It was probably that reputation and no previous record that got him tried as a minor instead of as an adult. Between that classification and the good fortune that the crime had occurred before the State of New York reinstituted the death penalty, Timothy had avoided being given a lethal injection.

Instead, he got a fifty-year sentence but had been granted his release for model behavior following his first parole hearing, having served more than half his term.

When asked why he killed his mother and father by countless physicians, therapists, officers, and magistrates, Timothy Leeds offered up the same answer.

“They wouldn’t let me borrow the car.”

It wasn’t due to a sordid tale of abuse by sadistic parents or unabashed greed like the Menendez brothers. Three decades ago, Timothy Alan Leeds had a very bad day. He had stopped taking the antianxiety medication that his folks had given him since he was an “overactive toddler,” and just acted out in the worst way possible when his parents said he couldn’t take his father’s new car to impress a senior girl.

He had been found weeping over their bodies when the police arrived (a pair of shotgun blasts in the Five Towns will get 911 calls going fast and furious), saying he only wanted to borrow the Ferrari. Timothy never denied his wrongdoing and accepted his sentence like the man he wasn’t yet. He didn’t miss a dose of medication in the thirty years that followed and emerged from his confinement as a man who just wanted to peacefully reenter society.

Unfortunately for Timothy, the city of Cedarhurst didn’t take to this idea.

The upper-crust Long Islanders weren’t about to welcome the town’s not-so-favorite son back with open arms. An online petition when Timothy’s parole hearing was announced became a full-fledged protest the moment he was freed.

So, despite his desire to return to his hometown as a forty-nine-year-old man wanting to resume the life he’d never had, it was arranged for him to be assigned to a halfway house in Far Rockaway, little more than a stone’s throw from cushy Cedarhurst, but more than a few rungs down the class ladder.

By the time Grant and Frankel hit the Long Island Expressway in the unmarked car, the commander had absorbed all of this. They also learned that Leeds had entered the halfway house the previous evening and left shortly after breakfast that morning.

And hadn’t returned.

The best thing about Timothy’s new digs was the unobstructed ocean view, one of many gone-to-seed buildings adjacent to the dilapidated boardwalk that was still in the urban planning stages post–Hurricane Sandy. Directly in the JFK flight path, the sandstone edifice was probably last painted during his presidency.