A family member? Someone from the senator’s security team? The company that installed the cameras?

We would look into all of those possibilities.

Sometimes the most obvious answer isn’t the first one you come up with because it’s too self-evident, but certainly the senator would have known about the angles of the cameras.

Could he have been the person behind the glass?

That seemed incomprehensible to me. However, I wasn’t going to count anything out at this point.

Also, Jon would’ve likely known the cameras’ locations. He could have told the person who watched him die. He could’ve also been the one who unlocked the window so the observer could enter the residence.

Why didn’t the observer help the young man?

Where did he go when he left?

The more I thought about the whole scenario, the more chilling it became to me, this idea of just standing by and watching someone kill himself. I’ve tracked some cold and remorseless killers over the years—first as a homicide detective in Milwaukee and more recently as an FBI agent—but there was a callousness to this act that unsettled me, even after all the things I’ve seen.

You can’t work in a job like this and not ask questions about the evil we are capable of as a species, which, of course, means the evil we are capable of as individuals.

From all indications, people are born with the desire to do good but the penchant to do evil. This is part of the dichotomy at the heart of human nature. Psychologists studying children as young as three years old have found this—the child will refuse to push other children down when he’s told to, but he’ll do so when the other child has a toy that he wants.

In other words, he knows right from wrong but will go against his conscience when he wants something for himself.

And that’s what happens when we grow up too. It’s just that adults have different toys we’re after.

And more permanent ways of pushing people down.

5

They told Timothy that the drugs would help, that they would make the bugs go away.

But that had not worked.

No, it had not.

The meds just made his thinking fuzzy and the nightmares more real, more vivid, more troubling. And so he’d stopped taking the drugs after he was released from Grand Haven two months ago.

It made things both easier and harder at the same time.

Now, as he sat in the restaurant finishing his dessert, the server was staring at him, and Timothy was certain that he must have been scratching his arm or his stomach without realizing it. Otherwise, why would the man be looking at him like that?

Get out and get home. Then you can take care of things. Then you can get rid of the bugs, and no one will know.