I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.