The There's one theory that says that when we're born we're a blank slate and we're shaped by the world around us.

And there's another theory that were really little savages when we're born and that the

job of our parents is to Tamer's.

I have come to believe very much more strongly that were savages that have to be tamed.

Evil is very much closer to us than many of us would like to think.

How close was evil now?

It clung to him like sweat as he ran, like the memory of that first murder, the anticipation of the next.

Here he was an adult, in thrall of the mere boy locked in a cell would he do the boy's bidding like the

others had done could he kill his name at Jim Greenhill he had had run once before, but purposefully that time. When he left his

native England and wound up in Fort Myers, Florida, he landed a job as a town's crime reporter,

the chronicler of evil.

It was a grueling existence, a long string of yellow crime scene

tape.

The reality is you're always right up against a deadline there are always too many stories there are

always too few reporters it was a grind. What idealism he once had had long since faded away. Gone was that naive sentiment that inspired him to name his dogs Woodward and Bernstein in honor of the

reporters who broke Watergate. So at night he'd escape to the indigo room, the cottage, the gator lanes, and the French connection.

One scotch drowning another.

It's a constant cycle of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol.

Too much caffeine, too much nicotine, too much alcohol, and too little protein and carbohydrates.

He had just entered his 30s. He was jaded, numb, an alcoholic. Strange, isn't it, that when you least

expected, do you come across the thing that changes everything?

For Jim, it was him.

...