The trip home was uneventful. Billy slept in the back seat while he and Trish stared out at the passing scenery and listened to an old Emerson, Lake & Palmer tape. They passed the green sign that announced the Willis town limit a little after four, and Doug drove past Henry’s Garage and the Ponderosa Realty office, but just beyond the Texaco station, the road was blocked by two police cars with flashing lights. A single policeman stood next to each car, along with a crowd of motorists who had not been allowed to pass the barrier. Several local residents milled around nearby. Doug saw at the edge of the crowd the brown uniform of a member of the sheriff’s posse.

He pulled to a stop in back of a battered jeep and told Trish and Billy to wait in the car as he got out to investigate. As he approached the makeshift blockade, he realized that one of the policemen was Mike Trenton. He strode up to the young cop. “Mike, what happened?”

“Please stay back, Mr. Albin. We can’t let you through.”

“What happened?”

“Ben Stockley went crazy. He took a pistol into the bank about an hour ago and started shooting.”

“Oh my God,” Doug breathed. “Was anyone hurt?”

The police officer’s face was pale, tense. “Fourteen people are dead, Mr. Albin.”

23

The murders made national news. All three of Phoenix’s network affiliates sent vans and reporters to Willis, and their stories were picked up for the national nightly newscasts. Channel 12 seemed to have the best coverage, and before going to bed Doug watched again as the cameraman’s telephoto lens caught the white flash of Stockley’s gun behind the smoked bank window at the precise moment that the editor killed himself. The suicide had happened live during the five-o’clock broadcast, and even the reporter had stopped talking as the sound of the shot echoed with a grim finality. Doug had known then that Stockley was dead, that he was not merely wounded or injured, and he’d watched with increasingly blurred vision as the remaining hostages ran out of the building and the police swarmed in.

By the time the commercial came on, he was openly crying.

He and Stockley had not exactly been friends, but they were closer than acquaintances, and the man’s death had affected him strongly. He had respected the editor. And he had liked him. It was strange watching it all on TV, seeing places he knew and people he knew in such a distanced and depersonalized form, and somehow it made him feel more depressed.

In an update, over a shot of Stockley’s covered body being wheeled across the bank parking lot to an ambulance, the anchor said that a series of letters had been found in the editor’s desk that police believed would give them a clue as to why he had suddenly gone on the killing rampage.

Letters.