by Gil Reavill
Finally, she broke. Three weeks had been long enough. Carrying a supply of freshly laundered towels, she crossed the street to her father’s house and found him dead in the front hall.
Helen wept over the still-raw memory. Tom and I waited, suffering along with her. She dried her eyes.
The round metal film canister with the original 1910 Edison print inside had somehow gone missing, she said. Tom and she had been unable to locate it in a first cursory search amid the chaos of her father’s house.
“I think he loved that movie more than he loved his own grandchildren,” Helen said. “I want to find it, because I want to put his ashes in the canister.
It would only be fitting, Helen said, a trace of bitterness playing amid her sadness. “It was the most important thing in his life.”
CHAPTER SIX
Every Unhappy Family
Dan Doggett’s alma mater
London’s lasting shame with many a foul and midnight murther fed.
—Thomas Gray
And if you tease the ragamuffin, gal, you gonna get kill.
—“Murder She Wrote,” Chaka Demus & Pliers
Familiarity breeds murder. An axiom of homicide investigation, “Look closest first,” means that in any killing, immediate family members, other relatives, co-workers, friends, roommates, acquaintances, and neighbors will receive the brunt of a detective’s early attention. Less than a quarter of all murders are committed by strangers. Of all the risk-taking behaviors in which humans indulge, the deadliest may be mundane, mild-mannered propinquity. This fact, along with the news that parents treat ugly children more harshly than pretty ones, establishes the world as a cruel place.
Because of the nature of Aftermath’s business, based on indoor cleanup scenes, the company’s experience with homicide was skewed even more than usual toward domestic killings. The nuclear family often blows up. Love fails, or, at least, does not prevail. Working at Aftermath fostered a cynical attitude toward the family. I came to regard other people’s families as suspect, because I knew at any moment there could be blood on the walls. But it also made me feel a desperate tenderness for my own warm, friendly, nonhomicidal hearth. We were an island surrounded by shipwrecks. Brother kills brother, mother kills infant, husband kills wife and offspring. It made me long for a good old-fashioned Charlie Manson–style home invasion.
Early fall in the London Terrace subdivision of Oak Park, Michigan, failed to show the new development off to its favor. There were no mature trees to burst into color, only thin, shivering striplings, newly planted and, a few of them, already dead. The muddy landscaping was clearly a work in progress.
But to Donal and Marjorie Koss, London Terrace was paradise. They had worked hard for a decade and a half—Donal as a masonry contractor, Marjorie in social services—to be able to afford their dream home. They had moved north, to the “good” side of 8 Mile Road, into a community of upwardly mobile African-Americans just like them. Their quiet, studious daughter, Myesha, had graduated high school as class valedictorian, and had just matriculated into an accelerated premed program at Wayne State, close to home.
When eighteen-year-old Myesha first saw the four-bedroom single-family house of tan brick in London Terrace, she burst into tears. “I never thought we’d live anyplace this nice,” she explained to her parents.
The only shadow in the Kosses’ blue sky was their son, Myesha’s older brother. Twenty-two-year-old Tarell—the family pronounced the name with the accent on the last syllable—had a little problem getting started in life. He couldn’t seem to gain traction in anything he tried to do. After getting tossed out of Fenwick by the stern Dominicans who ran the Catholic high school, he meandered through River Forest High with a low C average, never applying himself. He preferred video games, especially racing video games (“Need for Speed: Porsche” was his favorite, ahead of “F1 2000” and “Mobil 1 Rally Championships”).
Tarell and Myesha never got along. She always had afterschool jobs and always had money. He never had any. The white pit bull that the family bought as a prize for moving into their dream home was always Myesha’s dog. Miss Moneypenny, she called it, after the James Bond secretary, Money for short. When Myesha called her dog, she would say, “Come here, Money,” and Tarell made fun of her for sounding white, for acting like a cash-grubbing striver.
What Tarell loved more than anything else was muscle cars. All the Koss men did. Donal had a Victory Red 2002 Corvette parked in the two-car garage of the London Terrace house. Donal’s two brothers, Tarell’s uncles, had a fleet of five between them, two Corvettes, a cherry GTO, a tricked-out Camaro, and the family pride and joy, a Dodge Viper. For a while there, Tarell had his own, a blue 1998 Camaro with a white hood stripe.
