8. Evidence & Darkness

8. Evidence & Darkness 

In the final 12 months of his stay at the Pelican Ranch, Spook had been permitted special access to the community dayroom. There were no computers or electronics that he could use, but there were hundreds of magazines and second- and third-rate books -- fiction and non-fiction alike -- and Spook relished his time with them as though they were close and dearly appreciated friends. The precious minutes that would total less than a single day of time opened a personal infinity within McEntyre. He found a world that was so barely populated it could contain anything he desired in it. A place free from distraction and hassle and ambivalence and lies. The simple lines of text produced a sound he'd never heard. It was a sound that converted the prison wall into temple walls. He experienced divinity. He experienced God. 

His curiosity led him from one tale and journey to another: stories of people confused by love; stories of people corrupted with hate; the weak & the strong; the wild and the domesticated. They invited him to use introspection and to sharpen his skills of critical thinking. Every time he picked up something new or something familiar, his inner-self charged with the promise of random answer... And in that anthology of printed time, he stumbled into the Gemini Case of the 1960s and 70s. For those who are unfamiliar and for those who have forgotten: The Gemini Killer his/their first victim in 1969 on a quiet and essentially unpatrolled backroad in the hills of San Francisco. The woman, Sandra Longsbaugh, is believed by many people to have known her attacker. She was shot multiple times with a .44 caliber pistol and her body was discovered the next day by a patrol car in the performance of its daily duties. There are no persuading theories to explain how precisely the Gemini Killer tracked her there... Regardless, her death -- along with the six others that Gemini took credit for in the following years -- was punctuated letters to newspapers and police departments bragging about the killer's murderous agility and the authority's fecklessness in apprehending him. The letters became more infamous than the crimes they illustrated. 

They are also what lead cartoonist-turned-journalist Albert Graystone to his own personal obsession with the case. Graystone had been a fairly average illustrator. His drawings were largely concerned with American Imperialism, the rights of women and minorities, with occasional interludes into the environment and technology. Perhaps he'd arrived at some unpredictable and inevitable crossroads where he was neuro/anatomically predisposed to go into a deeper potency o grievous fascination.  He studied Gemini the way a hunter studies the forest, everything a maybe, everything going down longer roads into mystery and oblivion... It would ultimately cost him his marriage and burden his relationship with his children in addition to much professional scorn and discourtesy from other journalists, accomplished and unaccomplished alike. He wondered in print and in private, many times, if he wasn't wasting his life chasing something that would never be caught. 

And Spook poured himself into that chronology. Graystone and Gemini and the names of the victims occupied Spook's mind with the whispered memories of his own missing father. To be sure: Spook never considered that Andrew McEntyre to be a victim of Gemini's and the chance of otherwise is so remote from possibility it is not worth speculating. But the void of an absent father is one to eternally beg for solutions. In Spook's heart, at the center of that skinny, fragile being, a sad cloud of the unknowable ridicules his very existence. Outright threatening might be preferred. At least then he'd suffer an injury or he wouldn't. The lack of obvious danger opened a window of constant anticipation. To be sure, it wasn't there from the beginning to the end of each day, and he could count on himself to live in the moment. But when he read a certain line in Graystone's book on Gemini, he took great and accidental solace in the words. The line was this: "The lack of evidence for a crime doesn't prove that the crime has gone uncommitted." 

Imagine that. Words to acknowledge the unacknowledgeable. An idea to give the inexpressible form. McEntyre felt the weights of doubt and futility become undone from his shoulders and the years of weariness dissolved into a meaningless shadow. He didn't have the confidence to be a journalist. He thought he was a lot smarter than most of the idiots that he hung around, but he wasn't sure he was smart enough to write. Little ideas, half-formed images bubbled up from his subconscious. The angry faces of adults. The perpetual confusion of crestfallen children. The cacophonous and ordered world that is everything everyone will ever inhabit: It had all been summarized in a high school-dropout, ex-con, ne'er-do-well who could only look up at the empty stars to see what happened to his father.  

[End of Part One] 

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