When the Night Comes Falling by Howard Blum

Author:Howard Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

As the days passed and the case dragged on inconclusively, Steve Goncalves struggled to make sense of his emotions. In the agonized aftermath of his daughter Kaylee’s murder, Steve, his wife, and their remaining children had been brought low. But more demonstratively than the others in the family, his anger, as displayed in his public utterances, spewed out raw and unfettered. One day he railed with an uncomprehending anguish at the injustice of it all. “You can’t imagine sending your girl to college and they come back . . . in an urn,” he grieved openly to a group of reporters. “You’re numb . . . you can’t absorb that amount of pain and agony.” Next he chose to scorn the capricious, faltering manner with which, he had decided, law enforcement had been attempting to solve the murders. “I do not feel confident,” he responded with a vehement candor, when asked on a news show what he thought about the police investigation. “And that’s why I push the envelope and say a little more.”

Yet even as he made himself available to nearly every journalist who reached out to him, Steve couldn’t help feeling, he confided to a friend, that all his heartfelt proclamations, everything he had been calling truths, added up to little more than a sort of self-indulgence. His public sharing of his anguish and misgivings gave him little comfort. “I hate to be that guy,” he would say.

More disheartening, after all his years as a father, of devoting himself full-time to what he thought best for his children, he was confronted with the devastating reality that there was nothing more he could do for Kaylee. And, hand in hand with that, another sorrow: he couldn’t identify a clear-headed strategy to lead his grieving family forward. Never had he been so unprepared, and yet never had his family needed him so much. He was at a loss.

For weeks he had been struggling. No dogma, only emotions. It was as if he’d been letting himself be tossed around by the surging waves of breaking news. But now finally he knew what he would do.

He would do it because for a father no sacrifice is too great. And a father’s duty to his child never ends, not even with her death.

He would do it because while he was a man alone, with his family’s support and assistance, they became a force whose commitment and focus was greater than anything the so-called authorities could muster.

He would do it because to walk any other path would be weakness, or even cowardice.

He would join the hunters. He would solve the case.

And he would do it because it was what his beloved Kay-Kay would have done—and had, in fact, tried to do.

OCTOBER 5, 2021, HAD BEEN a surprisingly cool Tuesday in Moscow, a day when the sudden drop in temperature was the first unwanted reminder that a glorious Indian summer was over and the northwest winter would soon be closing in.

Yet undeterred by the chill,

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