“Good morning, T.C.” Quentin looked away for a moment. It was the first time they’d seen each other since the horrible murders up at Willis Good’s place.

Quentin was older than McCauley. He had just turned forty, his face still handsome and lean. People in town said he looked like an old-fashioned lawman, right out of a Louis L’Amour novel.

“It’s a damn shame, is what it is,” the sheriff said. “Why did Willis do it? I don’t understand. His wife and the two boys? I don’t understand, T.C. What makes people go off and do things like that? The kid had it all. He’d come so far.” It was as if they were still standing there, looking at Willis’s murdered wife and two small boys.

T.C. had seen a lot of cruelty in Iraq, the worst kind of wanton butchery. What he’d seen up at the Goods’ place was no easier to understand. T.C. looked out the window at his good friend, and beyond the sheriff at the wall of pine trees, their tops caked in snow, the snow painted by the morning’s first moments of light.

T.C. had known Quentin all his life. Quentin had chased him around the county when T.C. and his friends were teenagers. He’d always liked Quentin; seeing him always made him feel a little better about the world.

Quentin, he thought, should run for Congress. We should send him to Washington instead of the jack-holes up there now.

“I don’t know, Quentin,” T.C. said finally. They looked at each other blankly.

“They’re going to blow that snow bench this morning. Out at Emigrant Gap,” Quentin said. “I’m glad it’s you taking Willis to Sacramento—someone who knows him.”

“Yeah,” T.C. said. “I’m on the way to pick him up now. I promised his mother I’d be the one to take him.”

“The judge was right to send him for evaluation before the inquest,” Quentin said. “He’s crazy, if any human being ever was. Seven-Eleven coffee still as bad as ever?”

“I think it’s getting worse,” T.C. said, looking down at his cup. It started to snow harder. The small chink of red in the sky had closed as quickly as it had appeared. The mountains above Timberline had emerged, steel grey and ominous. The dawn had come and gone already.

“I’ll see you back at the office, then,” Quentin said. They couldn’t small-talk the murders away and they both knew it. It was preferable to move on than to think about it anymore.

“Say hi to the girls,” T.C. said, absent-mindedly. He almost mentioned that he’d seen Sharon, Quentin’s youngest daughter, out the night before with a known ex-felon and member of a white street gang who had moved up to town that summer and were suspected of cooking and selling crank. But he decided that it wasn’t the right time. Quentin nodded and said he would.

The men rolled up their windows. They glanced at each other one last time through the falling snow and the glass, as if they were looking at each other in a different light, wearing the expressions of great sadness grown men can wear when they confront the ugliness in life straight on.

Quentin drove off. T.C. sat contemplating the snow and the coldness of the landscape as if nature could deliver an answer to Willis’ crime. He shook his head, punched the gas pedal and drove faster than he should have into a morning that promised more bad weather.

CHAPTER 2

Miles Hunt, tall and thin, was sipping a Starbucks double latte. Standing alone, he looked out from the newspaper’s well-lit third-floor city room. At 6:00 a.m. it was still dark in Nevada City, dawn twenty minutes away. A hulking snowplow passed in front of the Nevada City Herald’s new six-story building. The newspaper served Nevada City and scores of the surrounding small communities across the Northern Sierra. The cub reporter wore a black turtleneck sweater his fiancé had bought him in New York City, in an attempt to dress him à la Esquire magazine. Miles sported shoulder-length blond hair that girls loved, his Nordic good looks a gift from his Swedish mother.

Miles touched his face and then his ears, which were still ice cold. He’d driven into work from his parents’ home in Timberline with his Mustang’s top down because he couldn’t afford to get it repaired.

Why don’t you get a better job? Why? Any job would be better than this. You have to leave town and go to San Francisco. Think up an app! Sell it to Apple for millions. What would it be? An app that eats student loan data! An app that blocks wedding-planners’ irritating emails, like the ones I’ve been getting all week: “Roses or Carnations? Boutonnieres for your guys—of course!

He’d begun forwarding questions relating to his upcoming nuptials to his fiancée, a budding fashion designer who worked for Lululemon. His fiancée was the daughter of a famous Hollywood producer, who was paying a small fortune for their wedding—solely, Miles realized, to impress the man’s horde of Gucci-clad friends, who expected a show. When Miles suggested they not have such an extravagant wedding, and instead donate some of the saved money to charity, the family—including his fiancée—had burst into laughter, thinking he was joking. They were all about the show of power.

Gazing out the window, Miles thought about the murders in Timberline and a chill went down his back. Like Willis Good, he too would soon be a young husband with responsibilities.  He’d come to realize, too, that his fiancée expected to live as if Miles were wealthy. She was already looking at homes they couldn’t possibly afford. This was it, he thought: student loans and a big fat mortgage. Maybe Willis had been under financial stress and snapped? He wondered what had happened to make Willis murder his wife and children. Willis had to be crazy.

He’d covered the story. The accused murderer, Good, had been a close childhood friend, and someone he’d thought he’d known well. If he’d not gone to the house and seen the family’s dead bodies, including the couple’s two little boys, with his own two eyes, he would not have believed it.

“What do we really know about the world?” Howard Price, the Herald’s managing editor asked, walking up behind him.

Miles stepped away from the window, gladly putting the murders in Timberline and his fully-mortgaged future aside.

“Really, what do we know, young man? How do you know that CNN isn’t all fiction, the whole thing?” Price said. He looked at Miles self-satisfied, his fifty-something face fleshy, robbing it of authority. Price was on his favorite tangent: the remarkable and ever present conspiracy of: fill-in-the-blank.

“And don’t forget Building Seven,” Miles said, “whatever you do.”

“Exactly,” Price said, turning serious. “Building Seven wasn’t hit by anything but debris and it collapsed like a house of cards! I watched it myself that morning. Concrete and steel don’t just collapse, son. There was a small fire in the building. Hundreds of engineers are saying the official government explanations are scientifically impossible.” Price walked away, checking his Facebook page on his new iPhone.

Miles had heard it all before. His editor had been fired from his six-figure salary at the LA Times because Price had refused to put down the 9-11 story long after everyone else in the country had moved on. Even in kooky, hippie-dippy Nevada City, most of Price’s colleagues considered him a tin-foil-hat-wearing wing nut. When Price tried to get his reporters to read the reports issued by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, no one bothered. The fact was, no one—even professional journalists—cared about the story. Mainstream journalists who still cared, like Price, found themselves without employment, lucky if they could find jobs on small-town papers.