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fighting, and she insisted he quit, because she was scared to death he'd suffer brain damage.
    "I loved her enough to do it," he says. Susan, a former beauty pageant contestant, was the prettiest and most sincere girl he'd ever known, and he didn't want to lose her.
    "I thought he was really cute," Susan says. "And I didn't want to be married to a punch-drunk guy with a bent nose and cauliflower ears." It made her mad to hear people call him Gorilla. When he stopped fighting, she put her foot down one more time: no more nickname. His name was Anthony, a beautiful name. He was to be known henceforth by that name, or by Tony. No more Gorilla, at least not within hearing range of his new wife.
    It tickled Tony, her concern for everything about him.
    "I wasn't that talented, anyway," he confides. "She gave me an excuse to get out."
    He's a straightforward kind of man, blunt, good with words, intense and focused, which are probably traits that helped to make him a rising salesman for the Motor Land Company. When he was interviewed by the Bahia Beach detectives, he looked them right in the eye, "even when he was crying," observed Detective Anschutz in her notes on their initial interview.
    The ancient Chinese believed there are secret forces at work in the world drawing together those people who belong together. Those "secret forces" were believed to be entirely beneficent. It was only when human beings willfully, obstinately, abused their freedom that the gods abandoned them to fate.
    Eventually, it would be possible to trace the sequence of "willful, obstinate" human error that drew Ray Raintree toward the McCullen boat dock that night, at that time, out of all the nights, times, and boat docks in south Florida. It was also possible to track the "human error" that left a door invitingly open for a little girl to be drawn down to rendezvous with her killer that night.
    "I almost always watch a little Leno in the family room before I go to bed," Tony miserably explained to the detectives. The late-night talk show starring Jay Leno, he meant. "It just relaxes me, I guess." In south Florida, The Tonight Show doesn't come on until 11:30 P.M.
    "So about how long do you usually watch it?" Detective Robyn Anschutz asked him.
    "I don't know. Through the opening monologue, not much after that unless he's got a really good guest I want to see. Dennis Rodman. Tanya Harding. Controversial people, especially sports stars, like that."
    But Jay Leno's first guest that night had been a hog-calling state fair winner, which hadn't been compelling enough to keep Tony up any later. He turned off the television and the lights in the family room, and went off to bed.
     
    "Did you check on the kids, Tony?"
    He didn't that night, because he didn't always. All three of them were light sleepers, and it was a mistake to make any sudden noise that might waken them. Though Natalie was deaf, she was ultrasensitive to movement in the house. Wake any of the kids, both parents said, and you could count on a long night of trying to get them back to sleep again.
    So he tiptoed past their bedroom doors, then on down the hallway to the room he shared with his wife. Telling the detectives all this, Tony broke down into tears and said that he wished he had taken a last look at Natalie. One final glimpse of her sweet, sleeping face. He wished he had, maybe she would have awakened, and then the worst thing that could have happened would have been a little delayed rest for him.
    But he didn't open her door.
    He didn't peek in one last time.
    Among all the blessings that Susan and Tony counted before they moved their family into the free house, the three most important ones were their children. There were the twins, the Holy Terrors as Tony called them: Troy and Todd, a couple of identically adorable blond babies who shared a crib and every minute of their lives from the moment they were conceived. They were always inseparable, always on the move ("Even inside my tummy!"