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121 " By May 16, a surge of newly installed floodlights lit up the east side like a Christmas tree. In one house tambourines were tied to every door and window. Hammers went under pillows. Nearly three thousand guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and May. Many people refused to sleep between one and four a.m. Some couples slept in shifts, one of them always stationed on the living room couch, a rifle pointed at the window. "
― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
122 " male tarantulas never return to their holes. They mate as much as they can and then die, from starvation or cold. "
123 " You know, and they feel Godlike because, in essence, they are controlling whether this victim lives or dies. "
124 " Every mother's brain cycles through the litany of terrible things that might befall her child. Rarely does the reverse occur. Why should it? Especially for teenagers, who between seeing their parents as God and then as human view them temporarily as an obstacle, a particularly cumbersome door that won't quite budge. "
125 " In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography. "
126 " He once interrogated a serial killer on death row in another state about a missing woman in Southern California police suspected him of killing. Pool suggested that the killer tell him where to find the body. It was the right thing to do. For his conscience. For the woman’s family. The killer began mild negotiations, remarking about the better conditions in California prisons. Maybe a transfer could be negotiated in exchange for information? Pool organized his paperwork and stood from the table. “You’ll die here,” he said and walked out the door. "
127 " That’s what we do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep. "
128 " Carol Daly was the lead female investigator on the task force. By the twenty-second rape, after another three a.m. trip to the hospital with a distraught victim, she surprised herself with a dark thought. I love my husband. I hate men. "
129 " The likelihood of any two individuals (except identical twins) having the same human bar code is roughly one in a billion. "
130 " The fact, too, that he was able, on a ten-speed, to evade an armed FBI agent pursuing him in a car, with a fleet of sheriff’s deputies on their way? Stan Los, the FBI agent who chased him, would later catch shit from local cops about why he didn’t shoot the guy. Los bristled at the taunt but remained resolute about his decision. All he had was a woman screaming and an ordinary white male on a bike who accelerated every time Los hollered or honked at him. He lacked the necessary context to shoot. "
131 " On April 6, 2001, two days after the news linking the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker hit the media, the phone rang in a house on Thornwood Drive in east Sacramento. A woman in her early sixties answered. She’d lived in the house for nearly thirty years, though her last name had changed. “Hello?” The voice was low. He spoke slowly. She recognized it immediately. “Remember when we played? "
132 " Washington’s Green River Killer. As it turned out, this prolific slayer of prostitutes was very much alive and well and living in suburban Seattle. His reason for slowing down? He’d gotten married. “Technology got me,” Gary Ridgway told cops, the verbal equivalent of an upturned middle finger. He was right. He fooled the cops for years by slackening his face and dimming the light in his eyes. No way this half-wit is a diabolical serial killer, they thought, and always, despite mounting evidence, they let him go. "
133 " 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. "
134 " On December 10, Detective Bill McGowen startled the Ransacker outside of the house; the suspect vaulted a fence and a chase ensued. When McGowen fired a warning shot the suspect gestured in surrender. “Oh my God, don’t hurt me,” he squeaked in an oddly mannered, high-pitched voice. “See? My hands are up!” The baby-faced man turned slightly, sneakily, and drew a gun from his coat pocket, promptly firing it at McGowen. McGowen fell backward and things suddenly went dark. The bullet had struck the officer’s flashlight. "
135 " One of the first examples of forensic science solving a murder appears in a book called The Washing Away of Wrongs, published in 1247 by Song Ci, a Chinese coroner and detective. The author relates a story about a peasant found brutally hacked to death with a hand sickle. The local magistrate, unable to make headway in the investigation, calls for all the village men to assemble outside with their sickles; they’re instructed to place their sickles on the ground and then take a few steps back. The hot sun beats down. A buzz is heard. Metallic green flies descend in a chaotic swarm and then, as if collectively alerted, land on one sickle, crawling all over it as the other sickles lie undisturbed. The magistrate knew traces of blood and human tissue attract blowflies. The owner of the fly-covered sickle hung his head in shame. The case was solved. "
136 " There’s a scream permanently lodged in my throat now. "
137 " Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time. "
138 " The ability to be tactful has always eluded me,” he says. "
139 " But there are hazards in having so much wizardry at hand. The feast of data means there are more circumstances to bend and connect. You’re tempted to build your villain with the abundance of pieces. It’s understandable. We’re pattern-seekers, all of us. We glimpse the rough outline of what we seek and we get snagged on it, sometimes remaining stuck when we could get free and move on. "
140 " The boy fell asleep. When he awoke, he peered over the bed. The EAR had left. His mother lay bound in strips of torn towels and was gagged with a washcloth. He mistook the ligatures for bandages. “Is the doctor gone?” he whispered. * "