“Pete, do you know?” I said. I could barely get the words out fast enough.
“Know what?”
“I just got an e-mail with a link to a news story. There’s been a shootout in some remote mountains in New Mexico. Two people are dead. A sheriff’s deputy. And the guy they were after. A kind of mysterious mountain man stealing from cabins.”
“No,” Pete said.
“Yes,” I said. “They fingerprinted the mountain man.”
I admit I paused here for maximum dramatic effect.
“Joseph Henry Burgess,” I said. “Pete, we were right. He was out there all this time.”
Our stunned silence lasted only a moment. I knew Pete wanted to get to a computer. The premiere organizers were herding people inside. I could see Patton scanning for me.
“Find out more,” I told Pete. “I can’t. I’m at a thing.”
This thing was not my thing. I realize confiding unease with movie premieres isn’t the most relatable hang-up and falls under the exasperated “must be nice” category. I get it. Bear with me. I’m not being falsely humble when I say that I haven’t yet attended a Hollywood event where someone hasn’t tucked in a tag, adjusted a button, or told me I had lipstick on my teeth. I once had an events coordinator bat my fingers from my mouth when I was biting my nails. My red carpet pose can best be described as “ducked head, half crouch.” But my husband’s an actor. I love him and admire his work, and that of our friends, and occasionally attending these events is part of the deal. So you get fancily dressed and sometimes professionally made up. A driver in a town car picks you up, which makes you feel weird and apologetic. An upbeat public relations person you don’t know leads you onto a red carpet where you’re shouted at to “look here!” and “here” at a hundred strangers with flashbulbs for faces. And then, after those brief moments of manufactured glamour, you find yourself in a regular old creaky movie theater seat, sipping Diet Coke from a sweaty plastic cup and salting your fingers with warm popcorn. Lights dim. Mandated enthusiasm begins.
Walking into the afterparty, Patton was introduced to the directors of Crank, an action movie he loves starring Jason Statham. He began regaling them with his favorite bits from the movie. “I’m gay-tham for Statham,” he confessed. After we parted ways with the directors, we paused and surveyed the crowd cramming into the ballroom at the Hollywood & Highland Center. Drinks, gourmet mini-cheeseburgers, and maybe even Garry Shandling, an idol of Patton’s, awaited us. Patton read my mind.
“No problem,” he said.
A friend intercepted us on our way out.
“Getting back to baby?” she said with a warm smile. Our daughter, Alice, was three months old.
“You know how it is,” I said.
The truth, of course, was much weirder: I was foregoing a fancy Hollywood party to return not to my sleeping infant but my laptop, to excavate through the night in search of information about a man I’d never met, who’d murdered people I didn’t know.
Violent men unknown to me have occupied my mind all my adult life—long before 2007, when I first learned of the offender I would eventually dub the Golden State Killer. The part of the brain reserved for sports statistics or dessert recipes or Shakespeare quotes is, for me, a gallery of harrowing aftermaths: a boy’s BMX bike, its wheels still spinning, abandoned in a ditch along a country road; a tuft of microscopic green fibers collected from the small of a dead girl’s back.
To say I’d like to stop dwelling is beside the point. Sure, I’d love to clear the rot. I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write.
The first one, faceless and never caught, marked me at fourteen, and I’ve been turning my back on good times in search of answers ever since.
Oak Park
I HEAR TERRY KEATING BEFORE I SEE HIM. HE WORKS AS A DRUMMER and drum teacher, and his booming voice is probably a result of either hearing loss or a habit of yelling at his students to be heard. “It’s Terry!” he shouts. I look up from my phone as I stand waiting for him and see a medium-size white guy with a flop of brown hair holding a Venti Starbucks cup. He’s wearing Levi’s and a green T-shirt that says SHAMROCK FOOTBALL. But he’s not talking to me. He’s crossing the street toward 143 South Wesley Avenue, the corner brick house in Oak Park, Illinois, where we have agreed to meet. He’s calling out to a man in his fifties working on a car in the driveway. The man is tall, lanky, slightly stooped, his once dark hair gone gray. He’s got what is sometimes unkindly referred to as a hatchet face. There is nothing warm about him.
But there’s something familiar. He bears a strong resemblance to the family who lived in the house when I was growing up; some of the kids were close to my age, and I knew them from around town. He must be an older brother, I realize, and either bought or inherited the house from his parents.
The man looks at Terry with no recognition. I see Terry is undeterred, and unease washes over me. I have a mother’s instinct to reach out, redirect, and quiet down. But I can see Terry wants to distinguish himself in the man’s memory. They are old neighbors after all.
“I’m one of the boys that found the body!” Terry shouts.
The man stares at Terry from the side of his car. He says nothing. The blankness is emphatically hostile. I look away, directing my gaze at a tiny Virgin Mary statue planted in the northeast corner of the front lawn.
It’s Saturday afternoon, June 29, 2013—an unusually cold and windy day for midsummer Chicago. In the sky, a block to the west, I can see the steeple of St. Edmund Catholic Church, my family’s old church, where I went to school from first through third grades.
The man returns to tinkering with his car. Terry peels off to the right. He spots me thirty yards down the sidewalk. I light up at eye contact and wave furiously at him, compensation for what just transpired. Terry was a year above me at St. Edmund’s. The last time I remember seeing him was thirty-five years ago. I know little about him aside from the recent discovery that the same night in August 1984 changed both our lives.
“Michelle!” he shouts, walking toward me. “How’s Hollywood?”
We hug awkwardly. His manner brings me back immediately to the Oak Park of my childhood. The flat vowels in his thick Chicago accent. The way he announces later that he has to “haul ass.” He’s got a cowlick, a raw, pink color to his cheeks, and an utter lack of artifice. No calculating mechanism filters his thought from speech. He starts in right away.
“So yeah, what happened was,” he says, leading me back toward the house. I hesitate. Maybe it’s fear of the already unhappy homeowner’s reaction. Maybe it’s my sense that walking might help transport us to that muggy summer night when we still rode bikes but had tasted our first sip of beer.
I look south down the alley.
“How about we retrace the path you guys took that night?”
Oak Park borders the West Side of Chicago. Ernest Hemingway, who grew up there, famously referred to it as a town of “wide lawns and narrow minds,” but that wasn’t my experience of the place. We lived in a drafty three-story Victorian on the 300 block of South Scoville, a cul-de-sac in the center of town. North of us was the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio and an affluent neighborhood of prairie homes and liberal professionals intent on staying hip. My friend Cameron lived in one of the Wright homes. Her stepfather was a civil rights attorney, and her mother was, I think, a potter. They introduced me to vegetarian salt and the word “Kabuki.” I remember the stepfather recommending that Cameron and I, who both tended toward black smocks and confessional verse, cheer ourselves up by going to see the Talking Heads’ concert movie Stop Making Sense.