No way to tell. And what did it matter? He was here now, and so was she.
He said, “Audrey Willard.”
“That’s right.”
“Do I know you? Because the name didn’t register when my lawyer mentioned it.”
Well, how could it? She’d never used it before. She sort of liked Audrey, it was unusual without being weird, old-fashioned without smelling of lavender sachets. He’d have known her by another name, and she was clueless as to what that name might have been.
“I may not have given you my real name,” she said.
“You look familiar, but I can’t—”
“You pulled me out of a bar in Riverdale,” she said, “or I pulled you, or we pulled each other. And the next thing I remembered was waking up the next morning.”
“Oh, God. I owe you an apology.”
“Not really,” she said, “because you gave me a repeat performance that got rid of my hangover faster than any aspirin ever did.”
“Jennifer.”
Entirely possible, she thought. She’d been Jennifer often enough back then. It had been a sort of default alias at the time.
“I knew you looked familiar. I remember you. You gave me your number. But when I called—”
“I gave you a wrong number.”
“I tried switching digits, but nothing worked.”
“So I’m the one who owes you an apology,” she said.
“Well—”
“Or maybe it’s a wash,” she said. “A wrong number, a couple of Roofies—”
“You could have died,” he said.
“Like that girl.”
He nodded. “Like Maureen McConnelly,” he said.
She was in Ohio when she discovered what had become of Peter Fuhrmann. She sat at a computer terminal and went to work, and she’d have found him in a couple of keystrokes if she’d had any idea what to look for.
His name, for instance. Google Peter Fuhrmann and he’d pop up in a heartbeat, with a flood of articles providing extensive coverage of the case. And it got a ton of ink — a good-looking Wall Street guy, a Choatie, a Yalie, all of that preppy street cred topped off with a Columbia MBA, who wakes up one fine morning with a beautiful girl in his bed. She’s a BIC, which is to say Bronx Irish Catholic, and she’s all of nineteen, in her second year at Marymount Manhattan College. And she’ll never graduate, nor will she ever be twenty, because, see, she’s dead.
If she’d been in New York when it happened, she’d almost certainly have known about it. That’s where it got a big play in the press. The story made the wire services, but it wasn’t that big a story and it didn’t play that well out of town, because Peter Fuhrmann never denied the charges. Yes, he’d picked up Maureen McConnelly in a Riverdale bar. Yes, he’d brought her home to his apartment — his bachelor pad, one tabloid called it. And yes, he’d poured her a drink, and helped his cause by dissolving a pill in it. The pill was Flunitrazepam, more popular under its trade name of Rohypnol. It was indeed the notorious date-rape drug, and date rape was precisely what happened to Maureen.
One enterprising reporter turned up a couple of young men who characterized feeding Roofies to Maureen as overkill. Reading between the lines, she got the message that you didn’t have to drug Maureen to get in her pants, didn’t have to get her drunk, didn’t have to swear undying love. All you had to do was take out your dick and wave it at her.
Well, she thought, why not? The girl’s dead, so let’s all tell each other what a whore she was.
But she didn’t spend too much time thinking about that part of the story, because there were other more important elements to consider. The drug rendered Maureen not altogether comatose but unfocused and acquiescent, a willing if not particularly active participant in what followed. One of its effects would have been retrograde amnesia, so Maureen very likely wouldn’t have remembered what happened to her, but she never got the chance to find out. Peter Fuhrmann had his way with her, and during a lull in the proceedings he paid enough attention to his silent partner to realize that she was no longer breathing.
If he’d been the least bit resourceful, she thought, he’d have got her back into her clothes, slung her over his shoulder, and left her under a bush in Van Cortlandt Park. Instead, after an unsuccessful stab at CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he’d picked up the phone and called the police.
Because it was obvious to him what had happened. He’d dosed the poor girl with a powerful drug, and it had stopped her heart and killed her.
“You called 911 right away,” she said. “You didn’t even call your lawyer first.”
“I called a lawyer later on, from the police station. I knew I’d need assistance with the plea bargaining.”
“You confessed.”
“I did it,” he said. “How was I going to say I didn’t? It was completely unintentional, I’d never heard of anybody having a bad reaction to Roofies. Maybe a headache and a hangover the next day, but you’d get that from the alcohol, wouldn’t you?”
“Normally,” she said, “it would just keep a girl from resisting. Or remembering.”
“If I could go back in time,” he said with feeling. “And wipe it out, the way the drug wipes it from a person’s memory. But you never can, can you?”
Because he was quick to confess, because he was prepared to enter a plea, the state didn’t have to knock itself out preparing a case. The post-mortem examination went looking for Flunitrazepam, and that’s what they found. They had no reason to look further, and death was accordingly attributed to cardiac and respiratory failure caused by the drug.
When she read about it, sitting in an Internet café in Ohio, she looked at a photograph of Maureen. She pictured the girl walking home with Peter, pictured her holding a glass of vodka. Pictured her dead.
I did that, she thought. I killed you.
Because, if they’d thought to look, they’d have found more than Roofies in Maureen’s system. She couldn’t even remember what she’d used, but she’d emptied the contents of a glassine envelope into a bottle of vodka before leaving Peter’s apartment. She’d hoped it would kill him, but had considered the possibility that someone else might be the first to sample the vodka. A woman, a male friend, even a tippling cleaning woman, raiding the liquor cabinet for a mid-afternoon bracer.
What did it matter, really? She’d liked the idea of leaving behind something that would kill someone, without knowing — or caring, really — who she killed, or when. A couple of times she ran scenarios in her mind, imagining what might happen, and it was exciting enough, but she’d never felt the need to find out what really did happen.
And time passed, and she more or less forgot about it.
She’d been different then. Well, no, that wasn’t it. She’d been the same person, she’d always been the same person, but her mission had been much less focused in those early days. She liked to pick up men and go home with them and have sex with them — though the sex in and of itself was never really the point. And she liked to end those evenings with more money than she started out, because you could almost always walk away with a few hundred dollars, and sometimes you scored big and left with a couple of thousand, and that made life easier and gave you a sense of accomplishment — but that was nothing compared to the pleasure of the kill.
No question, right from the very first time she liked to kill. It really got her motor going. The sex was a whole lot hotter when she knew she was going to kill the guy, and the money was more gratifying when she could think of it as a sort of bounty that was hers for taking her partner off the board. Sometimes she got off on the terror, when they saw it coming, and sometimes she killed them in their sleep and they were dead before they knew it, and either way it worked for her.