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and I went into the living room, by the entry, and I listened. I heard a key in the lock and I knew it had to be either David or Linda—because Cinnamon didn't have a key."
    Patti, clutching the baby and her bottle, ran toward the door, filled with relief that someone had come to save them.
    It was David.
    "He asked me what was wrong, and I told him about hearing the gunshots and seeing Cinnamon with the gun. He said, 'God, no!'"
    Patti Bailey told McLean that David Brown had questioned her carefully about where she had heard the shots, but she wasn't sure because the sound seemed to be everywhere. "He said, 'It's important that you tell me.' But I couldn't tell him, because all I knew was that it was close to my bedroom because of the loud noise and the echoing."
    David Brown had then checked the entire house—with the exception of the master bedroom. He'd come back to Patti and told her that everything looked okay.
    "Did you check Linda's room?" Patti had asked.
    "No."
    Patti told McLean that she had been afraid that Cinnamon might have shot Linda first and then committed suicide. "I begged David to check the back bedroom. He said, 'Don't say that!' because he knew what I was afraid of and he couldn't face it."
    For an instant, Fred McLean's face betrayed surprise, and Patti explained almost matter-of-factly that David Brown couldn't handle the sight of blood—everyone who knew him knew that.
    "But I asked him again to please go and look so that we would know what happened."
    If anything, David Brown had been more frightened than his wife's sister. He told Patti he just couldn't look; he was incapable of facing what he might find back in the bedroom he shared with his wife.
    "He sent me outside to look for Cinnamon," Patti said. She had looked around the backyard, with the baby in her arms, but she hadn't located Cinnamon, not in her trailer nor farther back where the shadows swallowed up the light from the kitchen window.
    "When I came in, David was on the phone talking to his father, asking him what to do, telling him to come over because he needed help. I guess Grandpa Brown told David to hang up and call the police, because that's what he did."
    Patti Bailey recalled hearing two periods of gentle knocking at the front door. David Brown said he never knocked at his own front door; he had a key. He said he always set the security alarm. But it hadn't gone off that night. It was controlled with both a key and a code to punch in each time it was either armed or disarmed. How did Cinnamon get out of the house without setting off the alarm? Or, if Brown had forgotten to set the alarm, why would he have had such a lapse? He said he was "religious" about setting it. But he had left for the beach; his wife, his baby daughter, Krystal, his teenage daughter, Cinnamon, and seventeen-year-old Patti were alone in the dark, possibly without the alarm's protection.
    McLean pondered the tragic synchronicity that had left the home unprotected at the very moment it had been so vital. The man seemed devastated at the loss of his wife, and he had to be blaming himself for forgetting the alarm. But then Brown had said over and over how upset he had been by the day-long family bickering, and then the argument with his wife. That could have been enough to make him forget the alarm on this one, terribly important night.
    Fred McLean studied Patti Bailey. It was clear she put all of her trust in David Brown, and she didn't seem disturbed that David had not had the courage to go back and check on her sister. That was just the way David was.
    Routinely, Sgt. John Woods and Bill Morrissey conducted GSR (gunshot residue) tests on David Brown and Patricia Bailey. Davis asked Patti if she had handled the little silver gun when Cinnamon asked her how to shoot it, and she said she had not.
    "When's the last time you fired a gun?" Officer Davis asked as Woods swabbed her palms, fingers, and the back of her hands with a Q-Tip, and Morrissey carefully