Shaw could only imagine what living in a ten-by-ten cell was like for a fleet-footed young man like Jude.

After graduation, Jude worked at a series of odd jobs—landscaping, fast-food, sorting packages at an international parcel delivery warehouse, stocking at an auto-parts shop.

When he was between jobs, which was often, he’d just sit home, watching horror and superhero films, sketching in notebooks, smoking pot.

His father told Shaw, “Never meth or coke, anything like that. It’s just that pot’d calm him down. He gets . . . Okay, I’ll be honest, Mr. Shaw. He gets angry. He’s got that side to him.”

“Angry about what?”

The mother shrugged. “Stuff. Can’t get a job, not a good one. And the ones he gets, he gets laid off. Not just him, but everybody around here.”

Hanson Valley, Arnie explained, had been a busy mill and dairy farming town in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as had happened in countless locales of similar sizes and economies, the fortunes of the town plummeted with the loss of industrial work overseas and the edging out of local producers by mega-farms. “Unemployment in his age group? Was thirty percent last year.”

Jewel said, “And he gets mad about what happened to his brother.”

The Sterlings’ younger son, Frank, fifteen, was disabled. Eight years ago, the car in which he was riding was struck by a pickup that crossed the centerline, the driver hotdogging and passing on a curve. No one else was badly injured but Frank Sterling’s resulting brain trauma left him emotionally and cognitively disabled. The boy was in the public school’s special needs program. The driver was a county official’s son and got only a ticket. This continued to infuriate Jude.

“But whatever you hear people say, he’s not so mad he wants to hurt anybody.”

Finally, Shaw capped the pen and rose. “I think I have enough to get started with.”

Arnie walked Shaw to the door. “Bless you, sir. You’re the only one listening. We just couldn’t believe he was convicted of murder. We tried to talk to the lawyer, the police, the press, the parents of the kids who were at the quarry that day. They wouldn’t pay us any mind. Nobody cares about him. Just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“the whole world forgot about him.”

3.

Over the next few days Shaw approached nearly forty people in and around Hanson Valley, about one half percent of the population of Steuben County, looking for information from friends of Jude and his family, classmates, coworkers, teachers, other family members.