It was a power play, a signal of ubiquity. I am both nowhere and everywhere. You may not think you have something in common with your neighbor, but you do: me. I’m the barely spotted presence, the dark-haired, blond-haired, stocky, slight, seen from the back, glimpsed in half-light thread that will continue to connect you even as you fail to look out for each other.
I left Sacramento in a bad mood. I hadn’t slept well. The hungover wedding party crowded the front door of the hotel as I tried to make my way out. At the airport, I walked past a giant red rabbit sculpture I somehow had been too preoccupied to notice when I flew in. I don’t know how I missed it before. The fifty-six-foot-long, ten-thousand-pound aluminum rabbit is suspended by cables and appears to be diving toward the baggage claim area. I searched the term “Sac airport rabbit” on my iPhone while waiting to board my plane. An Associated Press article said that artist Lawrence Argent had been commissioned to create an iconic piece for the new terminal, which was unveiled in October 2011.
“I wanted to play around with the idea that something has come from the outside and leapt into the building,” Argent said.
The Cuff-Links Coda
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section is an excerpt from an early draft of Michelle’s article “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]
THE DAY AFTER I PLACED THE ORDER FOR THE CUFF LINKS, I CALLED the Kid. I told him I was having the cuff links shipped overnight to me.
“To a P.O. box?” the Kid asked. Well no, I admitted. A ludicrous scenario flashed through my mind: EAR-ONS reselling the cuff links to the store where he happened to work inputting customer addresses; he’d no doubt be suspicious of someone who paid forty dollars for next-day delivery of his eight-dollar cuff links.
The best thing to do, I knew, was to turn over the cuff links to EAR-ONS investigators. The risk was that they’d be angry I’d taken this kind of unauthorized initiative. Coincidentally, I had recently scheduled my very first interview with Larry Pool in Orange County. I decided that if I felt the interview was going well, I’d explain the story and hand over the tiny gold cuff links in their square Ziploc bag.
The problem was, of all the investigators, the prospect of meeting with Pool was the most intimidating to me. He’d been described as inaccessible and a little remote. I knew he’d been working on the case for the last fourteen years. He’d been instrumental, along with victim Keith Harrington’s attorney brother, Bruce, in the passage of Proposition 69—the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, which in 2004 established an all-felon DNA database in California. The California Department of Justice now has the largest working DNA data bank in the country.
Pool and Harrington felt that by expanding the DNA database they’d surely net EAR-ONS. The disappointment when that didn’t happen, it was suggested to me, was sharp. I had imagined Larry Pool as a steely, impassive cop locked away in a dimly lit room, the walls plastered with EAR-ONS composites.
A pleasant but somewhat formal man in wire-rim glasses and a red checkered shirt greeted me in the lobby of the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. We sat in a conference room. He was duty officer for the computer lab that day, and when the occasional colleague poked their head in and said something, Pool would respond with a clipped “Copy that.”
I found him a thoughtful, measured speaker, the kind of person whose stoic exterior masks how generous they’re being with their insights. When I met with Larry Crompton, it was clear that the retired detective took his failure to solve the case personally. It kept him up at night, Crompton confessed, and he always asked himself, “What did I miss?”
Pool didn’t present the same sort of anguish. At first I took this as cockiness. Later I realized it was hope. He’s not nearly done yet.
We were wrapping up our conversation. I pegged him as someone who prioritizes procedure and decided he wouldn’t like the cuff-links story. But at the very end, I caved; I don’t know why. I began speaking way too fast and rustling around in my backpack. Pool listened but his face revealed nothing. I nudged the cuff links across the conference table at him. He took the bag and examined it very carefully.
“For me?” he asked, stone-faced.
“Yes,” I said.
He allowed the slightest hint of a smile.
“I think I love you,” he said.
* * *
BY THE TIME I RETURNED HOME TO LOS ANGELES, POOL HAD tracked down the victims and sent them a high-resolution image of the cuff links by e-mail. The cuff links had originally belonged to a deceased family member, and the victims had had them in their possession only a short while before they were stolen. They looked like the cuff links, but the victims were cautious about merely “wanting them to be them.” They got in touch with another family member who was more familiar with the jewelry. A couple of days later, Pool called me with the news: not the same cuff links.
I was disappointed; Pool seemed unfazed. “I don’t get excited like I used to,” he’d told me earlier. A decade ago, when the shock of the DNA match between the EAR and the ONS was still fresh, he had every investigative resource at his disposal. An Orange County Sheriff’s Department helicopter once flew to Santa Barbara just to pick up a suspect’s DNA swab. The suspect was under active surveillance at the time. Pool traveled to Baltimore to exhume a body. This was before 9/11, and he recalls that parts of the suspect were packed in his carry-on.
Eventually cold-case funding dried up. Investigators got reassigned. And Pool got less emotionally invested in every new development. Even the composite of EAR-ONS that hangs above Pool’s desk is deliberate and matter-of-fact—it shows the suspect in a ski mask.
“Is it of any value?” Pool said. “No. But we know he looked like that.”
He showed me the stack of mail he continues to get with tips from the public, including one piece of paper with a photocopy of a man’s driver’s license photo and the words “This is EAR ONS.” (The man is far too young to be a viable suspect.)
Eight thousand suspects have been examined over the years, Pool estimates; several hundred have had their DNA run. They conducted a DNA test on one suspect in a southern state twice when they weren’t satisfied with the quality of retrieval the first time. When Pool comes across an especially intriguing suspect, his curt response is always the same.
“Gotta eliminate him.”
Despite his reserve, Pool has reason to be optimistic about the case; in fact, everyone who’s weathered the ups and downs of the EAR-ONS mystery agrees that the pendulum is currently swinging in an upward direction.
Los Angeles, 2012
I WAS IN A PANIC. WE WERE HOSTING, AS WE HAD FOR YEARS, ABOUT a dozen adults and four kids under the age of ten, and the second draft of my seven-thousand-word story was due Tuesday. A few days before, I’d sent out SOS e-mails, brief and frank pleas for help that I hoped would be understood. “Dinner rolls. Butter.” Thanksgiving always makes me nostalgic for the Midwest. But the day was sunny and unusually brisk, the kind of California autumn afternoon when, if you concentrate on your friend’s gray cardigan and the forkful of pumpkin pie in your mouth and the snippet of NFL commentary running in the background, you can forget the bougainvillea and the wet swimsuits drying over the backyard chairs; you can imagine that you live somewhere where the seasons actually change. I wasn’t myself though. Impatience roiled. I made a bigger deal than I needed to that Patton bought an undersize turkey. When we went around the table and said what we were thankful for, I forgot the holiday for a moment and shut my eyes, thinking about a wish. After dinner the kids piled together on the couch and watched The Wizard of Oz. I stayed out of the room. Little kids have big emotions, and mine needed reining in.