It’s silent but for the tromping of my feet on damp asphalt, my breaths heavy in the gloom of a night smothered by an interminable inversion of fog squatting over Boise, Idaho. I’ve been running for an hour. My lungs ache, my thighs are sore. I run through nondescript neighborhoods of ranch-style homes. I run along massive expanses of asphalt lined with lumber companies and car dealers. I run across bridges that hover over speeding automobiles bound for the universal corners of the suburban universe. The tromping of my feet, my heavy breaths—they’re the only sounds in this unending smothering of night.
    The inversion hasn’t lifted for weeks. Nor has my depression. Tomorrow I’ll don slacks and a button-up shirt and return to the Ada County Courthouse to endure another six hours of testimony and photographs. I’ll watch as expert witnesses explain how grey matter ended up here. How a shard of bone ended up there. How a bullet casing was discovered in the garage.
    I turn left at an empty intersection, and my tromping ascends a short incline. At the crest I turn left again entering a sleeping neighborhood of modest, well-kept homes. The suburb is okay, but the hotel where the newspaper has rented me a room for the two-month trial is something else. I open the door greeted by shag carpet and the smell of urine. It’s night, but the lone window rarely fetches sun. I kick off my shoes and consider that the running works while I’m doing it. But I can’t run forever. Morning—and the trial—always comes.
    For some reason this is my job. I’m a reporter at a community newspaper, and the community the newspaper serves has suffered a concussion. A 16-year-old girl has been charged with murdering her parents, her mother while she slept, her father while he showered. The couple was slain with a hunting rifle in their home in the little town of Bellevue, Idaho, one of the communities that collectively comprise the wealthy resort area of Sun Valley.
    The murders happened in the early morning hours of Sept. 2, 2003. Mom was shot point-blank in the head, a crack that decapitated her and left blood and tissue strewn on the wall behind the bed and throughout the room, a fragment of her skull in the hallway some thirty feet away. Dad was shot in the chest in the bathroom. Before he died he clawed his way across the bedroom to his wife’s lifeless body. His naked, bloodied figure was facedown on the floor next to his wife’s. We’re spared no details in the courtroom. Nothing is left to the imagination.
    Most days my job is like that of a court stenographer. I write down what people say, then fashion those things into thread people can use to attempt sewing sense into the terrible upheaval the murders have caused.
    Proceedings begin at 9 a.m. I enter the sixth-floor courtroom and sit on a pew in the back to the right of the entry. Nearby are a television crew from Court TV, a producer from 20-20 and a reporter from the Times News, a South Idaho daily. On the other side of the room is the family of the victims, also the family of the defendant. Each day they file in. Each day the sit and watch with stoic expressions. Each day they file out.
    There’s a café on the first floor where Court TV has set up a mini studio where attorneys and witnesses who have already testified can give interviews. The Court TV reporters are all women, tall and sexy attorneys-turned-television personalities. Like the trial they’re covering they’re fodder for a public captivated by the surreal and superficial. One of the reporters comes and goes from week to week. The Michael Jackson child molestation trial is underway in Arizona, and there’s a public hungry for more than an astonishing child murderess story.
    Sometimes Nancy Grace appears on television monitors in the café. She interviews people remotely, and those interviews end up on Court TV and CNN. I’m invited to give an interview alongside the defense attorney at one point. I respectfully decline. I’m reminded of the O.J. Simpson Trial, the first time the American public was subjected to all-day coverage of a real-life tragedy. There’s no more need for soap operas. Real life serves up drama enough, and capitalism always finds a way to turn hard luck into a buck.
    A friend from out of town comes and goes from day to day, week to week. He’s picked up on my funk and attempts to lighten the mood. We spend an evening knocking back beers. On the way home he asks me to pull into a parking lot in front of a nondescript building with a sign hanging from its brick façade.
    “What’s the Rhino?” I ask.
    We walk through a double door into a room where two vertical brass poles are in the center of two circular stages. Asian men in suits are sitting in chairs. They’re watching topless women swing around the poles. They’re mutes. They sit without talking and stuff folded-up bills in garters, smiling widely when a busty woman pays them special attention. My friend shoves a wad of dollars in my fist. We sit, and before long he disappears with a curly-haired woman behind a curtain near the back of the room.
    There I sit, watching the cogs of the great American machine at work. We’re founded on puritanical ideals, but something seems broken. There’s no direct correlation, but I consider how the women swinging around the stages are part of the same machine that uses sexy reporters to serve the news. One, I suppose, has the higher purpose of journalism, but they’re both employing sex to make money. The stripper might argue a higher purpose, too, that of distracting people from their lives for a while, or maybe that of working a man up and sending him home to his wife. I really couldn’t say.
    Whatever the truth, I’m the wrong man to bring to this place. I seek fulfillment in trying to sort out what’s real. Fantasies and pretty faces don’t often deliver, and the fact is that capitalism and sex seem to go hand in hand. Everywhere from TV ads to glossy magazine articles they work in tandem to produce consumption. The base instincts of the human body are powerful indeed, and they can be more powerful—if shorter lived—than love.
