فصل 27

27

Afterword

MICHELLE WAS BORED BY ANYTHING WITH MAGIC OR SPACESHIPS. “I’m out,” she’d say with a laugh. Ray guns, wands, glowing swords, superhuman abilities, ghosts, time travel, talking animals, superscience, enchanted relics, or ancient curses: “All of that feels like cheating.”

“Is he building another suit of armor?” she asked during a screening of the first Iron Man movie. Twenty minutes into the movie, Tony Stark tweaks and improves his boxy gray Mark I armor into the candy apple red and regal gold supersuit. Michelle chuckled and cut out to go shopping.

Spaghetti Westerns were too long and too violent. Zombies were scientifically implausible. And diabolical serial killers with complex schemes were, as far as she was concerned, unicorns.

Michelle and I were married for ten years, and together for thirteen. There was not a single pop-culture point of connection between the two of us. Oh, wait—The Wire. We both liked The Wire. There you go.

When we met, I was a burbling, fizzing cauldron of obscure ephemera and disjointed facts. Movies, novels, comics, music.

And serial killers.

I knew body counts, and modi operandi, and quotes from interviews. Stockpiling serial-killer lore is a rite of passage for guys in their twenties who want to seem dark and edgy. I was precisely the kind of dork who, in my twenties, would do anything to seem dark and edgy. And there I was, all through the flannel nineties, rattling off minutiae about Henry Lee Lucas and Carl Panzram and Edmund Kemper.

Michelle knew those facts and trivia as well. But for her, it was background noise, as unimportant and ultimately uninteresting as poured cement.

What interested her, what sparked her mind and torqued every neuron and receptor, were people. Specifically, detectives and investigators. Men and women who, armed with a handful of random clues (or, more often than not, too many clues that needed to be sifted through and discarded as red herrings), could build traps to catch monsters.

(Ugh—that was the movie tagline description of what Michelle did. Sorry. It’s hard for me not to spiral upward into hyperbole when I talk about her.)

I was married to a crime fighter for a decade—an emphatically for-real, methodical, “little grey cells,” Great Brain–type crime fighter. I saw her righteous fury when she’d read survivor testimony or interview family members who were still reeling from the wrenching away of a loved one. There were mornings when I’d bring her coffee and she’d be at her laptop, weeping, frustrated and worn flat by another lead she’d chased that left her smashed nose-first against a brick wall. But then she’d have a slug of caffeine, wipe her eyes, and hammer away at the keyboard again. A new window opened, a new link pursued, another run at this murderous, vile creep.

The book you just read was as close as she got. She always said, “I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him. I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him.” And she meant it. She was born with a true cop’s heart and mind—she craved justice, not glory.

Michelle was an incredible writer: she was honest—sometimes to a fault—with her readers, with herself, and about herself. You see that in the memoir sections of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. And you see how she was honest about her own obsessions, her own mania, her at times dangerous commitment to the pursuit—often at the expense of sleep and health.

The mind for investigation and logic. The heart for empathy and insight. She combined those two qualities in ways I’d never encountered before. Without even trying, she made me rethink my own path in life, my own way of relating to people, and the things that I valued. She made everything about me and everyone around her better. And she did it by being quietly, effortlessly original.

Let me give you a specific, anecdotal example and then a broader, more universal one.

ANECDOTAL: IN 2011 I WORKED WITH PHIL ROSENTHAL TO DEVELOP a sitcom based on my life. Louie had been on the air for a year, and I was besotted by the new ground it was breaking in terms of how to structure a sitcom and how to present the personal in a comedic way. I basically wanted my own Louie. And so Phil and I sat down and walked through the details of my day-to-day life.

“What does your wife do?” Phil asked during an afternoon writing session.

I told him. I told him that she’d started a blog called True Crime Diary. I said it began as a way for her to write about the numerous cold cases and developing cases she followed online. I explained that she’d incorporate possible suspects’ Myspace entries. Social media is a gold mine for investigators, she realized. The old, pulling-teeth method of getting suspects to talk was nothing compared to the mind-dump these sociopathic narcissists offer daily on their own Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. She used Google Maps and a dozen other new platforms to construct solutions to seemingly dead-end cases. She was especially adept at linking data from an obscure, decade-old case to a seemingly unconnected current crime: “You see how he’s improving his m.o.? Failed kidnapping attempt on a street without easy freeway access has evolved into a clean snatch right near a cloverleaf where he can merge and reverse. He built up his courage and his skills. It’s the same car in each case, and he’s going unnoticed ’cause it’s a different state, and a lot of times different police forces won’t share info.” (That particular monologue, I remembered, was delivered one night in bed, laptop propped up against her knees; this was Michelle’s idea of pillow talk.)

Her blog entries led to interest from cable news shows, then to Dateline NBC, which hired her to reinterview suspects in a Mormon black-widow murder case. The persons of interest had stonewalled when approached by a major network, but they were more than happy to blab to a blogger. They just didn’t realize that the blogger they were talking to had invented a mutant, more expansive form of homicide investigation. They told her everything.

Phil mused over all of this for a minute or so after I finished talking. Then he said, “Well, that’s a way more interesting show than what we’re working on. How ’bout your TV wife is a party planner? Sound good?”

Now for the more universal example of Michelle’s uniqueness. We live in a swipe-right, blip-span culture of clickbait, 140-character arguments, and thirty-second viral videos. It’s easy to get someone’s attention, but it’s almost impossible to keep it.

Michelle was dealing with a subject that demands sustained, often unrewarded attention to yield any sort of satisfaction or closure. It requires the attention of not just a single reader but of dozens of cops, data miners, and citizen journalists to spark even a minor breakthrough.

Michelle earned and sustained that attention through flawless, compelling writing and storytelling. You understand everyone’s point of view in her writing, and none of her subjects are characters she invented. They’re people she got to know, cared about, and took the time to really see: the police, the survivors, the bereaved, and, as hard as it is for me to fathom, even a wounded, destructive insect like the Golden State Killer.

I’m still hoping he hears that cell door slam behind him. And I hope she hears it somehow too.

THIS PAST CHRISTMAS, ALICE, OUR DAUGHTER, OPENED A PRESENT that Santa had left her. She was happy, unwrapping her little digital camera and messing around with the settings. Fun gift. Happy holiday, sweetie.

Later that morning, she asked, out of the blue, “Daddy, why do you and Santa Claus have the same handwriting?”

Michelle Eileen McNamara is gone. But she left behind a little detective.

And a mystery.

— PATTON OSWALT

Herndon, VA

July 2, 2017