I wondered where we were and what we were doing when he decided on us. I understood in a new way why premeditation carried a stiffer sentence than crimes that occurred in the heat of the moment. It was a unique kind of violation to think that when you were curled up on the couch, watching As the World Turns with your best friend, someone was plotting your demise. I found I was having difficulty swallowing. The more I tried, the tighter my throat became.
“What does this mean for us?” I asked Carl in a strained voice.
“It means I’m going straight from here to get this story down. Four thousand words on the Colorado cover-up that led to a completely preventable double homicide right here in our backyard.”
I dragged the heel of my hand beneath my chin, flicking tears onto the copy of the container list. “Oh, God, sorry,” I said, using the hem of my sweater to dab the page dry. “I’m just so relieved. They’ll have to listen to me now.”
Carl nodded with this adoring smile on his face. “It’s going to be okay, Pamela.”
“Thanks to you,” I said. I went to hand him back the document, and he leaned forward slightly. In the heat of the moment, I scooted closer and kissed him.
* * *
Carl’s editor at the Tallahassee Democrat wanted the story ready to go. Though we were technically in the golden era of the American serial killer, that would have been news to most of us in 1978. The term had been coined earlier in the decade, but serial killer was not yet part of our colloquial true-crime-junkie parlance. There have always been serial killers—in the sixteenth century, they were put on trial as werewolves. There are women serial killers who amass their victims by manipulating others to do their dirty work, and Black serial killers whom we rarely hear about not because they are Black but because their victims are. After a boom of buzzy, media-driven notoriety for The Defendant, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, and the Golden State Killer, there was enough awareness around the idea that a deranged killer could be masquerading as the friendly usher at your church that anyone imprinted with that dark pathology was forced to tap into a different victim pool in order to keep hunting without getting caught. We don’t hear about serial killers much anymore because they target sex workers, people who get into a stranger’s car as a means of survival and whose disappearances are less likely to raise alarm bells.
Denise and all the others in Washington, Utah, and Colorado just so happened to be part of a particular victim pool, at a particular moment of comprehension in the field of criminal and social sciences, at a particular moment of media interest. But that flashpoint in history, as most flashpoints tend to be, is detectable only now, with the benefit of hindsight.
So: what Carl’s editor thought had promise was not a story about an assailant who was still classified by dull governmental nomenclature but a story about a cover-up. We were post-Watergate, and headlines about corruption and calls for transparency sold big at the newsstand. However, his editor said, we couldn’t go around making litigious claims. He would run the story if and when The Defendant was arrested and charged. To say we were all disappointed and frustrated was an understatement, but Carl did take a copy of the container list to Sheriff Cruso, who asked if he could hold on to it. This, the slightest sign of interest, buoyed me for a few days. Then nothing came of it, and I began to envision a life in which the case was never solved, not because there weren’t any leads but because of pure human arrogance. Hopelessness turned to vengeance. I imagined ghoulish scenarios where Sheriff Cruso’s wife became The Defendant’s next victim, where he came to me a broken man, ruing the day he decided to focus on Roger instead of listening to me. My mind had become a bleak and unrecognizable place.
One week passed indeterminably, then half of the other. At The House, we moved from the floor of the rec room and into our beds, figuring that we were scared no matter where we closed our eyes, so we might as well be comfortable. Denise’s roommate that quarter was a girl named Rosemary Frint, who had been away on a ski trip the night Denise was killed. She was matter-of-fact about returning to room eight—all her clothes were there, and she liked the proximity to the bathroom—but I would have felt like a captain abandoning ship if I’d let her sleep in there alone. I offered my balcony bedroom to Robbie’s roommate, who was less keen on returning to her old accommodations, and I slept in Denise’s bed with the new linens, where, if I lay on my right side, I could be eye to eye with her print of Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. Denise had been staggered to learn that I lived only thirty minutes outside of New York City and I’d never gone to see the real thing hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. The first time she came to visit me, we took the train in and went straight to the fifth floor, where the original still hangs in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries. I was surprised by the diminutiveness of the piece—the world-famous work was just a couple of inches wider than a page in the legal pads I used for note-taking in class. Denise broke down the composition element by element for me, tourists and schoolchildren gravitating, like she was an erudite museum guide.