The Follower (37 page)

It was an efficient way to kill somebody, all right, but it had a couple of minuses. The first was, it was exhausting. Peter considered himself to be in excellent shape and it had still taken a lot out of him. Kneeling over the body like in the woman-on-top sex position, Peter’s heart was going the way it did when he used level 20 on the Life Fitness machine at the gym. The other minus was the blood. There was a lot of it—well, enough to create a nuisance. Peter had been aware of it while he was banging Scrub Boy’s head and knew some of it might wind up on his clothes. He’d have to be careful about getting rid of any evidence, and make sure not to leave any of it in his apartment. Still, none of the negatives came close to overwhelming the positives—Scrub Boy was dead, the path to Katie’s heart was clear once again.

Peter got up slowly, peeked over the car. The kids were gone; no one else was around. As carefully as he could, he took off the gloves and put them in his jeans pocket. He’d have to get rid of all his clothes as a precaution, but there wasn’t as much blood on the gloves as he’d feared. In case the kids were around the corner on Lex, Peter walked to Park Avenue at a normal pace, and then headed downtown. He planned to avoid eye contact with anyone he passed in the vicinity, but the sidewalks were empty. Everything was going his way and it felt so good.

Katie’s roommate, Susan, was
spending the night at her boyfriend Tom’s, and Katie, alone in the apartment, was terrified. She had to check several times to make sure the locks were bolted and that the chain was on. But every noise she heard outside, in the hallway or on the stairs, scared the shit out of her.

Earlier, before she went to work, the two detectives had finally gotten in touch, and she went into work later so she could talk to them at her apartment. She’d told them all she knew about Peter and about the woman who’d been outside her office and at the bar, but this didn’t calm her down; actually it had made things worse. She felt like they hadn’t taken her seriously, like they thought she was just some ditzy, paranoid country girl in the city, and wasn’t it cute that she thought some guy was out to get her? She feared that the detectives would go talk to Peter and then Peter would get so angry at her that he would come over to her place and try to kill her. She was also afraid of that woman from the bar. Maybe she knew Peter, was a crazy friend of his or something. Maybe he’d even killed Andy and was planning to come after Katie next.

Katie tried to distract herself by reading and going on eBay, but she couldn’t stop obsessing. She turned on the TV, figuring a movie would help her relax. One of the first movies she flipped to was
Scream 2
, during one of the gruesome murder scenes. She turned quickly to something else, not only because of the mood she was in, but because she just couldn’t
deal with horror movies. When she was growing up, it was different. She and Heather were horror fanatics. Whenever their parents went out at night, they would turn out all the lights and watch horror movies, scaring the crap out of themselves. Back then, it was fun to get scared; it was exciting. But since Heather died, Katie hadn’t been able to watch movies with excessive violence. Life was disturbing enough.

She watched the Food Network for a while, then
House Hunters
on HGTV—that was more like it. During a commercial, she surfed the movie channels, stopping on
Sense and Sensibility
. She started watching it, then remembered how, that night at the French restaurant, Peter had mentioned that he loved all of the Jane Austen movies, especially some British TV version
of Pride & Prejudice
. She’d told him she’d only seen the one with Keira Knightley, and he went on about how much better the other one was and how they’d have to watch it together sometime.

Suddenly feeling nauseous, Katie turned the channel. Thanks to Peter Wells, she’d never be able to enjoy a fucking Jane Austen movie ever again.

She started watching some of
Wedding Crashers
, figuring laughing would be a good thing for her, when she heard creaking footsteps outside in the hallway. She was convinced it was Peter coming to kill her. He’d somehow managed to get into the building and now was going to break down the door or chop through it with an axe like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
.

She went to the phone and dialed 911. The operator picked up and Katie screamed, “There’s someone breaking into my apartment!”

“Is the person in your apartment right now?” the operator asked.

“No. He’s—” Then Katie heard the laughter in the hallway—female laughter. It was her neighbor, what’s-her-face with the red hair, talking to a friend. Feeling like a total idiot, Katie said to the operator, “Sorry, I…I made a mistake.”

