by Vera Kurian
“What a shame,” he said, unsmiling.
Suddenly I wanted Chad to fuck me. I wanted his weight to crush down on me. I wanted him to be bewildered by me, like ancient Greek soldiers coming upon Medusa.
I reached out and snaked my arm around his neck, pulling his mouth down to mine. He smelled like woodsy cologne and was not a bad kisser. We made out and the itch grew worse. His arms were wrapped around me, trapping me, and I rubbed one of my legs against him. I broke our kiss, murmuring at him, “Let’s go somewhere.”
“Sure,” he said. “No one’s at the house tonight.” We quickly left.
Chad had the largest bedroom on the top-most floor of the SAE house. It was shockingly neat, with a cleanly made bed and organized bookshelves. He closed the door and we started making out right away. One of his big hands was up my shirt. I closed my eyes, throwing my head back, then feeling his mouth on my neck.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him back into a sitting position on his bed. I took my dress off, realizing I could see a perfect reflection of myself in the dark window behind the head of his bed.
We both took off my bra and I let him take me in with his eyes. I plucked at his shirt and he removed his jacket, his sweater, and finally his T-shirt, revealing muscular shoulders and tan skin. He had some chest fur—not my favorite—but not a lot of it. He pulled me closer, his mouth on mine. I pushed him back, saying, “No shoes on the bed.”
He grinned and bent to take off his black shoes, then looked at me expectantly. “Pants,” I said. He wriggled out of his jeans and let them fall on the floor. He pulled me closer again and kissed my chest. I eased my panties off and climbed onto the bed, pushing him onto his back. He cupped between my legs and moved in a slow pulsing motion, but it wasn’t like I even needed foreplay at that point.
I was nearly pressing him inside me when he stayed me with one hand, laughing. “Hold on a sec, I need a condom.”
“I’m on birth control,” I said, impatient as he ruffled through his jeans pockets. I could forgive his fastidiousness because he had it on quickly, then was easing me onto him. I gasped and buried my face in his neck.
“Is that okay?” he murmured.
I nipped at his ear, squeezed him, then pushed him onto his back. In the darkness of his window I could see our reflection, like a mirror. My hair looking wild, his hands reaching up to touch me, our bodies moving in unison. I leaned down to kiss him, feeling his teeth behind his lips. I wrapped my fingers around his neck.
* * *
Sunlight and birds woke me up. Chad was spooning me, one of his veiny arms over my chest. I yawned, and his stomach growled loudly. He laughed. “I just woke myself up. Breakfast burrito?”
“Sure.” I dug into my purse for my phone. There were a few notifications, and someone had texted me a picture. I stared at it, confused. It was of me, sleeping, a striped background behind me. The same pattern of stripes on Chad’s pillows. “What the fuck?” I screamed.
Chad, who was hopping into his pants, froze, alarmed. “Is this your idea of a joke?” He pretended to be confused and I threw the phone at his face. He caught it with surprising deftness, then looked at the picture. I watched his expression carefully. He looked genuinely bewildered.
“But that’s my...” He looked up at me, horrified. “Chloe, I didn’t send this—this isn’t even my number.”
“Give me your phone,” I demanded. Wordlessly, he unlocked it and handed it over. He had not sent a text since last night when we decided where to meet up. I even went back in time and verified. He actually had texted Charles about the SAE pledge event—neither of them had lied. I handed it back to him, then hunted for my clothes. Chad was crossing the room to get to me. “Is your door even locked?”
“Why would I lock my door in my own house?” he asked, oblivious. I looked behind him and saw that both his windows were open a few inches. God, the joy of being a Chad and never having to worry about locked doors. The thought of someone sneaking in here while I slept like an idiot...watching me and taking a picture. I pulled my dress on. “The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that one of the guys thought it was funny.”
One of the guys. One of the guys with access to the house. I was too angry to speak.
He put his hands on my shoulders—if he had done it with anything but the upmost gentleness, I would have bit his head off praying-mantis-style. “It’s not funny,” he said. “It’s really uncool. A total violation of our privacy, and I’m going to have a talk with them.”
What if it was Will? Will had been here. Why don’t I actually think before I do shit? “I’m upset. I’m going home.”
His eyes got wider. “I understand. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t hold this against me.”
“I’ll see you around.”
36
Andre studied the row of pictures in front of him, resisting the urge to look across the table where the detectives watched him. “Take your time,” said Bentley—the nice one.
He wondered if he should just do what Sean had said and pick anyone, lest their focus switch back to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t see him.”
Bentley’s face fell, and Deever, the other detective, looked annoyed. “That’s okay.”
“I don’t want to say the wrong thing, but I don’t see him.”
“We can come up with another set,” Bentley said.
“Does this have to do with the other guy with the MRI?” Andre asked.
“Do you think it does?” Deever asked.
“Everyone’s talking about it. Is there someone on campus killing Adams students or is this a broader thing?”
Bentley jumped suddenly, then began to search frantically through papers and photos on his desk. He shoved a photo in front of Andre’s nose. White skin, cheekbones, mussed hair. “Is this the guy?” he asked at the same exact time as Andre said, “That’s the guy!” Bentley asked him if he was sure, really sure.
