“Thank God for that,” he said. “I don’t think of myself as a jealous guy . . .”

I took his hand, and pulled his palm toward my mouth, then kissed the warm soft space at the base of his thumb—this was something I did when I wanted to express my love, though I knew it wasn’t a gesture he particularly understood. “I love you,” I said, and the tears came again, along with the specific feeling of being at the end of something long and difficult, like a marathon, or in this case short and difficult, like a sprint, or both.

Dennis was partially correct: Margo had gone to the bus station, but after waiting an hour and a half had been unable to get out of town, even though Greyhound had added two buses to its southbound service. We continued trying in vain to get through to her, and finally, at midnight, she called. Dennis was watching the news in bed and I was in the bathroom, staring at myself in the vanity mirror. “Are you coming home?” said Dennis when he answered the phone. I rushed to the kitchen to pick up the other line.

“Mom? Isn’t it horrible?” she said. “A policeman threw up on my doorstep.”

“Lord,” I said.

Dennis groaned. “Don’t think about that, sweetheart.”

She explained the situation at the bus station. “I’m not at the apartment anymore. I’m at the dorms, with friends. There are five of us sleeping in one room. We’re on campus. We’re safe.”

Gainesville seemed a very small town. In my mind the place was dominated by the presence of a roaming monster, like the flashing red dot on a radar screen, blinking closer to its target. He could be a student, I thought. He could be one of the students Margo was with right now.

“I’m coming to get you,” said Dennis. Over the line I heard a dresser drawer in our bedroom opening.

“Daddy?” said Margo. “I’m going to stay. The semester’s just starting, and I don’t want to miss anything. I won’t be able to catch up.”

“I don’t think that matters, sweetheart,” I said. “Aren’t other people leaving?”

“Some,” she said. She sounded stern when she spoke again, even though her voice was shaking. “I think I’m going to stay. I’ll be safe. I promise.”

Dennis breathed into the phone. I said, “We won’t sleep until he’s caught.”

She was crying again. “They lived in One-Thirteen,” she said. “I live in One-Twelve.”

“I know, sweetheart,” said Dennis. Again he insisted that she come home, and again she refused. Then, after giving her cautionary tips—don’t walk alone, don’t go out at night, lock the doors, and for Christ’s sake, lock the windows—and after getting the phone number of the dorm room where she was staying and repeating it twice back to her, he reluctantly said good-bye.

The following morning we woke to learn that the Gainesville police had found another body, a student named Christa Hoyt. She was found in her apartment, two miles from Williamsburg Village. Again, the killer had pried his way in through a sliding glass door. (From this time on in my life, I’ve disliked sliding glass doors, and have wondered if the tragedy would have occurred without them. I’d let my daughter live on the first floor of an apartment complex, never thinking to ask whether there was a solid barrier between her and the outside world. The Williamsburg Village Apartments had a swimming pool—of course there were sliding glass doors.) The reports said only that Christa’s body had been mutilated; we learned later of the rapes, the decapitation, the gruesome poses. Gainesville officials urged students to be careful, to not go out at night, and to stay in groups whenever possible. All the murders had happened during the daylight, in the victims’ homes, but still this was the advice given. A press conference followed: the president of the University of Florida, John Lombardi, answered questions about precautions being taken. They’d added thirty more campus police (again, I thought: but this killer could be a member of the campus police!) and were opening up unused dorm rooms to students living off campus who wanted the extra protection.

It hit me, as I sat in bed watching television: this was not even a danger I’d thought to fear. The notion that I had let this happen, that my daughter had been asleep while on the other side of her wall two girls were raped and murdered, sent me into a panic. I reached for the phone and the piece of paper with the number Margo had given us, but the line was busy again, that goddamned automated message. Dennis wrapped his arms around me. One of the many things I felt at the time was anger—at myself for letting her move off campus in the first place, and at both of us for letting her stay in Gainesville while this killer continued to choose new victims. Of course I understood that living next door to a murder is not a fate equal to the murders themselves; I’d never felt a stronger sense of gratitude. But I knew that this experience—her proximity, her unbelievable luck—would haunt Margo. The knowledge that this might have happened to her would change her life. This was not the carefree college experience we’d wanted for our daughter. “It’s my fault,” I said to Dennis, because I’d approved of her moving off campus, and he said, “It’s not your fault.” But I’ll always remember the tone of his voice as he said it—weary, guilty, and impatient—because in that moment, if not after, I think Dennis might have agreed.

We heard from Margo again that afternoon. She’d moved with friends into a vacant dormitory suite, which meant she now had her own bed. We continued to insist she come home—Dennis packed a bag in anticipation that she would finally relent and he could go get her—but she was determined to stay. It was as if she had seized on staying as the only way to get through it all intact. She reminded us that she was twenty years old. Twenty! How old this seemed to her, and how young it seemed to me. The next morning Dennis left for work as if it were a normal day, though I stayed home. I got dressed and straightened the house, but left the television news on in the bedroom and the living room, and whenever the coverage shifted to the murders, I sat down and watched, and it was many minutes before I could return to my feet. I called Margo in the morning, then twice in the afternoon, then Dennis and I called together when he got home from work. “It’s like a ghost town,” said Margo when we finally reached her. The university continued to remain open—President Lombardi explained to the press that many students couldn’t reach their homes, and the university was better equipped to ensure student safety by continuing business as usual. We watched the news together that night: stores were selling out of Mace; Southern Bell was begging people not to call Gainesville unless absolutely necessary; pizza joints were losing money because of a rumor that the killer might be a delivery man; gun shops were reporting record sales; hardware stores had run out of deadbolts and door chains.

