“It was a great loss to the school,” Mr. Remington agreed.
There was a pause in the conversation. Marsha was about to excuse herself when Mr. Remington said, “If you want my opinion, I think it would be to VJ’s benefit if he were to spend more time here in school.”
“You mean summer session?” Marsha asked.
“No, no, the regular year. Your husband writes frequent notes for VJ to spend time in his research lab. Now, I am all for alternative educational environments, but VJ needs to participate more, particularly in the extracurricular area. I think—”
“Just a second,” Marsha interrupted. “Are you telling me that VJ misses school to spend time at the lab?”
“Yes,” Mr. Remington said. “Often.”
“That’s news to me,” Marsha admitted. “I know VJ spends a lot of time at the lab, but I never knew he was missing school to do it.”
“If I were to guess,” Mr. Remington said, “I’d say that VJ
spends more time at the lab than he does here.”
“Good grief,” Marsha said.
“If you feel as I do,” Mr. Remington said, “then perhaps you should talk to your husband.”
“I will,” Marsha said, getting to her feet. “You can count on it.”
“I want you to wait in the car,” Victor said to VJ and Philip as he leaned forward and looked at Gephardt’s house through the windshield. It was a nondescript two-story building with a brick facade and fake shutters.
“Turn the key so we can at least listen to the radio,” VJ
said from the passenger seat; Philip was in the back.
Victor flipped the ignition key. The radio came back on with the raucous rock music VJ had previously selected. It sounded louder with the car engine off.
“I won’t be long,” he said, getting out of the car. He was having second thoughts about the confrontation now that he was standing on Gephardt’s property. The house was set on a fairly large lot, hidden from its neighbors by thick clusters of birches and maples. A bay window stuck out on the building’s left, probably indicating the living room. There were no lights on even though daylight was fading, but a Ford van stood idle in the driveway so Victor figured somebody might be home.
Victor leaned back inside the car. “I won’t be long.”
“You already said that,” VJ said, keeping time to the music on the dashboard with the flat of his palm.
Victor nodded, embarrassed. He straightened up and started for the house. As he walked, he wondered if he shouldn’t go home and call. But then he remembered the missing laboratory equipment, the embezzlement of some poor dead employee’s paychecks, and the brick through VJ’s window. That raised Victor’s anger and put determination in his step. As he got closer he glanced at the brick facade and wondered if the brick that had crashed into his house was a leftover from the construction of Gephardt’s. Eyeing the bay window, Victor had the urge to throw one of the cobblestones lining the walk through it. Then he stopped.
Victor blinked as if he thought his eyes were not telling the truth. He was about twenty feet away from the bay window and he could see that many of the panes were already broken, with sharp shards of glass still in place. It was as if his retribution fantasy had become instant reality.
Glancing back to his car where he could see the silhouettes of VJ and Philip, Victor struggled with an urge to go back and drive away. There was something wrong. He could sense it. He looked back at the broken bay window, then up the front steps at the door. The place was too quiet, too dark. But then Victor wondered what he’d tell VJ: he was too scared? Having come that far, Victor forced himself to continue.
Going up the front steps, he saw that the door was not completely shut.
“Hello!” Victor called. “Anybody home?” He pushed the door open wider and stepped inside.
Victor’s scream died on his lips. The bloody scene in Gephardt’s living room was worse than anything he’d ever seen, even during his internship at Boston City Hospital.
Seven corpses, including Gephardt’s, were strewn grotesquely around the living room. The bodies were riddled with bullets and the smell of cordite hung heavily in the air.
The killer must have only just left because blood was still oozing from the wounds. Besides Gephardt, there was a woman about Gephardt’s age who Victor guessed was his wife, an older couple, and three children. The youngest looked about five. Gephardt had been shot so many times that the top part of his head was gone.
Victor straightened up from checking the last body for signs of life. Weak and dizzy, he walked to the phone wondering if he should be touching anything. He didn’t bother with an ambulance, but dialed the police, who said a car would be there right away.
Victor decided to wait in the car. He was afraid if he stayed in the house any longer he’d be sick.
“We’re going to be here for a little while,” Victor shouted as he slid in behind the wheel. He turned the radio down. The image of all the dead people was etched in his mind. “There’s a little trouble inside the house and the police are on their way.”
“How long?” VJ asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe an hour or so.”
“Any fire trucks coming?” Philip asked eagerly.
The police arrived in force with four squad cars, probably the entire Lawrence PD fleet. Victor did not go back inside but hung around on the front steps. After about a half hour one of the plainclothesmen came out to talk to him.
“I’m Lieutenant Mark Scudder,” he said. “They got your name and address, I presume.”
Victor told him they had.
“Bad business,” Scudder said. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match out onto the lawn. “Looks like some drug-related vendetta—the kind of scene you expect to see south of Boston, but not up here.”
“Did you find drugs?” Victor asked.
“Not yet,” Scudder said, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “But this sure wasn’t any crime of passion. Not with the artillery they used. There must have been two or three people shooting in there.”
“Are you people going to need me much longer?” Victor asked.
Scudder shook his head. “If they got your name and number, you can go whenever you want.”
Upset as she was, Marsha could hardly focus on her afternoon patients and needed all her forbearance to appear interested in the last, a narcissistic twenty-year-old with a borderline personality disorder. The moment the girl left, Marsha picked up her purse and went out to her car, for once letting her correspondence go to the following day.
All the way home she kept going over her conversation with Remington. Either Victor had been lying about the amount of time VJ was spending at the lab or VJ had been forging his excuses. Both possibilities were equally upsetting, and Marsha realized that she couldn’t even begin dealing with her feelings about Victor and his unconscionable experiment until she had found out how badly VJ had been harmed. The discovery of his truancy added to her worries; it was such a classic symptom of a conduct disorder that could lead to an antisocial personality.
Marsha turned into their driveway and accelerated up the slight incline. It was almost dark and she had on her headlights. She rounded the house and was reaching for the automatic garage opener when the headlights caught something on the garage door. She couldn’t see what it was and as she pulled up to the door, the headlights reflected back off the white surface, creating a glare. Shielding her eyes, Marsha got out of the car and came around the front. Squinting, she looked up at the object, which looked like a ball of rags.
“Oh, my God!” she cried when she saw what it was. Shaking off a wave of nausea, she ventured another look. The cat had been strangled and nailed against the door as if crucified.
Trying not to look at the bulging eyes and protruding tongue, she read the typed note secured to the tail: YOU’D
BETTER MAKE THINGS RIGHT.
Leaving her car where it was but turning off the headlights and the engine, Marsha hurried inside the house and bolted the door. Trembling with a mixture of revulsion, anger, and fear, she took off her coat and went to find
