Page 11 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

I see you. You’re like teachers the whole world over.

Your thin veneer of easy charm. The way you stand in the midst of your young, dumb acolytes, basking in their rapt attention, their trust, their love.

You’re the cat that got the cream. You make the same lame jokes with each new class, each new year.

Hit them with the same, tired anecdotes about smoking opium with the Buddhist monks in Myanmar, that time you outsmarted the chaplain in the county jail.

Ohhh, they wish their moms and pops could be cool like you.

But soon, Professor, you’re going to be smoking hot.

He clicked the voice recorder off. Today was the day.

Tonight the night. He had the key, and he didn’t need to do any further surveillance on Professor Whitman; he knew the guy’s routine like he knew the inside of his own pocket.

But he liked watching him. He enjoyed how unaware the guy was, that these were his last hours on earth.

Right now, the Prof was teaching his undergrad class under a chestnut tree.

Of course, he’d do that; hey, let’s take this outside , an instant vote-winner with every student.

The earnest boys who hang on his every flippant word, the girls who send him love letters, they all get to sit at his knees.

And he gets to sit in the midst of them, back against the tree, like a picture you might see on a pamphlet.

The Teacher and His Disciples. The Buddha under the bodhi-tree.

It was the puns that annoyed him the most. Because they weren’t clever.

They relied on a simple substitution of one or two words, and the end result didn’t really work, but the sort of people who read the New York Times cover-to-cover treated them as if they were spun gold.

“Religion is the O.J. Simpson of the masses.” What did that even mean?

Tonight, there would be justice.

The smug academic, with his deliberately ruffled hair, his corduroy jacket and his hipster jeans, would face judgment and pay a heavy fine.

And he would be witness to the moment, when Whitman realized that it was all true, and that all of his scoffing and his word-plays and his clever, clever arguments had merely bought him a one-way ticket to hell.

After this class, Whitman would be marking papers in the common room.

After that, he would jog or cycle into town, buy two empanadas – one pork and sweet chili, one cheese and beef – and eat them in the park, sniffing the air oh-so self-consciously, so that everyone could see how he was in the moment, appreciating the small things in life.

Didn’t need God or heaven to be happy with his lot.

Given the day of the week, he’d also buy some sushi to take back for his dinner, because Wednesdays he worked late. Lord in heaven, everything about the guy was a walking cliché. Right down to his personalized little pair of chopsticks.

Whitman would be late . Twice over, tonight. Now there was a pun.

He ran through his checklist again. The key. A set of picks in case the copy was no good. Mask. Gloves. The accelerant. A disposable cigarette lighter. A student ID – in case that security guard, the one who was obviously a moonlighting cop – should stop him.

The knife.

He had his dark clothes on underneath the shirt, jacket, and jeans he was wearing currently.

The outer clothes would go in the sea; he had the bag and the rock in the trunk of the car, but now he wondered if he shouldn’t set light to them instead.

He had several hours to work it out, but it troubled him that he was still tweaking the plan at this stage.

Failures were always down to poor planning.

And he found it hard to shift his thoughts now.

It was like having a tune trapped in your mind.

What are you going to do with your clothes?

He decided to stick with the original plan.

Setting light to his clothes created one more opportunity for someone to notice him.

And he’d have to wait, and make sure that the whole outfit was completely incinerated, at a point when he should be devoting every spare second to getting away from the campus, and from the scene of the crime. The sea it was.

Feeling better, he continued with his list. A signed copy of Whitman’s latest book – Fundamental Folly.

He smiled and shook his head at his own folly.

Back in the planning stage, he’d intended to leave the book at the crime scene, just as he’d done with the hymn sheet at the back of the church.

But Whitman’s office was minuscule. The book wouldn’t survive the inferno, and there’d be no message for Her.

And there had to be a message for Her. So, he’d found a way around it. But that was no surprise. He did, after all, have God on his side.