more than a good tip. He flirted back, and told her she looked a little like a movie star, if only he could remember the name. It was, he assured her, right on the tip of his tongue. Stick out your tongue, she said, and maybe I’ll be able to see it.
He asked her what time she got off work. Ten-thirty, she said, and told All the Flowers Are Dying
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him to wait for her at the far end of the parking lot, because she didn’t want anyone knowing her business.
He was in cowboy mode, dressed in boots and jeans and a western shirt with snaps instead of buttons, and it seemed natural to wear the knife on his belt. He waited for her in his car and followed her back to her trailer, where he fucked her to their mutual satisfaction and fell asleep at her side. He woke up after an hour and found her sleeping, her bottle-blonde hair spread out on the pillow, her jaw slack. She was snor-ing, and her breath smelled. He’d never told her the name of the actress she reminded him of—of course there was no such actress—and he thought now that she wasn’t very pretty, although she’d been a good enough sexual partner. He could stick around for a while, if only to find out what she would and wouldn’t do. He had no place to go, and this town was probably as good a one as the next to spend a few days or a week or a month.
He reached for his pants, and his hand brushed the sheathed knife, and it was as if the knife decided. Because the next thing he knew the knife was in his hand, its unsheathed blade resplendent in the light of the bedside lamp. If she’d turned off the light before she passed out, if he hadn’t seen the light glinting off the beautiful knife blade, if she weren’t lying on her back, giving him such a good look at her pale throat . . .
Did she even feel the knife? He drew it across her throat in one fluid motion and the flesh offered no resistance at all. It was like cutting warm butter. Her eyes fell open, but never saw anything. The light was already gone from them.
He dressed and left, and by the time the sun cleared the horizon he was a hundred miles from Durango. He’d cleaned up after himself in a limited fashion. He’d left his seed in her, so there was nothing to be done about that, and no point in worrying about hairs and trace evidence when he’d already provided them with a good DNA sample. Much luck to them, a small-town police force with the nearest competent lab where, in Denver? They were welcome to his DNA, they could store it in a test tube on a shelf in some back room, and what harm could it do him? None unless they arrested him, and that wasn’t going to happen.
He wiped away his fingerprints. That was enough. No one even knew 188
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he’d been to Durango, much less that he’d picked up the waitress. Anyone who’d watched her would have seen her get in her own car and drive off.
No one could have noticed him pull out and drive off in her wake.
He’d paid cash for his meal. He hadn’t even bought gas in Durango.
No trace of him in the town, except for a few cc’s of semen in a dead girl’s vagina.
Besides, he had an alibi. It wasn’t he who did it. It was the knife.
.
.
.
Online, he visits his newsgroups. There is, he’s pleased to note, a flurry of activity on the subject of Preston Applewhite. Several of the newsgroup’s more devoted participants have been following the coverage in the Richmond paper. Human remains have been unearthed from the private cemetery of an abandoned farmhouse, and preliminary evidence suggests strongly that the Willis boy has indeed been found.
There’s no end of speculation. Did Applewhite, unwilling to admit his crimes, arrange for someone to speak for him from beyond the grave? Did he have a confederate—one theorist calls him an unindicted coconspirator—
who’d participated in his crimes? Was Applewhite in fact part of a long-rumored satanic cult?
The newspaper has reproduced a portion of the e-mail he’d sent them, along with his signature, and one newsgroup member has been quick to pick up on Abel Baker. “You younger types won’t know this,” he writes,
“but these are the first two letters of the old phonetic alphabet. Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox . . . Can anyone remember the rest?” Someone of course can and does, and someone else chimes in with the modern replacement, beginning with Alpha and Bravo. And another party wonders when exactly Alpha Bravo etc. replaced Able Baker, and someone supplies a date which someone else challenges, and the thread rapidly degenerates into a discussion of the relative merits of the two alphabets, and the implication of the change in terms of the evolving role of the military.
He exits the newsgroup, Googles his way to the Times-Dispatch’s website. He reads everything he can find on the story, including an editorial calling for a review of the whole notion of capital punishment, and an op-ed piece taking an opposite tack and arguing that the process should All the Flowers Are Dying
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be streamlined, so that less “time for mischief” separate the imposition of sentence and its execution. Neither piece, it seems to him, is a master-piece of rational thinking.
He reads on, and yes, some enterprising reporter has determined that Applewhite had a visitor before he died, that he spent more than a few hours during the several days before his death with one Arnold Bodinson.
They’ve gone and anglicized the first name, he notes, probably having heard Arnie for Arne and opted for a more formal version, but surely they’ll correct that in the days to come. Dr. Bodinson is identified as a prominent psychologist affiliated with Yale University, and the coincidence of his initials matching those of Abel Baker has not escaped attention. No doubt the earnest chaps in the newsgroup will have something to say on the subject as well.
Efforts to reach Dr. Bodinson have thus far been unsuccessful, the reporter states. And are doomed to remain so, he thinks, but tomorrow’s paper should hold the revelation that Yale University has never heard of Arne Bodinson, or Arnold either.
Now won’t that be interesting?
