID the face of who he had seen while Michael died. “It’s definitely not him?” I said, tapping my cell phone where a picture of Charles’s face was still up, taken from Kristen’s Instagram.

  “No, I’d know if it was him.”

  “So, what’s your theory? What’s the big deal about meeting at 2 p.m.?”

  Andre checked his smartwatch. “It gives us an hour. I have an experiment at three and you’re going to come with me.”

  “I am?”

  “Here’s the thing—I think Wyman is the missing link.”

  I frowned, my pen hesitating. “He’s like seventy.” There’s no way that had been Wyman in the basement in that knock-down-drag-out fight with me. Whoever it had been was physically powerful.

  “No, I’m not saying he did it.” Andre had the light in his eyes of someone about to nerd out on you. He pulled up his email on the computer in front of him. He opened up a picture and tried to make it as large as possible. “This is the notepad we found in the office.”

  In front of me was a series of two-digit numbers, some of which were scratched out: “06” was circled, there was a “33” with a star next to it, and a few other numbers. “I tried every combination of those numbers—it wasn’t his computer password. Maybe he has a combination lock somewhere in his office, or a lock on one of the filing cabinets?”

  “It’s not a password—it’s math. He’s trying to figure out the relationship between two years.” Andre jabbed his finger at the screen at a “96.” “Does this year mean anything to you?”

  “What do I care about a year if it was before I was born?”

  “Have you ever heard of the CRD Killer? From the nineties to the early 2000s?”

  “Of course.”

  “Wyman was his therapist after he got caught, the only one who ever talked to him. He argued for clemency and said all this stuff in court about how he wasn’t a bad guy.”

  “What?”

  Andre nodded. “Wyman was doing math about years. Ripley was thirty-three when he was executed by the state of Virginia, a little over ten years ago. Go back twenty years, to 1996, and to the month of September specifically—that was the first CRD murder we know about.”

  “I don’t see how this has anything to do with us.”

  “Okay, we don’t have all the pieces, but we know that at least Wyman’s wondering about the dates. This September is the twenty-year anniversary of the start of CRD’s killing spree. And someone just happened to start their own series of murders on the exact day, twenty years later. It’s a copycat.”

  “But CRD was a rapist and he mutilated people or whatever. These murders are just murder for the sake of murder.”

  “Think about it,” Andre whispered, leaning forward. “Wyman’s running this program that’s supposed to make psychopaths functioning members of society. But maybe something’s gone horribly wrong. What better way to get Wyman’s attention than to mimic a serial killer he worked with? The first killing happens and it’s a random, terrible tragedy. But when the second one hits, he can’t help noticing the timing.”

  I leaned back, my mind churning. There were too few clues and too many dead bodies for my tastes. “That math could have been anything—he could have been thinking about his mortgage, or his wedding anniversary or something... Or maybe the killings are meant to punish Wyman. Maybe someone really, really hates him.”

  “Maybe he has a secret suspicion he can’t tell the police about—he doesn’t want his program and all his research to look bad. Maybe it’s a former student who he’s known for years and is covering for them. Or maybe it isn’t a student at all—it’s just a random crazy who’s coming after Wyman because of his CRD connection,” Andre said.

  “I doubt he or the school wants to advertise that he worked with CRD. Especially if there are a bunch of Wyman psychopaths wandering around campus.”

  He laughed, but slapped the desk with frustration. “I just think it’s weird he never talked about the CRD case, you know, in a true-crime documentary or an academic study. I’m in the process of figuring out who all his grad students were, and what years they were here. If we could find his students from the nineties, they might have more information.”

  “I think our best bet is finding out who else is in the program right now. There aren’t that many people who even know about the program—Wyman, Elena, some other grad students. Let’s face it, if there are seven psychopaths on campus and someone is killing people, odds are it’s one of us. But we can’t rule out that it could be one of his former students or someone who graduated from the program years ago.” I sighed. “Although if we can’t even figure out who’s in the program now, how are we supposed to figure out who was in it years ago?”

  “I have an idea of how we can figure out who else is in the program right now.” Andre stood up, pulling his bag on, and gestured for me to follow. We left the computer lab.

  “You know how some of the experiments are just like surveys or exercises, and in others you’re interacting with someone else?” Andre said.

  “Yeah, like the Share or Steal one. Did you make any money off that?”

  “Didn’t you? The way I figure, for the paired experiments, sometimes they probably pair us with control subjects, but other times we must get paired against each other.”

  “Psychopath versus psychopath!”

  “Some of Wyman’s published work is about stuff like that—how psychopaths interact with each other—but clearly he doesn’t want us to interact with each other in person.”

  “Somebody might get set on fire.”

  He snorted appreciatively, then opened the double doors to the psych department. “So, we do a stakeout every time one of us has an experiment. I go in and text you right before and right after I finish whatever interactive part with the other person. You wait on the landing and act like you’re playing with your cell phone.”

  What he was suggesting dawned on me, and I was jealous that I hadn’t thought of it first. “Snap a picture of them,” I finished. “Upload it to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg tells me who the new mysterious stranger is via facial recognition software. Pretty clever, Andre.”

  He sighed, staring up the curving staircase, a disturbed look on his face. He definitely didn’t want to go up there.

  “I know,” I said sympathetically. He seemed startled. “I know what you’re thinking—if this was the movies we’d do this once and figure out who it is, but in real life it’ll be tedious and we might have to do it ten times before finding out anything useful. Real life’s never that easy.”

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  26

  Day 31

  “What’re you doing?!” cried a dismayed voice.
The girls and I were sprawled across the hallway of our dorm, plastic bags from Home Depot littering the floor.

  Byron, our RA, who generally proved useless except for occasionally asking if everything was copacetic, stood in the hallway surveying us.

  “We’re taking matters into our own hands,” Yessica said, holding up a new dead bolt.

  “The university president sent out this bullshit email about ‘the unfortunate death of two of our own,’” Apoorva said. “They’re not even telling us what’s going on!”

  “You can’t destroy university property.”

  I pointed the power drill I was holding at Byron and pressed the trigger. “Sure we can. If you people can’t protect us, we’re going to install our own locks.”

  “I’m going to talk to Mr. Michaels about this!” he exclaimed, then walked off, as if any of us knew who Mr. Michaels was.

  Two of the crew boys had wandered out of their room to observe our work. Molly and Apoorva were sitting cross-legged, watching a how-to YouTube video about locks. I finished my drilling and leaned back to observe my handiwork. Only Yessica and I would have a key to the dead bolt. And I had already installed a new lock on my window, which I could lock from the inside and unlock from the outside with a key.

  Yessica sat back on her heels, her dark eyes wide. “This girl in my Civilization class? Her brother is in the MPD and he said the second guy who got killed was apparently force-fed pieces of metal, then he got shoved into an MRI machine and his guts exploded!”

  It struck me as an inelegant way of killing someone. Whoever this person was, they were a showman: this could be their downfall. “I heard it’s like a secret society that dates back a century. Every thirty years, they start killing again,” I said, then left them to mull over this idea.