Yellow tape went up around the property in 1986. The crime scene stayed largely undisturbed until the final disposition of the case became known; the former Valley News building stayed empty for some time after that, as the right to the deed was in question. Once the contents of the building were no longer in dispute—the tapes and the magazines, the old 8mm projectors and the multicade video machines, the bags of spray-gold tokens and the boxes of off-brand condoms—it was all sent to the landfill. That was in 1990; all that’s deep under several dozen strata of recent history now.
Twelve years later, I moved in. I entered the fully remodeled interior to find the smell of fresh paint still competing with a Coronado Cherry–scented air freshener on the kitchen counter, the visions I’d been hunting for in histories and blueprints and printouts difficult to reconcile with new ergonomic angles and muted hues: the hopeful face of this affordable, cheerful house I’d be getting at a price that wouldn’t have fetched me a closet just a short drive and a bridge away in San Francisco.
4.
PEOPLE BRING EXPECTATIONS to the site of a massacre. It can’t be helped. Often, they’ve formed these expectations in secret—not the small sort of secret you keep because it’s a little unflattering or because it’s nobody’s business, but the deep cover of secrecy afforded by the infinite unlit corners and corridors squirreled away inside the human brain, where wishes and biases and preemptive guesses can be activated and established without the host ever knowing that the process has even taken place. This is a necessary dynamic for us to function in the world: we can’t always be referring back to a table of which opinions we already know we have, which questions we consider already answered. But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.
* * *
THE MURDERS at Devil House were not, of course, the first time Milpitas had been in the news for murder. They weren’t even the first time in its recent history. In 1981, a teenager named Anthony Broussard murdered fourteen-year-old Marcy Conrad without any apparent motive; he showed the body to several friends, who’d all been too afraid to call the police. There was a movie about it a few years later, River’s Edge: it was popular, because people love to tell themselves stories about the grave dangers posed by wayward youth. They always arrive at the same questions—why don’t these young people care? how did they get like this? where were their parents?—but the asking of these questions is an exercise in self-portraiture. They’re not good questions; they’re not even questions. They’re ghost stories masquerading as concern.
I suspected that people in Milpitas had learned this the hard way, and I imagined they wouldn’t be thrilled that a writer was moving to town to write a book about an even grislier local case: one which had somehow managed, for the most part, to duck the radar of the national news media. This was part of what made the case attractive to me: Why hadn’t they swarmed? There are several ready-made narratives to be spun from any local crime story whose details call to mind some earlier communal shock; you just have to plug in a few particulars. The Problem with Milpitas. The Soul of the Suburbs. A Small-Town Boy.
If you live where catastrophe strikes, you’re right to be suspicious of the people who come to gawk. They may dress up their motives—“telling the real story”; “getting it right”—but they’d say anything if they thought it would make you talk. Reporters are like the police. It’s in their interest to tell you whatever you need to hear as long as it makes you cooperate. The same is true, too, of writers with bigger plans, greater ambitions. I had a detective once tell me, by way of declining to answer any further questions from me after a few facts-of-the-case softballs: “Everybody has a motive.” He didn’t elaborate. No elaboration was needed.
By the time I arrived in Milpitas you could track how locals felt about River’s Edge without even having to play gumshoe about it. There were message boards, archived listservs, op-eds in The Mercury News about parole hearings. With very few exceptions, Milpitans felt like their town and its people had been misrepresented—by writers, by actors, by a whole host of moneyed people from the other end of the state who didn’t know the first thing about what it was like to live an hour or more from the big city. It was a raw deal: stay invisible until somebody wants to spotlight your defects. Small communities whose murder cases are just lurid enough to attract the attention of outsiders learn and relearn this again and again; it’s one of the unignorable facts of crime. The less you have to lose, the more it will end up taking from you.
So it seemed there’d been a collective effort to start forgetting about Devil House almost from the moment the story broke. This effort, by and large, had been successful. They hadn’t been able to keep the camera crews away—nobody’s strong or clever enough to drive off the camera crews—but somehow they’d weathered the onslaught quietly. It was a dark miracle of forgetfulness, a gift of near-erasure. There are few such gifts in a world like ours.
I mulled this over in my new house by the freeway—my new house! I loved saying these words, sometimes aloud, thinking about how most houses contain more stories than their present-day owners can really fathom; my work, and the way it worked, had bought me two houses for the price of one. It was a deeper level of engagement than my previous stakeouts, than the simple trespassing of my greener days, I considered; gazing all the while deeply—ridiculously—into its beige walls: trying to imagine them as they’d once been, and coming up empty-handed every time.
* * *
I WISH I COULD SAY I got my box full of primary texts from a retired cop who requested that his name be withheld until five years after his death. I wish I could claim they came bundled like an enormous manuscript, tidily tucked into a box, and that atop the sheaf there’d been a typewritten note in which the anonymous officer who’d had access to this material all along details his anguish over having withheld it from people who, he knew, had need of it—even if, as he says in an aside, he can’t imagine what actual use any of it might be. I wish I could tell you that I then drew up a comprehensive study of the department as it had been during the investigation, eliminating all serving officers still living, so that I might, from among the already narrow possibilities on the list of the dead, draw forth a name or two who might be likely suspects for putting such invaluable sources into my hands. Failing all that, I’d like to say I used social engineering to get into the evidence room at the precinct: bluffing my way past security, lying outright to the clerk, and finally luxuriating in the archives, avoiding curious glances as I pocketed several bagged and numbered exhibits, one-of-a-kind artifacts which I then spirited out of the police station inside the false lining of an overcoat. See me, waiting until I get home to examine my contraband, triumphant but unsurprised: I get away with stuff like this all the time. It’s who I am and how I work, in this version of me.
But that version only exists in movies. I don’t even own an overcoat. I made my first local inroads into the story of Devil House by doing what anybody else does these days: I went on eBay.
Buying source material from strangers on the Internet always makes me a little queasy. The hospital charts that arrived one day from Redding while I was working on Spent Light: nobody’s even supposed to see medical records without a court order. They’re confidential. But nothing’s truly private anymore. There are people out there who will sell you anything.