    The trial makes that point as well as any. During a succession of six-hour-days in the courtroom the prosecution argues the murders were a crime of passion. There’s a lot of evidence to support that. The murderess had been dating an older Hispanic man, an illegal alien. The upper-middle-class white parents didn’t approve. On the Monday of the murders they had scheduled an appointment with a local police officer to consider statutory rape charges. It’s a visit that never took place.
    The prosecution reconstructs the events thus: Sarah Marie Johnson spent considerable hours in the family’s guest house that Memorial Day weekend in 2003. Hunting was a popular pastime with the family, and so guns were commonplace. There was a hunting rifle kept by a tenant who rented the guest house and who was out of town that weekend. That rifle was the murder weapon. Sometime around 6 a.m. Alan Johnson was taking a shower, and Marie Johnson was asleep. Young Sarah Johnson, wearing a pink bathrobe, one latex glove and one cotton glove, walked into the room, held the weapon within inches of her mother’s sleeping head and pulled the trigger. She then worked her way to the bathroom where her father was emerging from the shower. From the bathroom doorway she pulled the trigger once more. She then took the bathrobe and gloves to a trashcan that was sitting near the street in front of the house and awaiting Monday-morning pick-up. She ran into the street screaming and crying: “My parents have been shot. My parents have been shot.”
    The defense surmises several alternatives. Johnson’s boyfriend, Bruno Santos, could have done it. Perhaps members of a gang were recruited to carry out the atrocities.
    There is no single piece of conclusive evidence, but the totality of the prosecution’s effort is convincing.
    After two months of proceedings the trial is winding down, and prosecutors have invited expert witnesses to the stand. They retrieve the bedding, rifle and shards of bone that were collected from the home. They open some of the packaged evidence and attempt to reconstruct the scene of the murder. They lay the bedding on a plywood replica of a bed. For some 15 minutes they work while the acrid smell of aging blood overruns the courtroom. The judge calls the proceedings to a halt and declares the area a bio-hazard. The courtroom is evacuated.
    Again I find myself running through the darkness. The interminable inversion has lifted in Boise, but the smothering of the trial on my mind has not. I pad through the Boise State University campus where book-laden students stroll through the night. My legs whisk me beneath clacking limbs beginning to wake with the arrival of spring.
    It’s a high-profile affair. Careers are made and unmade. Soon after the trial the young deputy prosecuting attorney realizes a significant promotion to the Idaho Attorney General’s office. Nancy Grace presumably receives improved ratings. The defense attorney eventually finds himself in trouble with the Idaho Bar for allegedly overcharging on unrelated cases. And in the midst of it all are the ruined lives of a family caught by the unthinkable circumstances of atrocities that could have been avoided.
    Justice was brought, the prosecutors declare.
    An innocent girl was convicted, the defense says.
    The public was educated, the media considers.
    And loss is suffered, irreparable damage to the psyches of the family and those who know and love them.    “You had it all,” says Judge Barry Wood at the girl’s sentencing hearing four months later. “You had a nice family, nice school, car, freedom. You had it all. In the final analysis you had lots of options . . . You had all kinds of ways to not go down this road, and yet you elected the worst possible course of conduct . . . Are you the shooter? The jury found you were. When I make the comment that I think the evidence in this case is strong, it is. It is really strong. You had a chance to abandon, to step out of this senselessness. Presumably, you had a conversation with your father before you shot him. And you had to look him in the eye. You shot him in the lung. There's only one story to be told here, so to speak, and it’s sad.
    “Why? It’s the ring that can't be taken out of the bell. Everybody in this room is asking why, why, why? It defies explanation, except for the explanation of your selfish protection of your relationship.”
    Sarah Johnson’s aunts, uncles, grandparents and brother are given the opportunity to speak at her sentencing. One of the family matriarchs, Diane Johnson’s mother, Pat Dishman, puts her finger on the pulse of the situation and returns to the one thing that seems to cast light in such dark times. In slow, deliberate words she addresses her granddaughter.
    “Sarah, I’m not talking to the court. I’m talking to you. I haven’t talked to you since you were arrested. I need to talk with you now, Sarah. We have been absolutely devastated by the deaths of your mom and dad. This is most difficult, Sarah, because we all loved you. We all loved you. I still love you, Sarah, and I pray for you every day. I pray that you will come to terms with what you have done and that you will make your way back to God.”
    In closing arguments at the sentencing hearing deputy prosecutor Justin Whatcott says in succinct words something I’ve been mulling for months.
    “When I think about this case, the only word I think about is frustrating. It’s been frustrating for everyone involved. None of us chose to be here. We didn’t choose to be involved in this case. She put us here. She’s the reason we’ve had to go through this horrific case. For everyone who has had to deal with this case, the question is why. Why did you do this? That's all anyone wants to know. Why did this have to happen to two decent people.”
    Once again I find myself running, something I hadn’t done in years before the trial. Now I’m running on a narrow dirt trail in the mountains near Sun Valley, probably a mere 10 miles from the home where the Johnsons were slain. I’m weaving through spotty stands of aspen trees and Douglas firs, up a gradual incline, a grade that seems to climb forever.
    Running. Feeling guilty for having been affected by someone else’s tragedy. Trying not to look back. And looking back just the same.