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    Kevin arrived first. As he walked in, there was a terrible, cold silence in the house. A deafening hum of pain and emotional tension. His mother sat at the table. Joan was silent and sullen. She stared blankly, Kevin recalled, “her eyes covered in tears, her face red.”
    The progression of processing what was about to happen, Kevin recalled, was taking place in front of him. Both his parents were thinking things through. Facing facts. Trying to digest what was going on. What was coming. Accepting that a child is dead is not what parents are designed to do. It is a slow, wearisome transformation from protector to feeling like you’re running to stand still. You want to do something, but you have to come to the realization that there is nothing you can do.
    Then you’re expected to open up and help an investigation that’s going on around you.
    It’s as though the soul is being torn apart—slowly.
    Philip didn’t say much. But what he said stung Kevin as he acclimated himself to the house, the tone, and what was happening. It was like being sucker punched. You had no idea you had been hit until you felt your jaw begin to swell, turned and then saw someone running away from you.
    “The GBI is on the way,” Philip explained tersely, not pulling punches. His voice choked up.
    The idea that Alan and Terra were in a car accident became the mainstay of thought. It was something they all considered, without verbalizing their feelings. That look Philip gave Kevin, however, told him something else. Staring at his father, Kevin considered: The GBI would not be coming here if Alan and Terra were involved in a car accident.
    No way.
    “At that point you realize something really wrong has happened,” Kevin said later. Before that, there was the hope that a hospital would call to say Alan and Terra were there. Alan was okay. Hurt, but okay. Terra was there by his side, holding vigil, befuddled and amazed. But safe.
    When Robert walked in, he could see the look on Kevin’s, his mother’s and his father’s faces: gloom and doom. A pale shade of white. Ghostly. The life had been drained out of them, the air sucked from the room. Philip Bates was not a man who broke under pressure. He was an engineer. He thought things through with a methodical sense of composure. He analyzed situations, came up with solutions. Here, though, at this moment, Philip was dazed. He didn’t have the answer.
    Kevin filled Robert in.
    “Well,” Robert said under his breath so his mom and dad couldn’t hear, “I’m with you. The GBI doesn’t get involved with just a traffic accident. This is bigger.”
    “We were just trying to think things through. What do you do?” Kevin later explained. “You don’t know much, and what you do know is not good.”
    As they comforted one another, various emotions came in waves: hope, worry, dread. Up. Down. Tears. Then a happy memory. More doubt. Then a glimmer of optimism.
    At this point they just wanted to know where Alan was. The GBI had not given them any specific details.
    The GBI agents at the house were total professionals. They walked in. One of them comforted the family without giving away too much information. As they talked, another agent was getting details via walkie-talkie from the other agents at the crime scene and out in the field.
    The agent asked the family for the spellings of names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Where? When? How? What time?
    Everything seemed to be going at hyper speed. Kevin and Robert gave the agent as many phone numbers as they had. Philip explained what he knew up to that point. And this was the reality about tragedy: in its early stages you’re forced to go over the same stories again and again. The details are in the repetition.
    “Where was Alan? Where did he fly into?”
    Robert answered.
    Then they’d ask how he seemed: Happy? Sad? Upset? Angry?
    Slowly the pieces of the GBI’s investigation began to emerge and come into focus for the Bateses. The GBI’s