“Positive.”
“Wait, I got other pictures.” He produced half a dozen, and the ones in profile only made Andre certain.
“That’s the guy I saw.”
Bentley put his hands on his hips and looked at Deever with something like exasperated satisfaction. “It’s Kellen.”
“Kellen?”
“Kellen!” Andre shouted before he realized he was not supposed to know his name.
* * *
Andre hurried across campus, texting as he went. He and Chloe had been planning on meeting at the library, anyway, to compare notes. Andre had been working on making a list of Wyman’s former students, narrowing them down to those who would have been around in the CRD years and might be able to shed light on the new killings. Chloe had said she was doing a “deep dive” on the Dufresnes’ internet presence.
The library during the daytime was always crowded with students carrying coffees and jostling for table space. Still, every time Andre took the elevator he kept his hand near his knife. All of the murders, he reasoned, had happened when the victim was alone. Much like a horror movie there were standard rules: get caught alone, you die. He hoped the rule about being the Black guy wasn’t true.
Chloe was waiting on the fifth floor, where the dissertations were stored, in a private study room and was eager to talk about Kellen being the stranger at the murder scene. “Of course,” she said. “Now it makes sense. Who else would come upon someone bleeding out and a bystander screaming for help and walk away but a psychopath?” Andre pointed out that Kellen being present at Michael’s death didn’t really tell them anything other than that Kellen was an asshole. “Maybe it gets the police off your back,” Chloe said.
“Not sure how you figure. Kellen didn’t have any blood on him—it couldn’t have been him.”
“Are you sure he didn’t have blood on him?” she pressed. Andre understood that she was suggesting he lie to the po
lice.
“What a terrible party,” said a familiar voice. Andre looked up to see Charles entering the room while taking off his coat. Andre shot a look at Chloe, who had apparently invited him. He would have preferred a warning. Forced to pick between two psychopaths who had each warned him against the other, he banked on trusting neither. But at least he had settled into a working relationship with Chloe, who had proven herself reliable. While he didn’t trust Charles, he didn’t seem murderous. He came off more like a person who was supposed to be attending a polo party but made a wrong turn and ended up at college. Unless, of course, that was all put on.
“Are you going to help, or be an asshole?” Chloe asked.
“Are those two things mutually exclusive?” Charles dropped a greasy paper bag on the table and a puff of white powder emanated from it. He withdrew a bizarre food-like object from the bag. “So, what are these developments you’re so excited about?”
“Do you know the girl in the picture I sent you?” Chloe was watching him carefully.
“Never seen her.”
“What the hell is that?” Andre asked.
“And why didn’t you bring us any?” Chloe added.
“There’s a funnel-cake cheeseburger truck outside,” Charles said, and Andre watched in horror as he proceeded to add several packets of mayonnaise and relish under the top layer of sugar-encrusted funnel cake. “Who’s the girl? Is she in the program?”
Chloe turned her laptop around and activated a PowerPoint presentation that started with the picture of Emma she had taken. “We saw this girl eating dinner with Wyman in an intimate restaurant. Emma Dufresne, not to be confused with her twin sister, Megan Dufresne.”
Charles paused midbite. “Twins?” Andre got the sense that Charles never took anything seriously, so it was a little satisfying that they finally got his attention.
Chloe clicked to the next slide, which now showed another picture of her from Andre’s video. “Here’s what I figured out. She’s a philosophy major, a junior—just like you, Charles. It’s hard to find anything about her because she’s not really on the internet. This is her Instagram—notice that she has a bunch of followers but she doesn’t follow anyone herself. Here’s the kind of stuff she posts.”
Andre watched a series of slides breeze by. She was a photographer—and a good one—but the only thing she photographed was insects. High-definition extreme close-up photographs of various insects: a fly with its mirrored eyes, a praying mantis, a bumblebee in midflight. “Those are really good,” Andre murmured, unable to help feeling a twinge of jealousy.
“She’s placed in several photography contests, all with pictures of insects. She never responds to comments on her Instagram posts.”
“Bug girl. Got it,” Charles said, his mouth full.
“This is her sister, Megan,” Chloe said, switching to a snapshot of a Facebook profile. It was standard fare for the pumpkin spice latte brigade. A post about loving the autumn weather. A cute dog. Some people at a party drinking beer. “She’s a junior at American University. There’s more stuff about her on the internet than her sister—she used to compete in gymnastics when she was a kid and wrote for her high school newspaper.”
“Wait,” Andre said, pointing. “Look under ‘Relationships.’ She doesn’t say anything about having a sister, or a family or anything.”
“Not everyone fills that out,” Charles said. The burger had been consumed with surprising speed. He wiped at his mouth with a napkin, then tilted his chair back, folding his arms across his chest.
Chloe clicked to a new slide, Lingering Questions, which had bullet points. “Why do they go to two separate colleges in the same city?” she asked.
“Uh, because they got into two different places?” Charles said, his tone suggesting that Chloe was being stupid.
“Well, there’s this thing called poverty that most of the rest have? And most schools have a thing where if you have two siblings around the same age you get a huge discount if they both attend the same school.”
