The Drifter(64)
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.
McRae blamed the murders on a multiple personality disorder, claiming that a thing, a dark force, took over that convinced him to kill. But if he started following them at Taco Bell, he spent days trailing after Ginny. McRae confessed to stalking his victims for a day or two, sometimes trailing after multiple women at once. Then, Betsy wondered again, was it really Ginny he was after? Or Betsy? Could it have been Caroline? When he broke into that apartment, who was he expecting, even hoping, would walk through that door? Once he had Ginny in his grip, in the dark apartment, and was close enough to look directly into her terrified eyes as he wrestled her onto the ground, was he relieved, because she was the one he really wanted?
Ginny’s hazel eyes shone through those picture frames, and Betsy hoped they peered through to him, bored into his brain.
Betsy saw Scottie McRae in her dreams, in front of Ginny’s car, in the aisle at Walmart, in the shadows at Weird Bobby’s party, ordering juice at Bagelville. She would be riding on the handlebars of Gavin’s bike, but she’d turn around and see that it was Scottie pedaling hard, his hot breath on her neck.
Did he hear me laughing when the markers dropped near his feet? wondered Betsy. Did her irreverence set him off, and seal her fate as his next victim? Or when he reached out to hand it to Ginny, did he feel her skin brush up against his sleeve and realize his good fortune? Like the gods had intervened and delivered this girl to him. She remembered that Ginny blushed crimson at their exchange. Was there a flash of recognition before she quickly looked away?
She read about the blue duffel that he had strapped across his chest, the tapes, about the knife that was inside. How did he find out where they lived? With the traffic the way it was, and the stoplights, and the thoughtless way Ginny drove her car, it must have been easy for him to follow on a bike. Betsy must have tried to piece together that day after they left Walmart hundreds of times. They dropped Betsy off at the record store, and went back to the house. Did he wait there for Ginny and Caroline after they went inside? He had nothing better to do than watch those pretty girls come and go for hours. It was after midnight by the time she left, and she and Caroline never would have noticed the man across the street as he hopped on a bike and followed the two of them in Caroline’s car down the hill to their apartment.
He knew there was a pattern. After a few days of following them, McRae knew no one would be back at that apartment until after midnight. He’d hide behind the bedroom door and grab her, tape her mouth, quickly bind her wrists and ankles like he did his other victims. He would draw his knife out of the bag, put two strips of duct tape together on his left hand, and find a spot in the shadows to wait.
THE GIRLS AT the sorority house didn’t remember seeing Ginny leave. She was in the TV room until at least midnight, and someone remembered seeing her in the back with her arms outstretched in an exaggerated yawn. She asked Nan, the house supervisor, for an ice pack and some Excedrin earlier that night, which she washed down with a Diet Coke. She had a headache, everyone remembered her saying, and nothing she tried would dull the pain that crept in after lunch and lingered over her right eye. Even the nap she took after dinner in one of the cool, dark rooms lined with bunk beds upstairs where all the residents of the house slept—the “sleeping porch” system many sororities adopted after Ted Bundy’s killing spree at Florida State, designed to keep the girls together in one room, naively thinking there was safety in numbers—didn’t help. She and Caroline were sprawled out with at least twenty other students on the floor, half-awake, half-watching a lame thriller on VHS they’d all seen at least twice.