Donal took it away, sold the Camaro right out from under him. He and Marjorie disapproved of the way Tarell spent his time. The last straw was a gun charge Oak Park police leveled against Tarell in the summer of 2005, “unlawful use of a weapon.” Police said Tarell had pulled a little .22 automatic on a man he thought owed him fifty dollars on a bet. The charges were dropped and the pistol was destroyed, but from that minute on, Donal kept his son on a short leash.
“You can have a car when you get a job,” Donal said. “No job, no car.”
Tarell didn’t give in. Not right away. It took him six months to gain employment, a half year in which he regularly indulged in screaming fits directed at his parents and his sister. He was nasty, delighting in making fun of his mother’s religious devotion, her “Jesus shit,” as he called it. It didn’t help that during that period, the brilliant Myesha finished her high school education with a bang, delivering a valedictory address at graduation. Tarell didn’t show for the ceremony.
He finally did land a job, a miserable gig at a telemarketing firm in Ferndale. He had to take the bus to work, listen to people curse and hang up on him for eight hours, then take the bus back. And still Donal would not relent. He didn’t get a car, Donal said, until he proved himself.
It seemed to Tarell as if they were all trying to goad him, trying to get him to explode. Like the jokey card Donal and Marjorie had given him for his twenty-second birthday that September.
“Son,” the front of the card read, “I wanted to get you a Jaguar for your birthday…” Inside, when you opened it up, was the kicker: “…But the darn things need so much exercise and raw meat and they roar really loud in the morning like you wouldn’t believe! Happy Birthday anyway!”
Tarell had actually talked to his father before about getting one of the big-engined twelve-cylinder British Jags, an old beater maybe, working on it together, making it purr.
Donal rebuffed him. “You buy a Jaguar, you might as well get a couple, because one of ’em is going to be broke down all the time.”
Then, as if twisting the knife, they gave Tarell this motherfucking birthday card. Making a joke out of his one passion! He literally tossed the stupid card back into Donal’s face.
“I’m sick of you all,” he screamed, before storming out. But there was nowhere to go. London Terrace was in the middle of nowhere. He didn’t even have bus fare. Happy birthday, Tarell.
Tarell’s relationship with his family degenerated to the point where Marjorie could not even talk to her own son. She wrote him a careful, two-page letter. “Pray to find your right path,” she wrote. “Put your faith in God.” Exactly the kind of thing that drove Tarell up the wall.
Two weeks into his telemarketer job, he had had enough. Of everything. With his first paycheck, he bought a .40-caliber Glock automatic at Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale, the single largest supplier of guns traced to crimes in the nation. The law demanded a three-day cooling-off period.
Tarell waited the three days.
After he took the gun home and did what he felt he had to do, he faked a note from Donal on the front door of the London Terrace dream house. “Sorry all, we missed you. My wife has been in a bad car accident. We will be in contact soon.”
Then he too
k Donal’s money roll, backed his father’s muscle car out of the garage, and drove the red Corvette to Detroit Metro. He parked the car in the airport’s short-term parking garage. Packing the Glock in his checked baggage, he watched his green duffel slip through the new X-ray security procedures unscathed. Then he flew to New York’s Kennedy Airport, booked another flight to Tampa, and wound up in Florida on a rainy fall morning.
The tempo of Tarell Koss’s last hours picked up. In short order he bought a car, paying eleven hundred dollars of his daddy’s cash, not for the muscle machine of his dreams, but for a used, piece-of-shit 1992 Toyota Tercel. The most boring, common vehicle on the road. Driving north three hundred miles to the outskirts of Tallahassee, he checked into a motor inn off Interstate 10, again paying cash for the first-floor room. A housekeeper checked his room at eleven o’clock the next morning, opening the door a crack until the security chain stopped her, and saw Tarell lying on the bed. Later that afternoon, the motel manager broke down the door, discovering Tarell Koss dead from a gunshot wound to his head. The Glock lay on the floor beside him.
