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A cyclist had discovered her on his daily ride, drawn by an unusual sparkle in the middle of a field nine miles outside of town. It was Maddy’s purse, its sequins glinting in the morning sun.
Maddy lay next to it, facedown in the dirt, dead for at least a day.
At first, everyone—the police, the town, the university—had hoped it was a normal murder, as if such a thing existed. Foul play that could easily be solved. A jealous ex-boyfriend. An obsessive classmate. Something that made sense.
But there were the multiple stab wounds to contend with. And the fact that her wrists and ankles had been bound with rope. And the missing tooth, an upper canine that dental records indicated hadn’t been missing before she disappeared.
It was the tooth that led police to conclude the worst: Maddy was another victim of a man who had struck twice before.
The Campus Killer.
Charlie grudgingly admired the authorities’ restraint in the nickname.The Silence of the Lambshad hit theaters seven months earlier, entering Buffalo Bill and Hannibal the Cannibal into the pop cultural lexicon. Instead of going for something in that same morbidly catchy vein, the police opted for simplicity.
He was a killer.
He prowled Olyphant University’s campus.
He snatched women and tied them up and yanked out a tooth after stabbing them to death. That was attention-grabbing enough for most people—and the general public didn’t even know about the missing teeth. Only the victims’ families were told that gruesome detail. Charlie had found out simply because she was the first person the police talked to after finding Maddy’s body, and they needed to know immediately if she’d been missing a tooth. The detectives begged her not to tell anyone else, and she hadn’t. Not even Robbie. She understood it was something the cops needed to keep to themselves to differentiate between a random stabbing and the work of the Campus Killer.
Charlie had learned the nickname the day she arrived at Olyphant. The Campus Killer had struck a month earlier, sending the whole university into a panicked frenzy, even though the victim was a townie and not a student. Her freshman orientation included a lesson in self-defense. Rape whistles were distributed with ID cards. On campus, girls never walked alone. They moved in packs—great, unwieldy groups of nervous giggles and shining hair.
During campus-sponsored mixers or late-night chats in the dorm lounge, the murders were talked about in hushed tones, like urban legends whispered around a campfire. Everyone knew the names of the victims. Everyone claimed to have some tangential connection. A shared class. A friend of a friend. A glimpse on the street two nights before they were killed.
Angela Dunleavy was the first, murdered four years earlier on a rainy night in March. She was a senior who worked part-time at a bar downtown. One of those places that made its waitresses wear tight T-shirts in the hope the college boys would leave bigger tips. She went missing shortly after last call and was found the next morning in a patch of woods on the edge of campus, bearing the then-novel signs of the Campus Killer’s handiwork.
Tied up.
Stabbed.
Tooth pulled.
There were no leads, no suspects. Just a horrific murder that police had stupidly assumed was a onetime thing.
Until the second victim was found a year and a half later. Taylor Morrison. The townie killed a month before Charlie’s freshman year, her body dumped on the side of a maintenance road two miles away. She worked in a bookstore two blocks from Olyphant, which was close enough to campus for her death to be lumped in with Angela Dunleavy’s.
When a year passed without another murder, people started to breathe a little easier. After two years, the rape whistles stopped butthe self-defense classes remained. By the start of Charlie’s junior year, no one roamed campus in groups and the Campus Killer was barely mentioned.
Then Maddy was murdered, and the vicious cycle began anew. Only this time Charlie was part of it. A supporting player to Maddy’s morbid starring role. She talked to so many people in the days following the murder. Local detectives. State police. Even two FBI agents. A pair of women dressed nearly identically in silk blouses and black blazers, their hair pulled back in severe ponytails.
Charlie told them everything.
She and Maddy had gone to a bar to hear a cover band. No, she wasn’t yet twenty-one, an admission that caused her not a second’s hesitation. Maddy was dead. Her killer was still out there. No one gave a shit about her fake ID. Yes, she and Maddy had argued outside the bar. Yes, she had walked away even though Maddy had begged her to stay. And, yes, the last two words she uttered to her best friend were indeed “fuck off,” a realization that, when it hit, sent Charlie running to the police station bathroom to throw up in the sink.
It got worse when she returned to those tough-chick FBI agents and learned everything they knew about Maddy’s final moments.
That no one could remember seeing Maddy back in the bar after Charlie left.
That two people exiting the bar five minutes after Charlie saw Maddy leaving the alley with a man, although they didn’t know for sure because he had already rounded a corner, giving only a glimpse of white sneaker.
That based on her time of death, authorities believed the man Maddy followed out of the alley was the same person who killed her.
“I saw him,” Charlie said, stunned by the realization that what she’d seen hadn’t entirely been a movie in her mind.
The FBI agents straightened in their chairs.
“What did he look like?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know.”