“I know what Naomi means to you,” he whispered against the side of my skull. “I know some of what you’re feeling. You need me again, you call.”
We gave each other a quick kiss on the cheek, like Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas used to before their NBA basketball games. That drew a few stares from the peanut gallery milling around the metal detectors. Sampson and I love each other, and we’re not ashamed to show it. Unusual for tough-as-nails men of action like the two of us.
“Watch out for the Fed Bureau. Watch your back with the local folk. Watch your front, too. I don’t like Ruskin. I really don’t like Sikes,” Sampson continued to give me instructions. “You’ll find Naomi. I have confidence in you. Always have. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
The Big Man finally walked away, and never once looked back.
I was all alone down South.
Chasing monsters again.
CHAPTER 20
I WALKED from the Washington Duke Inn to the Duke campus at around one o’clock on Sunday afternoon.
I had just eaten a real North Carolina breakfast: a pot and a half of hot, good coffee, very salty cured ham and runny eggs, biscuits and redeye gravy, grits. I’d heard a country song playing in the dining room, “One Day When You Swing That Skillet, My Face Ain’t Gonna Be There.”
I was feeling crazy and on edge, so the pretty, half-mile hike
to the campus was good therapy. I prescribed it for myself and then listened to the doctor. The crime scene the night before had shaken me.
I vividly remembered a time when Naomi was a little girl, and I’d been her best friend. We used to sing “Incey Wincey Spider” and “Silkworm, Silkworm.” In a way, she’d taught me how to be friends with Jannie and Damon. She had prepared me to be a pretty good father.
At the time, my brother Aaron used to bring Scootchie with him to the Capri Bar on Third Street. My brother was busy drinking himself to death. The Capri was no place for his little girl but, somehow, Naomi handled it. Even as a child, she understood and accepted who and what her father was. When she and Aaron would stop at our house, my brother would usually be high, but not really drunk yet. Naomi would be in charge of her father. He would make the effort to stay sober when she was there. The trouble was, Scootchie couldn’t always be around to save him.
At one o’clock on Sunday I had a meeting scheduled with the dean of women at Duke. I went to the Allen Building, which was just off Chapel Drive. Several administration offices were housed there on the second and third floors.
The dean of women was a tall, well-built man named Browning Lowell. Naomi had told me a lot about him. She considered him a close adviser and also a friend. That afternoon I met with Dean Lowell in his cozy office that was filled with thick, old books. The office looked out across magnolia- and elm-lined Chapel Drive to the Few Quad. Like everything else about the campus, the setting was visually spectacular. Gothic buildings everywhere. Oxford University in the South.
“I’m a fan of yours through Naomi,” Dean Lowell said as we shook hands. He had a powerful grip, which I expected from the physical look of him.
Browning Lowell was well muscled, probably in his mid-thirties, and good-looking. His sparkling blue eyes seemed relentlessly cheerful to me. Once upon a time he’d been a world-class gymnast, I remembered. He had attended Duke as an undergraduate, and was supposed to star for the American team in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
In the early part of that year an unfortunate news story had broken that Browning Lowell was gay, and having an affair with a basketball player of some renown. He had left the American team even before the eventual Olympic boycott. Whether the story was true had never been proved to my knowledge. Lowell had married, though, and he and his wife now lived in Durham.
I found Lowell to be sympathetic and warm. We got down to the sad business of Naomi’s disappearance. He had all the right suspicions and appropriate fears about the ongoing police investigation.
“It seems to me that the local papers aren’t making simple, logical connections between the murders and the disappearances. I don’t understand that. We’ve alerted all the women here on campus,” he told me. Duke coeds were being asked to sign in and out of dorms, he elaborated. The “buddy system” was encouraged whenever students went out at night.
Before I left his office, he made a phone call to Naomi’s dorm house. He said it would make access a little easier, and he wanted to do everything he possibly could to help.
“I’ve known Naomi for almost five years,” he told me. He ran his hand back through his longish blond hair. “I can feel a small fraction of what you’re going through, and I’m so sorry, Alex. This has devastated a lot of us here.”
I thanked Dean Lowell and left his office feeling touched by the man, and somewhat better. I went off to the student dorms. Guess who’s coming to high tea?
CHAPTER 21
I FELT like Alex in Wonderland.
The main dormitory area at Duke was another idyllic spot. Smaller houses, a few cottages, rather than the usual Gothic buildings. Myers Quad was shaded by tall ancient oaks and spreading magnolias, surrounded by well-kept flower gardens. Glory be to God for dappled things.
A silver BMW convertible was parked in front of the place. The sticker on the Bimmer bumper read: MY DAUGHTER AND MY MONEY GO TO DUKE.
Inside, the living room of the dorm had polished hardwood floors and respectably faded oriental rugs that could pass for the real thing. I took in the sights while I waited for Mary Ellen Klouk. The room was filled with overstuffed “period” chairs, couches, mahogany highboys. Bench seats were under both front windows.
Mary Ellen Klouk came downstairs a few minutes after my arrival. I had met her half a dozen times before that Sunday afternoon. She was nearly six feet tall, ash blond, and attractive—not unlike the women who had mysteriously disappeared. The body that was found half-eaten by birds and animals in the woods around Efland had once been a beautiful blond woman, too.
I wondered if the killer had checked out Mary Ellen Klouk. Why had he chosen Naomi? How did he make his final choices? How many women had been chosen so far?