WALT JENKINS’S PLANE LANDED THE DAY BEFORE. HAD HE NOT RECENTLY come to the realization that his life was in a downward spiral, he might have passed on Jim Oliver’s offer. But Walt was looking for an opportunity to stop running, and perhaps he’d found it. The Bureau put him up in a suite at the Grand Hyatt in Midtown. It took Walt just over an hour to make the trip out to the country. The Bureau of Criminal Investigation branch of the New York State Police was an investigative division of plainclothes detectives that, for the most part, assisted local law enforcement that lacked the investigative resources needed for major crimes. The 2001 murder of Cameron Young in the Catskill Mountains, near the town of Shandaken, had certainly been an example of a county police department caught off guard. The community consisted of wealthy individuals who owned second homes in the area and spent long weekends and holidays in the town. Before Cameron Young had been found hanging from his balcony, there hadn’t been a homicide in the area in four decades.

The Shandaken Police Department was not prepared for the murder, and the chief had quickly called the state authorities for help. Walt had been assigned to the case. At twenty-eight years old, he had been the youngest detective in the BCI. The older cops in Shandaken had not been happy to see him pull up to the crime scene. Their sentiment, Walt knew, was that if they wanted a kid’s advice on how to handle a homicide they’d ask their own teenagers. But Walt had been undeterred by the cold reception and worked hard to win them over. He was careful to include the police chief in every decision, despite that, once invited, the BCI had full jurisdiction. When the name of the victim leaked—Cameron Young, a well-known novelist—the media took notice. When details about the gruesome nature of the crime were disclosed, as well as the links to sexual deviance, the media sunk its teeth into the story. To keep jurisdictional peace, Walt named the chief as official spokesman and invited him to speak at each press conference. When the cameras rolled, it was not Walt Jenkins revealing the details of the case and answering questions from the press, but Chief Dale Richards. Walt worked in the background. He was happy to stay out of the spotlight and concentrate on piecing the evidence together.

Now, on Friday afternoon, Walt pulled the nondescript government car—on loan from the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—into the small parking lot of the Shandaken Police Station. Because Chief Richards had been the front man of the Cameron Young investigation, the case files resided at the Shandaken police headquarters. Twenty years later, Walt hoped they still existed.