Barkham Dell was not far from Cooperstown. In the incident report, he found the exact location on Long Swamp Road, with annotated photographs of the point at which half of Sharon Stone’s face had been blown away and her car had plunged off the tarmac into the mire.

He entered the location into his GPS and drove out through the gates of the Otesaga’s parking lot—not with any major expectation of discovery but with a modest sense of getting back to the beginning, of finally getting his feet on the ground.

The first visit to a crime scene, even ten years after the fact, had an effect on Gurney he found hard to label. To call it stimulating sounded perverse, but it definitely intensified his senses. The chemical reactions it catalyzed in his brain had the result of making everything he saw there far more memorable than the sights and events of his ordinary life.

It wasn’t the first time he’d visited the scene of a murder committed long ago. A confession he’d once elicited from a serial killer included the murder of a teenage girl in a wooded area near Orchard Beach in the Bronx—a murder that had occurred twelve years prior to the confession.

Now, as Gurney drove slowly through the gentle leftward curve where Long Swamp Road moved away from the state highway toward Dead Dog Lake, he went through the same process he’d gone through at Orchard Beach—in his mind subtracting years of growth from the trees, erasing saplings and smaller bushes.

He had the incident-report photos to guide his adjustments. There had been no additions or subtractions of man-made structures. No buildings, no billboards, no telephone poles. The road hadn’t had a guardrail in 2000, and it didn’t now. Three tall landmark trees appeared virtually unchanged. The time of year, early spring, was the same then and now, giving the old photos an illusion of currency.

The position of the tall trees, combined with the photo notations and accompanying angle-and-distance measurements, made it possible for Gurney to locate the approximate position of Sharon Stone’s car when the bullet struck her.

He drove back along the road to the point where it was intersected by a road that connected with the state highway. Then he drove from that point to the point of the shot, and from there through two miles of bog and marshland, past Dead Dog Lake, through the Currier & Ives village of Barkham Dell, and another mile to the point where Long Swamp Road teed into a busy county route.