The Drifter(59)

“I’ve gotta go. There’s something I’ve gotta do.”

The attack in prison and the contents of the bag—including the disturbing tape—were grounds to bring him in for questioning. Three hours into the interrogation, he described in dispassionate detail carving the first victim with that foot-long blade. Then another, and another, until they had linked him to all five murders. The newspapers described it all. Kathy avoided the details specific to Ginny. But as she rattled off the information, Betsy closed her eyes and she was back in Gainesville, on the stolen bike, in Ginny and Caroline’s dark apartment. She heard someone clear her throat and opened her eyes to see Jessica standing at her desk, staring at her. Jessica mouthed “What the fuck?” and nodded toward the end of the hall, where the department head and a handful of other supervisors were returning from lunch.

Betsy straightened up in her seat.

“Betsy, I’m sorry,” said Kathy over the phone when her daughter fell silent. “But I think we should focus on the fact that he’s behind bars, and he will never hurt anyone again.”

Kathy agreed to fax the articles to Betsy, and she stood by the machine waiting for the slick paper to churn slowly out.

After work, Betsy raced to the newsstand to see if any of the papers ran the story, and in the following weeks she collected all the clippings she could find. Her mom sent her the manila folder filled with all of the articles she had started clipping back in 1990, and Betsy kept it in a drawer in her desk at home.

Her thoughts took another obsessive turn. Scottie McRae was all she could think about.

“Aren’t you feeling at all relieved?” asked Gavin one night after work. They were sitting on the large fire escape outside of their bedroom window, wrapped in blankets, watching the sunset, sharing a six-pack of Rolling Rock. “He’s behind bars. He confessed. Those rednecks on the jury are going to give him the chair. He’s going to die in the Florida state pen. There’s no way that guy’s getting out of prison alive.”

“I guess I should be relieved,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen his face, it’s all I can see, you know? I see his face and I think, That face is the last thing Ginny saw. It seems weirdly familiar to me, like I knew him. And I just feel like I’m there, in that apartment, all over again.”

On the evenings when she decided to take a long amble home down Madison Avenue past the jewel box stores that sold precious objects to the precious people she avoided at work all day, she would walk through the canyons between towering skyscrapers manned by bored security guards whose revolving doors exhaled indistinguishable men in important suits and women in snug pencil skirts and white sneakers. She would watch them scatter off to Metro-North trains and buses at a very important pace, wondering how many of them had lost someone too soon. Whenever she wasn’t distracted by work or Gavin, or Ian’s pills, or long runs along the Hudson, she would try to piece together the details of what happened in Gainesville.

She was fixated on the duffel bag. Why did that detail stick with her? Betsy hated to admit it, but McRae had what people might describe as a sympathetic face, handsome even. He had a strong jaw and a delicate nose, and eyebrows that turned down at the corners, slightly, so he wasn’t likely to be pegged as a murderer or an armed robber at first glance, though he was both several times over. His eyes were what gave him away eventually, though. They were hollow and haunted. The look of them made her so sick she could never stare at his picture in the newspaper for long.

Of course he found Gainesville, she thought. The town was flat enough to suit a bike without gears, easy enough to navigate, big enough to absorb strangers in its daily routine without anyone noticing. And the sun’s glare hid everybody’s flaws for a while. There was a revolving door of people showing up for the party. How many times had Betsy turned away random guys just like him when they stumbled into the bagel store, drunk and desperate, asking for food? Maybe he was one of them? He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. It had been two and a half years since she left Gainesville, and she had filled her brain with new scenery, as many distractions as she could, in an effort to erase those memories. Now she was struggling to recover them and it brought out a certain recklessness in her. Every night, she fell asleep wondering how many times she could be in a room with a murderer and still make it out alive.





PART 3





CHAPTER 16


NUMBER 79


August 27, 1995

Betsy noticed the sheets first, which were dark and flannel, and completely unfamiliar. Is that . . . plaid? she thought, recognizing how odd it was for her to be asleep on top of a bed made with a combination that she found so offensive. She struggled to focus her one opened eye, which felt heavy and crusted at the edges.

That usually meant that the previous night involved too much bourbon and a couple of lint-covered pills that she found buried in a pocket. She scanned the room for familiar details: the IKEA school clock on the wall that she loved but Gavin hated because of its faintly perceptible ticking, the chipped, black dresser she found on the street when they first moved into their place on the Bowery, the fraying, stuffed armchair in the corner that was always piled high with their rumpled clothes. When she spotted nothing she recognized, a shot of adrenaline coursed under her skin, and it took her roughly twenty seconds to execute her quick escape. She checked to make sure she was still wearing the last article of clothing she remembered putting on (a vintage sundress, which was cheery enough to draw disapproving glances from her colleagues, even under a prim beige cardigan), scanned the bed to see if there was another occupant beside her (there wasn’t), and surveyed the rest of the sad studio. Despite her panic about waking up, again, in a stranger’s apartment, she couldn’t stop her mind from wandering back to her favorite moment of Wall Street, ca. 1987. Whenever she saw an “exposed brick wall,” she thought of Daryl Hannah’s withering critique, and remembered what an impression that movie made on her. It was when she first realized that New York was amazing, which she now realized was not the intended moral of the story. There was no time to consider the profound impression Gordon Gekko left on her young mind, and the ripple effects that would push her toward this place, through uncertain waters, and eventually to this weird little hovel of an apartment, whose current occupant was unknown. She spotted an asymmetrical slice of light under the crooked bathroom door and knew her next moves had to be stealthy and swift. Betsy scooped up her shoes and her bag, which were dropped on the floor next to the bed, and as she stooped down she realized, to her horror, that it was actually a futon, and raced out of the battered front door down far too many flights of stairs. Betsy burst past a row of neglected mailboxes in the vestibule and out onto a sidewalk. She identified her whereabouts instantly by smell alone. In the far–West Village, one avenue from the Hudson River, the pre-dawn sounds and odors of slaughterhouses at work on a muggy summer morning were unmistakable. She checked her watch. It was nearly 5:00 a.m. She remembered it was Saturday.