It was night, late, and the museum was several blocks away from the nearest open train station. Beatrice walked quickly, sneakered feet padding on the gum-littered pavement. She looked up at the moon, between the tall sky-reaching buildings, pale and distant. She exhaled a thin white cloud of fog into the still night air. A taxi coasted past her, slowing, hoping to pick her up. She ignored it, walking and shivering, shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. The street lamps cast oily puddles of yellowish light on the dirty sidewalks and she watched her shadow stretch and pull as the direction of light changed over head. Her pale copper hair was pinned to her head in one great coil, her neck bare and tickled by the bracing fall breeze. She looked around nervously, hearing imagined foot falls. She picked up her pace, the train station entrance visible, well lit, safe.
        She clattered up the cast iron stairs, turned on the landing, clattered up the next stair case. She slid her transit card from her picket into the slot and pushed through the turnstile, onto the deserted platform. Behind her, footsteps clanged up the cast iron stair way, echoes of her own steps. She waited, listening, hoping they’d turn the opposite way on the platform, head south instead of north. They didn’t. The train platform was wooden, old, well soaked in creasote and rain and the leavings of both pigeons and humans. Across the thick set of tracks was another platform, the south-bound platform. The platforms and tracks looked like two big breadsticks guarding a plate of spaghetti. Bea could dimly make out the advertisements on the wall of the southbound platform: bright posters for mouthwash, movies, polo shirts, deoderant. Behind her were the same ads, keeping her company. The footsteps clanged their way up, the tread heavy and stubborn. A man, she thought. Those footsteps belonged to a man. They clunked their way across the wooden floor, fiddled with the turnstile. She heard the over-loud beep as he put money on his transit card, and then he was through the turnstile with no problem. She stepped into the protective plexi glass heat shelter, punched the button to activate the heat lamps in the ceiling. Two of the three lamps flickered on, and she stood in the mock daylight that spilled yellow across the wooden floor. Near her head, a hand-lettered, photocopied flyer announced a punk show. It flapped forlornly in the breeze, tapping against the cloudy, scratched plexiglass. She shivered, and shifted from foot to foot, cold seeping through her jacket and into the meat of her, into her bones.
        He walked onto the platform, black boots thudding dully. She felt the platform shake, and then wondered if it actually shook, or if she merely imagined it. She was right in that he was a he, a tall broad man perhaps made taller and broader by the large woolen coat he wore, the plaid muffler wrapped around his head and face, obscuring his features. The combination of coat and muffler made it difficult to tell his exact size, or make out any features at all: his body type, his facial features, the color of his hair. Bea stood under the yellow light and watched him. He headed for the heated waiting area almost immediately and, oddly, stood near Bea. She shivered again, more at his proximity than the cold, and huddled against the marred plexi-glass. He came closer, looming over her.
        “Bea?”
        He slowly unwound the muffler from his head, away from his face. Wild black hair sprang free in tight curls, bushy black eyebrows perched forbiddinly over inky dark eyes. She smiled, sighed, in relief.
        “Aren’t you aware that there’s a killer on the loose? What are you doing out alone? You look cold. Is that the warmest jacket you’ve got?”
        He fussed like a mother hen, wrapped his muffler around her head in a make-shift hat. She grinned at him.
        “Hi, Jamie. I haven’t seen you in awhile.”
        “From what I’ve heard, you haven’t seen anyone in a while. Turned into a bit of a recluse, hm?”
        He rested a hand on her shoulder.
        “What are you doing out so late, anyway? Alone, especially.”
        “I was at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago and I lost track of time. I forgot how quickly it gets dark.”
        She grinned weakly at him.
        “You shouldn’t be out alone. Are you heading home?”
        She nodded, watching him lean against the plexi-glass wall.
        “Let me take you?”
        It was three long, unlit blocks from the train station to her home, the only lights coming from people’s front porches; feeble efforts that barely pierced the shadows thrown by century old oaks. She shook her head no at him.
        “I’ll be ok. If anything happens, I’ll yell for help. Everyone knows me. They’ll come running.”
        Jamie refused to be put off that easily.
        “Let me take you home. Come on.”
        He switched tactics suddenly.
        “ Let me take you out for coffee. I haven’t seen you in a long time, and I can’t just let you go. You’re turning into a hermit.”
        “Hmm.”
        “Say yes. Say yes or I’ll use my Jedi Mind Powers on you.”
She laughed at that, tucking the muffler closer around her bare neck and cold-pinked ears.
        “Thank you, but no. I should get home.”
        “Look. Whether you agree to coffee or not, I’m seeing you home.”
        He sounded very serious, his dark eyes wide and deep as oil wells.
        “I actually saw you earlier. I’ve been following you for the past two blocks.”
        “Jamie!”
She glared at him, angry and a little scared, face pale at the intrusion on her privacy.
        “Bea, look. There’s some nutball out there cutting up girls who look like you. I don’t want that happening to you, ok? If anything happened to you tonight, I’d feel like it was my fault for not making sure you got home safely. Maybe I’m being overprotective, over male, but you mean a lot ot me. You’re a friend. And this whole… this things… scares me. I don’t want you getting hurt if I can help it. This just… it feels like something I should do.”
        “You’re a manipulative bastard.”
        “Guilty as charged.”
        “Ok. You can see me home.”
Jame was stubbornly cheerful, secure in his success.
        “Coffee, first. We can go to that little 24 hour place off the red line. On the Belmont stop.”
        “I take the brown line home.”
        “The red and brown lines are congruent untill that point.”
        She scowled, unhappy at the prospect of enforced socialization. Her stomach, Judas that it was, betrayed her by growling loudly.
        “Coffee it is, then. Sandwiches, too.”
        “Don’t get all smug, Jamie.”
        “You’re crabby cos you’re hungry. Come on. Make you a deal: if the next train that comes by is on the redline, we’ll go get dinner. If it’s the brown line, I’ll take you straight home. How’s that?”
        “Yea. That sounds good.”
        Jamie sighed.
        “I worry about you. I mean, it’s one thing to wander around by yourself at night like you do, inviting random danger. It’s another thing entirely to invite specific danger. There’s 15 girls dead already, 15 girls who look like you. I don’t want you to turn into 16, ok? To just be a number.”
She shifted nervously from foot to foot as he talked, chewing on her lower lip. His brow was furrowed earnestly, and he plowed his hands through his curly dark hair, standing it further on end.
        “So. Coffee. But only if there will be cake.”
        He laughed.
        “Of course there will be cake. And we will be friends.”
        He laughed and hugged her, big arms enveloping her, her face mashed into his coat.
        “Oof.”
        She gently disengaged herself and straightend her jacket.
        “I can hear the train coming, Jamie.”
        “Which do you think it is? Brown or red?”
        She yawned and brushed a loose strand of copper hair back into the muffler.
        “Doesn’t matter. Not to me.”