فصل 21

21

Fred Ray

I’M NOT ENJOYING MY SECOND CUP OF TERRIBLE COFFEE IN A CAFE in Kingsburg, California, twenty miles southeast of Fresno, when I’m given an explanation to a mystery that’s puzzled me for years. The man who provides the answer, Fred Ray, is tall and laconic and possesses a slightly nasal drawl befitting a descendent of generations of Central Valley farmers. When Ray isn’t using his long fingers to emphasize a point, he folds his hands and rests them gently on his chest like a scholar. His mostly brown hair is enviously abundant for a retired detective who’s being asked about a thirty-five-year-old double murder he once investigated. I formed a certain ungenerous impression when Ray first loped in with his battered briefcase and Dust Bowl twang. He wanted to meet on the early side to avoid the high school crowd, he told me, but I spot no one under seventy in the tiny café, which consists of a handful of tables covered in thick, clear plastic, shelves of Swedish knick-knacks (Kingsburg is known as Little Sweden), and a narrow glass counter displaying scattered pastries. Two of the café’s few patrons are Ray’s wife and then his pastor, who asks me where I’m from even though I haven’t been identified as an out-of-town visitor. I tell him I’m from Los Angeles.

“Welcome to the state of California,” the pastor says.

But my impression of Ray changes abruptly early in our conversation, when he’s describing his time as a detective with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, in particular his experience interrogating a certain kind of troubled kid. Outwardly the kids, young white males mostly, presented little threat. The laid-back pace of an old-money coastal town trickled down to them, even if they didn’t live in upscale Hope Ranch, with its horse paths and private beach, but the trailer park on Hollister. These were Garys and Keiths, shaggy-haired late-seventies burnouts who started but never finished Dos Pueblos or San Marcos High. They dragged beat-up armchairs into the avocado groves and hid out smoking homegrown weed. They surfed Haskell’s Beach all day and gathered around bonfires at night, drunk and feeling safely out of reach; they knew the cops would never hike down the sage-scrub-covered bluffs to break up a beach party. Their troubles were petty stuff. Minor aggravations. Except that Ray discovered a surprising number of them engaged in a chilling pastime, one they kept secret even from each other: they got a thrill out of breaking into strangers’ homes in the middle of the night.

They were prowlers. Peepers. Burglary was an afterthought. What they took pride in, Ray learned from talking to them, was their ability to get inside a house, crawl along a floor, and stand unnoticed in the dark, watching people sleep. Ray was amazed at the details they would share with him once he got them started.

“I always had a way of getting guys to talk to me,” Ray says.

“How would you do it?”

He opens his hands. His features soften almost imperceptibly.

“Well, you know, everyone does that,” he says, his tone both conspiratorial and direct. “Everybody has wanted to see what’s going on in someone else’s house.”

That sounds reasonable. I nod. “

Right,” I say.

But then Ray snaps back to his former self, his real self, and I realize that, without my noticing, he’d assumed a slight slouch and slackened his expression to appear more casual. This wasn’t the ham-fisted method used to coax information out of a suspect as seen on Law and Order. The abrupt transition was startling. I bought the act completely. One of Ray’s most winning mannerisms is a huge, unpredictable smile that’s the opposite of eager and therefore more gratifying when you prompt it. He got me, and he knows it. He grins.

“They all want to tell their story, but they want to tell it to somebody that’s not going to freak out on them. When you sit there showing no emotion, kind of agreeing with them, almost like you’re enjoying what they’re telling you, they’ll talk.”

The parade of troubled young men whom Ray questioned decades ago interests me for a specific reason.

“You interviewed these guys, these prowlers,” I say. “Do you think you might have talked to him?”

“No,” he says quickly.

Then carefully, “I could have.”

But he’s shaking his head.

Him. The third person at every interview I conduct, the faceless killer whose tennis-shoe impressions Ray once tracked through the neighborhood, retracing the man’s path as he crept from window to window, searching for victims. Ray was deeply involved in the case of a serial killer who picked up hitchhikers, shot them in the side of the head, and then had sex with their corpses; over the course of his career, he has stood over headless bodies and examined ritualistic carvings on the decomposing skin of a young woman. Yet the only killer he mentions who made, as he says, “the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” was the one who brought me here. Him.

That Ray doesn’t believe he talked to the unidentified man I’ve dubbed the Golden State Killer doesn’t surprise me. Every detective I’ve interviewed who’s worked the case insists the same thing. They’ve held precut ligatures he left behind and stared at his spermatozoa under a microscope. They’ve played and replayed audio recordings of hypnotized witnesses and survivors, listening for any throwaway clues to his identity. Decades after retirement, one detective found himself squatting in the woods outside a possible suspect’s house in Oregon, waiting for the trash to come out so he could swipe a DNA sample. The Golden State Killer haunts their dreams. He’s ruined their marriages. He’s burrowed so deeply inside their heads that they want to, or have to, believe that if they locked eyes with him, they’d know.

“It’s kind of like a bloodhound thing,” a detective said to me. “I believe if I were at a mall and he passed by me, I’d know.”

I explain to Ray that the reason I’m interested in his memories of young prowlers is that I recently visited Goleta, the city eight miles west of Santa Barbara on California’s Central Coast where the killer attacked three times between 1979 and 1981. All three attacks took place in an unassuming neighborhood in northeast Goleta, an area occupying less than two square miles. Shoe tracks and twine ligatures presumably dropped by accident from his pockets show that he moved along San Jose Creek, a narrow gorge that begins in the mountains to the north and meanders through the neighborhood of tract homes until emptying into the Pacific Ocean. His victims all lived close to the creek.

I walked along the creek bed, I tell Ray, and was struck by how captivating the overgrown path, shrouded in huge, draping trees and strewn with moss-covered rocks, would be for a certain kind of suburban adolescent boy, a semiwild, underparented kid yearning for refuge. Rope swings dangled from sycamore trees. Adults who’d grown up in the neighborhood told me that in the midseventies some boys built a BMX track down there. There were secret tunnels and cement-lined drainage ditches where kids skateboarded. There were no lights, and the path was confusing and hard to follow. It felt like the kind of place you’d know only if you’d spent a lot of time down there as a kid.

“Especially when you consider the first attack on Queen Ann Lane,” I say. The Queen Ann Lane house isn’t even visible from the street, as it’s located behind another house. You’d notice it only from the path along the creek.

The mention of the October 1, 1979, attack on Queen Ann Lane hardens Ray’s otherwise matter-of-fact face.

“You know, they could have caught him that night,” Ray says.

That was the night he realized he had to kill. The night the victims survived and their neighbor, an off-duty FBI agent, pursued the suspect as he fled on a stolen ten-speed bike. I’ve walked the route of the pursuit and stopped at the place where the agent lost him. The agent was in radio contact with deputies who were on their way. I’ve never quite understood how he wasn’t apprehended.

“I knew what was going to happen,” Ray says. He shakes his head. “I knew exactly what the deputies were going to do.”

What they did was let him slip away.