I thought, watching the other car speed away, Maybe this is more than role-play. But remembering it now, with the distance that comes from a good night’s sleep, I see it for what it was. The girl was very young to have had and lost a child—a child herself, really—and the young are the best at pretending. Those comic book conventions where they dress up as characters and fully commit to the roles, the online games where they waste entire days in a cartoon landscape, spending play money and living out alternate identities, even falling in love . . . You have to have one foot in childhood to commit to pretending that intensely, and they do. These kids do.
Anyway, all this speculation is really just something to keep my brain occupied as I work on my one ongoing assignment—sitting in a parked car outside the train station in Croton-on-Hudson from eight p.m. on, recording the times when a short, impeccably dressed man with a shaved head arrives from the city, gets into a silver Porsche, and roars out of the parking lot. Truth told, it’s the dullest assignment I’ve had yet. The man has been arriving at the same time every night, always parks in the same space, and speaks to no one on his way there, a true creature of habit. It might help to know who he is and why I’m watching him, but I’ve been given nothing other than a single picture. Names are dangerous, 0001 says. But then again, so is boredom. Knowing the man’s name and what he’s done might revive my interest in this assignment. Would it be so bad to break this one rule, if doing so makes me more devoted to the game?
The Porsche has M.D. plates, so that narrows things down. I click on my phone’s web browser and scroll through doctors with practices in Croton-on-Hudson and NYC—a very long list, shortened only slightly after I rule out females. I’m about to give up when I remember that Catfish TV show Emily used to watch, how the host was able to drop a photo directly into the Google Images search bar on his laptop and identify the subject. I look up “how to search an image on iPhone” and the process is quite similar. . . .
It works. Dr. Porsche’s real name is Edward Duval, and the photo is clipped out of a three-year-old group shot, taken at a conference put on by the New York Society of Plastic Surgeons. A plastic surgeon. Of course that’s what he is.
The alarm on my phone goes off: 8:44 p.m. That’s four minutes before the time Dr. Duval has arrived for the past three days—8:48 sharp. And sure enough, as I watch the cluster of people leaving the station at 8:48, there he is—predictable as clockwork and alone as ever as he hurries down the stairs, straight for his usual space, so lean and purposeful, that bounce in his step, a man with somewhere important to be.
Maybe 0001 was right. Maybe names are dangerous. Because as Dr. Edward Duval, plastic surgeon, slides in behind the wheel of his shiny Porsche, I have such a powerful desire to start up my car and follow him that I need to restrain myself. One of the murderers mentioned in the Kaya chat was a plastic surgeon—a man who botched someone’s forty-year-old daughter’s breast reconstruction, succeeding in what cancer had failed to do. Insurance did pay the daughter’s husband an undisclosed sum, but the plastic surgeon did not admit error or guilt and kept his license in good name. “Is that you, Dr. Duval?” I say it out loud in my empty car, only vaguely aware that I’ve turned the ignition, that I’m pressing ahead and tailing him out of the parking lot, making a left shortly after he does. I’ll just follow him a little way. He won’t notice.
The chrome bumper gleams in the streetlamps, the car it’s attached to a sight to behold, the cost of it at least a year of tuition at Brayburn, maybe more. While we’re at it, that suit he’s wearing is probably two months of the mortgage Matt and I were paying, and I can only imagine what his house looks like, or the details of his most recent vacation. But there’s one thing I know for sure: Whether or not he’s truly the same plastic surgeon who killed that woman’s daughter, Dr. Edward Duval is rich enough to have gotten away with it.
With the back of his carefully shaven head in my sights, I feel the same rage that I did a week ago on the Brayburn campus, when I saw the boy who wasn’t Harris Blanchard but may as well have been. I could kill him, I think. I could kill him, and no one would see and the world would be a better place for it. . . . Just a little push on the gas, enough to send him flying across the overpass, that shiny silver Porsche sailing through the air, and it would no longer be role-play. It would be real.