“No, you don’t get it. I saw him, and my friend Ginny did, too, at Taco Bell. She wasn’t a random victim. The guy who killed her chose her. Or worse. Maybe he chose me and got the wrong girl.”
She could picture him standing in the kitchen of Ginny and Caroline’s apartment waiting for them, the water dripping from his hair onto the linoleum floor in steady, rhythmic drops as he raided Ginny’s fridge. According to the press, it’s what he had done in all of the apartments. He came in, searched for snacks, and took his time looking through the rooms. He couldn’t have found much. There was rarely more than a couple of bruised apples, a brown banana, a few condiments, and some expired yogurt in the fridge. She imagined his gloved hand moving along to the cabinet, over a jar of popcorn, a bottle of expensive maple syrup, and a box full of flavored instant oatmeal. And he took a shower.
Her vision of him was so vivid that she could smell his stench from sleeping in a tent in ninety-five-degree heat, the camp he set up in the woods off of 34th Street behind Bennigan’s. It was secluded enough, hidden from the street by the thick overgrown scrub around it, but easy to get to through a hole in the fence at the far end of the bar parking lot. How many times had Ginny driven by, not knowing what or who was hiding back there? He would find a neglected pool to jump into when he couldn’t stand his own filth. When he needed to rinse off the blood, he found a hose for a quick blast over to clean his hands and drench his shirt and filthy jeans. He was almost caught once, by a superintendent of one of the large apartment buildings nearby, who saw the man rinsing clothing from the hose in the back of the building and threatened to call the cops, but never did. But once he was inside the girls’ homes, he was concerned that they would notice his foul smell and sense his presence, so he cleaned himself up. In his mind, it was a seduction. He needed to think that the women wanted him, and he was making himself presentable, more desirable. An actual shower, with soap and hot water, had become a rare event, and he likely took his time, and breathed in the scent of Ginny’s shampoo, which smelled like the tropics.
She pictured him toweling off, rifling through the medicine cabinet. Caroline had done the same thing dozens of times at parties around town, so it was stocked with prescription bottles written to at least five different names. Maybe he stashed the Percocet in his pocket for later. He needed to stay sharp.
According to police interviews, it had been easy enough to get into the place. One thing about Gainesville was that the doors were rarely locked, and if they were, it was easy to pop them open like a can. Old Florida windows, the ones with the long, narrow panes of glass that opened with a crank, were the easiest to get into. All you needed to do was slide a couple of those narrow panes off of their tracks and pull yourself inside. Betsy had done it herself when she was locked out of her house once. Or a person could hop onto the back balcony and jam a screwdriver into the lock of the sliding door so fast that no one would notice. He could be inside in under a minute and no one was the wiser. She thought of him browsing through the apartment with a small flashlight between his teeth, examining the bookshelf next to the television and its stack of old videotapes—Purple Rain, Dirty Dancing. Did he notice that it wasn’t like the other apartments he had seen over the last week, all of them mostly the same with a futon, a plastic crate of books, one of those lamps that cast a sickly greenish light on the ceiling? Did he notice it was special? There was a rug that looked worn but expensive, real wood furniture, and a big chintz sofa. Betsy remembered the silver frames that were clustered on top of the tables, showing the girls in various poses: dressed up but cross-eyed drunk at a formal; Ginny glancing over her shoulder on a bike against a background of the bluest water in the world; Ginny and Betsy hanging upside down from a tree, their T-shirts falling down to expose their tan, teenage skin. He would have remembered them from the drive-thru, the way Ginny called him “Sir,” like no one ever did. Did he remember the way her ponytail blew in the wind behind her? Did he see Betsy’s face and think of the salute? Of course he did. That’s why he was there. It was no coincidence.