Once I’d marked up the floor I began walking in circles around the room, tracing ghost objects whose shapes were suggested by the hash marks on the floor. It’s a childish exercise, which is its value: kids have no problem believing absolutely anything. Tell a two-year-old you’re going to feed a make-believe candy bar to his teddy bear. Half an hour later you’ll still both be there, feeding a bear whose appetite never diminishes, and who demands, over and above his candy rations, ever-increasing supplies: of apples from imaginary orchards, of oats from bottomless feed bags, of carrots pulled fresh from the living room carpet. Spend an afternoon at this kind of play and you’ll remember the carrots at the day’s end. You may even smell them when you close your eyes. There is ample space in the brain for several worlds to occupy at once.
I walked up to the rim of one of my fresh greasepaint x-rings and I looked down into its center. Then I looked back at the dry Polaroid in my hand, its once-white frame aged nicotine-yellow. In it, I could see a pile of clothing on a floor, a rumpled denim jacket atop it obscuring any clear details of what lay beneath. T-shirts, right? It had to be mainly T-shirts. Socks, some puffy shirts, maybe. I thought I could see some loose ends poking out, possibly. But Polaroids fade as they age; I could only be sure about the jacket.
I closed my eyes and bent down, and I began to inhale deeply through my nose. Any reasonable person, looking through the window at that moment, would have come away thinking they’d seen an idiot. I felt like one, standing there bent at the waist, sniffing at the bare floor of my own house, trying to see if I could pick up the ancient scent of some teenagers’ unwashed clothes: to regenerate, in my mind’s eye, a place whose subsequent buyers had spared little expense erasing all traces of who had lived there and what had happened to them. But I’m a professional. I don’t care if I feel like an idiot. It’s kind of an item of faith with me that my feelings aren’t important when I’m working.
And so, venturing down interior pathways that have grown familiar to me, I smelled stale sweat, and cigarette smoke. I smelled cheap used paperback books and the baked-earth smell marijuana had before it became big business. I smelled bleach: they’d never wash that scent out of this place. And then something new and unwelcome got in the way. Berries. There was another air freshener in here, one I hadn’t noticed, something New Visions had hidden in a closet someplace.
I opened my eyes. Between the smell I’d been trying to conjure from the ghost of some clothes on the floor and the air freshener making itself inconspicuous somewhere, I had the beginnings of something, a way in.
I begin with rituals like this in part because the more distant a crime is historically, the harder it becomes to know just where to start. Some people focus on what makes their killer tick; others like to render the historical scene as vividly as possible. You see this latter a lot with people who cover the Son of Sam: they want the reader to feel the heat of New York City in the summer, to see the lakes of riotous color dripping down the sides of subway cars and taste the parched pavement on the air during a four-week stretch when it never rains once.
I always end up at the actual scene of the crime, no matter where I begin: that’s my method. A feeling for the coordinates. A sense of place. To arrive on the premises, facts in hand. It helps, when it’s possible, to begin in the same spot where you’ll end up: you get both views this way, the bird’s-eye and the worm’s. But no matter what, I have to get my hands dirty. It matters whose air I’m breathing.
* * *
VICTIMS FEEL HARMLESS, at first: they can’t raise objections, they’re finite objects at rest in a stable field. But in the wake of each victim come waves of hurt: the rooms in which they lived have to be cleaned up; their larger possessions have to be parceled out; the people with whom they had outstanding accounts, material or otherwise, must learn to swallow their complaints. Sooner or later, I’d have to locate any such creditors still among the living, I knew. I hoped to forestall the search as long as I could. Just thinking about it made me tense. Cold calling is a bad look in almost every profession.
But by June I’d made a friend, and he knew more than I did about the neighborhood. It was Ken from the apartments across the street. We’d exchanged several head nods while leaving our houses at around the same hour of the morning a few times, but nothing past that; I was out early one day when he called out to me, his voice gravelly, a lit cigarette in hand. “Hey, the new guy,” he said, waving with the other.