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There’s a backpack in the evidence locker, plain and black with an off-brand logo on the front. The tag reads Kobble, Dale - 1/14/1992 and Lee doesn’t know how to handle seeing her own birthday next to his name. To be fair, she doesn’t really know how to handle anything anymore. Just like she doesn’t know what to do about her mother’s funeral having to be postponed, because every news station from here to Portland leaked the precise location of where Ruth Harker’s wake was taking place. That was the day Lee found out the rest of the world decides what becomes of a person after they die, no matter what she has to say about it. Nobody else knows her mother as mother, only as some pathetic amalgamation of victim and monster.
Somehow, that was easier to parse. Nobody had ever been there for Ruth and Lee to begin with, so she never expected anyone to be there now that she is the only one left.
Nobody came for Dale Kobble, either. She suspects nobody ever did and the ways in which they are the same have begun to pile up. Lee had no legal right to take his belongings out of the evidence room, but if she didn’t do it then another agent would’ve and all of this shit will eventually end up on some morbid collectors market. Sold to the sort of people who have drawings from John Wayne Gacy hung on their walls. Why she doesn’t just let it go, why she feels a desperate ache to hoard every piece of this man for herself, Lee doesn’t know and cannot begin to pick apart. Maybe it’s that he feels like part of her life, he was there and that matters, even if it's only to her.
Why it does is another thing she refuses to look too deeply at.
So she loads up her Chevy with evidence boxes and the belongings Dale was carrying when he was arrested; a guitar case with a cherry red electric Turner guitar inside, a suitcase filled with nothing but notebooks covered in ciphers and Satanic text in rambling shorthand, and a backpack that had its contents emptied into one of a dozen cardboard boxes. She begins sorting through as she sits on her bed crisscross, plucking out broken pencils and a pack of half-eaten fruity bubblegum. There isn’t much of note in it, nothing different from the suitcase really, but from the box containing whatever was in his coat pockets she finds a faded leather wallet with his ID and it makes her feel seasick the second she sees his placid face looking back at her.
Lee doesn’t look through the evidence box again for ten years, trying to forget about it all hidden away in her spare room that’s become a mausoleum and when she does it is no easier than the first time. Within Dale’s wallet she finds a punch card for the same coffee shop she’s stopped at since college, the one right on the corner by the drugstore and she finds a crumpled receipt with a pack of Winston's in the box too. He was getting coffee on Sunday’s, then picking up the same brand of cigarettes her own mother smoked. People knew him, recognized him, maybe even thought he was a polite oddity of a customer.
Did her mother and Dale ever smoke together on the porch? Did they get coffee and argue while she was out at Quantico? Something bores down around her, the weight of gravity pressing in on all sides, and suddenly Lee cannot breathe through how much it all hurts. Impossibly, she thinks, he’d be sorry for it.
The week after, Lee is brave enough to click open his guitar case to inspect it for herself. It is far from new, little scuffs along the flared edges and chips of paint worn away around the neck. She realizes it's the places his fingers have sat, Dale Kobble’s hands wearing down the finish on wood over nineteen years. Probably longer. Lee has never played a guitar before, so it’s an awkward fumble to get the frayed strap over her head and adjust the bulk of it in her lap. Fits her hand over the same grooves Dale has left behind, as if he has drawn her a map with his own fingerprints.
There’s vinyl records in a box she managed to save from the dumpster, most of it is rock music she hasn’t heard much of. Lou Reed, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and the like. There’s a little bit of Fleetwood Mac in there too and she likes them a lot. Did he ever hear her listening to the radio? Was he downstairs straining to pick out the chorus to Dreams while she got ready for school in the morning? More questions build and build and build, but she’s never going to get an answer and that's why it aches as it does.
Maybe she could’ve, if she’d known what he would do when pushed.
The psychiatrist at work said it’s survivor’s guilt and that might be part of it, but mostly it’s that she watched someone die choking on his own blood and spitting out his own gnarled teeth. Lee doesn’t even know what she expected out of that, why she went to see him all alone, only that an inescapable pull in her gut drove her down to the holding cell and the way he had smiled at her hurt. He looked at her like she mattered to him, like he cared about her. Maybe even loved her, in some way. To be cared about by Longlegs was painful, she did the only thing she could when the embarrassment of how weak she felt became consuming.
Whatever she thought he’d do, whatever she wanted from him, it wasn’t that. She didn’t want him to die. A lotta people did, though. People who don’t care about anything beyond whatever their sense of justice demands, so when she cried and told them all she’s sorry they looked at her like she’s nuts. Why is she sorry, if the monster is gone? Why? A decade later and sometimes Lee still has these moments where things get a little squirrelly in her head, so now she’s stuck at home on ‘medical’ leave and waiting on the results of another psych eval, lingering in this painful limbo of if she’ll be told they think she’s too kooky for field work again.
They’ve thought it for long enough that she’s surprised she lasted as long as she had.
A month and a half after she first brought all of Dale Kobble’s belongings home, she attended his funeral because nobody else would. There wasn’t a pastor to read bible passages about righteousness and forgiveness, because everyone knows he wouldn’t give a damn anyway, so she stood there in her jeans and sweater and watched dirt go over top of him - just like her mother. She said sorry to them both and wondered if they’re with the Devil, listening. If they forgive her.
When she gets home on a rainy afternoon in the year of 2002, it’s from having to turn over her firearm - all while someone far higher up the chain than herself examines the answers she gave in therapy for proof of her instability. Lee immediately returns to emptying Dale’s wallet in hopes she’ll find any answers at all. A note. A phone number. Anything. She finds a photograph folded behind his debit card, her own face smiling back at her as she stands on the porch with her new backpack on for the first day of school. The date in the corner is the year she turned ten. This very same photo had been pinned to her mother’s fridge for decades, Ruth had given him a copy and Dale had kept it for just as long.
He smiled when he saw her at the station.
He cried.
Lee sets it all back in the evidence box, drops her face into her hands, and sobs until it hurts. Howls out the pain until she’s choking on it and can hardly stop now that she’s started. She wails and she sobs and she says sorry while not even knowing what she’s sorry for. Everything. All of it. His life, her own. Choices she cannot take back because he’s gone and won’t ever be there to hear her regret it.
“What do you want from me?” She pleads to the horned shadow in her doorway, because the Devil has never once left her.
The Devil doesn’t speak, only watches. A silent observer.
It takes her another week to actually look at all those notebooks Dale has left behind, or rather for her to look with intention. Searching, desperate, for a scrap of anything to make this all better. An answer to something, somewhere, to put her why’s away for good. None of it made a lick of sense to her the first time she flipped through the pages years ago, all arcane scribbling and half rambling notes, but as she goes through with intent she finds the words no longer jumble together and the symbols speak to her more clearly.
Whatever insanity lived within Dale Kobble, this much was real, the Devil is real.
Or, maybe, she’s breathed in the spores roosting within these pages and has caught the same sickness he had. That her mother contracted, like touching black mold. She won’t know for certain if she doesn’t try.