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would be shot in a remote Humboldt garden filled with emerald green plants much like his.

Chapter Three
Emma
    E mma Worldpeace had just finished up a day’s work as a sales associate at Chico Sports LTD when she noticed the missed calls. They were from her little sister, Lisa. It was odd that Lisa had called a few times. Though the sisters were close, they weren’t in touch often. Emma decided to call her back as soon as she got home. She hopped on her bike and began the short ride back to the house she shared with her boyfriend, Ethan.
    It was early on the evening of August 26, 2010. The dense, dry heat that could make the Central Valley city of Chico feel like a brick oven was just beginning to subside as Emma pedaled down Arbutus Avenue toward the sage-green suburban home she shared with Ethan and a roommate. Emma was twenty-three years old, with pale skin and a smattering of freckles. She had her father’s button nose and wide, doe-like brown eyes, though the first thing everyone noticed about her was her hair, which hung in shoulder-length ringlets and was the russet color redwood needles turn after they fall from the tree. Emma’s legs pumped up and down like pistons. She was an avid cyclist and regularly rode at least fifteen hours a week.
    After stashing her bike in a shed behind the house, where there were enough bikes to start a small rental business, Emma stopped to kiss her boyfriend. Ethan, a tall, athletic thirty-four-year-old, was drinking a beer with a buddy under the shade tree in the backyard.
    Only then did Emma think to pick up her phone and return her sister’s call. Lisa was two years younger. Of her five siblings, Lisa was the only one with whom she shared both parents, though Emma considered all her siblings equal. Lisa also used to be the only one who shared Emma’s hippie last name, though she had dumped it a few years earlier for the flashier-sounding name of an Italian sports car.
    â€œHey, girl!” Emma said when her sister picked up.
    Lisa sounded strange.
    â€œDid you hear about Mike?” she asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI don’t know exactly what’s going on, or if it’s true or not,” Lisa said hurriedly, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “But basically it sounds like there were some guys living on his property and there was some kind of a fight, and they say he shot someone and has been taken into custody.”
    After trying to reassure her sister that everything would be okay, Emma hung up the phone, cracked open her laptop, and began scanning the local papers back in Humboldt. There was a lot of news online about the shooting, and it wasn’t good.
    â€œAt least one man was severely injured in a shootout in Kneeland last night, apparently in a marijuana-related dispute,” The North Coast Journal reported.
    They were calling it the Kneeland Shooting, and the details were grisly. A forty-year-old Guatemalan immigrant named Mario Roberto Juarez Madrid had been shot and killed in an enormous marijuana garden in a place called Kneeland, in the hills outside Eureka. Another man had been shot in the face and back and had stumbled onto a California Department of Forestry base early that morning.
    The prime suspect was Mikal Xylon Wilde, age twenty-eight. He’d been arrested later that morning while driving his big green truck on a road near where the shooting took place. In the mug shot that had been released, Mikal’s head was shaved, his beefy shoulders bulged out of a tank top, and he stared blankly at the camera. It was a face that was deeply familiar to Emma. She’d known Mike since childhood. They had been friends; then her mother and his father had children together, and he became family.
    Emma considered him her brother.
    She scanned the stories for clues to what had happened, searching for anything that might lead her to believe that Mike didn’t do it. According to the news reports, Mike had hired three