“Is there someone in your apartment or not, ma’am?”

“No, there isn’t. Sorry.”

She hung up quickly.

This was crazy—she had to get a grip. After checking the locks, she returned to the couch. TV wasn’t helping. She didn’t know how the hell she was going to fall asleep tonight. Though she didn’t smoke, she craved a cigarette. She needed to fucking relax somehow. She opened the fridge, found an old bottle of wine in the back. No glasses were clean, so she poured some into a mug. It tasted more like vinegar than merlot, but it calmed her a little bit.

It was starting to rain, the drops splattering hard against the window. Rainy nights were very horror movie-like. The farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, the power cut off, the killer outside…

“Stop it!” Katie screamed. “Just fucking stop it!”

She gulped more merlot and reminded herself that she’d done everything she could and that the police would protect her. Besides, this wasn’t a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere—this was an apartment building in the middle of Manhattan. She had neighbors a few feet away, right behind the thin walls. Nobody was going to hurt her here.

But she wasn’t buying any of this crap. She felt completely alone in the world, more alone than she’d ever felt in her entire life. How had this happened? A couple of weeks ago everything had seemed so great—she was going out with Andy, adjusting to life in the city, and now everything was shit. She had no boyfriend, no close friends. She knew her relationship with Amanda would be ruined forever. How could she ever face her after making out with Will, a guy Amanda was so into? Katie couldn’t believe she’d done that. What the hell was wrong with her?

She wanted to be home, in Lenox, in her old bedroom. In her closet there, she still had her old stuffed animals, and she wanted to take out Snoopy and Clifford and curl up with them, the way she did when she was a kid whenever she was sad. She knew if she called her parents and told them what was going on, they’d freak and come to New York immediately to get her.

But Katie didn’t want to call home. Her mother would just get on her case, blaming her for getting involved with Peter
Wells, and her father would be his usual distant, unsupportive self. Besides, calling her mommy and daddy would just make her feel like a big fat baby.

It was past midnight. Katie knew she had to try to get some sleep or she would be a wreck tomorrow at work. The rain was still coming down hard and there were occasional rumblings of thunder. She dimmed the light, but didn’t turn it down completely. She was so anxious, she didn’t know how she’d ever fall asleep. She kept thinking about Peter, replaying just about every conversation she’d ever had with him, as if the repetition would reveal some hidden truth. But it didn’t do anything except increase her anxiety. One thing that was really stressing her out was what her mother had told her, about how Peter had stalked Heather in high school. Katie was still amazed by how little she remembered from that period of her life, how it all seemed to have taken place in a fog. Maybe she’d blocked it out because the memories of Heather were too painful, the same way she rarely thought about her sister’s suicide and the weeks afterward. That had been the darkest period of Katie’s life by far. It had been terrifying to see her parents lose control that way, wailing uncontrollably. The whole family met with a grief counselor, but it didn’t seem to help. They were beyond grief, unreachable.

Katie cried a lot, too, during that period, but most of the time she was just numb. Now, in bed, Katie shuddered as she let the horrible memories back in. She pictured her sister with an insane, wide-eyed expression, leaping off the roof of the dorm and splattering on the concrete. One thing Katie never understood at the time, and which still baffled her, was what the hell had happened to make Heather want to do that to herself? Yeah, she’d suffered from depression during her freshman year and hadn’t been taking her Prozac, but lots of people in the world were depressed and most of them didn’t jump off buildings. When Heather was living at home, she’d suffered from typical teenage angst, had a period of anorexia, rebelled during her senior year of high school, and started cutting and hanging out with the druggie crowd. But she never had any major
problems, or at least didn’t seem to have any. Then when she started at UMass, everything seemed normal. She didn’t have any serious adjustment issues; why would she have? The UMass campus at Amherst was only about an hour’s drive from Lenox, and she frequently came home on weekends. She seemed to have a lot of friends and was doing well in her classes. She’d never been the straight-A type, but she was getting mostly B’s and wasn’t failing any classes. But somehow, despite all this, she hated herself so much that she decided to end her life.

