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crawled crossing the river. A cluster of flashing lights blasted the rise to the east, on Lookout Mountain trail. Spotlights lit up the forest like the spaceship descending in Close Encounters. If that had been the sniper’s perch, it would make the shot in Dealey Plaza look like the one in Ford’s Theater.
    Trudy snaked her way through town and came up to speed on the interstate. The pickup climbed Glenwood Canyon, following the tight curves in the road.
    Was Lemke’s warning for real?
    Was it based on anything ?
    The pickup rambled out of the canyon and the traffic sped up. Trudy slowed at the Dotsero exit, ducked back under the interstate and followed the road north, into the black summer woods.
    Her thoughts returned to the footbridge, those surreal seconds that had already moved into a section of her memory where all thoughts and all the associated sounds, smells, and sights would be kept in a hermetically sealed container for as long as her heart kept beating.
    The planning that must have gone into those seconds of action—and the cold-hearted nerves behind the trigger—gave Trudy a shudder.
    She cracked the front window, tasted the cool night air. A freight train ambled along on the far shore of the pitch-dark river, heading in the opposite direction. Piercing squeals of steel on steel floated across the night. Her headlights caught a porcupine scampering across the road. From the rear, the porcupine was a headless ball of spikes. It looked perfectly alien and terribly alone.

five:
monday, early morning
    Duncan Bloom stared at his newspaper’s website. The first bit of instant history was in the books.
    â€œDem. Senate Candidate Lamott Shot Downtown.”
    It was 2:38 a.m., a grueling fourteen hours since the shooting. The cops had so little information that most of his first piece was all from eyewitnesses inter-mixed with reaction from political and civic leadership.
    The newspaper had thrown everything at it that they could, but the big boys from New York and L.A. were already here or on the way, landing now at Eagle-Vail or DIA, speeding along the interstate with all their presumptive access and armies of producers, fact-checkers, investigators, and sources.
    A bottle of red wine served as dinner and drinks in one convenient container, supplemented by a package of gas station peanuts, hours ago, and a granola bar grabbed from the abundant stash of supplies where the police set up shop at the train station. Given the paucity of edibles in his carriage house, rented from an active, bright-eyed widow, the wine would have to do.
    It was three blocks straight up Lincoln Avenue to the scene that was now putting Glenwood Springs on the national news map. Bloom lived at 10th Street and Lincoln. The floodlights and police were buzzing around 7th Street, by the river, and up in the woods to the east of Lincoln Avenue on the base of Lookout Mountain. From the window over the kitchen sink that faced north, the glow that rose from the police encampment looked like premiere night in Hollywood. The people who lived in the houses smack next to the scene would need sleeping pills tonight. For Bloom, sleep wasn’t on the agenda.
    Bloom scrolled to a number on his cell phone and hit redial. The big boys were coming, but Bloom wasn’t about to choke on their exhaust. This was his story, this was his town. He’d been right there for Chrissakes.
    The moment Lamott fell defined surreal. He stewed about those split, fragmented seconds over and over. He had already played them in his mind a thousand times. He relived them as he interviewed witnesses. He relived them as the cops interviewed him. He was treated like any other witness put through the drill at the train station. Bloom knew four shots for sure, but there might have been more. How did he know if the first shot didn’t miss the bridge? He didn’t. Trudy Heath was at a nearby interview station, being grilled at the same