I was hoping the name Roger Yul might mean something to Tina, that she had heard Denise’s ex-boyfriend was a person of interest in the investigation, but I saw no sign of recognition on her face. She opened the door wider and invited us inside.
There were two queen beds, one made, one slept in, and a standing television in the corner, on but the volume low. The room stank of stale smoke and chlorine. “I’m surprised Tallahassee doesn’t have nicer hotels,” Tina said, responding to the wrinkle in my nose. She gestured to the two chairs at the small round table, where a dirty glass acted like a paperweight for the headlines of the day. Sit. Roger landed only one ass cheek and made a wild grab for the edges of the table before he went over.
“I guess I need to catch up,” Tina said with a wry laugh.
I had hoped to flash her a look as she reached between us for the glass, ringed a crusty maroon at the base, but Roger was watching me with pure malice in his eyes. “Mug shots in that pile.” Tina indicated a stack on the windowsill before she went into the bathroom to wash out the glass.
Roger picked up a copy and held it out at a long angle, trying to bring The Defendant’s image into focus.
“That’s the man I saw at the front door,” I told him.
“Why’s it say he’s from Colorado?” Roger asked angrily, like we were wasting his time.
“Washington, actually,” Tina said, returning from the bathroom, drying out the glass with a hand towel. “His first victim was a woman named Lynda Ann Healy. She was a senior at the University of Washington who reported on ski conditions for a local radio station. When her alarm went off at five a.m. and she didn’t turn it off, her roommates checked on her and found that her bed had been made and her nightgown hung in the closet. The police discovered a small drop of blood left on the pillowcase and determined that she got a nosebleed and went to the hospital in the middle of the night without telling anyone or taking her car, purse, or shoes. They found her body six months later off a hiking trail on Taylor Mountain. Who wants wine?”
“I’d rather a beer,” Roger said.
“I’m not a bar,” Tina said. She poured him a glass of red and set it in front of him, looked at me.
“None for me,” I said. “Thank you.” Roger mimicked me again. Thank you. I sounded like a stuck-up bitch you wouldn’t hesitate to smack around.
Tina poured herself a hearty glass and lit a cigarette. “After Lynda, he developed a pattern. He struck once a month for six months. Mostly he kept to the Seattle area, though the year prior he had been in Aspen, where he abducted a woman named Caryn Campbell from a hotel that was hosting a medical conference. She was there with her fiancé, a physician. She went to her room to grab a magazine one evening and never came back. They found her body along a rural dirt road a month later, when the snow finally melted.” Tina went over to the nightstand, switched on the gooseneck lamp, and emptied the ashtray into the waste bin. She set it on the table and offered Roger a cigarette.
“In June 1974,” she went on, striking a match for him, “another University of Washington senior named Georgeann Hawkins left a fraternity party early to go home and study for her Spanish final. She lived in an area of campus known as Greek Row, a bunch of fraternities and sororities all right next door to one another along a brightly lit street. It was a warm night, and everyone had their windows open. She stopped to talk to a friend through his window on her way. He estimated she had about twenty steps to go to the back door, and yet she never made it.”
“Were me,” Roger said, with stained merlot lips, “I woulda walked her home.”
“He’d just have found someone else,” Tina said, unmoved by this bogus claim to chivalry.
I counted on my fingers. “You said he struck once a month for six months. June is five months.”
Tina sank down on the edge of the bed she hadn’t been sleeping in, drawing a pillow into her lap. She rested her elbows on it, massaging her temples with her cigarette still burning between two fingers. I kept thinking about her freshly washed hair under that turban, how it would need to be washed again.
“In July,” she said, “we got unusual weather. Eighty-seven degrees on a Sunday. I know that’s not breaking any records down here, but the hardware store sold out of coolers. There’s this beach in Issaquah. Lake Sammamish. Lake Sam, everyone calls it. Ruth and I had plans to go and lay out all day. But then…” Tina studied Roger a moment before continuing, cryptically. “There was a change of plans. I went alone. I guess she came later and tried to find me, but they estimated there were thirty thousand people at the beach that day.” She pulled contemplatively on her cigarette. “Thirty thousand people,” she marveled through a lacework of her own exhaust, “and he killed two girls, precisely two hours apart in broad daylight, and no one saw a thing.”
My eyes slid nervously to the window, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling like I was being watched. “Do the police have any sort of theory? About how he pulled that off?” I started scratching at my arms, my scalp, every part of me feeling suddenly infested with bugs.
“They only know that Ruth went first.” Tina had a foul smile on her face that I could understand, that something so preposterous could be true. “Just like Denise. And, just like Denise, she wasn’t enough for him.”
We stared at each other, and a moment of raw understanding passed between us.
“What does Ruth think?” came Roger’s contribution, in his dumb gargled voice. He had to tilt his head back to see through the heavying hoods of his eyelids, and his cigarette had burned down to a precarious line of ash. Gingerly, I removed it from between his fingers and stubbed it out in the ashtray. His fingers stayed stuck in a V-shape.
“Hey, man,” Tina said, patting the bed, “you wanna lay down?”
Roger’s head bobbed around on his neck, a nod in the affirmative, it appeared, but he did not get up. Tina shot me a look—what’s his deal?—before continuing on.
“Then it was like… it all stopped. Or it seemed like it did. We know now that he moved to Utah to attend law school, a good one that he had to scam his way into. Despite hundreds of hours of preparation, his Law School Aptitude Test results were mediocre and his performance on the grammar part of the exam below high school level. So he forged his recommendation letters and moved to Utah, and that was when women in the Salt Lake City area began to disappear. One after another, until an eighteen-year-old named Anne Biers managed to escape and identify him. He was arrested, sentenced to fifteen years for kidnapping, and then they found in his compounded car a strand of Caryn Campbell’s hair. He was extradited to Colorado to stand trial for her murder, and that was when law enforcement shit the bed.”
Roger’s chin touched his chest and his head snapped up. “I didn’t do it,” he insisted.
Tina ignored him. “In Colorado, he filed a pro se motion to represent himself, arguing that it was a violation of his constitutional right to a fair trial to be restrained while using the law library at the Aspen courthouse.” Tina’s upper lip curled to indicate what she thought about The Defendant’s rights. “The judge agreed, with the condition that he must be supervised at all times. Only, the guards took one look at the guy and decided he didn’t pose a real threat, and it wasn’t long before they were leaving him to do his research in the library while they popped out for a smoke break. One of those times, he opened the window, jumped two stories, and took off. A week later, he was apprehended in the mountains. The public was understandably outraged, and so the sheriff moved him to a higher-security prison, about an hour outside of Aspen, and put him on a twenty-four-hour watch. Within six months, he escaped a second time. What the hell kind of incompetence happened there, God only knows. In any case, that was December. Exactly one month before you saw him at your front door.”