“Bullshit,” said Gavin. “You are so full of shit.”
“Ask the guys inside. Cops were in here earlier and they all but confirmed what they’d heard on the police radio. They got some kind of scanner and shit,” he said. “Hey, you don’t have to believe me. But you’ll read it in the paper soon enough. There are three victims. That crazy fucker cut off a girl’s head and put it on a bookshelf. He stabbed all of them something like ten times, in the chest, with, like, a machete or something. I mean, they’re saying that he cut off their tits and . . .”
“Whoa, whoa, we’ve got it. I got the picture,” Gavin said, as he glanced back at Betsy, whose eyes were trained on Danny.
“Fine. Like I said, don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”
“What’s surprising is that you’re still believing everything you hear. In this town?” said Gavin. “Bored-ass people making up stories is all that is.”
“I speak the truth, brother,” he said, shuffling through the parking lot, head shaking. “Why don’t you ask Phil Donahue what he thinks? He’s setting up cameras in the Plaza right now. They think the killer might be dressing up like a cop, or a deliveryman, since there’s no sign of forced entry. It could be anybody.”
“Good idea, Danny. I’ll ask Phil Donahue if he thinks you’re full of shit,” said Gavin.
“Seems like he’s targeting young girls, maybe brunettes? That’s all they can guess about his pattern so far,” continued Danny, despite Gavin’s skepticism, his raised eyebrow. “Not Phil Donahue, dickhead. That murderous lunatic on the loose.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just you wait,” he said, scuffing across the hot asphalt, in no particular rush. “You’ll see it in the papers, and think, ‘Ole Danny knew all the news that’s fit to print.’”
Gavin and Betsy drove the rest of the way into campus and neither of them dared to say a word. Betsy had a rare moment of absolute clarity. She was still a kid, selfish as hell, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that these dead girls were ruining their moment. During her entire time at college, she imagined the threat came from the young women around her, casting judgment, chastising her for being different, mocking her behind her back. And now there was a threat so visceral and real that she could barely process what was happening around her. It occurred to Betsy, suddenly, that she should feel sympathy for the parents of the victims, or consider their families in some way. She thought, Why wasn’t that my first instinct?
“I wonder if we knew them,” Gavin said at last, when they were stopped at a traffic light. “Like, did I sit next to one of them in class? Were those girls in that room full of five hundred strangers, nodding off to a lecture nobody remembers?”
“I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Gavin offered to drop her off at “home,” a first-floor apartment in an old, stucco fourplex behind Norman Hall, and he walked her to the door.
“So, my new roommate?” she said, with one hand placed on the doorknob, as she hesitated to let him in. Her words lilted at the end, a tick that was exaggerated when she was nervous or drunk, and she was a little of both. “She’s not back in town with her furniture yet. I just want to warn you, it’s spare in here.” Here came out like a squeak.
She unlocked the door and surveyed the mess, the lonely lamp on the floor, the milk crates full of books, a cardboard U-Haul box spilling over with clothes, the dusty Matisse Harmony in Red poster in a cheap frame leaning against the scuffed wall, and a double mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms in back. The message light blinked on her answering machine. Melissa had called with the same news that stoner Danny had shared at the gas station, saying that all of the sorority girls were camping out at the houses because no one wanted to go home alone. Betsy and Gavin had escaped to the lake for a few hours, and in that time the fear on campus had grown from something vague and unsettling to something sharper, more menacing.
“You think I’m going to say ‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’” he said, coming out of her empty room. She wondered if he had overheard the message.
“But that would be too predictable.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“I’ve been staying with Ginny, at her place over in Williamsburg Village on 16th. I slept in Caroline’s room while she was away, but she’s back,” she said.
He nodded.
“Anyway, I’d crash on their couch, but I just heard that they’re all camping out at the house until they catch this guy, you know . . .” She trailed off.
“The psychokiller.”
“Yep, that one.”
They stood there for a bit, under the bright overhead light in the kitchenette, and she was suddenly aware of her own pulse, every creak in the building, the tiny bugs circling the lightbulb above their heads.
“I tell you what. You grab some clothes and you come to my place for a night or two, just until the roomie arrives,” he said.