When Ballard got the job of city manager in Weldonville, Leah was upset and angry. Weldonville was her hometown, and his arrival seemed to her to put her family home in a forbidden zone. But six months after the Ballards had moved to Weldonville and Mark was managing the public works, water, power, and buildings, Leah applied to the Weldonville Police Department and was hired as a detective sergeant, her rank in the state police. A couple of years later she was promoted to lieutenant.

The night of July 19, Leah was awakened by the sound of distant gunfire when the first twelve escaped inmates arrived in town driving the cars of dead guards. The gunshots were single events—maybe a shot or two, and then no more shots for a few minutes—because they were the sounds of an escapee shooting an unarmed person in a dead guard’s house. There were no gunfights, no rounds of return fire at first.

A complication was that July 19 was one of the regular nights when Mark Ballard slept at Leah Hawkins’s house instead of at home. The story for the benefit of others was that he was in Denver on those nights working on Weldonville’s relationship with the state government and consulting on public projects for the city of Denver for extra money. On those nights, his car was parked at the train station and his wife, Marcia, had a visiting nurse scheduled to be with her.

Leah was up in a second, and was at her dresser stepping into some underpants and hooking a bra in front of her, spinning the clasps around to her back and putting her arms under the straps, and then pulling on a black long-sleeve pullover. She tugged up a pair of jeans, stepped into some black running shoes, then knelt and tied them. She put on her utility belt with the police equipment, took two extra loaded magazines from her dresser, and only then looked in the direction of the bed.

She expected to see him still lying there naked with only his feet under the sheet, and the blissful look he often had when he had fallen asleep after sex. He wasn’t there. He was up, buttoning his dress shirt with his sport coat already over it and his belt buckled. Then he was at the side of the bed with the drawer of the nightstand open, taking out her spare Glock 17.

“Hold on,” she said. “I’m just going out to see what it is.”

“You know what it is.” He stuck the pistol into his belt at the small of his back. “I’ll just borrow this and go along for the ride. That’s all.”

“Mark—”

“You know I can shoot and I can see behind you.”