The sun is setting into the Beaufort Sound; I don’t want to wear out my welcome. Derrick’s been very generous with his time.
“They didn’t see me, and you don’t see me, and nobody’s ever going to see me except the people who actually know me outside of that whole story,” he concludes—there’s no rancor in his voice, no anger. He’s just laying out the facts on the ground for me, making his case. “Unless you were actually inside, any story you end up telling will be some distortion along the lines of, Four teenagers killed a property developer and a landlord with a sword, then disposed of the weapon and deflected attention from themselves onto the new kid in town until the case went cold.”
People do end up pretty invested in the stories they tell to explain how, and why, some awful thing happened in their community, I offer.
“That they do.” He laughs. “But I feel like they settle on whichever story eases the burden a little.”
The burden?
“The burden of the story they don’t want to tell.”
ALEX
I didn’t find Alex.
I asked Angela, and I asked Seth, and I asked Derrick, and I even sent follow-ups to Angela and Derrick—I hadn’t gained Seth’s trust; there was nothing tangible on the other side of any further communication between us—and I parsed their responses for hints that they might be hiding something from me, trying to protect their friend. I liked this story, because Alex had means, motive, and opportunity, and that’s the trifecta. If there were people trying to keep others from picking up the scent, from following the trail that led to Alex, that alone would have drawn me nearer to the horizon-line of all cases, the place where we begin to state our conclusions.
But they weren’t lying. I meet a lot of liars in my line of work, and I do a lot of lying to get the information I need. Most people consider themselves good judges of character, but for me it’s a job requirement. Angela didn’t know where Alex was. Derrick told me directly that he’d shield Alex from scrutiny if he had to, but it wasn’t necessary. Alex belonged to the wind.
One of the first rules of detective work, especially the historical kind, is that nobody really disappears without a trace. The term is empty poetry. Everybody leaves traces. There is no lost colony; the bones of every pilot downed over the Bermuda Triangle rest peacefully under silt at the bottom of the ocean; every city that ever was can be excavated if you have the right tools, and time, and patience. If you come up empty-handed, it only means you were digging in the wrong place.
I talked to Joey Macias. That was as close as I could get, and it wasn’t close at all. He worked as an orderly on the night shift at a shelter in San Jose during a span of time that overlapped with the Devil House days; he runs a treatment center for drug addiction now. I found his name, without any further identifying notes, in a police log from the investigation. My call to Joey was the last cold call I made to anyone regarding the murders at Monster Adult X.
“That was twenty years ago,” he said.
Right, I said, they never made a collar.
“They called the shelter and I took the call,” he said. “Asked me if anybody showed up who looked like he was on the run from something.”
And?
He laughed. “All my guys were on the run from something,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, every one of them had his own story, and some of them it would break your heart to hear it, it just gets harder when you realize how many of them there are. In cities everywhere. It hurts your head to imagine it.”
I waited; if you stay quiet sometimes, you get something.
“The shelter was a safe place,” he said. “If I’d seen anything I wouldn’t have told them, but I didn’t see anything. Which doesn’t mean anything, I guess. Nobody likes to talk about it, but a lot of these guys, they just disappear. It’s sad. It’s really sad. But they just stop showing up to the places they used to show up and—”
“Yeah,” I said, and I thanked him for his time, and wondered what to make of Alex, how to give a decent burial to a man whose body had never been found.
6
The White Witch
1.
YOU FOUND ME IN MILPITAS. I had taken no pains to obscure my location, since I usually don’t have a lot of people looking for me, but, for you, the process of finding me had been long and arduous, and the human cost of that process was reflected in your first letter. You spent most of your first two pages on this theme: how you had written to me at my mother’s house, because finding that address had been easy enough: the public library still kept old phone books, you said, and it had them all; all the various little local ones, anyway. Los Osos and Avila Beach, and San Luis Obispo. You had looked up my last name for the year Jesse died, and there it was, the same name as the one on the cover of the true crime book about the woman who killed your son.