Devil House(80)

The first peg of the plan was to lock down all photos of the crime scene. Photographers gathered all the evidence that might be needed, and then the cleanup crew arrived: the police themselves, but also several trusted helpers from town. In one day, they scoured the inside, took down the sign out front, and threw a tarp over the roof to cover the gigantic portrait of the ghoul. Overnight, one of the most sensational crime scenes imaginable became an unremarkable remodeling project in progress: orange cones, drab scaffolds, thirty-gallon garbage cans. It looked like plenty of places by the freeway in any small California city, and the absence of a focal point for cameras went a long way toward dampening out-of-town enthusiasm about the case.

The next thing they needed was a suspect, or so they thought. As soon as they had a suspect they’d be in a position to fast-track the whole affair. But they were wrong about that, Derrick insists. “They’re very, very lucky they never arrested me,” he says. “My mom and dad worked very hard to give me the best chance they could, and they were mad as hell about my little secret life inside the store, but they stayed focused. They told the police to charge me or let me go, and then they hired a lawyer, and they didn’t blink at the price tag.

“If there’d have been an arrest,” he says, “that’s all the national media would have needed. A name on the logs, a kid with a face to splash onto the pages. Without that, what do you have? The same thing I get from recovered ships’ quarters. Salvaged relics. People look at them once and maybe they have some kind of reaction, but minus the story behind them, hardly anybody cares.

“But in town they didn’t know this yet, and it was very hard for a few weeks—”

He stops; he looks worried, or frightened. Is he trying to compose himself, or searching for the right words?

“It will be hard for you to understand what it was like during that time for me,” he concludes.



* * *



THE MILPITAS POLICE DEPARTMENT interviewed Derrick at least eleven times over the course of eight days. It was his senior year; according to Derrick, he kept his mind on his coursework inside all the cacophony. “I was pretty focused on college,” he insists. “There’s nothing wrong with Milpitas, but when it’s the only place you’ve ever known and you start to get the feeling there’s a whole world out there for you, you lean pretty hard into taking your shot.

“And it was exhausting,” he continues. “Just absolutely exhausting. I think they brought me in for follow-ups twice in a single day at least two times.” He’s right, and errs generously; on three occasions over this span of time, his presence was requested for an interview at the police station twice in a single day—the second day after his initial interview, three days after that, and once again a week later. These interviews grew more confrontational as public pressure increased, and Derrick remembers wishing he could make a public statement of some sort.

“Just something, anything,” he says. “I mean, when you’re the one in the crosshairs, it’s like you don’t have permission to be going through what everybody else is going through. And that’s just an awful feeling, because you are going through that. You just have to do it alone. My dad tried to help, my mom tried to help, I’m lucky I’ve always had a very supportive family, but in the end it was just me. I couldn’t call Seth and I couldn’t call Angela, and Alex was gone again and the police didn’t even have him on their radar, thank God, and I was—you know, when you’re a kid, and you hear adults talking about whether they slept well or not, it’s like, what are these people talking about, you know? But suddenly it’s me, I can’t sleep at all, and I want to just say something to clear the air. To clear the air, and for me personally, just to be seen.

“But the lawyers weren’t having it,” he says. “And they were right. No smoke, no fire.”

But there was a little smoke, I suggest, knowing from experience that you can’t miss these small moments when an opening appears. The scene itself, I mean, the writing and the arrangements and the decorations: that was you.

“Yeah, but I didn’t—”

He appears to be sizing me up anew, trying to get a different angle on me. Am I a tabloid reporter disguised as a guy who writes real books?

But he smiles again, a smile he’s very fortunate to have been born with, I think. “You saw the crime scene photos, though, I know. Seth told me.

“You already know none of us could have actually done that.”



* * *



I HAVE, IN FACT, SEEN THE CRIME SCENE PHOTOS, probably several more of them than Derrick has. I’ve exhumed more evidence connected to the crimes at Devil House than had been previously supposed to exist: relics and primary texts, case notes and bagged exhibits. I know where people in town pointed the finger at first, projecting their unease over the ever-present prospect of Silicon Valley sprawl onto the site of the unspeakable—there were those, at first, who’d said that this is what happens when homeless people from neighboring cities get word that there are places to sleep nearby where the night patrols don’t reach. There were those, as there still are, who suspected that, whatever the real story was, they were only hearing a part of it. And then there were the voices that were easiest to amplify, because their ranges were familiar from similar stories around the country. The kids are out of control. They grow up faster and bigger than they did in our day. They lack the moral grounding of generations past.