Charles shrugged. “Maybe they don’t like each other.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Andre realized. “Because if you come to the program, college is free. So Emma’s in the program, but Megan isn’t.”
“You don’t even know if Emma’s in the program—” Charles started, but Chloe interrupted him.
“But they’re twins,” she murmured, standing up and beginning to wander around the room. “They could be fraternal twins who just look a lot alike, or they could be identical.”
“Why does that matter?” Andre asked.
She held up a dry erase marker. Charles looked pained. “What if they’re a natural experiment? Identical twins, but one is a psychopath—Emma—and the other isn’t. That makes Megan the perfect control for Emma. Want to compare brains, or behavior, or whatever? Run Emma against her sister, who has the same genetics and comes from the same family.”
It was an intriguing idea. Andre knew enough about psychology to know that the field often relied on twin studies to tease apart the nature versus nurture question, about how much certain traits are heritable versus how much environment can shape a person. “But if they’re identical wouldn’t they both be psychopaths?”
“Only if we think psychopathy is entirely determined by genetics.”
Charles successfully tossed his paper bag into the garbage bin across the room. “Tell you what, if Emma’s a junior I may know people who know her. Give me a few days to look into her and I’ll report back.” Chloe looked at Andre as if trying to say something silently he couldn’t quite read. Charles did seem like a guy who knew a bunch of people. And really, he hadn’t been much of a help yet, so let him do this one thing.
“Sounds like a plan for now,” Andre said. “And regardless of if Emma’s in the program, why is Wyman having a private dinner with her?”
“Why’s that weird?” Charles asked.
“Are you having private dinners with him?” Andre said. “You don’t go to dinner at a nice restaurant with your shrink. Or if you do, there’s something weird going on.”
Chloe sighed. “Andre thinks they could be having an affair.” Charles laughed heartily, which got Chloe laughing, and after a moment Andre found their laughter contagious and couldn’t stop himself from joining in.
“And now for the fun part of the evening,” Chloe said, turning to Andre as she popped to her feet. “I reserved every single dissertation you asked for.” She opened the door and wheeled in the library cart just outside their study room.
“What are those?” Charles asked, dismayed at what appeared to be real work.
“Dissertations from former students of Wyman’s,” Andre said. The fifth floor had hard copies of all dissertations that had been filed at Adams. Andre had reserved all the relevant ones to search for information suggesting links to CRD. Wyman was a lot older than he looked and had had many students—the first thing Andre had done was eliminate anyone from the list who predated the late nineties. Some students were easy to find off academic “family tree” websites because they had gone on to become academics themselves, and some were full-time clinicians.
Andre shoved a stack of dissertations in Charles’s direction. “Look for anything about psychopathy, murder or paraphilia.”
“Why does it matter what Wyman’s students studied years ago?” Charles asked.
“Wyman thinks these killings have something to do with CRD, which means he knows or thinks something we don’t know yet. He never published about CRD, but maybe one of his students did. Or Wyman’s never published about someone who failed out of the panel study, but maybe one of his students did,” Andre said.
Chloe sprawled on the floor on her stomach, and after some theatrical sighing, Charles sat across from Andre at the table, and they flipped through the leather-bound volumes.
As Andre did so, he couldn’t help
feeling the persistent nagging guilt he felt whenever they did their investigative stuff. How was it that all of his friends seemed to get their work done and still have time for partying, smoking pot, working on their six-packs—both liquid and muscular—and sleeping till 3 p.m. on the weekends? Consistent with his diagnosis, Charles seemed like someone who paid people to write papers for him, or perhaps relied on his frat’s test bank, but Chloe, he had learned, had come into college with a bunch of AP credits and never seemed to complain about how much work she had or if she was even able to get it done. He had thought about asking her but hesitated, not wanting to reveal any weakness. Maybe there’s something to this bullet journaling thing, Andre wondered, flipping pages.
Chloe made a noise—she had found one about psychopathy, but it took her a good ten minutes of looking through it to determine that it contained nothing useful. “You know this is a waste of time, right?” Charles said. He had been paging leisurely through dissertations, so leisurely that Andre realized he would probably have to double-check everything Charles did.
“I don’t see you coming up with any solutions,” Chloe said, kneeling up now, and rolling her head around to crack her neck.
“I told you I would look into Eleanor—”
“Emma!”
“But I also don’t want you doing something ridiculous that gets Wyman in trouble,” Charles added.
“You’re just lazy and don’t want to do any work,” Chloe said.
“This isn’t the best use of my skill set.”
“Skill set,” Chloe muttered. She stretched into child’s pose, and Charles liberally checked out her ass. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and get us some food. I’m starving.” Andre shrugged in agreement. Apparently eager to shirk work, Charles put on his coat before he left. “That boy has never had to work a day in his life,” Chloe said.
“Go easy on him. He’s trying to be helpful.” Chloe had an eyebrow raised and was carefully studying him. Uh-oh. Why did she have to view Chloe vs Charles as a zero sum game? The more help they had, the better. “You don’t know how to work him,” Andre said.