No suicide note, but fevered scribbles on a pad of paper next to the bed. “You arnt a good Christin evn tho you say you are. You wont hep yor on son.” The writing dug angrily into the pad, breaking through the paper in places.
Jacksonville authorities, discovering Tarell’s expired Michigan driver’s license among his effects, contacted the Oak Park PD, who dutifully drove out to the London Terrace subdivision to notify the family that their eldest had most likely committed suicide in a Florida motel. Officers found Tarell’s note on the front door. No one answered their knock, and when they broke in, they were confronted with a bloodbath.
Donal and Marjorie, shot to death in the upstairs master bedroom. Myesha, also shot to death, with Miss Moneypenny dead beside her in her bedroom. Police noted the special ferocity of the attack on Myesha. The killer had pumped thirteen bullets into her body, then used a carpet knife implement to nearly sever her head from her body.
Greg Banach’s last name rhymes with manic, and he was legendary among Aftermath techs as “Manic Banach,” an intense, junk-food-fueled motormouth who reigned at the top of the company’s pecking order. He had been with the company for five years, and it showed. Banach could attack any job, deconstructing a badly contaminated room down to its floor beams. He had developed numerous arcane tricks over years of practice. But he appeared brittle around the edges. Despite his bluster (“I don’t give a shit—I can stick my face in a bowl of Chinese restaurant rice after scooping up maggots by the handful”), he suffered from bad dreams.
Banach’s compact stature contrasted nicely with his partner, the bearlike Greg Sundberg. To invoke the medieval theory of humors, if Banach had an excess of bile, then Sundberg was phlegmatic in the extreme, gentle, happy, slow to antagonize or excite.
I first worked with them on a rifle suicide in Joliet, where a sixty-five-year-old man shot himself in the basement of his house. The bullet exited the top of his head, passed upward through the first floor, and put a hole in the roof. We confronted a gory, blood-spattered scene in a basement room filled with huge black plastic fish-breeding tanks. The deceased had bred exotic tropicals all his life, but was seeing himself shoved out of the market by the big chain stores.
“This was murder by Wal-Mart,” his son-in-law said. “All he wanted to do in life was raise exotic fish, and when he found he couldn’t do it…”
Banach eased the son-in-law back upstairs, away from the scene. He was a master in handling grief-addled relatives, giving them firm but unsentimental direction. I could never figure out where the Aftermath techs, most of them twentysomething ex-jocks, developed their skills of sympathy and discretion. But it was true. I was always afraid of saying the wrong thing, but every one of them appeared to be unerring.
Banach had a mouth like Samson had hair. I once tape-recorded and transcribed a five-minute stretch of Banach talking. Within those five minutes he spoke 374 words. I counted.
Working with “Greg and Greg,” as the two-man crew of Banach and Sundberg were known, was a whole different experience from Dave and Ryan. Banach had no interest whatsoever in training me or having me help. I was a sounding board for him. I sat on the floor of the fish-tank basement and listened to him bitch about his job.
The money (not enough). The hours (too many). The way that whenever you plan to do anything with your family, inevitably you get called away on a job. Aftermath techs were on call twenty-four hours a day.
Every so often he stopped for breath. “Right, Greg?” he’d say, and Sundberg would say, “Right.” Eventually Banach’s constant chorus of “Right, Greg?” got to me. I realized he was actually talking to himself, asking himself if he was right. The answer always came back in a comforting echo. The first dozen times I heard the taciturn Sundberg speak, it was always the same word: “Right.”
All the while Banach chattered, he was mopping up a bloodstain the size of a bathtub, from where the rifle suicide had bled out. There was a special Aftermath technique to cleaning up blood. The techs tossed a bundle of clean, factory-produced, white terry-cloth rags into a bucket containing a solution of TR-32 deodorizer and Thermo-55 disinfectant. They would spray the bloodstain with Liquid Alive, an enzyme that loosened it, then fish a rag out of the bucket and go to work. The rag never went back into the bucket. To prevent cross-contamination, the rags were discarded as soon as they had soaked up all the mess they could. For the final pass and for general biowashing, an industrial cleaning product called Spray & Wipe was the tech’s best friend.
