Things happened.

“We’ll let you know what we find,” the officer told Philip.

2

Hoover, Alabama, Police Department patrolman Scott McDonald was dispatched to Jeff and Jessica McCord’s Myrtlewood Drive address. He had been told to check things out. Maybe Alan and Terra had broken down and were staying at the McCords’ for the night while their car was being repaired.

Overdue motorist . . .

All cops know that these types of calls—nine times out of ten—turn into nothing: a misunderstanding, miscommunication. It was late. Alan and Terra were probably at a hotel somewhere in town. Sleeping.

Myrtlewood Drive is located in a residential area close to Baston Lake and Interstate 65. It’s a quiet neighborhood, full of white picket fences and tarred driveways with the standard 2.2 cars, boat, lawn mowing on Saturdays, cookouts on Sundays, neighborhood dog walkers, and an overall feel that this small section of Hoover represented a broad brushstroke of what middle-class America should look like.

Little pink houses.

By the time Patrolman McDonald took a right onto Myrtlewood Drive and looked for the address, it was dark, desolate, and rather lonely in the neighborhood. Most families were asleep. A lone dog, which the cop could not see, barked at the night moon. But other than that, and a line of porch lights on for safety, the neighborhood was quiet.

Nothing much happening.

After pulling up in front of the McCords’ house, the officer grabbed his flashlight—the house looked deserted—and walked up to the front porch.

Strangely, the window panels on the door were “covered up,” McDonald later said, “with towels or sheets from the inside.”

Huh.

It gave the windows a peculiar look. Like someone was trying to block the view of the inside of the house from anyone looking in. Or maybe there was work going on inside the house, spray painting or something.

That was it. Home repairs. The Home Depot and Lowe’s had sent the suburban handyman into a frenzy of remodeling. Everyone was into changing this and painting that and falling farther into debt.

McDonald shined his light toward the windows to his right and left.

Same thing: the windowpanes were covered with towels and sheets.

Back on the porch, McDonald found a note of some sort—a handmade sign, Magic Marker written on a piece of cardboard: WE’RE HAVING SOME PROBLEMS WITH OUR FRONT DOOR. PLEASE COME AROUND TO THE BACK DOOR.

Now it made sense. In all likelihood, the family was having some work done to the inside of the house.

McDonald checked his watch: 12:21 A.M. Everything was magnified at this time of the night. Spookier and more mysterious. There was probably a nice, cozy family inside the home, all of whom were sleeping. Nothing more than a routine call.

Overdue motorist . . .

The officer rang the doorbell in front before heading out to the back. It was worth a try before walking away.

With no answer, he knocked hard on the door a few times.

Nothing.

Staring more closely into the house, his view obstructed because of the paper towels and sheets, McDonald saw the faint shimmering of a few lights left on. Was someone working in there now?

Of course not.

The officer found his way to the driveway and noticed that there were no vehicles parked in the yard.

He walked toward the garage. It was connected to the house. One of those you could walk from the garage directly into the house. He was hoping to look in through the twelve-by-twelve-inch square windowpanes on the garage door to see if there were any vehicles inside.

Once again, he couldn’t see. The windows were covered with the same material: paper towels and sheets.

What in the world . . .

Beside the garage was a fence blocking the officer’s view of the back door.

McDonald looked for the gate, he said in court later, not being able to see inside the fenced-in section, when he heard footsteps seemingly coming at him.

Fast and furious. Leaves cracking. Branches breaking.

Then came the barking. Ferocious and mean-spirited.

A dog. It was caged up inside the area. McDonald knew better. He wasn’t going inside and having a showdown with some Cujo-like home protector. No one had answered the front door. What were the chances of someone answering the back?

So McDonald walked to his car and called dispatch. “Back in service,” he said. “No contact with anyone at this residence.”

3

During the early-morning hours of February 16, 2002, somewhere near 3:30 A.M., four friends traveled down Old Mill Road in Rutledge, Georgia. They were on their way to South Carolina to attend what one of them described as a “chicken show.” In fact, inside the Toyota minivan they were traveling in were cages of chickens to bring to that show.

It was dark as motor oil out there that time of night. The men had just woken up. They were all a bit groggy still, the ruts in the dirt road bouncing them along, when one of them noticed a light. It was no common light. It had a red and orange glow to it. It came from off in the distance.

“Over there,” one of the men shouted.

The others looked.

“I know someone who owns that land, y’all. Turn around and head over there.”

There was a concern that the woods were on fire. A friend might lose acreage. Maybe even a barn. Animals. People. The closer they got, pulling onto Hawkins Academy Road, where the dark smoke and flames were centered, the more it became clear that this was not a small brush fire, but some kind of inferno. Something was burning out of control.

Pulling up to what they realized was a car engulfed in flames, the men got out of the van. As soon as they hit the outside air, they could feel the heat from the blaze push them back.

One of them was already on his cell phone calling the sheriff.

Morgan County, Georgia, deputy sheriff John Eugene Williams took the call. The man on the other end of the line reported that there was a car on fire in the woods near Hawkins Academy Road. Someone needed to get the fire department out there immediately, before the woods burned out of control. There were trees on fire already. The ground was charred and flaming. Rutledge is a suburb of Madison. It is a deeply settled region of Morgan County. Lots of trees and dirt roads and farmland.

Bucolic nothingness.

“It’s rural,” Deputy Williams later explained.

“There’s a car on fire,” the man said into his cell phone, “out here at Hawkins Academy Road. . . .”

Damn kids probably messing around again. After all, it was still Friday night, unofficially speaking. Bunch of punks probably tied a good one on and, after funneling beers half the night, got a little rowdy and decided to torch an old rusted-out junk vehicle sitting in some farmer’s pasture. Deputy Williams needed to get the local fire department out there as soon as he could and get those flames extinguished before that common car fire turned into an uncontrollable forest fire.

Then he’d have big problems on his hands. A headache the deputy surely didn’t need. Or wanted to deal with.

“Thanks,” Williams said. He was on it.

Deep in the Georgia woods, standing there humbly among the flagpole-straight American beech trees, rotting leaves from the previous fall underneath your feet, you look up in the middle of the night and realize you are a witness to the immaculate grace of God’s country: a blanket of diamonds sparkling against a perfectly black shawl of a sky that gazes back down at you. Off in the distance are the subtle, darkened silhouette outlines of mountains in the shape of a camel’s back. Rutledge, Georgia, as Deputy Williams seemed to imply, is just a blip on a GPS screen, with a population of seven hundred. The town is located approximately halfway between Atlanta and Augusta. It is a forgotten place, essentially, there to serve its people. Rutledge and Madison are quiet and nondescript wooded areas off Interstate 20 that interlopers might assume are nothing more than lost, vast wilderness. Out here, good old folks live quietly. They bother no one. Their focus is on working the same land their forefathers have had for generations past.