The majority of them declined to speak with him, but fourteen people were willing to talk, some over coffee or a beer or, in several instances, a meal Shaw paid for. The interviews were largely nonproductive; the folks he spoke with offered opinions like, “Oh, I couldn’t believe he’d do it.” Or: “He has a temper, I’ve seen it. He gets all scary.”

Colter Shaw’s father, a former professor turned survivalist in California, had compiled a lengthy list of rules, most of which began with Never.

Never assume October ice is thick enough to walk on.

Never assume a mother bear is more than ten seconds away from her cubs.

Ashton Shaw formulated some more general rules too, one of which was: Never make decisions based on opinion, only facts.

And it wasn’t opinions about Jude Sterling’s character that Shaw was presently after. He wanted facts: details, even if secondhand, about what might have happened on January 12 at the quarry, the days leading up to the events, and the days following.

He spoke—by phone—with the author of the Valley Register pieces but the man couldn’t offer any other details. Arnie and Jewel had spoken to him and asked if he could look into their son’s arrest, but he wasn’t, he explained, an investigative journalist.

He spent a half hour with Jude’s attorney. Harold Cummings was a fifty-year-old general practitioner in Hanson Valley who—Shaw had learned from his private eye—was the town’s main criminal lawyer, though he handled mostly DUI, domestic abuse and minor drug possession offenses.

Cummings, a big man wearing a rumpled seersucker suit, was clearly overworked and distracted. His desk was piled high with folders. When Shaw explained about the reward the lawyer was, curiously, not defensive that someone was revisiting the conviction. Shaw’s impression was that Cummings believed he’d done an adequate job for the fee he’d been paid—probably bargain basement. The case was done, and he had no more interest in the forgotten boy.

“What’re you, a private eye?”

“Like that.”

“And they offered a reward . . . Well, it’s a waste of your time and their money. He did it,” Cummings said. “Classic case. Kids, not working, hanging out, drugs, guns.”

“Did he admit it?”

“No, but who does?” The man swept off his glasses and cleaned them on the tail of his blue and white sport coat. “Tough about the sentence, have to say. But Judge Walker’s a hard-ass. I’d’ve thought you whack a drug dealer, you’re doing a community service. Ten to twelve would’ve been good. But the back-of-the-head thing was a problem for him, I guess.”

“You have a copy of the transcript?” Shaw asked.

This was public information, not subject to the attorney-client privilege.