“Now that’s how to clean a fucking bloodstain,” as Al Swearengen said on Deadwood. It was a simple process, and Banach managed to keep up a steady stream of verbiage all the while. After five years on the job, I would have bet he could do it in his sleep.
Using an aquarium net, dipping into the big black tanks, Sundberg fished out gray globs of brain matter, a bit of face with an eyelash still attached and white-gleaming pieces of skull. The angelfish had eaten the rest.
A week later, when I met Greg and Greg in front of the Koss death house in the London Terrace subdivision, Banach had gotten used to me to the degree he was now throwing an occasional “Right, Gil?” in among the constant dun of “Right, Greg?”
A cold fall evening in suburban Detroit. We were joined by Dan Doggett, a trainee who was preparing to open a California Aftermath office. Balding, intelligent, and earnest, Dan was the husband of longtime Aftermath office manager Nancy Doggett. The other techs all called him Mr. Smithers, off the Simpsons character, since he had previously worked nuclear power plants.
“I need all the experience I can get,” Doggett said that evening in London Terrace. He was explaining to Banach why he had shown up at the job unannounced.
“I don’t mind you coming along,” Banach said, his tone indicating that indeed he did mind. “I just wish they would tell me before they hand me a trainee. I think it’s right for the crew foreman to know something like that. Right, Gil?”
“Correct, Greg,” I barked. I thought he might think I was mocking him, but he was unfazed.
At the end of the Koss driveway neighbors and friends had started a memorial shrine going with a wreath of white roses tied to a driveway pillar. A note with the roses read, “May God bless you all. Your memory will always live on.” Down below, a plastic-wrapped bouquet of purple flowers.
As a decorative touch, the builder had topped the driveway pillar with a cherub reading a book (the book of love?) balancing on a mirror ball.
We geared up. The Oak Park CSI team was just leaving. “She’s all yours,” a detective said to Banach.
“Check,” he said. Banach loved hobnobbing with police. His brother and father were both police officers. For a long time he had owned a fully equipped police squad car. The only difference between it and an official black-and-white was its lighting array. As long as Banach didn’t utilize blue lights, the squad car was street legal in Illinois. Pervers
ely, Banach kept the backseat filled with stuffed teddy bears.
I always detected a slight pause, a wavering hesitancy, before an Aftermath crew entered a job site. Brief, almost unnoticeable, but it was there. I identified it as the “What fresh hell is this?” moment, after Dorothy Parker’s famous line. Just outside the front door of the Koss house, Banach poked his foot at a couple pairs of turned-inside-out green rubber gloves, discarded by police as they left.
We entered to a two-story vaulted foyer. A tan-carpeted stairway curved upward to our right, to the second floor, where Tarell Koss had killed his family. At the bottom of the stairs, the CSI team had casually left a clear plastic garbage bag of bloody latex gloves, soiled paper towels, and ripped-apart body-bag packaging.
“That’s nice,” Banach said. “Usually they don’t pick up after themselves at all. Right, Greg?”
The word brummagem describes cheap and showy ornamentation, the kind that puts mirror balls underneath cherubs. Inside, the Koss house continued the brummagem theme. A chandelier hung from the ceiling of the vaulted foyer, but it was Lucite, not crystal.
In the kitchen, downstairs, a bullet hole had blasted apart a piece of walnut molding. “He started down here,” Banach said, “then chased her upstairs.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because a cop told me that the parents were already dead when the sister came home. Look, you can track how he followed her.”
More bullet holes in the wall of hallway and foyer.
“A couple dozen fucking shell cases,” Banach said. “How many shots do you need to kill three people?”
We climbed the stairs. I imagined the sister running, screaming, away from her brother, trying to get to sanctuary. The white pit bull snarling. To the left, Myesha’s bedroom. Dog waste piled in the center of an air mattress, where Miss Moneypenny voided when she was shot. Underneath a chest of drawers, a sodden bloodstain the size of a small child gave off a foul odor.
