We both laugh; Derrick’s natural, easygoing manner is immediately comforting. I feel like success, on whatever terms he might define it, was always awaiting Derrick, wherever he ended up.
“But I know what you mean,” he continues. He pats the dock, dappled by the shadows of the pines; he has an office inside the museum, but it’s windowless, lifeless. Dockside, it’s peaceful. “I’m the man, right? They didn’t charge any of us, but I was the guy they wanted.”
There is a very long pause; there’s a shift in the tranquility of the water and the shadows on it, one that I think I see Derrick try to wish away.
“I was the guy they wanted,” he says again, and the mood lingers.
* * *
THE MOOD LINGERS because Derrick was, in every sense, the guy they wanted. The killings at Devil House hit Milpitas hard, resonating with a deep and menacing tone; River’s Edge, the movie dramatizing the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad just five years earlier, was due to hit theaters next year; it was already on the festival circuit, and, around town, people were talking. There was burgeoning local resistance to sensationalism of all stripes, and front-page images of the ratty storefront with caution tape around it provoked immediate and bitter resentment. “People felt like, Why should we have to go through all this again?” is how Derrick puts it. “Everybody wanted to fix the problem as fast as they could. Simple explanations are what people want when they’re scared.”
The simple explanation that would have scratched several itches was that a cabal of Satan-worshipping teens had sacrificed a couple of innocent victims to the devil for kicks. Stories like this had been generating high Nielsens ever since the Manson killings in 1969; a small industry had grown up around cult coverage: pockets of evil sewn under the skin of the suburbs. Hidden infections waiting for the right host. There’d been the Ripper Crew in Chicago, and the unsolved Jeannette DePalma case in New Jersey. Father Gerald Robinson in Toledo and Ricky Kasso on Long Island. Whole legacies of grief, texture-warping events in the life of a community. Milpitans, collectively, decided that one was enough, and the police department—with, Derrick suspects, the help of some outside advisors, though he’s unable to offer anything more concrete—developed a strategy to quash interest in the case beyond the city limits.
The first peg of the plan was to lock down all photos of the crime scene. Photographers gathered all the evidence that might be needed, and then the cleanup crew arrived: the police themselves, but also several trusted helpers from town. In one day, they scoured the inside, took down the sign out front, and threw a tarp over the roof to cover the gigantic portrait of the ghoul. Overnight, one of the most sensational crime scenes imaginable became an unremarkable remodeling project in progress: orange cones, drab scaffolds, thirty-gallon garbage cans. It looked like plenty of places by the freeway in any small California city, and the absence of a focal point for cameras went a long way toward dampening out-of-town enthusiasm about the case.
The next thing they needed was a suspect, or so they thought. As soon as they had a suspect they’d be in a position to fast-track the whole affair. But they were wrong about that, Derrick insists. “They’re very, very lucky they never arrested me,” he says. “My mom and dad worked very hard to give me the best chance they could, and they were mad as hell about my little secret life inside the store, but they stayed focused. They told the police to charge me or let me go, and then they hired a lawyer, and they didn’t blink at the price tag.
“If there’d have been an arrest,” he says, “that’s all the national media would have needed. A name on the logs, a kid with a face to splash onto the pages. Without that, what do you have? The same thing I get from recovered ships’ quarters. Salvaged relics. People look at them once and maybe they have some kind of reaction, but minus the story behind them, hardly anybody cares.
“But in town they didn’t know this yet, and it was very hard for a few weeks—”
He stops; he looks worried, or frightened. Is he trying to compose himself, or searching for the right words?
“It will be hard for you to understand what it was like during that time for me,” he concludes.
* * *
THE MILPITAS POLICE DEPARTMENT interviewed Derrick at least eleven times over the course of eight days. It was his senior year; according to Derrick, he kept his mind on his coursework inside all the cacophony. “I was pretty focused on college,” he insists. “There’s nothing wrong with Milpitas, but when it’s the only place you’ve ever known and you start to get the feeling there’s a whole world out there for you, you lean pretty hard into taking your shot.