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around. The victim’s name was Stephanie Patchet, a girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend in some accounts, shot by Riff with his father’s handgun one evening after an argument in her family living room. I got sober scanning the pieces. An accident. A struggle. A slipped gun. An early version called it a tragedy, a later article described it as a malicious, well-planned homicide masquerading as juvenile distress. The verdict turned because of the notebook found in Josh’s car, which was filled with drawings that proved, in explicit and occasionally pornographic detail, his murderous intentions. No examples were provided, but I saw her photo, the eager aliveness of a smiling face framed in mousy blond hair, the kind of shot always chosen by journalists when they want to canonize a victim.
    It knocked me back to see that Josh was nothing more and nothing less than a girlfriend killer, and that his drawings had earned him the hard time. Given his milquetoast persona and the relative stability of his family life (minus those communication problems regarding his father’s health), it was not surprisingthat his crime was unrelated to any of the thicker pursuits surrounding drugs or gangs, yet the revelation truly pissed me off. Wallace had sent me, without warning, on a secret road trip accompanying a lying, emotionally manipulative, murderous coward who’d killed a woman. I hate domestics. I hate passion murders. Why did thwarted love so often turn physically harsh? I was sick of young men and their fevered imaginations and the irreparable harm they caused through clumsy assertions of control.
    Or did I just want the freedom to hate from a distance? The job usually allowed for that. Contempt was part of the gear you wore. The rote duty dulled your personal take on the world, and that suited me just fine. If Josh was an in-between inmate, then I was an in-between person. Thirty-nine years old, pretty in a conventional way, though one eye was slightly lower than the other and I wore my bang across it. I had combat experience in Iraq, but that was paper fake. I did yoga twice a week, liked bourbon, and knew how to rap the vulnerable point of an elbow with a baton. I had an ex-husband, but the marriage had left no dent on my life. I was all holding pattern and no hold. It took the rest of the bottle of wine to contemplate the details in full.
    Such was my queasy and slightly disoriented state of mind the next morning when the violence began.
    They had me working the tower. The task was to look down onto the yard and also to scan the slate rooftops with their fringes of barbed wire and even the absurd glass dome. I was there to catch odd breaks in the traffic flow, to spot what could not be spotted on the ground, to call warning if a fellowCO was under duress, to scatter perimeter shots if a clustered knot of violence ever unraveled and spread—in short, to simply be the watchful eye of a pissed-off and ever-vigilant God. Most COs counted it a lucky day to be assigned such duty—all that power with the luxury of being safe and bored, too—but the isolation up top emptied me out. I watched the inmates and COs and the civilians—or weak sisters—and thought, that’s me down there, that’s how small I am; and I got down on myself for thinking that way.
    The office at the top of the tower was cramped with gray furniture and blue metal. Even with the chill I preferred the open air. Standing on the platform six stories above the yard kept me alert, or as alert as was possible overseeing such heavy routine. On a clear day you could see beyond the walls to the forest and the valley and the choked, twisted river, and beyond that to the crisp brown farmlands and the jut of the city. But on that day visibility was almost nonexistent. The sky was low-ceilinged. Time had thickened up, and every sound was muffled, as though the yard were contained within a lidded pot. Then the first snowflake appeared, and Ditmarsh became a fairy-tale castle.
    It