But 1986 is a long time ago. Might there have been a local source for weird army stuff back then, someplace that’s gone now: a storefront, a counter inside a hardware store? If you want to reconstruct local retail histories, contemporaneous materials are your safest bet—old newspapers, phone books, ledgers if you’re extremely lucky. Thrift stores, flea markets, any used-books place whose street-facing windows are caked with several seasons’ worth of dust and dirt: you learn to view them all as libraries operating under more modest auspices. Free from the obligations of outlines and dramatic arcs, you dig through documents whose faces never offer any eureka moment; you have to open them up, you have to go down the columns line by line. Sometimes you strike a vein and learn two or three things nobody else was ever going to remember: the storefront office that sold magazine overstock by mail order for a few months before closing up shop, its proprietor forever anonymous now; the fire somebody set in the same office, who knows why, just a week after the magazine guys moved out. But no matter how deep you dig, you’ll still probably have to guess when it comes time to say where a teenager might have gone to buy an old sword.
I have pictures of it; anybody who cares at all about the case has seen pictures of the sword. It looks heavy, though most swords weigh less than people think. It looks ancient, but cheap materials can bestow a kind of crude antiquity on their subjects. Its outsized handle looks like a movie prop.
It’s not a prop, though. In fact, when the forensics team retrieved it from its place atop the crushed bodies of Marc Buckler and Evelyn Gates, one of the technicians, betraying an adolescence spent in hobby stores and library multipurpose rooms, said, a little louder than he meant to: “Whoa. Two-hander. No wonder nobody heard anything.”
I don’t know whose sword it was, and I don’t know where it came from. There are conflicting stories. They cancel each other out, amounting to anecdotal evidence, only useful to people who’ve already got a story to tell. To get this kind of detail exactly right, meticulous care has to be taken with the initial investigation.
It happens sometimes. People take extra care, they bother to fill out the paperwork before their memories start to rust. You get lucky. But in the case of the Milpitas teenagers accused of plotting and carrying out the murders of a local property owner and visiting real estate developer, you don’t.
6.
MINOANS VI
The first thing Derrick said after Seth and Alex emerged from the arcade was “It’s beautiful.” He looked at his friends, and then back at the immense, terrible angel overseeing its new domain, the total repurposing of practically every item and surface in the store.
“You like it?” Seth was smiling broadly, his face tense with pleasure.
“It’s incredible,” Derrick said, circling the angel, watching it sway.
“Wait til you see the booths! Every booth is different! There’s a witch booth, there’s a wizard booth, there’s the Son of Sam booth. I saw something about him in People when I was a kid and I just went for it,” Seth said, unable to contain himself any longer, audibly catching his breath and then beginning again. He described how he and Alex and Angela had spent half the night working, making it all up as they went along; the characters he’d improvised and the symbols he’d assigned to them, all the half-grasped mythologies he’d been trying to invoke on every surface and in every corner. To every booth an angel or a demon, its face gazing menacingly out from plexiglass screen protectors, slogans and symbols clustering riotously on the walls and ceilings.
“On the floors, too!” Seth said, in triumph. “On the cushions! It’s crazy!”
Alex stood by him but didn’t look up; he was still good at drawing, and, given the right tools, could still lend form and shape to his ideas and visions. The night’s work had been a team effort; after Angela went home, Seth’s intensity had escalated, and Alex had managed to keep up with him. Something about the solitude of the project, its hermetic boundaries, allowed him to remain present to the moment instead of disappearing into the interior fog that called to him whenever things got quiet. But this feeling, which he’d harbored all night, didn’t survive Derrick’s arrival; the severe discomfort in just talking to people, even people he liked, remained. It wasn’t that the presence of others was intolerable; their bodily presence was actually nice. Space, left empty too long, might start to hum. But when those bodily presences began to talk—asking questions, getting animated, complicating matters—their need for some kind of response caused the pressure to push against the inner walls of his skull. The pain cut through the haze. It demanded relief. Seth was a perfect foil in these times: he never stopped talking. You could use his shadow like a blanket.