Addis entered the revolving door to the Mayflower Hotel, and Starrell followed. He tried not to think the obvious: It all began here. With two people shot dead when they walked into a room floors above. But that was wrong. It had started somewhere else. Where? He could not say for sure. At the spot where Matthew Morrison’s father first learned his family had been shafted so the Hanovers could pocket $130,000? In the dining room of the director’s suite at CIA headquarters, where the director—now dead—had said to himself (or to Grayton, or to Mumfries), We need to kill a few people, on the sly, to ease our foreign policy woes? In the office where Chasie Mason first cooked up the land deal? Was it in that Louisiana town where the hospital collapsed, killing a bunch of kids, in a tragedy that confirmed the charges being made by a nobody law professor running for state attorney general? Or in the boarding school dorm room where late on cold Vermont nights Margaret Mason listened to her roommate rave about a young man from back home—and Margaret decided she would find him?

The chain was long; it was twisted. He envisioned it shaped like a string of DNA. The code for life … and it led to Julia Lancette dead in a canal. And his place on it? How responsible had he been for Hanover’s election to the presidency? In the large three-ring binders of Nick Addis clippings maintained by his parents, there were articles—by the best political reporters in the nation—that credited him with providing decisive advice during the first presidential campaign.

As a family of arguing Germans walked by, he recalled one particular piece of counsel: Fly back to the state for the execution of Donny Lee Mondreau, the mentally retarded convicted murderer. Why? Hanover had asked. To be there and accept full responsibility, Addis had argued during the conference call, in which M. T. O’Connor had urged Hanover to keep his distance. What had Hanover desired? He had wanted it both ways: to be seen in favor of the death penalty—a compulsory position for a southern politician—but not be so close to a practice that Addis assumed he did not actually favor. You can’t run away, Addis had told him. Voters will consider you a politician afraid of your own stands. You can’t be for killing murderers and scumbags, if you’re not willing to be there for the killing. Hanover followed Addis’s recommendation. And he won the nomination. Because of the episode? Probably not. But who could say?