05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (18 page)

“Yes,” Jennifer said, beaming. “I sure can.”

When Colton got up, he updated his Facebook.com profile. He had forty-four friends listed at schools all over the country, including Harvard and USC, some who went back to his time at Catholic High. Then he couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to get his car out of hock. His parents must have been upset about yet another crisis, but his mother still got the car title to him and gave him her credit card to pay the $200 impound fee. Colton called Laura to drive him to the impound lot.

A week earlier, Jason Mack had warned Hall that Pitonyak was dangerous and advised her to stay away from him. Still Hall agreed to pick Pitonyak up in her green Caddy about three.

That afternoon, they left Colton’s apartment, hit the drive-through at a nearby Arby’s, then drove north to Williamson County. At the car lot, Laura dropped Colton off, and then left. During his drive home in the reclaimed Toyota, Colton took a call from Laura, who suggested they get together later that night. Apparently she’d fulfilled her purpose by delivering him to pick up his car, and Colton wasn’t interested. “I’ll call you later,” he told her. In Austin, he stopped briefly at a liquor store to procure a fresh bottle of vodka. When he reached the Orange Tree about five that evening, he unscrewed the top and poured himself a healthy glassful. He’d had to stay sober to pick up the car, but that was over.

At six, from his apartment, Colton called Jennifer. He hadn’t seen her in weeks. When she didn’t pick up, he left a message. Later he’d guess it consisted of: “What’s up? Call me.”

At about that time, in Denise’s apartment, Jennifer was jumping up and down, screaming, “They hired me. I started work and, you know what, I did such a great job that they promoted me, all in one day! I got the best job!”

That afternoon in the office, Bill Thompson watched Jennifer and realized she could do more than answer telephones and file. So, instead of the $10-an-hour job he’d hired Jennifer for, he offered her the full-time administrative assistant slot with a salary and benefits. The job required multitasking and determination, and it involved scheduling cases and motions, but Thompson had no doubt she could handle it.

“The office is near Austin Community College,” Jennifer gushed to Sharon in one of their calls that evening. “I’ll be able to take a class or two and get school going again. It’s perfect.”

“That’s wonderful, Jennifer,” Sharon said. “We’ll get you a little one-bedroom apartment close by and fix it up really cute.”

“I just want you to be proud of me, Mom,” Jennifer said.

“Jennifer, we’re always proud of you. We love you,” Sharon said.

“I know, but I’ve been nothing for so long,” she said. “And now, who knows. I could go to law school. I could do anything.”

“Just do a good job, Jennifer. Work hard for these lawyers,” Sharon said. “They’re putting their faith in you. Don’t let them down.”

“I won’t, Momma,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, sweetie.”

When she hung up with her mother, Jennifer phoned Jim, calling him by his family nickname, “Buffalo, I’m going to make you proud of me,” she said. “I got a job!”

Early that evening, Scott paced in his apartment, thinking about Jennifer.

The day before, a friend had confirmed that Jen and Eli were dating. When Scott heard the news, he was upset by what he saw as a bitter betrayal. When she moved out, Jennifer promised they would work on their relationship, try to save it. And Scott considered Eli a good friend. “Now I knew that they lied to me,” Scott says. Reeling from the news, the night before, Scott had sent Jennifer a long, angry e-mail.

All that day, he chewed on the situation, thinking and rethinking it. Although still hurt, after reconsidering, Scott regretted the e-mail and much of what he’d written. Considering all that had happened, all they’d meant to each other, Scott didn’t want to be upset with Jennifer. He still loved her, more deeply than he’d ever loved a woman. So he decided to talk to her in person.

At Denise’s he rang the doorbell, and Jennifer answered.

“I’m sorry for the things I said,” he told her.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said. They talked, and Jennifer began to cry. She knew she’d let Scott and Madyson down, but she just wasn’t ready for a family. First she wanted, perhaps even needed, to explore her place in the world. And there was this other thing, the same thing she’d told Karissa Reine about months earlier.

“Scott, I feel like I’m surrounded by demons,” Jennifer confided, her eyes filling with tears. “I really do. I can’t shake it.”

Scott held Jennifer as she cried. “It’s the drugs,” he said. “That’s all it is. Get them out of your life, and it’ll go away.”

“I’m trying. I really am. But it’s so hard,” she told him. “I can’t shake the feeling that I’m surrounded by something evil.”

