The western approach to the city, as much as he could see from the car, was depressing. The area was scarred by dead, dying, and generally ugly industrial and commercial enterprises. Zoning seemed an iffy matter, a patchwork quilt at best. The voice of his GPS directed him off the main route through a neighborhood of small, poorly tended houses that seemed to have had the color, life, and individuality drained out of them long ago. It reminded Gurney of the neighborhood he’d grown up in—a defensive place of narrow achievement, ignorance, racism, and an insular sort of pride. How small a place it had been, small in so many ways, sad in so many ways.

Another instruction from his GPS brought Gurney back to the task at hand. He made a left, went a block, crossed a major thoroughfare, went another block, and found himself in a different sort of neighborhood—one with more trees, bigger houses, neater lawns, cleaner sidewalks. Some of the houses had been divided into apartments, and even these had a well-kept appearance.

The GPS announced his “arrival at destination” as he drove past a large multicolored Victorian. He continued another hundred yards to the end of the block, turned around, and parked on the opposite side of the street in a position from which he could see the porch and the main door.

As he started to get out of the car, his phone emitted its text ring. He stopped and checked it, saw that it was from Kim: PROJECT IS A TOTAL GO!! NEED TO TALK ASAP!! PLEASE!!

Gurney considered “ASAP” a flexible concept, stretchable at least to sometime after his meeting with Meese. He got out of the car and walked down the block to the big Victorian.

The front door opened from the wide porch into a tiled foyer with two more doors. Two mailboxes were mounted on the wall between them. The box on the right was labeled “R. Montague.” Gurney knocked on the door, waited, knocked again more firmly. There was no response. He took out his phone, found Meese’s number, and called it—putting his ear to the door to see if he could hear a ring. There was no detectable sound. When the call went into voice mail, he broke the connection and returned to his car.

He reclined the seat a few inches and relaxed. Then he spent the next hour skimming through the lengthy incident reports and supplementary annexes describing the movements of the victims in the hours prior to the shootings. He was immersing himself in the details, instinctively scanning for anything striking, anything the original investigators might have missed in that mass of data.