I started with the last question first. I reviewed my interview notes. Peg Donohue was the only person who alleged that Bill had hit Nick, but Michael Lauro and Randy Gifford corroborated her observation that Ryan’s personality went south after his friend Waldo’s death from AIDS, and he became withdrawn, angry and terrified. I had no trouble empathizing with him on that score. I could understand why his best friend’s horrifying death could have sent Ryan into a downward spiral. Had he taken Nick with him? Nick was young and impressionable. Ryan was his first lover, a driven and dominant man. I could imagine that what had begun as a relationship might have turned into a hostage situation. Maybe Nick had seen no other way out. Still, the young man I’d met hardly seemed self-assured enough to have planned a killing, much less be psychologically capable of killing his lover as he slept beside him.

Which brought me back to the question of method. Homicide by gas leak? Nick would not only have risked killing himself but blowing up the building, killing Peg Donahue, and torching the neighboring houses. I found PG&E’s incident report and reread it, looking for anything out of the ordinary. I found it at the bottom of the page where, beneath an illegibly scrawled signature, was the typed name of the inspector: Sal Trejo. Nick’s brother.

“Do you buy the official line?” I asked.

Pat Durand pushed the utility company report across his desk with a shrug.

“Well,” he allowed, “it could have happened that way. The gas line could have corroded and leaked or been knocked loose if the stove had been moved. But the occupants would have noticed the smell.”

Durand was an accident reconstruction expert recommended by a fellow lawyer who specialized in personal injuries cases. I was in his office in San Mateo, a big, bright room filled with charts, graphs, photographs and models, all of them illustrating the many ways in which humans meet with accidental misfortune. Duran was comfortably padded—the extra weight gave him gravity—and spoke with an easy authority that doubtless went over well with jurors.

“Isn’t gas odorless?”

“In the olden days,” he said. “Now gas companies treat it with a sulfur compound called mercaptan that smells like rotten eggs to alert people to a leak.”

“So, these men would have known there was a leak before it became fatal.”

“You’re more likely to die from a fall from your bed than a gas leak. It’s just not that common anymore.”

“The report says the leak was going on for some time. Could that mean weeks? Days?”