They stood together, silent, while she cried. Then Scott leaned forward to kiss her. As their lips met, Jennifer slid down to the floor. “I have been using meth again,” she confessed, her voice quiet and ashamed. “I have, it’s true. But I’m going to stop the drugs. I’m going to take this job and run with it.”

Scott had never been hurt the way the breakup with Jennifer had hurt him, and he looked down at her, and then reached down to lift her up. He didn’t want to let her go. It felt good to hold her.

At about 7:30 that evening, Scott turned to leave, feeling better for having forgiven her.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he responded, and then he was gone.

Later that night, Jennifer text-messaged Scott. “I’m sorry. Thank you.”

After Scott left, Jennifer called friends Eli, Laura Ingles, and others to tell them about the new job. She offered to help Laura, who’d just moved that weekend, unpack, but then never showed up at the new apartment. Instead, Jennifer told Denise that she wanted nothing more than to stay home and get to bed early. By eight that evening, Jennifer had washed her laundry, dried it, and put it away. Wearing a pair of red gym shorts and a gray half T-shirt, she lay on the couch at Denise’s apartment watching a Lifetime movie about two troubled teenage girls who got into drugs.

“Oh, I love this one,” Jennifer said to Denise, who lay on a couch across from her.

They laughed and talked, Jennifer cluing Denise in to what to expect before it happened on the screen. “I knew a girl like that,” Jennifer said about one of the characters. “She was so screwed up.”

Through it all, Jennifer talked about how excited she was. She had her clothes laid out for work the next day, and her words were full of plans and hopes. Later Denise wouldn’t be able to remember what time the movie ended, but when it did, Jennifer stood up and stretched. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Will you wake me when you get up at 6:30?”

“Sure,” Denise said.

“Don’t forget,” Jennifer said. “It’s important. I want to get there early in the morning.”

Meanwhile in his apartment at the Orange Tree, at 8:47 that evening, Colton logged onto the UT Web site to check his summer school grade. Missing the exam had cost him dearly. The brilliant scholarship student had earned a D in his biology class. How much longer would his parents support him with such disappointments? He was already complaining to friends that his father had cut off his allowance. Minutes later, Jennifer returned Colton’s telephone call.

A short time later, Nora Sullivan saw Colton outside his apartment and asked if she could watch his television that night. She wasn’t unpacked yet, didn’t have cable, and wanted to see
Rescue Me
, a series about New York City firefighters on the FX channel.

“I’m going out to dinner and I won’t be there,” Colton said. Then he thought about it, and added, “But I could give you my key.”

“No,” Nora said. “It’s no big deal.”

At 10:30, Michael Rodriguez finished his shift at Progressive Insurance and called Jennifer. She told him about her new job, excitement lacing each word.

“We need to hang out again,” he told her.

No longer with Scott and her relationship with Eli casual, she replied, “We’ll do lunch, soon.”

“What’re you doing tonight?”

“I’m going downtown to hang out with a friend,” she said. “Colton’s got some issues.”

Michael didn’t know Colton and didn’t ask what kind of issues. At the time, he hadn’t wanted to pry. He liked Jennifer, but they were still in the getting-to-know-each-other stage, when it wasn’t a good idea to push too hard.

Although she’d told Denise she was staying in, sometime after 10:30 Jennifer left the apartment and drove to Colton’s place. Perhaps she was worried about him. Between the D in biology and having to call his parents to reclaim the car, he must have been in a foul mood. That Jennifer was pulling her life together, excited about the new job, must have drawn into even sharper perspective the mess he’d made of his own.

A month or so earlier, Jennifer had called Karissa Reine in the middle of the night, frightened, saying she was in a closet and that she couldn’t leave because she didn’t have her car. This evening, Jennifer drove her own car. She dressed in a short khaki skirt and a striped tank top. She left her long red hair down, and got in her black Saturn to pick Colton up at the Orange Tree, then drove to Sixth Street. Their first stop was Jazz, a cavernous Louisiana-style Cajun food place with wood floors, a long bar, and New Orleans decor.

From Jazz, Colton and Jennifer drove or walked down Sixth Street. It was quiet that night, between semesters at UT, and many of the students who habitually crowded the bars even on weekday nights hadn’t returned for the fall semester. It was hot, August always is in Central Texas, and they passed old wood and brick storefronts with blazing neon signs, advertising massage and tattoo parlors, and saloons like the Chugging Monkey, The Blind Pig, and Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar.

