“Remember the Hammerman turned off the lights during the attack,” Moberg said. “The flashlight may have helped him find his way around in the dark, but the attack was so methodical that he was probably also familiar with the layout of the house, maybe because he’d been there before. A small detail, but it’s important. Now take a look at this.”
From the back of his notebook Moberg pulled out a single black-and-white page torn from an old real estate catalog. It had been folded into quarters and its seams were beginning to tear. On each side was printed a dozen advertisements for properties, each with a small description and a photograph of the place for sale.
“What do you see there?” Moberg asked.
Lydia studied the ads and found herself mildly distracted by how inexpensive the homes were and by how much her state had changed. Then she noticed that all the places were in the mountains—some weekend cabins, some year-round homes, some dying farms and ranches.
“Turn it over.”
When Lydia did she had to hold the page in the direction of the light to be sure of what she was seeing, but there it was in the lower left corner of the page. A small smudged photograph of her father’s house in Rio Vista, with a brief description: 2 BR A-frame, mtn. views, 8 acres, lrg. shop, school bus route. $19,950.
“That’s your home in the mountains.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“That’s not the original that you’re holding. The original page is somewhere in an evidence box in Denver, sharing a shelf with a bloodstained hammer. The original was found crammed in the bathroom trash can, water-damaged to the point of being almost unreadable.”
For a moment Lydia felt as if she was sitting in a rocking chair, about to teeter over.
“You found this in the O’Tooles’ bathroom?” she said.
“We found it the morning after the murders. Based on the other items in the trash, it had probably been there for a day or two. I’m guessing since your dad’s Thursday visit. You know, when he dropped off those all-important mittens.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Fuck.”
Moberg chuckled. “Yes,” he said. “Fuck.”
Lydia looked again at the image of the cabin where she’d spent most of her teenage years, the unhappiest years of her life. And she tried to determine whether the uneasy feeling she had at the moment was due to Moberg’s insinuations or to the memories evoked by this crumpled vision—or both.
“It makes no sense,” she said. “We moved into the cabin because of the murders. So why would the O’Tooles have a picture of it?”
“This is the question,” Moberg said. “Your father was up to something bigger than mittens over there, no doubt. Of course he claimed there were no interactions between them except those having to do with you and Carol. And there was no one alive to say otherwise. My first thought was that he and Dottie O’Toole had something going on. Lord knows she sowed her oats, but one look at your dad— I mean, did the guy ever wash his hair, let alone tie his shoes? It’s pretty obvious he wasn’t exactly her type, a fact made loud and clear through Dottie’s Tupperware circles. Did you know at the time she was screwing one of the Broncos? Third string, but still. Of course anything is possible, but I’ve always placed high doubts on Dottie going near a man like your dad. As did everyone else I interviewed.”
“Go on,” she said, reluctant.
“What seems more likely to me,” Moberg said, planting his elbows on the tabletop, “is that Bart O’Toole and your dad were up to something. That O’Toole needed a legitimate face for something he was putting together under the table. The problem with Bart is that almost everything he did was off the books, so it was hard to know whether he was working for lowlifes or he was a lowlife himself or just another asshole who wanted the good life without having to pay taxes. There were plenty of plumbing calls in the dead of night, but that doesn’t mean he was up to no good, you know? Maybe he needed your dad to sign a loan or to launder some paperwork, to milk the city or squeeze a contract out of the state. Maybe the cabin in Rio Vista was supposed to be collateral, or some kind of tax scam related to his plumbing venture. But no matter how deeply I dug I could never figure out the connection between them. I puzzled over the possibilities for months, going through public records and IRS files and library budgets, but nothing panned out. But to find a picture of your future house balled up in the bathroom trash can? That’s always been the answer without a question.”
“Did you ever bring him in?” she said.
“As a suspect? Never. I talked to him plenty in the weeks after the murders, but barely ever beyond that. The last time I saw your father was after you moved to Rio Vista, when you came here to the cabin to check out photos of suspects. I was hoping the different environment might encourage him to open up, but I couldn’t even get him to make eye contact with me. You’d know better than I do, but it seemed to me that he started losing it up there in the mountains. Maybe it was the altitude.”
“They always blame the altitude.”
“That or guilt,” he said. “Eventually my superiors in all their wisdom forced me to come up with hard evidence or else steer clear of him, mainly because they didn’t want to bring any more attention to the fact that the dreaded Hammerman was still at large.”
“But you obviously didn’t give up on the case.”
“I’ll tell you, I’ve lost sleep just wondering if we missed something. Some detail none of us in the department ever turned up.” He shook his head as if to rattle away the possibility. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we screwed it up somehow. Missed something. Because anyone who stepped foot in that house? Let’s just say I saw grown men lose it there, embracing each other as if they themselves had lost a child. One guy gave up his career in homicide and transferred over to property crimes. Just couldn’t deal with the magnitude of evil. That place was a bloodbath. It was hard to be there.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.”
Moberg stared hard at Lydia, and this brash acknowledgment left her grunting with discomfort.
“You can’t imagine the number of leads that came across my desk,” he said, more contemplative than she’d expected. “Ask me why I’m single. People sent me their grocery-store gossip and church scandals, all of them convinced that the Hammerman was their creepy neighbor or their bastard husband or their asshole boss. Even now it’s an open sore in the city—the Hammerman still at large after all these years. Can’t blame people for wanting to be part of the great return to order, I guess. I just wish . . .”
Moberg’s voice trailed off and he fiddled with his pen.
“Anyway,” he added, “that’s all I got.”
Lydia stared into her empty coffee cup.
“If I give you a guy’s name,” she said, swallowing hard, “could you tell me if you ever had any dealings with him? Not necessarily with this case, but later. Maybe even years later.”
“What guy?”