The Drifter(58)

“You know, it’s a great decoy, the Minor Threat thing,” Gavin said, chuckling. “Though I’m not sure the NYPD would totally get the reference.”

Betsy scanned “Ian’s” face for a reaction, but he just stared at Gavin blankly, impatient for him to stop talking to him about this amusing paradox. Betsy had become his more frequent customer, and she could always sense a relief in the kid’s face when he saw that she was the one who answered the door. It was harmless, she would rationalize to herself, just a few pills and pot, and the only repercussion was that she was a little foggy at work the day after a “delivery.” Which is one of the reasons she was so startled when the phone rang at work one day, mid-daydream, and taken off guard when she answered it and heard her mother’s voice on the line.

“May I please speak to Betsy Young?” she asked, in her most efficient and professional voice.

“Mom?” Betsy asked, her eyes darting around her desk to see if anyone was around to hear. “It’s me.”

“Oh, hi, darling. Is this a good time?”

“Not really,” she said, clicking the top of her Tupperware over the rest of her uneaten lunch. “But I guess I have a minute.”

She covered her mouth with her hand and lowered her voice to a whisper.

“Also, I’m Elizabeth at work, remember?”

“Oh, darn it, hon. That’s right. I’ve got to remember to be more official.” Kathy giggled. She had had time to get used to the idea that her daughter was living in sin, and only asked when Betsy and Gavin planned to get married about once a quarter now.

“So what’s up?”

“Well, I don’t want to upset you, but I also didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else,” Kathy said.

“Hear what? What’s going on? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine, Betsy, it’s just that, there was a story in the paper today about Gainesville. They think they got him, the killer. And it’s not that Rhodes boy, either.”

The last Betsy had heard of the investigation, before she willed herself to stop obsessing over details and following it completely—not that it would have been easy in New York, where it wasn’t exactly headline news—they’d arrested Dwayne Rhodes, a violent twenty-year-old who attacked and robbed his disabled mother two days before the first body was found, and kept him in custody for longer than what was necessary. It was the only lead they had, even though it was clear to everyone that they had the wrong man. The police needed to save face with the university, which was answering to an understandably concerned student body and their anxious parents who demanded action, but it was a feeble effort. Betsy’s throat tightened. She leaned forward in her chair until her head was practically under the desk.

“Are you serious? Are you sure? What happened?”

Kathy took her time reporting the details she’d read in the local Florida papers. His name was Scottie McRae. He was twenty-nine, twenty-six at the time of the murders, but he could have passed for early twenties with his longish sandy curls and rumpled, slouchy posture. He was a drifter with a long criminal record on the run from authorities in Mississippi. He said he picked Gainesville on a whim, because voices in his head told him that something was waiting for him there when he rolled through on his journey south from his hometown, Biloxi, on the run from the police after he shot at his grandfather. Betsy pictured the bus wheezing and groaning out of the empty depot as it started its journey through the deepest South, across the Panhandle into Fort Walton, Destin, Pensacola, Tallahassee, and on to Gainesville. He bought a ticket through to Sarasota, but, mysteriously, got off two stops early. For nearly seventeen hours, half of them in darkness, McRae must have considered what awaited him in the Sunshine State. Why Gainesville? Betsy thought. Maybe he couldn’t be still and quiet on that bus with his own thoughts any longer? Maybe he walked off of it and felt relief, with the last, pneumatic sigh of air before the doors clapped shut? With each dot on the map he passed, he widened the gap between the past and the present, between reality and the infinite possibilities of starting anew. He arrived in Gainesville on August 19, 1990.

The worst part of the story, Betsy thought, was that they didn’t even arrest him for murder. They picked him up for armed robbery after he held up a convenience store near Orlando. He only confessed to the killings to brag about them to his fellow inmates. The theory was that he wanted to be recognized, to be famous in the way that serial killers, not armed robbers, are.

Scottie had been cooperative, almost docile, with the Orange County jail authorities and in court during his armed robbery trial back in 1991. It wasn’t until he attacked a fellow inmate, biting his face in a fit of rage, that the warden started to believe that he was capable of any kind of real violence. Their interest in him was officially piqued, and when detectives from Mississippi started to reach out to law enforcement in states across the southeast to look for someone who fit certain behavior patterns of a man wanted for triple homicide, they started looking more closely at Scottie. Scottie, sensing the increasing scrutiny, must have loved the adrenaline rush it caused and wanted to add to the intrigue, because he started to run his mouth to fellow inmates about the women he assaulted in Gainesville. Eventually, state authorities dug out the blue duffel bag from the box of evidence they’d sealed and stowed away when they first arrested him. In it, underneath some white Reeboks and dirty clothes, were cassettes and a small tape recorder. Scottie made a habit of recording songs, his thoughts, letters he hoped to transcribe and send to his family, an attempt to finally be seen and understood by them. At the end of the one cassette still snug inside the tape deck, which was filled with long descriptions of the women he was following, was one simple but ominous warning.