Free The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts by Laura Tillman

like a gang. That’s whom Miguel Angel hung out with, along with the little kids from the Rubio building.
    Then, on March 11, cop cars swarmed the street.The area was barricaded and the apartment cordoned off as evidence. When the police departed, Miguel Angel remembered going into the apartment and seeing the blood on the floor, the porn magazines. He even said that he had had a confrontation with John the day before the murders. John, Miguel Angel said, was standing on the sidewalk, hitting little John Stephan. Miguel Angel’s friends, a few of the Los Hernandez siblings, told John they were going to call Child Protective Services. According to Miguel Angel, John said he didn’t care if they called CPS. Miguel Angel said that a friend of his did, indeed, make a call, but that the children were dead the next day. I asked Miguel Angel why he wasn’t subpoenaed, why no onehad heard this perhaps crucial piece of information during either of the trials.
    â€œWe were always out there,” Miguel Angel said, indicating the corner where the neighborhood kids used to hang out across from the building. “They didn’t even ask us any questions. They just told everyone to clear out.”
    I found an article in The Houston Chronicle quoting a Maria Hernandez, mother of fourteen, who told the paper she had called the Brownsville Police Department shortly before the murders and reported that people in the apartment were using drugs.
    â€œThey never listened when I made the call,” she told the Chronicle . “It didn’t have to happen.”
    In the article, Police Chief Carlos Garcia said the department did get a call about the apartment. “But with those kinds of calls, you have to corroborate the information. We consider it intelligence,” he said. “You don’t just go and knock on people’s doors and violate their rights. Even if we had followed up on this information, that doesn’t mean these killings wouldn’t have happened.”
    Miguel Angel still kept watch on the building when he came to Brownsville and noted the changes. Even with my regular pilgrimages, I’d failed to notice a new fan in a second-floor window, above the Rubio apartment.
    â€œSomeone’s living in there,” he said.
    His girlfriend had heard the stories many times. The tale of the crimes had become part of Miguel Angel’s story. He looked over the evidence like a kid detective; through that final confrontation with John, he was linked to the day the crimes took place.
    An intangible echo of the children’s essence began to manifestthrough Miguel Angel’s stories. They were like shadows to me now: long and inexact and opaque, but a whisper more than nothing.
    At Good Neighbor, a couple of toddlers were eating lunch. One had curly hair, one straight. Their young mother scooped them up soon after I sat down at their table, along with slices of bread and cookies folded into napkins, taken home for later. Sister Luz Cardenas testified that she often saw John, Angela, and the children at Good Neighbor. John was always polite, she told the court, and would compliment the food. He was gentle with the children, serving them before he served himself. Angela, she said, was usually quiet.
    Within a few minutes I was asked if I was married by a large, sweaty man with a dead front tooth and was told a series of incoherent conspiracy theories by a kind-faced former scientist in need of psychiatric medication. The latter presented me a manila envelope full of papers and told me we were going to write a Nobel Prize–winning article together. Two of the documents were apparently from government entities in Switzerland and Mexico. One letter thanked the man for his paper and stated that it had indeed been accepted for a 1978 conference in Zurich. One sheet listed random names and phrases: Leon Panetta; Nikola Tesla; Cure for Cancer; Michael Faraday; Elixer; $93 Billion (ESCROW). He