I turned a page of the Rugglestone file, saw diagrams of the empty warehouse where Hardiman had inexplicably turned on him. The warehouse was gone now, a supermarket and dry cleaner’s in its place.

The diagram showed me where Rugglestone’s body had been found, tied to a chair, stabbed, beaten, and burned. It showed where Hardiman had been found by Detective Gerry Glynn, who was responding to an anonymous call, curled naked into a fetal position in the old dispatch office, his body saturated with Rugglestone’s blood, the ice pick four feet away from him.

How had Gerry felt, responding to an anonymous tip, walking in and finding Rugglestone’s body and then finding his partner’s son curled up with the murder weapon?

And who had called in the anonymous tip?

I flipped another page, saw a yellowed photo of a white van registered to Rugglestone. It looked old and uncared for and it was missing the windshield. The interior of the van, according to the report, had been hosed down within the last twenty-four hours prior to Rugglestone’s death, the panels wiped clean, yet the windshield had been demolished only recently. Glass filled the driver and passenger seats, glistened in rocks on the floor. Two cinderblocks rested in the center of the van floor.

Somebody, probably kids, had tossed the cinderblocks through the windshield while the van was parked outside the warehouse. Committing vandalism while Hardiman committed murder only a few feet away.

Maybe the vandals had heard noise from inside, recognized it as something insidious and called in the anonymous tip.

I looked at the van for another minute, and I felt something akin to dread.

I’ve never liked vans. For some reason which I’m sure Dodge and Ford would love to eradicate, I associate them with sickness—with drivers who molest children, with rapists idling in supermarket parking lots, with childhood rumors of killer clowns, with evil.

I turned the page, came upon Rugglestone’s toxicology report. He’d had large quantities of both PCP and methy-lamphetamine in his system, enough to keep him awake for a week. He’d counterbalanced these with a blood alcohol level of .12, but even that much booze, I was sure, couldn’t override the effects of so much artificial adrenaline. His blood would have been electrified.

How did Hardiman, twenty-five pounds lighter, manage to tie him down?

I flipped another page, found the postmortem report of Rugglestone’s injuries. Even though I’d heard both Gerry Glynn and Bolton’s accounts, the magnitude of damage done to Rugglestone’s body was almost impossible to comprehend.

Sixty-seven blows from a hammer found under a chair in the dispatch office with Alec Hardiman. Blows came from a height of seven feet and from as close as six inches. They came from the front, the back, the left, and the right.

I opened the Hardiman file, placed the two side by side. At his trial, Hardiman’s defense lawyer had argued that his client had suffered nerve damage to his left hand as a child, that he wasn’t ambidexterous, that he couldn’t have swung a hammer with such force using his left hand.