PART 1

At 2:27 a.m., my eighty-year-old father called me from a police station in Little Rock, Arkansas. His voice was so unsteady that I could barely understand him.

“Sweetheart, Tanya hurt me. Now she’s telling the police I’m losing my mind.”

Then he said something that frightened me even more.

“Garrett was right there. He saw everything, and he won’t tell them the truth.”

My brother had always been Dad’s favorite fishing partner, the son he’d helped through a failed business and more than one financial crisis. I couldn’t imagine him standing by while our father was accused of something he hadn’t done. But when I asked Dad whether he was hurt, he whispered, “Please just come get me,” and the call ended.

I pulled on jeans and a sweater, grabbed my keys, and drove through the nearly empty streets. I’d worked in federal law enforcement for seventeen years, long enough to know that a frightened caller rarely tells the whole story over the telephone. But this wasn’t a witness or a stranger asking for help. It was the man who’d taught me to ride a bicycle, checked the oil in my first car, and sat beside my hospital bed when I had pneumonia at twenty-three.

At the station, I found Dad sitting alone in a molded plastic chair near the wall. His gray cardigan hung loosely from his shoulders, and his hands were clasped tightly in his lap. Across the waiting area, my sister-in-law, Tanya, was speaking to an officer while Garrett stood beside her, staring at his boots.

“He’s been confused for months,” Tanya insisted. “Tonight he got aggressive. We can’t keep pretending he’s capable of living alone.”