A little before one in the afternoon, on the 9th of July, 2004, a silver acura pulled into a driveway in Marana, Arizona, and a man got out of it alone.

He had a bag of groceries, salsa, tortilla chips, ahead of lettuce, and two cans of beer.

He had spent the late morning driving around the northwest edge of

Tucson, running small errands in the heat, and now he was home. And his two older girls were just

arriving back from a morning at the trampoline park, and the house was about to fill up with

the ordinary noise of a summer afternoon. He went inside. He sat down in the living

room, in the air conditioning, and he picked up a game controller, and he opened one of the beers.

His wife was at the hospital, and would be for hours yet. The afternoon was his. It was

109 degrees outside. The Acura sat in the driveway, where he had left it, nose to the west, taking the full sun through the passenger glass.

The man in the living room played his game.

The hours went by.

He would say later that he lost track of time.

That part, at least, was true.

Yeah. That part at least was true. That part at least was true. I'm a Oh, sweet God of God, oh, please take me Oh

Show me the

mercy Long before the need that you denied

Long before the afternoon in the driveway, there was a pattern, and the pattern had a paper trail.

Christopher Shultes was 37 years old in the

summer of 2004, a husband and the father of three daughters. His wife Erica was a physician,

an anesthesiologist at a Tucson hospital, a job that demands long hours and steady nerves

and the ability to hold a stranger's

life still on a table without your own hands shaking. She was the one holding the household up.

...