And the following morning, August 28, there were two more victims, which brought the total to five murders within seventy-two hours. This time, the killer had varied the profile. One victim was a petite twenty-three-year-old brunette named Tracy Paules, but the other was her male roommate, Manny Taboada. Manny was—these details were included in the reports—six feet, two inches, 200 pounds, and a former football player. Again, the killer had entered through a sliding glass door by jimmying it with some kind of tool. These killings had happened in the middle of the night, when Tracy and Manny had been sleeping. When I reached Margo on the phone, Dennis grabbed his packed bag and headed to the kitchen to get on the other line. “Don’t let her talk you out of it,” he said to me, and I nodded. But again she repeated what she’d been saying: that she was safe on campus, that she was with people all the time, even at night, and that she knew the university was forgiving tuition for anyone who needed to leave Gainesville—this is when Dennis picked up the other line—but she really didn’t think it was necessary, and besides she really liked her American history class. Her professor wore a tunic and took off his shoes when he came into the classroom. “Don’t let him sell you any baloney about the ‘good’ war,” said Dennis, who had always had, in my estimation, an enviable talent for switching focus. “If he does, ask him about the internment camps.”

Before she hung up, Margo reassured us again. “They gave us whistles. If I get in trouble, I just blow on it and someone appears in the blink of an eye.”

“They gave you whistles?” I said, thinking of the tools this killer had: a knife, obviously, and duct tape, and cleaning products of some kind—there were reports that all the bodies had been cleaned up before being staged for discovery. And of course he had something unnameable and unknowable, something Margo and Dennis and I could not understand: a force. I found it amusing and terrifying, this fact: the university had issued my daughter a whistle.

Dennis reluctantly unpacked his suitcase. In the face of Margo’s determination not to let us rescue her, I realized that the transition we’d been so worried about had come to pass. She really had left home.

Despite the fact that a man had been killed, I was reassured by the roster of Margo’s bunk mates. In one suite, there were two rooms and three kids sleeping in each room—the housing division had hastily made space and provided cots—and four of the six kids were young men. Normally, I would’ve been appalled to learn that the university was allowing my daughter to room with boys, but in these circumstances, I think the administration showed an admirable willingness to depart from tradition. They did what they had to do. We can go on about the benefits of equal rights, but when a killer is loose, you want a man—or men, plural—looking out for your daughter.

Several times when we called Margo’s suite we reached a young man named Stuart, whose name we’d never heard before. “Margo kicked ass on her biology assignment,” he would say to me. Or, “Yesterday we rode out to Hampton Lake for a swim.” By the third time we’d talked, I’d developed the sense that this boy and my daughter were close, in no small part because of the speed with which she reached the phone whenever he passed it to her—physically at least, geographically, they were together. Once, Dennis asked him bluntly how tall he was, and Stuart said, “I’m not tall, but I’m fast and strong. You don’t need to worry about your daughter. We’re taking good care of her. We’re taking care of each other.” This was something I’d seen stressed in televised interviews with the university’s director of psychological services—students relying on each other not only for safety but for comfort. Dennis choked up when Stuart said good-bye. He wanted to be the man protecting his daughter.

A day passed with no news—no leads on the killer, no new victims—and then another day passed, and then it had been a week. Five thousand students had left campus. There was a lot of nonsense in the Gainesville student paper, the Alligator—Margo sent us a copy—linking the murders to Ted Bundy, who had been executed a year earlier. (The theory went: Bundy was born on November 24 and executed on August 24 at the age of forty-two; the Gainesville murders started on August 24 and happened in a neighborhood off State Road 24; the second murder was on SW 24th Avenue, and so on.) I ran into Kathleen Beck at the grocery store—her twins had come home and were enrolling in classes at the University of Miami so they wouldn’t fall behind. Kathleen seemed confounded when I told her Margo was still in Gainesville, so I rushed to reassure her. “She’s not off campus anymore,” I said. “She’s in a dorm with a bunch of kids—half of them are boys.”

“Boys?” said Kathleen. “She lives in an apartment?”

“Not anymore,” I said, but then I ran out of patience with Kathleen, and said good-bye. That evening, Gloria called—she’d called daily since the murders—and after I’d reassured her that yes, Margo was still insisting on staying on campus, and still being very cautious, Gloria said, “You know, with all the hubbub I’d forgotten what I wanted to ask you.”

“Yes?” I was putting away groceries, leaving out ingredients for a stew. I had a bag of black beans in my hand.

“Eleanor Everest said she saw you the other day at the beach with a man.” I put down the beans. The tone in Gloria’s voice was one I’d never heard from her before: not accusing exactly, but stumped and oddly intimate, as if she were saying: Come on, you can tell me. “Someone with dark hair,” she said. “She didn’t recognize him.”

I didn’t say anything. I suppose I was deciding whether to lie, or how much.