He saw the detective wheel aside, disappearing from the window.

Cowart stood rigid for an instant, letting the night envelop him. Then he strode away, walking slowly at first but rapidly gaining momentum and pace until he was marching briskly across the town, the words that would become his story beginning to gather deep within him, parading in military array across his imagination.

7. Words

Returning home, however, a spreading exhaustion forced the living to fade into his notebooks and let the dead take over his imagination.

It was late, well past midnight on a clear Miami night and the sky seemed an endless black painted with great brushstrokes into an infinity of blinking starlight.

He wanted someone to share his impending triumph but realized there was no one. All were gone, stolen by age, divorce, and too many dyings. Especially he wanted his parents, but they were long gone.

His mother had died when he was still a young man. She'd been mousy and quiet, with an athletic, bony thinness that made her embrace hard-edged and brittle, which she'd compensated for with a soft, almost lush voice used to great advantage in storytelling. A product of times that had created her as a housewife and kept her mired there, she'd raised him and his brothers and sisters in an endless cycle of diapers, formula, and teething that had given way to scraped knees and imaginary hurts, homework, basketball practices, and the occasional, inevitable heartbreaks of adolescence.

She'd died swiftly but undramatically at the beginning of her old age. Inoperable colonic cancer. Five weeks, a magical, steady progression from health to death, marked daily by the yellowing of her skin and growing weakness in her voice and walk. His father had died right along with her, which was odd. As Matthew had grown older, he had come to know of his father's boisterous infidelities. They had always been short-lived and poorly concealed. In retrospect they had seemed far less evil than the affair with the newspaper, which had robbed him of time and sapped his enthusiasm for being with his family. So, when his father had followed her funeral with six months of obsessive, endless weeks devoted to work, only to announce at the end that he was taking early retirement, it had surprised all the children.

They had had long conversations on the telephone, questioning his act, wondering what he would do, all alone in a big and now insistently empty, echoing suburban home, surrounded by young families who would find his presence unusual and probably unsettling. Matthew Cowart had been the last of a half-dozen children, grown into teachers, a lawyer, a doctor, an artist, and himself and spread across the states, none close enough to help their father, suddenly old. They had all failed to see the obvious. He'd shot himself on his wedding anniversary.

I should have known, he thought. I should have seen what was coming. His father had called him two nights earlier. They'd talked gingerly, distantly, about news stories and reporting. His father had said, 'Remember: It's not the facts that they want. It's the truth.' He had rarely said that sort of thing to his son before, and when Cowart had tried to get him to continue, he'd gruffly signed off.

The police had found him sitting at his desk, a small revolver in one hand, a bullet wound in his forehead, and her picture in his lap. Cowart had spoken with the detectives afterward, forever a reporter, forcing them to describe the scene with all the small details that, once heard, could never be forgotten, and stripped the dying of all its drama: that his father'd worn old red slippers and a blue business suit and a flowered tie that she'd purchased for him some forgettable Father's Day in the past; that a copy of that day's edition of the paper, red-penciled with notes, had been spread before him on the desk next to a diet soda and a half-eaten cheese sandwich. He'd remembered to write a check to the cleaning lady and left it taped to his antique green-shaded banker's lamp. There had been a half-dozen crumpled papers strewn about his chair, tossed haphazardly aside, all notes started and abandoned, to his children.

The stars blinked above him.

I was the youngest, he thought. The only one to try his profession. I thought it would make us closer. I thought I could do it better. I thought he would be proud. Or jealous.

Instead, he was more remote.

He thought of his mother's smile. His daughter's reminded him of her. And I let my wife take her with hardly a whimper. He felt a sudden dark emptiness at that thought, which was instantly replaced with the nightmare memory of the crime-scene photographs of little Joanie Shriver.

He lowered his head and peered down the street. In the distance, he could see the boulevard glistening with yellow streetlamps and the sweeping headlights of passing cars. He turned away, hearing a siren wailing some way away, and entered his apartment building. He rose in the elevator, stepped across the corridor, and opened the door to his apartment. For an instant, he hesitated in the entranceway, flipping on the lights and peering about himself. He saw a bachelor's disarray, books stuffed into shelves, framed posters on the walls, a desk littered with papers, magazines, and clipped articles. He looked about for something familiar that would tell him he was home. Then he sighed, locked the door behind himself, and went about the business of unpacking and going to bed.

Cowart spent a long week working the telephone, filling in the background for the story. There were brusque calls to the prosecutors who'd convicted Ferguson and didn't want to talk with any reporters. There were longer calls to the men who'd worked the cases against Blair Sullivan. A detective in Pensacola had confirmed Sullivan's presence in Escambia County at the time of Joanie Shriver's murder; a gasoline credit-card receipt from a station near Pachoula was dated the day before the girl was murdered. The prosecutors in Miami showed Cowart the knife that Sullivan had been using when he was arrested; it was a cheap, nondescript four-inch blade, similar but not identical to the one he'd found beneath the culvert.

He had held the knife in his hand and thought: It fits.

Other pieces fell into line.

He spoke at length with officials at Rutgers, obtaining Ferguson's modest grade record. He'd been a steady, insistently indifferent student, one who seemed to possess only meager interest in anything other than completing his courses, which he'd done steadily, if not spectacularly. A proctor in a dorm remembered him as a quiet, unfriendly underclassman, not given to partying or socializing in any distinguishable fashion. A loner, the man had said, who kept primarily to himself and had moved into an apartment shortly after his first year at the university.

Cowart spoke to Ferguson's high-school guidance counselor, who said much the same, though pointed out that in Newark, Ferguson's grades were much higher. Neither man had been able to give him the name of a single real friend of the convicted man.

He began to see Ferguson as a man floating on the fringe of life, unsure of himself, unsure of who he was or where he had been going, a man waiting for something to happen to him, when the worst possible thing had swept him up. He did not see him as much innocent as a victim of his own passivity. A man to be taken advantage of. It helped him to understand what had happened in Pachoula. He thought of the contrast between the two black men at the core of his story: One didn't like pitching and reeling in the back of a bus, the other ran out under fire to help others. One drifted through college, the other became a policeman. Ferguson hadn't had a chance, he thought, when confronted by the force of Tanny Brown's personality.