The Drifter(63)

“Oh, so seventy-nine has a past. You and your man, Mr. Decoy, on the run from the law?”

“Not exactly running, I don’t know. I guess we’re running from something, but we’re not wanted in ten states or anything.” She motioned with one hand to clear the smoke while she reached for the joint with her other. “I think that what I’m doing could best be described as avoiding, which is like a passive running.”

He nodded, silent. The kid wasn’t much of a talker, which made Betsy talk even more.

“I had some dark days. I lost my best friend. I let her die.”

Four months earlier, in March, Scottie McRae had been tried on five counts of first-degree murder in an Alachua County courthouse, and the details of the student murders in Gainesville once again flooded the news. Betsy thought about calling Caroline at least once a day in the weeks after the verdict was read and he received the death penalty, but she didn’t have her number, and was too chicken to call her mom, Viv, at her Miami office to get it. Now that she knew he was behind bars, with no possibility of parole, Betsy was desperate to tell someone what had happened, and thoughts of Caroline kept surfacing. Eventually, she got a recommendation for a therapist from Shana at work and called her instead. It worked for a while. Then she found herself confiding in Ian.

“I knew he looked familiar,” said Betsy, wondering how long she’d been talking, how long Ian had been sitting on the chair opposite her, leafing through a year-old issue of The Atlantic, listening. “Once I saw his face in the papers, it haunted me for weeks. I said to myself, ‘He looks so familiar.’ It was eerie as hell.”

She heard herself talking, how much she sounded like a stoner, and she hated herself for it, but she couldn’t stop. She told him about the dreams, the persistent visions she had of the night Ginny was killed. Warmth radiated from the base of her skull, forward to her hairline, and down her spine. The new mystery pill she swallowed was doing its job.

“I knew I had seen him before, but where? I couldn’t figure it out. Then one night, I don’t know when, maybe in June, while I was hauling bags of groceries back from Gristedes, I figured it out. It was one of those quiet, warm nights with no sirens wailing, and I felt calm and still even with two heavy bags in my hands. Even that sweet, rotten smell that comes up through the subway grates, you know what I mean when I say sweet? It didn’t bother me.”

“It’s rat poison,” said Ian, nodding intently. “That’s what my grandma says.”

“Oh God, really? That’s depressing. Well, even that sweet, rotten smell didn’t bother me that night. It was like my brain was turned on to some different frequency, or something.”

Betsy had pieced together a profile of her friend’s murderer from newspaper clippings and interviews with McRae, which had been published after his conviction the previous year. From what she had read, McRae dropped out of high school and spent his late teens and early twenties in a constellation of prisons across the South, robbing stores and stealing cars. He had been abused as a boy by his father and his grandfather, both mechanics with anger issues, and had his wrists taped to his brothers’ and been shoved to the floor more than once, just for sitting on the furniture in muddy jeans. Then, he was the one who started taping wrists, and found the power too delicious to resist.

She knew she’d seen his face before, but she couldn’t place him for months.

“So one night I was walking home from the grocery store after work, like I said, and I got about twenty feet away from our building and I just stopped. I dropped the bags on the sidewalk and I thought, ‘Taco Bell.’”

McRae was the loser on the bike at the Taco Bell, the one she saluted, the words echoed in her head. McRae handed Ginny the marker at Walmart.

“Aw, man, I could use some Taco Bell right now! Stat!”

“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.