I'll Be Gone in the Dark(67)
He bypassed rooms with closed doors and headed directly for the master bedroom, in the northwest corner of the house. Standing
in the doorway, he faced the bed from a distance of about ten feet. A woman lay there alone. She was sleeping, positioned on her stomach, face to pillow, the kind of “flung off the cliff of consciousness” sleep that anchors rather than drifts. Who was she in the moment before he wrenched her awake from unburdened sleep? Esther McDonald* was small, what the generation when her name was popular might have called “a slip of a thing.” Back home in a cold midwestern state, a marriage at nineteen had lasted a decade with no kids or staying power. Suddenly she was thirty, which is older in Middle America than on the coasts. “California Dreamin’” wasn’t a song but a siren call for a sunnier future. She and a girlfriend moved to San Francisco. The Summer of Love was over, but the Bay Area retained its reputation for improvisation, a place where you could shed your past and debut a new life.
There were jobs: a wholesale florist and an electric motor repair company. A pawnbroker twenty years her senior wooed her with jewelry and invited her to live with him in Danville. The house was five miles from the Calaveras Fault, a major branch of the San Andreas. Six months later, they split amicably. He moved out, put the house on the market, and told her she was welcome to stay until it sold. A romance was bubbling with a co-worker; the pawnbroker was still around. Matters of the heart were bidirectional and unresolved.
That’s who she was as she slept around two a.m. on a cold night in December: a woman starting over in a state where the covered wagons stopped and storied reinventions began, a woman navigating an unremarkably complicated love life, a woman about to be irrevocably changed. What is the lasting damage when you believe the warm spot you were just sleeping in will be your grave? Time sands the edges of the injuries, but they never lose their
hold. A nameless syndrome circulates permanently through the body, sometimes long dormant, other times radiating powerful waves of pain and fear.
A hand gripped her neck. A blunt-tipped weapon dug into the side of her throat. At least a dozen investigators in Northern California could have correctly predicted the first words whispered in the dark.
“Don’t move.”
“Don’t scream.”
He was back. Or, more accurately, he had doubled back. The uncertainty of his course, the randomness of his strikes made him an unpredictable dark force, a one-man crime wave.
The first deputies alerted by dispatch arrived at 5:19 a.m. Tension ratcheted at the telltale signs. Knotted white shoelaces. Torn strips of orange towel. Cut phone lines. The house was bracingly cold. He’d turned off the thermostat, along with the radio, apparently for optimal hearing. Radio calls went out. Phones rang. People began arriving in the blue-black light of dawn. Crime-scene investigator Larry Crompton pulled up. The search for meaningful details focused him, made him alert despite the early hour. He noted the Realtor’s sign in the front yard, the vacant property next door, and the railroad tracks out back—all ideal conditions that stoked the EAR’s compulsions and telescoped his roving to a single target.
In a few weeks, Crompton would be promoted to sergeant and join the urgently formed EAR Task Force. He was unaware as he entered the house, the door shutting behind him, that this case would be the one he would carry for the rest of his life. It would become like a game of hangman he refused to lose, all the guesses wrong, the stick figure nearly fatally hung; Crompton kept the last move open, staving off defeat by waiting until he, or one of his successors, could reverse the momentum and fill in the blanks. Only then, the final letter correct, would the long, bruising
chase in the dark end in the simplest but long-sought-after prize: a man’s name.
The first of three bloodhounds, Pita, arrived. She exhibited excitement immediately, her nose wrenching the air. Who knows what goes through the minds of tracking dogs, whether they absorb the hopes of the solemn people milling around them. Pita’s job was enviably clear-cut. Find the scent and follow it. A small group of handlers and cops, including Crompton, watched Pita exit the house through the back patio and head confidently to the southwest corner of the backyard. She agitated at the fence, wanting over. She was led out the yard and around the other side, to the abandoned railroad tracks. She raised her nose.
They were sifting once again through the fresh wreckage of the faceless wrecker. Foam still clung to a bottle of Schlitz Malt Liquor he’d taken from the refrigerator and set down in the backyard. Scuff marks on the fence were photographed. The group at the railroad tracks huddled in the cold, waiting for Pita to make her next move. Their hope lay in a dog’s nostrils connecting with a molecule.
Then a jerk of movement. Pita caught it; she smelled him. She surged forth, galloping south down the left path alongside the tracks. She was, as police K-9 units say, “in odor.” Her stride was controlled but accelerating, relentless drive her genetic gift. She was, in every sense of the word, unleashed. Crompton and Pita’s handlers chased after her. The sudden commotion on the tracks, with its whiff of danger and unrest, was unusual for a Saturday morning in Danville. It was an unwelcome disruption, one that would repeat in the coming months.
Pita stopped abruptly about a half mile from where she started, at the point the railroad tracks intersected a residential street. Two other bloodhounds, Betsey and Eli, were also brought in to work the crime scene. Pita’s handler, Judy Robb, noted in her follow-up report that time and even minute changes to wind velocity can