So I wrote Savage Coast in part to speak up for Alan, who was no prize, but whose death meant that one person’s story had never been told. It’s how my mother raised me: I think of the candle maker who wants to be king. I try to let him at least hold the keys to the castle in his hand, even if he never gains entry.
But as my time atop the foundations of Devil House grew longer, my long-cultivated stances toward victim and perp, as they call them at the conventions, began to pull at their moorings. It was an uneasy feeling for me. I resisted it, but I followed the facts where they led: to the other bodies, to the neighborhoods in which they’d lived and died, to the streets beyond them and the highway above. Measure, measure again, then cut. It’s what you’re supposed to do, if you’re honest.
7.
FOUR BLACK-AND-WHITES PULL UP in front of the building at exactly 4:30 a.m. It’s November 2, 1986: in bigger towns, Halloween parties probably are still going strong, but here it’s quiet. An onlooker, in the dark, might take the garish graffiti all down the door that faces the street as seasonal decoration, an invitation to trick-or-treaters who might otherwise skip the house by the freeway. But as the arriving officers begin to ascend the porch steps, they take note of the devastation around them, which is general.
Broken bottles are planted out front, jagged sides up. It’s like something out of an old cartoon but for the stench, which you can’t miss: these are Thunderbird and Ripple empties, their cheery upside-down labels like distress flags, raised foil highlights glistening in the dark. Mingling with their winey sweetness is a smell of fresh soot: vaguely runic shapes have been burned onto the concrete walkway. Off to one corner, atop a broomstick jutting up from a patch of grass at an angle, there’s a mannequin’s head, its hair scorched to the roots, its eyes painted matte-purple. If this particular detail is meant to scare people away, it’s strangely positioned: only one officer sees it going in, but the later inventory confirms his impression.
Across the steps that lead to the front door, someone’s scattered dozens of small animal bones—chicken, fish—and these, as boots advance across them, break the carefully observed quiet with a chorus of loud snaps. Everyone freezes, on the lookout for traps; but no lights go on inside the building, and no sounds come from within. The team leader waves two officers around to the back of the house, where there’s a door that used to be an employee entrance; it’s padlocked, but the wood is warped and splintered. Anybody could easily kick it open from either side.
The remaining two officers stand guard near the patrol car—it’s only paces from the scene; the lot is small—their guns drawn in case anyone tries to run. From their position, these two have the best view of the proceedings. They get only seconds to take it all in: the element of surprise is indispensable in a raid. In the glint of the streetlight, they note that the planks of the porch have been painted in alternating colors—red, black, two reds, another black, recurring voids in a crimson field. On the front door, silver paint: a pentagram inside a circle that heralds a riot of words in red that bleed over into the doorframe and onto the outer siding both right and left:
SICK SATAN SENTRAL FAITHFUL 4EVER! BY THIS
SIGHN CONQUER BY THESE LIGHTS COME TO
SEE
Beneath the door, where a welcome mat might be, two great bloodshot lidded eyes, painted by a hurried hand, pupils misty purple: two coats of paint, color over primer, to make them pop. The eyes look to their right, toward the vacant lot below the freeway, away from the overgrown side yard.
When, seconds from now, the battering ram breaks down the front door and floodlight fills the room, the scene that greets the team claims its intended effect: believers and nonbelievers alike are temporarily frozen in their tracks. Half-melted action figures, hulking blobs of plastic or rubber, hang from light fixtures, their heads shapeless or snapped off at the neck. Mirrors and jagged pieces of mirror, some painted with slogans like the ones from the front door, dot racks that once held only porn: many of the old VHS housings and magazines are still there, defaced, and joined now by comic books or scarecrow-like figures hand-twisted from old newspaper, their feet jammed between spindles to hold them steady.
Where the racks give way to a clearing, in the middle of the room, yellow DO NOT CROSS tape has been affixed to the floor around what seems at first to be the outline of a body. Trained eyes catch as much as they can from the information overload confronting them. Through their protective visors, each member of the team begins screaming, in his own rhythm and pitch: POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND!