Sure, I’d like to tell you I solved the case, that something I did or wrote broke it wide open, as the old-timers called it. But there’s the Program, and its pesky vow of honesty.

Instead, think of it as a tort lawyer would. Those guys talk about proximate cause. One act or event leads to another and another and so forth. The proximate cause is the act or event that makes you liable, the one from which you start counting.

In Lotty’s case, start with a condition, an old man’s plump prostate. The old man sees a car. The car connects to a kid. The kid connects to him. Not that we knew that immediately, of course. Not that we—those of us who were not cops—knew much of anything for what seemed then like much too long.

The cops caught the boy when he tried to peddle his ass to a church deacon in Orlando. For the deacon, the experience fulfilled every sin-laden fantasy that every preacher had planted in his head since he was dipped. For Jake, it was strictly amateur hour.

The deacon had slipped away late at night to a Waffle House when he could not sleep. He had a raging sunburn, and he did not want to disturb his wife and four kids, all of whom were snoring off a day’s worth of hanging with the Mouse in the one motel room they could afford after admission and snacks.

Jake shuffled up to the guy and asked him what he’d pay to have one cranked off. Fearing for his life and perhaps his soul, the deacon fled to his car and called the cops. Call it cynical of me to ask the Orlando cop I talked to if the Waffle House was in a part of town known for red-light work and to wonder aloud if the deacon would have screamed as loud if Jake had been a girl.

The cops picked the kid up, ran his name through a computer, and called Wood. Wood and McConegal headed south the next day. They spent five days talking to the kid and getting the legal work straight so that they could bring him back.

Moze disappeared from sight the whole time they were gone. I heard from grumbling colleagues that he was staying at Wood’s place and feeding his livestock, but that didn’t explain why he was not taking his shifts. Still, deputies taking time off usually is not news, so I did not inquire further. I should have, I suppose now.

Turned out, Jake was trying to scrape together enough money to get into Disney World. I reminded myself that authorities believed the kid had been involved in shooting children not much younger than himself, but when Wood told me that later, after they brought him back, it made me sad. I could not remember the last time I felt sad.

There is no doubt that we are a sentimental bunch. The clans run too many pictures of orphaned dogs and sick, bald children for it to be otherwise. I like to think that it is merely to cheer thought patterns darkened by inherent and extreme cynicism. I recognize that it may be that we just print what sells, although I try to resist that notion since it is cynical of itself.

Nevertheless, sometimes a fact gets to me more than it should. Rent or food apparently were low on the list of things Jake was willing to prostitute himself for, but I imagine that when you’re young, stupid, and run low on self-esteem your priorities skew. Or maybe priorities don’t even enter your mind. Maybe you just want to be a kid.

All those facts but none of those opinions went into the stories I wrote about Jake’s arrest. In the way these things often go, however, much of our readership, the publisher in particular, concluded from the facts that might make Jake seem sympathetic that I might be biased. As a result, the paper, I in particular, caught a fair amount of hell for the coverage, regardless of how objective it may have been.

Maybe because I felt a little sorry for Jake and maybe because I felt a little singed by the reactions to my work, I was not what you would call receptive when he called, again at home.

“Do you know who this is?” he said.

If I had not been angry, I would’ve been surprised. Instead, I said, fairly quickly I might add, with an extra dollop of pride in the evenness of my response: “Nope, you wouldn’t give me a name last time. Remember?”

The pause. The think-through.

“I mean,” he said in his soft, even, offhand way, “do you recognize the voice?”

“You seem agitated,” he said.

“You seem happy about that.”

“Do I?” He sounded genuinely surprised before he gave me the pause. “You also seem less, what should I call it, deferential?”

“Is this, like, group or you call for a reason?”

“You aren’t going to ask for my name?”

“Nope. You want to give it to me, you will.”

“Ah,” he said, as though he faced yet another choice.

Since I’d stripped down to my underwear for the evening, during the inevitable pause, I had to scramble around the apartment for a notepad and a pen. The recorder I’d promised the authorities the next time he called didn’t even cross my mind.

“I hear they arrested a boy,” he said.

The way he phrased it irked me to the extent that I almost dropped the notepad and pen I’d found and propped on the wide plane of my knee.

“You don’t know his name?” I said.

“Well, yes.”

“What is it?”

“I usually called him son.”

“I bet you did.”

“What does that mean?”

“It gets to what I should have asked you the last time. Why?”

“Ah,” he said and paused. “I don’t know that I can say.”

“I bet you can. You’re a thinker. You thought it through a long time ago.”

“Well,” he said, and I waited for him to hang up, but he didn’t. He just let the cosmos bristle around my head for a while.

“I cannot feel,” he said at last.

“What’s that mean? You paralyzed?”

“Oh, no. Not physically.”

“You don’t have emotions?”

I cursed myself in my head for not letting him talk, but he said, “Yes. Yes, exactly.”

“So?”

“So, I try things.”

“You try things.”

“To see if I can feel.”

“What kind of things do you try?”

“I don’t know. The usual.”

“The usual,” I said, repeating what he said to buy time.

I’d read a book or two about serial types. If you’re a serious crime reporter, you got to keep up.

“Hurting things?” I asked.

“I tried doing good things first.”

“But maybe that was a long time ago?”

“Yes.”

“And when that didn’t work maybe you went to doing other things. Like what? Cats? Small reptiles? Then people?”

“There have been . . . experiments.”

If I’d been driving, I would’ve gone off the road. I sat very still on my ratty couch for what seemed like a very long time, my turn to try and think it through. I couldn’t begin to put myself in the shoes of a guy who had lined up and shot three children and an old woman, but I’d been through enough Meetings to have a few ideas about how sick minds work.

“So what’s talking to me do for you?”

“Frankly, not much.”

That was too quick and glib for that guy. I said, “Bet it does” and let microwaves steam his skull for a while.

“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t do anything.”

“Sure it does. You’re trying to manipulate me and, through me, your situation. That’s what makes you feel, isn’t it? Not the hurting. The manipulating. The controlling. You call the boy son. You teach him how to be a man. You talk him into shooting people.”

“You seem to know a lot,” he said distractedly.

He seemed to realize what he’d said and lightened up for the first time I’d heard.

“What is this?” he said. “Group?”

But I wasn’t letting up.

“And now the boy’s out of reach or you’ve tossed him aside, you’re looking for someone else to twist up. Like me?”

“You are not worth the effort, I’m afraid,” he said softly, as though talking to himself. Louder, he said, “I just need information from you.”

“Subscribe,” I said. “Tell me you’re not pounding your pud, right now, even as we speak.”

There was a long pause.

“You’re very crude,” he said before he hung up.

We gathered at the table in the paper’s library: Wood, Crandall, Marley, me. It was close to midnight.

After I had written the story about the call and Marley and I had saved it to disc and tucked the disc in the paper’s safe, we called the paper’s lawyer. Once she got over the time of night by assuring us she would double her hourly rate for the call, she advised cooperation. A fitness freak, she also suggested diet and exercise’d probably solve the rest of my problems. Officiousness is just one reason people hate lawyers.

I told Wood and Crandall the story twice and signed a piece of paper allowing them to obtain my phone records, but they wanted more.

“Thought you were going to tape your calls,” Crandall said.

“He calls out of the blue, and anyway, the recorder’s probably here, not at home where I am.”

“Meaning you don’t have a clue where a tool of your trade is,” Marley said. His tone was snider than I would’ve liked in front of those miles outside the fold.

“How many people have your home number” Crandall said.

“Excellent question. I don’t know.”

“Work it out,” Wood said.

“Before all this? Anybody I wanted to call me back after hours. The standing order here is: If somebody calls the paper, I’m not in, give them all the numbers I got. Since this? Damn near anybody’d talk to me about Aunt Lotty.”

“Meaning?” Wood asked.

I explained to them that because they wouldn’t tell me I had spent the weeks since the murders trying to find Lotty by calling anyone who had done business with her or who knew her socially and that I had worked in a widening circle from Lotty’s house. Since it was mostly farms out there and the population density was accordingly thin, I was out maybe 20, 25 miles by then.

“How many’ve you called?” Wood asked.

“Dozens, at least.”

“Where’s your list?” Crandall asked.

“List?”

“Of the fucking people you’ve called.”

“Didn’t keep one.”

“Where’re your notes on the calls?” Wood said

“Same place as all useless notes. Tossed.”

“Bullshit,” Crandall said.

“Don’t cuss,” Marley said.

Crandall pulled a cigar out of his pocket and started to peel off the cellophane.

“Don’t smoke,” Marley said.

“Well, fuck,” Crandall said.

He smiled amiably at Marley, then frowned at me.

“Here’s how your cross-examination would go: ‘Mr. Ambrose, you never saw the man who called you?’”

Crandall raised a hand to welcome me on stage.

“Come on now,” he said, “help me out.”

“No.”

“And you’ve never heard my client speak, have you?”

I rolled my eyes. Crandall turned his attention to Marley.

“Your honor, would you direct the witness to answer?”

Marley said, “Clay, let’s just get this over with.”

“No.” I said.

“No, you’re not going to play, or no, you’ve never heard my client speak?” Crandall said.

“No, I’ve never heard your client speak.”

“So.” Crandall paused for effect. “You cannot say that his voice and the voice of the person who called you are the same, can you?”

“No.”

“And the person who spoke to you on the phone never said to you, ‘I killed three children and shot Lotty Nusbaumer’?”

“He knew things,” I interrupted. “He knew Jake, called him ‘son.’ He talked about not feeling and suggested he hurt animals before he hurt people.

Crandall shrugged and continued.

“Many people knew Jake, did they not?”

“Yes.”

“Some of them would’ve been older?”

“Yes.”

“Some of them would’ve been men?”

“Yes.”

“Some of them might’ve called him ‘son.’”

“Okay. All right.”

“Maybe even his guidance counselor at school?” Crandall said and smirked. “He called us after you embarrassed his secretary.”

He started in on me again.

“The person who spoke to you on the phone, he didn’t tell you he’d shown Jake Danvers how to kill people?”

“No.”

“The person who spoke to you on the phone, he didn’t tell you he’d actually hurt small animals, did he?”

“No.”

“He just said there’d been experiments, correct?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t tell you what those experiments were?”

“No.”

“It was you suggested small animals, was it not?”

“Yes.”

“And just so we’re clear here, you’ve never seen the man who called you on the phone twice, have you?

“No.”

“And as a result, you can’t say here today that the man seated next to me, my client, is the person you spoke with on the phone.”

“No.”

“Either time.”

I sighed. “No.”

Crandall pursed out his lips. He put the cigar in his mouth, pulled a match from his pants pocket and fired it up. He looked at Marley through the smoke as he exhaled.

“Without a recording,” he said, “see what we got?”

He rose, putting on his porkpie hat.

“Somewhere in this fucking building is a story about those calls already written for tomorrow’s paper.” He looked again at Marley as he put on his coat. “Without a recording, see what you got?”

In the old days, an editor killed a weak or dead story by literally driving a spike through the paper it was typed on. In 1994? No longer so.

When Wood and Crandall left, Marley went to the safe, pulled out the disc, and waved it at me. “This is on you. I can’t risk our credibility, not for no more than this tells us.”

He jammed the disc in the drive to erase it. As the drive grunted and whirred, he said, “Don’t know which I hate more: talking to those bastards or this.”

Mad as I was then at Crandall, Marley, and me, I doubt I could choose either.