Six

Later—much later—this policy of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department was to be the subject of fierce contention between the Sheriff’s Department and the Sacramento Coroner’s Office.

The Sheriff’s Department insisted that it was fruitless for them to pursue a criminal investigation in the absence of a cause of death; while the Coroner’s Office eventually insisted, in the light of subsequent events, that an investigation by the Sheriff’s Department might actually help establish the cause of death.

This chicken-and-egg conundrum was to bedevil both agencies for the better part of three years, while the death of Irene Barron slumbered in the cracks of the Sacramento County criminal justice system.

In retrospect, it appears that the Coroner’s Office had the better part of the argument. For, had the Sheriff’s Department initiated a serious investigation of the circumstances of Irene Barron’s death that spring, the chances are quite good that three other people might be alive today.

For one thing, insulated by the medical mystification of Schmunk, neither Lauther nor Reisdorph bothered to find out very much about Jack Barron, or the circumstances of the Barron family life before Irene Barron died. Had they inquired, they might well have discovered a number of facts that would have given them pause before deciding that Irene Barron’s death was none of their affair.

Nor did anyone consider some of the hidden, yet most astounding, coincidences in the lives of Irene Barron, Jack Barron, and their families—synchronicities that, if not necessarily directly indicative of what really happened to Irene that June night and morning, were at the very least powerful evidence of some sort of mysterious force that somehow pulls people together, in some sort of hardly understood yet still fated way—for good or ill.

Because, when it came to the lives of Irene and Jack Barron, there were by far too many otherwise meaningless coincidences: of names, of dates, of places, almost as if some controlling force had mixed up two families’ lives in some sort of macabre cosmic joke.