“The lights were off,” she said, “and when he came into the kitchen, all I saw was his flashlight between the cabinet doors. But I would know if it was my dad.”
“But you didn’t see the guy,” he said, “so it could’ve been anyone. Did you know your daddy had no alibi? That’s reasonable enough given that he was a single father with no social life outside of his groupies at the library, but still, no alibi is a good place to start.”
“Of course he had no alibi,” she said. “He had to drive the Bookmobile through a snowstorm for that festival in the mountains, otherwise he would have lost his job. That had to take all night.”
Moberg peeled open his notebook and scanned the pages with his finger.
“He dropped off the Bookmobile in Breckenridge, then took the last ski bus into downtown, caught a cab, and made it home around midnight, even with the snow. That gave him plenty of time to walk over there. It coincides with the timeline. But the next morning, when he discovered the O’Tooles’ bodies, that’s when the real inconsistencies began. He stumbled upon the crime scene, up there with the most repulsive in the city’s history, and what did he do? Shoved the bodies around. Piled them aside, claiming to have been searching for you. Convenient then that he had the victims’ blood all over his clothes, his face, his hands. You know we picked pieces of brain off his shirt collar? Brain as in brain. We found bloodstains inside his pockets. But moving the bodies wasn’t enough, so he stormed through the house, touching everything in sight. His fingerprints were everywhere and bloody. Which brings us to the murder weapon. When we got there that hammer had been smeared so much by his sweaty hands that all the latent blood basically turned into paste and ruined any chance we had of lifting a viable print—other than his, of course. On the phone with the 911 dispatcher, he made sure to announce loud and clear that he was holding the very hammer that sure as hell wiped that family out. Called from the kitchen like ordering a pizza. Doesn’t look too good, does it?”
“I’m sure there’s a reason,” she said.
“It doesn’t look good,” Moberg said firmly, leaning forward in a pose that was as threatening as it was assertive. “Listen, I’m not doubting your sincerity here. And you may not want to hear this, but when you map out the serology of that crime scene, you know what you get? You get the distinct blood of the three O’Tooles. Then you get your blood on part of the carpet and the kitchen floor and beneath the sink. Then you get one other person’s blood—”
“My dad’s,” she said. “Because he cut himself.”
“When he was looking for you. I know. I’ve heard it. At some point after the killing, the Hammerman had dragged Carol’s body partway down the hall to just inside the bedroom doorway, right where her parents died, probably so she couldn’t be seen from the front window or door. Maybe he thought it would give him some time. And in the morning your dad showed up, didn’t see you anywhere, so he began searching for you, even going so far as to shove aside the bodies in case you were piled beneath them. In his panic, somewhere in there he cut his hand, most likely on broken glass.”
“But he told you all of this,” she said.
“He sure did.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that your dad’s blood wasn’t on the bodies. It was only on one body. Dottie’s. No one else’s.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“No shit it doesn’t.”
A plume of spite swelled in Lydia’s chest. Whatever she’d been expecting by visiting here, it was not this.
“Are you saying—” she said, but had to restart. “When you say my dad’s blood was on Dottie’s body, were there other signs? I mean, do you mean that—?”
“Nothing like that. I mean his blood was on her neck and face and shoulder and wrist and hand. And nightie. If it was just that, or just his tracks, or just your hiding, or just the hammer— If those were the only oddities, I may have written all of this off as coincidence. But there’s more. I don’t need to tell you that, after the murders, your daddy fled the city as soon as he could. He wanted to protect you. I get that. But the thing that always got me was his silence before he left. At the O’Tooles’ he stumbled right into the heart of the crime scene, knew all three victims, yet he had little to say about anyone involved. Tell me that doesn’t stink. The only way we were going to get any information out of him was to press charges, but that idea was crushed from above. Little Lydia had been through enough. Just ask Life magazine.”
“I had been through enough.”
“I know you had. Which is why in all those years, in all those press conferences, not once did the department ever raise public suspicion about your father. It might be that your misery gave him his freedom. You could be mayor of Denver with a history like that, I shit you not. But you see my point about your daddy.”
More than anything Lydia saw how desperately her dad had tried to insulate her, to keep her safe, to erase a night that couldn’t be erased—at least before settling in Rio Vista, where he became a different man.
“Maybe you were just frustrated,” she said. “No suspects were turning up so you settled for the cliché: blame the parents.”
“That’s exactly what my colleagues in the department said. And for a while I believed them, because maybe all this circumstantial crap was really just in my head. For a time I let it go. I tried to focus on fishing and trains and a merciful God. But then a few months after the murders we got a phone call from the O’Tooles’ neighbor. You remember her? Agatha Castleton, a lonely old woman who’d lived across the street her whole life. I’d tried interviewing her twice before, but like the rest of the city she just seemed crippled by dread. Like the Hammerman was just waiting to get her next. I left her my card in case anything came up.”
“And it did?”
“The day before the murders, around lunchtime, Agatha was eating a sandwich by her window and guess who she saw whistling up the sidewalk and knocking on the O’Tooles’ front door? A man who looked and dressed just like your daddy. Which isn’t all that strange, given that you and Carol were such buddies, but the two of you were in school all day. So what was he doing there? Think about it. The murders happened late on Friday night, and your daddy had been at the crime scene Thursday at noontime. When I asked him, by the way, he told me he was just dropping off Carol’s mittens, which she’d left at the library. Said he stuck them in the mailbox on the porch and left.”
“Carol was always losing things,” Lydia said, almost smiling.