I had a lot of contacts at the police department. Early on, they had considered me part of the brotherhood, mostly because of my EMT and fire training, and they handed out my cards to grieving widows and distraught adult children.
Over time, several officers would call me before the city did, letting me know I had a job on the way, and preparing me so that I could put the proper team on it. If the case was sensitive, I often did the work myself. That way, if I found overlooked or lost evidence, I knew that it would be handled correctly. Mostly, I would leave it alone, and place a call on my cell. The forensic teams would arrive quickly because, I’d learned, it was me. My assistants often didn’t get the same kind of respect.
Still, asking to see files in a case that had been closed for years was a sensitive thing. It irked all of us involved that we hadn’t found the bodies, but, we had consoled ourselves, we had found the killers. I had taken this case as personally as the detectives who had worked it, and we all confessed late one night in the local cop bar that this was the case that haunted us.
Detective Jeffrey Foreno was the only one who had ever expressed doubts about the case. He had openly questioned whether the cult had done the killings. After all, he said, no blood was found in their hidey hole. No knives, no black candles. And nothing suggested they had been on the property that night. It had all been supposition and circumstance, fear and small-town politics.
He had been shushed pretty quickly.
So he was the one I went to that morning.
He was approaching retirement. The lines in his face were deep and grooved, accented by the white stubble he’d forgotten to shave off before coming to work. The rest of his hair was black and thick, in need of a cut. His eyes, once sharp and alert, were bloodshot, and when he saw me, he sighed.
“I knew someone would want to resurrect the dead.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands folded over his stomach. “Just didn’t expect it to be you.”
I’d told him once I dreamed about cleaning the house, about the way the blood came back, as if the walls never wanted to give it up. He’d told me that he dreamed of the case too — of the Christmas tree that hadn’t existed even though the outside of the house had been exquisitely decorated, of the lack of food in the kitchen, of the empty pet bowls, cleaned and stored in a dusty pantry.
“Why did you think someone would bring up the case?” I asked, sitting across from him.
He gave me one of those sideways looks that always made me nervous. Even with bloodshot eyes, Jeffrey Foreno had a way of looking all the way to your soul.
“The party,” I said.
He pointed at me, which, in Jeff language, meant You got it in one.
“How come you didn’t go?” I asked.
“It felt like dancing on someone’s grave.” Then he gave me that look again and his lips thinned. “You went.”
I nodded. “Figured I had to. It had been my job to make sure no one noticed what had happened there.”
He didn’t move, nor did his expression change. “Did it work?”
I shrugged. “I think Louise was using the murders to give the place ambience.”
“The power of rubbernecking,” he said.
“Yeah.” I wouldn’t have put it so crassly, but he was right. Maybe that was why I hadn’t gone upstairs, why I refused to look at the rooms where the police had assumed most of the killings had taken place. Downstairs, the tree, the presents, the food, masked the prurience that went into the planning. Upstairs, the unvarnished truth — the naked interest of people more fortunate than the dwellers of the Moorhead place — would have been readily apparent.
“Did it open old wounds?” he asked.
I shook my head quickly, not sure I wanted to examine my answer to that question too closely.
“So you just came today out of curiosity,” he said as if he didn’t believe it.
“I came because I saw someone.” I told him about the waiter, the way the man had looked at me, both at the party and at the courthouse.
Foreno shrugged. “Maybe he was one of the rubberneckers. Some people make certain murder cases into their hobby.”
“I know,” I said. “But sometimes there’s more to it.”
He frowned at me.
“Remember anyone involved in the case who looked like that?”
“Like a perfect World War Two German? Can’t say as I do.”
Put that way, I wouldn’t have recognized him either. “I’d like to look through the file.”
“Be my guest,” Foreno said. “It’s not going to bother anyone. Unless you find something.”
We grinned at each other. Then he led me to Records, got me the case files, and signed off so that I could work.
The Moorhead file took up five boxes, most of them police and evidence reports. I gave the evidence reports a cursory glance, and saw exactly what I suspected: The assumptions began with the murder of the family and went from there. Most of the blood evidence was scraped from the wall of the bedroom — the crime-scene tech’s reasoning was simple: He didn’t want to deal with the inevitable carpet fibers in the blood pool. Although, to his credit, he did cut carpet swatches as well, and stored them in one of the refrigeration units at the crime lab. Unless someone needed the space, the evidence might still be there.
I searched through the boxes until I found what I was looking for. Pictures. Not of the house, but of the family.
Five members — husband, wife, three children, the oldest being fifteen, the youngest twelve. Speculation by the investigating officer was that one or all of the children had had contact with the cult.
I stared at the father. His face was bony and Aryan too, almost but not quite the same as the waiter I had seen. The eldest son, fourteen, looked like his father or might have if he’d lived. That heavy bone structure was unusual, at least in these parts. I thumbed through the documents to see if there were other family members in the vicinity.
No one had located any. Pages and pages of police interviews, with neighbors, coworkers, friends, did not include anyone from the family.
Then I looked at the mug shots of the cult members. I remembered those faces from the trial as well. Young, confused, ravaged, they made me wonder whether those kids were vulnerable because they were following the wrong leader or whether they had followed the wrong leader because they were vulnerable.
I closed the boxes, feeling more uncertain than I had before I started. I put them back, and went upstairs to say goodbye to Foreno.
“Find anything?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Let it rest.” Then he gave me that look. “You’re not going to, are you?”
“Who inherited the house?” I asked.
“No one,” he said. “The state ended up with it.”
“No family,” I said.
“None that we could find.” He tapped a pen against the top of his desk. “And before you ask, let me tell you I remember this because it seemed so damn odd. Two middle-aged parents with no family at all. No one remembered any grandparents or aunts and uncles visiting the kids. These people were an island.”
“Their money went to the state, too?”
“Eventually,” he said. “Not that there was much of it.”
“In a house like that?”
“Mortgaged and credit cards. The furniture wasn’t even worth anything. The appearance of money, but no real money.”
“Don’t you find that strange?”
“Always have,” he said.
“The guy I saw,” I said, “looks a lot like the father.”
Foreno cursed, then leaned back in his chair. “You sure?”
“It’s not him,” I said. “There’re differences.”
“Family differences?”
“I’d’ve thought they were brothers or cousins,” I said.