“And it was exhausting,” he continues. “Just absolutely exhausting. I think they brought me in for follow-ups twice in a single day at least two times.” He’s right, and errs generously; on three occasions over this span of time, his presence was requested for an interview at the police station twice in a single day—the second day after his initial interview, three days after that, and once again a week later. These interviews grew more confrontational as public pressure increased, and Derrick remembers wishing he could make a public statement of some sort.
“Just something, anything,” he says. “I mean, when you’re the one in the crosshairs, it’s like you don’t have permission to be going through what everybody else is going through. And that’s just an awful feeling, because you are going through that. You just have to do it alone. My dad tried to help, my mom tried to help, I’m lucky I’ve always had a very supportive family, but in the end it was just me. I couldn’t call Seth and I couldn’t call Angela, and Alex was gone again and the police didn’t even have him on their radar, thank God, and I was—you know, when you’re a kid, and you hear adults talking about whether they slept well or not, it’s like, what are these people talking about, you know? But suddenly it’s me, I can’t sleep at all, and I want to just say something to clear the air. To clear the air, and for me personally, just to be seen.
“But the lawyers weren’t having it,” he says. “And they were right. No smoke, no fire.”
But there was a little smoke, I suggest, knowing from experience that you can’t miss these small moments when an opening appears. The scene itself, I mean, the writing and the arrangements and the decorations: that was you.
“Yeah, but I didn’t—”
He appears to be sizing me up anew, trying to get a different angle on me. Am I a tabloid reporter disguised as a guy who writes real books?
But he smiles again, a smile he’s very fortunate to have been born with, I think. “You saw the crime scene photos, though, I know. Seth told me.
“You already know none of us could have actually done that.”
* * *
I HAVE, IN FACT, SEEN THE CRIME SCENE PHOTOS, probably several more of them than Derrick has. I’ve exhumed more evidence connected to the crimes at Devil House than had been previously supposed to exist: relics and primary texts, case notes and bagged exhibits. I know where people in town pointed the finger at first, projecting their unease over the ever-present prospect of Silicon Valley sprawl onto the site of the unspeakable—there were those, at first, who’d said that this is what happens when homeless people from neighboring cities get word that there are places to sleep nearby where the night patrols don’t reach. There were those, as there still are, who suspected that, whatever the real story was, they were only hearing a part of it. And then there were the voices that were easiest to amplify, because their ranges were familiar from similar stories around the country. The kids are out of control. They grow up faster and bigger than they did in our day. They lack the moral grounding of generations past.
“Yeah, yeah, ‘the moral grounding,’” Derrick says; his smile holds, but we’re out on the open water now. “People looked at me like I had demons inside me, and I was grateful for how my mother’d always coached me to hold my tongue if I didn’t have anything useful to say. But when you have your neighbors thinking you’re a monster, you know, a demon from hell—I’ll be honest, there was a part of me, and there will always be a part of me, that sort of carries this, that would feel a stranger’s eye on me and want to call them on it to their faces. To just say to somebody: You, there. Staring at me. I see you! You don’t know anything about me! Everything you think you know about me is a lie!”
What stopped you? I ask.
He pauses, and I see him returning to the familiar ground of himself: the person who’s still alive, and reasonably happy— on the worst day, still content with the way things turned out for him.
“People already know what they want to believe,” he offers, returning wholly to his comfort zone; I feel almost like I’m watching a ghost reenter a body. “I see this even in my daily errands here, when it’s busy. People want me to tell them about pirates, but I know that if I told them what pirates were really like, it would ruin their day.”
I don’t quite follow you, I say.
“Well, you know, Treasure Island,” he says. “Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder, the push and pull of good and evil, the romance of the high seas. The integrity of the thief, all that stuff. Whereas if there were even one photograph of the aftermath of a real pirate raid on a ship, you know, it’d turn your stomach. There’s a reason they hung pirates without a trial.”