On Tuesday morning, March 3, 1975, when Deputy Ken Crowley and I reported for roll call at the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department Patrol and Investigation Division, it was overcast and eighteen degrees. We would be working the scout car in Romulus, a nothing-special suburb west of Detroit.

January 25, 2014, was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Surf City, USA—also known as Huntington Beach, California. It was a pleasant seventy-two degrees, with not a cloud in the sky. The weather was especially nice since, just the evening before, I had flown out of Detroit, where it was two degrees with biting forty-mile-an-hour gusts. I had been in Detroit for a week of unavoidable family business with three self-absorbed siblings.