The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,92

majors in fine arts? A dreamer, I thought, and grief slammed into my chest like a two-by-four.

It was a ground-level room with two windows on the outside wall, flooded with light. I remembered studying the Ted Bundy murders when I had first been transferred to the Behavioral Analysis Unit at NCAVC. When Bundy was here in Florida stalking and killing more young women, terrified students at WFSU had piled leaves and crumpled paper outside their windows hoping to have advance warning of a prowler. Some planted cactus and nailed their windows shut. None of it helped. Bundy wasn’t the type to climb in windows. Good looks and charm and the sympathy con were his weapons. His victims came right to him. When Anne Chambers had been butchered here, had young women once again been terrified to cross campus alone or leave their rooms at night?

The walls were thin. Even through closed doors, music and sound seeped out.

The killing had taken place midday. The dorms would have been half empty, I guessed. Even then the killer was doing plenty of homework, knowing when to show up, when Anne’s roommates were absent, class schedules. There had been a serious blow to the victim’s head. It wasn’t cause of death. It was merely the controlling blow. For at least a few minutes, Anne Chambers would have been incapable of defending herself, making noise, and this would have provided plenty of time for restraints and gags.

How did the killer get out without being seen? I looked up and down the hall. No way to get to one of the exits in the middle of the day without a resident noticing a person with blood all over his clothing. It was a violent scene. There was blood everywhere. A window maybe? No. The nearest parking lot was too far. The next building was too far. Someone on campus would have seen someone headed there. Perhaps the killer carries a bag or a briefcase with tools, a change of clothes. A bag would also solve the problem of what to do with the bloody clothes. No. Too much baggage. And then it hit me. The clothes come off. Of course. Being naked with the victim is part of the ritual.

I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wanted to do what I had done in the past after imagining the unimaginable. I wanted to drink.

Instead, I spent a day pawing through a dead woman’s life. I made lists of Anne Chambers’s classmates, roommates, professors, and started the process of tracking them down, calling them. It had been so long ago, it was difficult to find anyone who remembered very much about Anne apart from her murder. No one seemed to know anything at all about her relationships, her dreams. She’d had three different roommates at different times. All remembered her as shy, distant, maybe even a little secretive. Mary Dailey lent me a stack of yearbooks from different schools within the university system covering the couple of years Anne lived here, and I packed them into my car for later viewing.

I had called Anne’s mother and arranged a visit for the next morning. The trip to Jekyll Island would only take a couple of hours, even in a little piece-of-shit Plymouth Neon. I hoped I’d have time to take a walk on Jekyll’s hard-packed sand. I loved it there, loved the smooth bleached-out driftwood that littered the beaches, the big gnarled live oaks bent like old men over the dunes from taking on the constant sea winds. At sunset the tangled black branches of those trees in silhouette is all at once so eerie and so beautiful it will raise the hair on your neck. Jekyll isn’t one of those hosed-down-fluffy-white-sand islands. The Atlantic is choppy and white-capped, and the afternoon thunderstorms will pound you into the sand. The locals were trying hard now to hold on to what they had left and fight back the developers, protect the wildlife and an island that had transformed itself into rolled-up shirtsleeves and artists and writers and shrimpers and fishing boats. Take any trail through the interior of the island and you are treated to deer and crabs and turtles, birds large and small, and alligators pretending to sleep in the shallow marsh. The feeling of belonging hits me there like no place else as if I sprang up barefoot from this earth and sand and weeds and made my way like a loggerhead to the sea. In