There had been no doubt that she’d jumped and wasn’t pushed. The police did a full investigation, and a witness—a maintenance worker—had seen her go up to the roof alone, and a few students who were up there sunbathing had seen her jump. Her friends had claimed that she’d been very agitated during the week before the suicide and the police speculated that academic pressure might’ve caused her to jump. But this had never made much sense to Katie. It had been finals week, and every student on campus, especially freshmen who were taking year-end exams for the first time, had been under pressure. Heather had never been the type to freak out about academics. She was laid-back, a vegetarian, listened to the Grateful Dead. She might’ve been nervous about her exams, but Katie was positive that something like that alone wouldn’t make her kill herself.

Katie remembered the police and school counselors suggesting other possible causes for Heather’s distress, including that some crisis they weren’t aware of had led to a psychotic breakdown. For years, Katie had wondered what that crisis could have been. Heather hadn’t been getting along with a roommate, but that didn’t seem like a big enough deal. A guy she knew had died, and she’d been upset about it, but that didn’t mean…

Katie sat up in bed, afraid she would hyperventilate if she sat still; then she rushed into the living room and started pacing. She had to relax, get a grip.

A guy she knew had died and she’d been upset about it
.

This had never seemed significant to Katie before, maybe
because she was fourteen when Heather had died, and the idea of “a guy she knew” dying being enough to cause a suicide didn’t really add up. But “a guy she knew” was only how her parents had described the relationship to her. What if it had actually been more serious than that? If she’d been so upset about some guy dying, it figured that the guy probably wasn’t a casual friend. Parents were so lost about those sorts of things. The guy had probably been someone she’d hooked up with, or even had fallen in love with. Girls in college don’t exactly report home to their parents every time they start having sex with a guy—God knows Katie never had.

If the guy who’d died had been a boyfriend of Heather’s, that changed things dramatically. Maybe Heather’s death had been indisputably a suicide, but what about the guy’s? Katie remembered the cause of the guy’s death—he’d fallen off the roof of his frat house while drinking during a frat party. The police at the time had even pointed out that Heather may have decided to jump to mimic the way the guy had died, and Katie vaguely remembered the cops stating some psychological mumbo jumbo about how suicide victims often choose their cause of death by mimicking another recent dramatic death, maybe because they’re striving for the same type of attention. As a fourteen-year-old, Katie had questioned that logic, but now it seemed to hold more weight. Maybe Heather really loved this guy and wanted to die the way he’d died.

But, the catch was, what if the guy hadn’t fallen? What if someone had pushed him? Someone like Peter Wells.

Katie continued pacing frantically, wondering, What if Peter couldn’t get over Heather when she went away to college? Maybe he started stalking her on campus. If he did, it figured Heather wouldn’t want to worry her parents by telling them about it. She might’ve feared that they’d get overprotective of their freshman daughter and make a big deal about it. She also might’ve figured that Peter was harmless and that she could handle the situation herself. But this had turned out to be a huge mistake. Peter continued stalking her and then he saw her, hooking up with this other guy. He got insanely jealous and killed him, pushing him off the roof at that frat party. It all
seemed to fit. Maybe this was what Peter did—he got obsessed with girls and killed their boyfriends, just like he’d killed Andy.

Katie was going to call 911 again, but stopped herself. She felt out of control, a little crazed. In the state she was in, who would believe her? Those detectives hadn’t exactly taken her seriously about Peter being involved in Andy’s murder, so why would they care when she told them her new theory about how Peter had killed Heather’s boyfriend?

A few minutes went by and Katie was glad she hadn’t made the call. Now that she had a little distance, she realized how far-fetched the whole thing would have sounded. She had some imagination, all right, the way she could always imagine worst-case scenarios so vividly.

She got back into bed. After a while, she managed to fall asleep, but then a noise jolted her awake. She didn’t know what time it was, but there was some light outside, coming through her window, and the rain had stopped. She heard the noise again, someone jiggling the front door. Thinking,
It has to be Peter
, she locked herself in the bedroom, and then heard the front door opening.