I'll Be Gone in the Dark(68)

alter scent pools. However, the three handlers were in agreement on several points. The dogs had sniffed along many fences and darted down numerous side yards. Their behavior suggested that the suspect had spent a lot of time prowling the area. He entered the victim’s backyard by the north-side fence. He left by crossing over the southwest corner of the back fence and headed south along the tracks until at the cross street he likely entered a vehicle.

The victim had been taken to the hospital by a sergeant. He drove her back home after her exam was finished, but when he parked his county vehicle outside her house, she didn’t move. Raw anguish pinned her to the seat. Daylight provided no comfort. She didn’t want to go back inside. It was tricky. The investigators sympathized, but they needed her. The importance of walking the crime scene with them was gently stressed. She consented to a quick walk-through, then left. Friends came and retrieved her belongings later. She never entered the house again.

There’s always the question of what to call an unknown perpetrator in police reports. The choice is often “the suspect,” occasionally “the offender,” or sometimes simply “the man.” Whoever wrote the Danville reports elected to use a term that was stark and unambiguous in its charge, its tone of reproach as if a finger were pointing from the very page. The term affected me the moment I read it. It became my private shorthand for the EAR, the simple term I returned to when I lay awake at three a.m. cycling through a hoarder’s collection of murky half clues and indistinct facial features. I admired the plainness of its unblinking claim.

The responsible.

*

HOLES PARKS ON A RESIDENTIAL STREET IN DANVILLE THAT’S ADJACENT to the Iron Horse Regional Trail, a path for bikers, horses, and hikers that meanders for forty miles through central Contra





Costa: the old Southern Pacific Railroad right-of-way paved over and made pedestrian friendly.

“We’ll get out here and walk,” he says.

We head south down the trail. We’ve walked maybe ten feet before Holes directs my attention to a backyard.

“The bloodhounds tracked the EAR’s escape to the corner of the victim’s yard,” he says. He steps forward. A row of agave plants shields the backside of the fence, hindering any attempt at getting closer.

“He jumps the fence here,” says Holes, pointing. He stares for a long moment at the thick, sword-shaped leaves of the agave plants.

“I bet this homeowner got so freaked out about the attack, they planted this cactus,” he says.

We continue walking. We’re following the path that criminalist John Patty took thirty-five years ago when he scoured the area for evidence after the bloodhounds established the EAR’s exit route. Patty found something during his search. He labeled what he found and sealed the items in a plastic bag; the bag went into a box that was taken to the Property Room and slid in tight against hundreds of identical boxes on a steel shelf. There it remained untouched for thirty-three years. On March 31, 2011, Holes called Property to inquire about the ski cap of an EAR suspect from the 1970s whom he was resurrecting. The director of Property had a box ready when Holes arrived. The ski cap was there. Then Holes noticed a Ziploc bag with a tag that read, “Collected from RR Right of Way.” What he found inside changed the course of his investigation.

Evidence collection, like everything else in police work, requires a paper trail. John Patty’s Scene Evidence Inventory form is hand-scrawled, the answers brief—“1 a) 2 sheets of spiral, 3-hole binder paper bearing pencil writing; b) 1 sheet of spiral, 3-hole binder paper bearing a pencil drawn map; c) 1 length





of purple yarn 41 inches in length; d) fragment of paper with typewriting.”

Were the items found together? Scattered across the ground? No photograph or sketch of the scene exists to orient Holes. Patty left a brief notation explaining where along the tracks he found the evidence. That’s it. Holes is able to subject the paper to touch-DNA technology and high-resolution scanning, have multiple experts parse and analyze every aspect of the map, but he lacks one crucial authority who’d give him context: John Patty. He died of cancer in 1991. The bane of cold cases: knowledge disregarded as irrelevant but later deemed critical has died with the knower.

At first, Holes didn’t know what to make of “the homework evidence.” One page appeared to be the start of a poorly written school-assigned essay on General Custer. The content of the second page was more intriguing. “Mad is the word,” it begins. The author rants about sixth grade and the teacher who humiliated him by forcing him to write sentences repeatedly as punishment. “I never hated anyone as much as I did him,” the writer says of the unnamed teacher.

The third page is a hand-drawn map of a residential community, depicting a business area, cul-de-sacs, trails, and a lake. Holes noticed some random doodling on the back of the map.

The evidence puzzled Holes and drew him in fast. Unexpected flashes of clarity kept him pursuing the lead. He cold-called experts for input. An offhand observation by a real estate developer shifted his conception of who the EAR could be. Clues were reconsidered in a new light. Holes knew his theories diverged from his fellow investigators’. He decided not to care too much. He carved out a place for himself as the guy whose views were, as he puts it, “left field.” He asked more questions. He was given several compelling explanations for the curious mix of juvenile writing and obvious design skill exhibited in the evidence. Insights accumulated. The danger of taking a wrong turn in the catacombs