She aimed at his forehead.

“No, please.”

And she fired twice.

5.

To say Rick Patterson was half dead when they found him would be to seriously overstate his condition. With a crushed spinal cord, two gunshot wounds to the head, half his blood drained to the ground, a pulse of 28 and a diastolic blood pressure of 40, he was well beyond half dead. A crew of first responders and paramedics worked on him for an hour under the tree until he was stable enough to be airlifted to a Cincinnati hospital where he underwent eleven hours of surgery. Forty-eight hours later, he was still listed as critical.

And he was not yet Rick Patterson. There was nothing on his body that revealed identity, address, phone number, nothing. A detective with the Ohio State Police obtained a search warrant and took a partial set of fingerprints while the suspect fought for his life on a ventilator. The prints were finally matched to a U.S. Army veteran, one Rick Patterson of Tacoma, Washington. A brother said he worked in private security. Ballistics tests quickly matched his sniper rifle to the carnage on Higgs’s patio, but his two head wounds were caused by smaller bullets from a handgun. Back at the scene, the landscape was scoured with little to show for the effort—a few ineffectual boot markings and some tire tracks.

For days the great mystery baffled the police. The killings of Mrs. Higginbotham and her lover, Jason Jordan, were solved, but who shot Patterson and got away? And why? And who paid him for the contract killings? Mr. Higgs was already being investigated and had hired lawyers.

For days Patterson refused to die. He clung to life with the help of machines and wonder drugs and a tenaciousness the doctors rarely saw.

And on the ninth day, he began to talk.

6.

Bob Cobb had just finished a long walk on the beach, and was pouring a cold beer into a frosty mug for a rest by his pool, when the phone rang. It was Agent Van Cleve from the FBI office in Jacksonville. Bob had met him a month earlier when he began snooping around the island.

Van Cleve asked if Bob could stop by the office tomorrow. Since the office was in downtown Jacksonville and at least an hour away, Bob was hesitant. He was writing these days and, as always, behind, and really didn’t want to kill a day with the FBI.

“It’s rather important,” Van Cleve said. “And we need to discuss it here.”

Bob knew that if he pressed he would get nowhere, so he reluctantly agreed to rearrange his entire day and appease the FBI.

He arrived promptly at 10:00 a.m. and followed Van Cleve to a small room with large screens on three walls. Van Cleve was antsy and eager and obviously on to something. As he dimmed the lights he said, “Got a couple of videos for you.”

The first one, in color, was from a tiny camera inside the sniper’s rifle scope. Van Cleve was saying, “This happened two weeks ago near Dayton, Ohio. The guy getting out of the Porsche is the boyfriend, not the husband, and he’s sneaking into the house for a quickie with the wife. Hubbie is in Vegas with the boys but he left the contract behind. Lover boy goes inside, they tango for forty-seven minutes, and then the fun starts. Here he comes, out the door, walks to his car. Bam. Half his head is blown away by the sniper, who’s almost four hundred yards away. Twenty-six seconds pass and the missus decides to check on him, and, bam, she loses half of her face.”

“This is pretty awesome,” Bob said.

“I thought you’d like it.”

“May I ask how you got this?”

“The sniper was/is a dumbass who, for some unknown reason, thought it would be cute to film a couple of his greatest hits. Doubt if he planned to post this on Facebook, but more than likely he wanted to present it to the husband. Who knows? A dumb move. Big story in western Ohio. You see it by chance?”

“No, missed that one.”

The front page of the Dayton Daily News appeared on another screen with the bold headline: Wife and Lover Dead in Contract Killing. Below it were large photos of the two victims, then a smaller photo of Higgs the husband.

Van Cleve continued, “The sniper was in a tree, and after the killings he somehow fell and snapped his spinal cord. He couldn’t move, so his partner shot him twice in the head, sort of like finishing off a dying animal. The law of the jungle. The police there, along with the FBI, made the smart decision to keep quiet about the sniper, who appears to be a professional. Damned good shot, just not much of a climber. Anyway, not a word in the press about him, so far.”

Van Cleve clicked a button and another video ran through its warm-up. “Here’s where things get good. The sniper is still alive and four days ago he started talking.” The image was of Rick Patterson in a hospital bed, on a ventilator, his head wrapped in heavy white gauze, tubes and wires everywhere, and five stern-faced men in dark suits staring at him. Van Cleve paused the video to say, “That’s him, along with his lawyer, a U.S. attorney, a federal magistrate, and two FBI agents.” On the other side of the bed were two doctors in scrubs. The wide camera angle was from the foot of the bed and it conveyed a scene that was truly hard to grasp.

Van Cleve said, “Patterson is not expected to survive. He has two small but steady brain hemorrhages that the doctors can’t seem to stop, and even if he did hang on his life is pretty much over. He knows it. And so he’s talking, or, rather, communicating. Obviously, with all the tubes and crap in his mouth he can’t talk, but he has regained some movement in his hands. He can scrawl out messages and grunt his approval. Along with all the other wires and tubes there is one that runs to an audio unit. It’s all being recorded in the U.S. Attorney’s office across town. Obviously, he’s in no condition to answer questions but he insisted. He’s very motivated. His doctors objected at first, but hell, they’ve given him a death sentence so how much does it really matter?”