On the street, Jennifer saw a friendly face; Melissa Kuhl was celebrating her birthday with a group of friends. Jennifer had met Melissa at Michael Rodriguez’s party just days earlier, and they’d spent much of the time talking. “We’re going in Treasure Island, want to come?” Melissa asked.

Inside Treasure Island, a hole-in-the-wall tavern with an illuminated fish tank behind the bar and a skull and cross-bones flag outside, Kuhl and four friends, three girls and a guy friend named Jeff Sanderson, along with Jennifer and Colton, pulled together stools and took over a table. In the dimly lit bar, while Jennifer talked to the others, Kuhl sat next to Colton, and began to feel an attraction. He flirted, and he was cute and funny. Before long, Kuhl and Colton huddled together. He was soft-spoken and well-mannered and seemed interested in what she had to say.

“I want to get back into school. I haven’t done well,” he confided. “I came to UT, did great for a couple of years and then screwed everything up by getting into drugs.”

Colton told Melissa about his month in jail and insisted he wanted to get off the drugs and get back to his original goals, to finish business school and start a good career. It surprised Melissa when Colton then leaned forward and asked her if she wanted to leave with him. “I have to meet some friends,” he said. “They’ve got an eight ball for me.”

Melissa knew an eight ball was coke or meth, but she didn’t use drugs and their mention bothered her. Still, Colton was attractive and easy to talk to. When he walked to the bar to buy a drink, she asked Jennifer, “Are you two together?”

“No, we’re not,” Jennifer said. Then she leaned forward and warned, “But you really don’t want to mess with him. He’s crazy.”

“What do you mean crazy?” Melissa asked.

“He’s crazy. He’s got a lot of emotional baggage, and you don’t want to mess with him,” Jennifer said. “He’s weird.”

“You’re not going anywhere with him,” one of Melissa’s friends insisted. “You came with us and you’re leaving with us.”

When he returned, Colton said, “Come with me. We’ll get it and come back.”

“I’d better not,” Melissa said. She’d been thinking about what Jennifer had said and wondered if Colton was clingy, one of those I-love-you-in-two-days kind of guys.

At least on the surface, Colton took rejection well. He simply shrugged, appearing not to really care.

The friends drank and talked, but Colton, who’d lost interest in Kuhl, turned to Sanderson. Jennifer seemed fine, not drunk, not drugged, but Sanderson thought Colton was high on something, “really out of it.” Listening to Colton on his cell phone talking about the eight ball convinced Sanderson that he was right.

In Treasure Island, Jennifer’s phone buzzed at 11:30, with a text message from Michael Rodriguez: “Why are you such a beautiful girl?”

“I get that from my mother,” she responded, just minutes later.

The seven talked, laughed, and listened to music. When one of the girls struggled to pull off a plastic wristband she had from another bar, it wouldn’t budge. She asked if anyone at the table had a scissors. No one did. Then Colton, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, pulled a black-handled, folding knife with a four-inch serrated blade out from his belt, reached across the table, and cut it off. The knife made Sanderson uneasy.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” someone suggested, and all the others nodded in agreement. Soon Melissa and her friends paid their tabs and walked toward the Cheers Shot Bar, almost directly across the street.

“Colton has to pay the bill,” Jennifer told Melissa. “We’ll meet you there.”

About then, at 11:54, Jennifer’s phone buzzed with a second text from Rodriguez: “When do I get to hang out with you again?”

“Sometime soon,” was her response.

Jennifer wasn’t the only one a friend wanted to hook up with that night. Four minutes later, at 11:58, Laura Hall, apparently disappointed that the guy she thought of as her boyfriend wasn’t interested in hanging with her, messaged Colton: “Ugh, you should have called me back.”

Just after midnight, Melissa and her friends walked across to Cheers and got a table, while she watched the door for Jennifer and Colton. Kuhl saw them show their IDs to the bouncer, and then she turned away to talk to Sanderson. When Kuhl glanced back at the door, Jennifer and Colton were gone. Kuhl looked around the bar and didn’t see them. She rushed to the door, wondering what had happened, and peered out just in time to watch Jennifer and Colton walk away. They turned a corner and disappeared from sight.