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anything of it. It was a part of life, as they say.

The basement was creepy, all old wood and water-stained ce-
ment where the ceiling's fluorescent bulb could only make more visible
the prevailing darkness. On one of the support beams, someone had left:
a list of names scratched into the wood.

The attic access was nailed shut. The garage was locked and its
windows were painted over. The funeral home used those areas for stor-
age. We'd joke about what might be in there.

Since the house was near the University, every Saturday and Sunday
morning the yard would be peppered with empty cans, burnt down
butts and the soft:former rectangles of cigarette packs. Alex once wit-
nessed a drunk girl peeing in our grass.

Before my family lived there, it had been rented to a group
of students. We'd heard that it had been a notorious party house, that
people as far as four blocks away had called the police to report noise
violations. When we first moved in, as we were unloading the truck, a
car full of backwards-hatted dudes slowed, rolled down their window
and told my brother and me we rocked, oblivious to the moving truck
we were unloading and apparently oblivious to whoever lived there
before.

§

Near the front door of Lindsey's apartment, James Edward
Cooke Jr., a 34-year-old black man, wrote "KKK" and a number of
racial slurs on the wall with blue magic marker, an apparent attempt to
throw investigators off his trail. Magic marker in calming blue; not red
spray paint, not even a black Sharpie. It must have been a last minute
idea, half thought out. He must have seen the magic marker sitting on
a table or counter top inside the apartment and thought, I know, if I
write "White Power" on the wall, the cops won't even consider that a
non-white person could have done this. Lindsey, by the way, was white.
Surveillance cameras recorded a few images of Cooke when he used
Lindsey's card at an ATM. Grainy, but good enough to make a sketch of
his approximation.

In all honesty, I don't see the resemblance between the draw-
ing and the mugshot. I'm no art critic, but the drawing sucks. It has
that high-school sketchbook look, with big, heavily outlined lips that

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