In San Francisco they make you sign for a package; anything left outside your door will be gone in minutes. I remember the sound of the buzzer in my apartment the day the Spent Light charts arrived; as I signed the FedEx guy’s clipboard I couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew something was fishy. He stayed quiet, but I felt him watching me, I thought, while I scribbled on the signature line. What did he imagine might be in the box: Weapons, maybe? Drugs? What kind of drugs would you need shipped to San Francisco?
But probably he was thinking about how many more stops he needed to make before lunch, or whether he was meeting his hourly quota. I’ve repeated the process enough times now to know that it wasn’t his expression telegraphing guilt or suspicion: it was my guilt. It’s a feverish feeling, preparing to flip through a sheaf of paperwork to which you have no legitimate claim, making ready to glean information from it for the purposes of telling a story whose darker details ought to have remained hidden.
Shortly after I moved to Milpitas I learned that the FedEx guy here just leaves your package on the porch.
It was right there waiting for me when I got back from my shopping. I’d scoped out an enormous Goodwill down the highway, and it didn’t disappoint: shelves were full of dusty plates and cracked cups, abandoned electric popcorn makers and can openers, pens and stationery and knickknacks. I meant to stock the kitchen cabinets with old things, things that might conceivably have passed through the hands of its former inhabitants. Not antiques: cast-offs. Things of no known vintage, the invisible bits of the past that form its greater part. When I immerse myself in the search long enough, I get a precise feel for what works.
I stood on my porch looking down at the package for a minute. Cars on the freeway above me buzzed by in the irregular rhythm of midday. Then I sat on my step, box in hand, and split the seam on the packing tape with a house key. I eased the bubble-wrapped bundle gently out from its housing. It’s a grim sort of Christmas, the arrival of the primary texts: a time when the imaginary world of things I haven’t seen collides with, and is always at least partially annihilated by, the world of the real.
But I’d been deep in secondary research for several months now, ever since Ashton’s initial email. I was glad I’d kept notes from our call, because the contrasts between what I’d heard then and what seemed to be forming a truer picture had begun to sharpen:
Cult of teenagers
Ritual murder
Obscene staged crime scene
No arrests
I was ready to get down to work.
* * *
FIRST THERE WERE THE POLAROIDS: twenty of them, held together in bunches of five with skinny rubber bands. It was a decent haul for my first venture into the world of what might be out there. Getting lucky is at least fifty percent of good research; I’ve had whole projects go down the drain when I couldn’t make a good connection in the early going.
These pictures, and the clipped newspaper stories that accompanied them, made for a promising beginning. They came from an eBay user in New Jersey called “tru_crimebuff973.” She had all the usual entry-level stuff—local police bulletins with sketches of now nationally remembered suspects; inkjet reproductions of paintings by serial killers on death row: puppies, flowers, clowns; black Zodiac rifle sights against white backgrounds on one-inch badges, a dollar apiece. But among these run-of-the-mill finds, she also boasted several collections of photographs, which she claimed came from estate auctions. I didn’t believe her; but my responsibility is to my story, not to whether the stuff I dig up might be admissible in court.
My guess was they were actually what I call outtakes: crime scene photographs discarded in favor of better, clearer shots, later fished from the trash behind the police station and subsequently passed from hand to hand over the years. Prices decline as the public’s memory of the case fades, and these, in particular, were lowball items as far as the market was concerned—they had no bodies in them, no handwritten annotations, no context beyond the claims attached to them in the listing. Scenes from the investigation of the crimes at Devil House. Even so, they seemed quite inexpensive, given the usual rates of the actual-artifacts market. Some cold cases grow legs of their own. Mine hadn’t.
But verifying the scene was easy, because the renovation, while thorough, hadn’t been a complete do-over—in 1986, the building having until recently been a business, there’d been no porch at all—but the shot on the top of the bundle was a view from the street, and you could see where the addition of the porch had been a pretty hurried surgery. Even with all the smoke long since cleared, the scene remained. The bricks, the awning, the distances between the windows: they were all the same. They were just cleaner now, their details shinier but their general station unchanged. This was my house. This was how it had looked back then.
But the first thing that catches the eye in the shot is the sign, of course. Derrick’s gift for lettering, had things gone differently for him, might have landed him a job on Madison Avenue. It’s not fancy; the clientele it sought to attract didn’t want fancy. They wanted to know that what waited for them inside was wild, and forbidden, and possibly dangerous. Accordingly, Derrick had chosen a style recalling the horror comics of the 1940s and ’50s. The edges of the letters seem to ooze or bleed; only black outlines around each letter, neat and seamless, constrain the runoff. One word hermetically facing the street: MONSTER.
Its lure feels more violent than sexual, but this could be a function of phantom presentiment, and of the secondary work Derrick did after the building changed hands. By the time you see this picture, you probably already know that it used to say ADULT X in the space to the right of MONSTER, a space afterward occupied by the cartoonishly grotesque hairy tongue seen in many of the news stories. The hand that painted this tongue might as easily have extended it farther to the left, blotting out the rest of the original sign: but Derrick left MONSTER intact, either because a tongue all by itself might have seemed too much, or because he was proud of his lettering and wanted to leave it up long enough for more people to see it than the ones who used to come here seeking skin mags and video booths.
First looks mean a lot; I stayed with this frame a moment more. I could see, from my window, a telephone pole, also present in the photograph—but it was clean now; in the photo it had several layers of paper stapled to it, though I couldn’t make out the text. The edges of another house on the lot a little to the north crept into the frame: that house was gone now, though I didn’t know what had become of it. I wondered briefly whether it had been a business or a home. It made a difference: both to my story and to the people who’d either lived or done business there. For now it was just a blank.
Finally, there was a dog who’d just happened to be walking past when the picture was taken. It was of no particular breed: just a dog with dirty golden fur, its mouth open and its tongue hanging out. I was happy to see this dog. A dog brings something cheery to even the grisliest of scenes, or so it’s always seemed to me, and the presence of a second tongue mirroring the painted one on the sign overhead seemed almost like an artist’s choice, an Easter egg for the keen onlooker.