Listener, there is a village in the apple country of western New York called SOTUS, up in Wayne County, near the south shore of Lake Ontario, about 30 miles east of Rochester.

This is Fruit Beltland, orchard and muckfield running back from the lake. Roadside stands selling cider in the fall.

The big cold lake, holding the frost off the trees in spring.

In October, the orchards go heavy, and the light comes in low and gold across the drumlands.

The long humped hills, a few thousand people, one central school the whole area feeds into. The worst trouble

in a given year, usually a bad wreck out on Route 14. The kind of place where a double

murder in a driveway on a sunny Monday afternoon does not just grieve people. It cracks the basic

understanding they have about where they live. On the 22nd of

October, 2018, that understanding broke. It broke on a short residential street called Carlton Street,

a block of modest houses near the SOTIS Central School, the kind of street where people leave

the doors unlocked and the

kids ride bikes in the road.

And a little after three in the afternoon, in full daylight, with neighbors home and children

about, a young couple was shot to death in the driveway of their own home.

By the time the first deputy arrived, the shooter was gone, and the street had become a crime scene that the people who saw it would carry for the rest of their lives.

The question that organized everything that came after was not really who pulled the trigger, though that question would take a jury to answer and would be fought hard in a courtroom in lines.

The deeper question was how a quiet street in Apple Country became the end point of a plan

that began more than 1,500 miles away in the Texas Panhandle in the mind of a sitting police chief.

Because that is what this case turns out to be.

Not a robbery gone wrong,

not a stranger, not a crime of the moment. It was a hit, a planned, financed,

long-distance killing, carried out by a man with a badge and a career in law enforcement

...