The restaurant was extremely busy, and I had to wait at the bar. It was the University of Tennessee’s homecoming weekend, I discovered, and everywhere I looked I found jackets and sweaters in flaming orange, and alumni of all ages drinking and laughing and obsessing about this afternoon’s game. Their raucous instant replays rose from every corner, and if I did not focus on any one conversation, what I heard was a constant roar.
The Vols had beat the Gamecocks, and it had been a battle as serious as any fought in the history of the world. When men in UT hats on either side occasionally turned my way for agreement, I was very sincere in my nods and affirmations, for to admit in that room that I had not been there would surely come across as treason. I was not taken to my table until close to ten p.m., by which time my anxiety level was quite high.
I ate nothing Italian or sensible this night, for I had not eaten well in days and finally I was starving. I ordered baby back ribs, biscuits, and salad, and when the bottle of Tennessee Sunshine Hot Pepper Sauce said “Try Me,” I did. Then I tried the Jack Daniel’s pie. The meal was wonderful. Throughout it I sat beneath Tiffany lamps in a quiet corner looking out at the river. It was alive with lights reflected from the bridge in varying lengths and intensities, as if the water were measuring electronic levels for music I could not hear.
I tried not to think about crime. But blaze orange burned like small fires around me, and then I would see the tape around Emily’s little wrists. I saw it over her mouth. I thought of the horrible creatures housed in Attica and of Gault and people like him. By the time I asked the waiter to call for my cab, Knoxville seemed as scary as any city I had ever been in.
My unease grew only worse when I found myself waiting outside on the porch for fifteen minutes, then half an hour, waiting for Cowboy to come. But it seemed he had ridden off to other horizons, and by midnight I was stranded and alone watching waiters and cooks go home.
I went back into the restaurant one last time.
“I’ve been waiting for the taxi you called for more than an hour now,” I said to a young man cleaning up the bar.
“It’s homecoming weekend, ma’am. That’s the problem.”
“I understand, but I must get back to my hotel.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Hyatt.”
“They have a shuttle. Want me to try it for ya?”
“Please.” The shuttle was a van, and the chatty young driver asked all about a football game I never saw as I thought how easy it would be to find yourself helped by a stranger who was a Bundy or a Gault. That was how Eddie Heath had died. His mother sent him to a nearby convenience store for a can of soup, and hours later he was naked and maimed with a bullet in his head. Tape was used in his case, too. It could have been any color because we never saw it.
Gault’s weird little game had included taping Eddie’s wrists after he was shot, and then removing the tape before dumping the body. We were never clear on why he had done this. Rarely were we clear on so many things that were manifestations of aberrant fantasies. Why a hangman’s noose versus a simple, safer slip knot? Why a duct tape that was blaze orange? I wondered if that bright orange tape was something Gault would use, and felt it was. He certainly was flamboyant. He certainly loved bondage.
Killing Ferguson and placing Emily’s skin in the freezer also sounded like him. But sexually molesting her did not, and that had continued to nag at me. Gault had killed two women and had shown no sexual interest in them. It was the boy he had stripped and bitten. It was Eddie he had impulsively snatched so he could have his perverted fun. It was another boy in England, or so it seemed now.