Near Death by Glenn Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

relationship. He was solvent and up to date on his mortgage and financial obligations. He had no police record and to their knowledge was uninvolved in drug use or trafficking. None of his friends or family could point to soured relationships or lurking dangers. Hewasn’t shy about his sexuality and was a fixture at a few gay nightclubs in Boston. The working hypothesis was that he had strayed into a random sexual encounter with a homicidal psycho.
    The police had focused on his mobile phone records, particularly the last calls he had made on his putative day of death, a Thursday. He had worked a full day shift in the OR doing orthopedic procedures. His phone was inactive throughout the day but at three o’clock it came to life with a flurry of calls between two numbers, a mobile phone belonging to a graduate student at Boston University named Davis Fox and a landline at Harvard Medical School assigned to a researcher named Alex Weller.
    Both men had been interviewed by the police. Fox described a brief affair with Quinn a year earlier. The relationship had cooled but they had remained friends. Weller apparently had no romantic connections with the victim. Instead, they had some common intellectual interests that Fox also shared. Police reports were vague about the details; egghead stuff. Neither Fox nor Weller had seen Quinn that Thursday afternoon or evening and neither had any theories as to his fate. The police had canvassed Quinn’s usual haunts in Boston but he hadn’t been seen at any of them since the previous Saturday night.
    Cyrus arranged to meet Davis Fox at the BU Student Union during the heart of the lunch hour. The place was packed with kids coming and going and he wondered how he’d be able to pick one young man out of the crowd. Beneath the hanging food court sign, he shifted his weight from foot to foot, absorbing the din generated by students living a life he dimly remembered, unencumbered by those things that were making his own existence as oppressive as the air in a malarial jungle.
    As it happened, it was easier for Fox to find
him
since Cyrus was the lone short-haired clean-shaven adult in a suit and overcoat. A pale-skinned African-American youth in skinny jeans tucked into boots and a bright woolly scarf flamboyantly draped around his sweater approached and asked, “You the FBI guy?” He had the flowing manner of an effete trendy, the body of a dissipated male model. He was not quite handsome, his eyes too narrow, mouth too large.
    They found a table for two and no sooner sat down when Fox’s mobile rang. “Yeah, I’m with him now. I’ll call you later.”
    Cyrus immediately wanted to know who was calling but shelved his curiosity. He began with small, procedural questions. Fox told him he’d been interviewed a month earlier, that he’d told the police everything he knew, etcetera, et cetera. Cyrus let him go unprompted until he talked himself out. He liked to see where people would wander, unguided. Over the years, if he had a hundred dollars for every time this approach was useful he’d be living in a better zip code.
    Cyrus began to probe deeper and studied the young man’s face as he responded. It was contemporary hirsute with carefully shaped hair, long sideburns, uniform stubble and a neat tuft between his chin and lower lip. He had multiple small gold loops piercing each earlobe, which Cyrus found off-putting. He tried not to look at them.
    When Fox talked about Thomas Quinn, Cyrus sensed a lack of guile; he’d been at the game long enough to trust his intuition. As to the details of the crime, Fox knew, as widely reported, that Quinn’s head had been caved in. If he had any knowledge of the more macabre aspects of the case, he certainly didn’t volunteer it.
    Fox was a second-year grad student in experimental psychology. He’d known Quinn for a little under two years. They’d met through a mutual friend, Alex Weller. Cyrus grunted at the name—his next appointment. Fox