Attention Patrons of the Treeline Dining Club

The body copy says: "Have you contracted a treatment-resistant form of chronic fatigue syndrome after eating in this establishment? Has this food-borne virus left you unable to work and live a normal life? If so, please call the following number to be part of a classaction lawsuit."

Then there's a phone number with a weird prefix, maybe a cell phone.

Duncan says, "You think there's a story here?" and the page is dotted with his spit.

Here in the City Room, my pager starts to beep. It's the paramedics.

In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant.

They want you to believe that the news and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn't about you.

My third baby is in a farmhouse two hours downstate.

My fourth baby is in a condo near a shopping mall.

One paramedic leads me to a back bedroom, saying, "Sorry we called you out on this one." His name is John Nash, and he pulls the sheet off a child in bed, a little boy too perfect, too peaceful, too white to be asleep. Nash says, "This one's almost six years old."

The details about Nash are, he's a big guy in a white uniform. He wears high-top white track shoes and gathers his hair into a little palm tree at the crown of his head.

"We could be working in Hollywood," Nash says. With this kind of clean bloodless death, there's no death agonies, no reverse peristalsis—the death throes where your digestive system works backward and you vomit fecal matter. "You start puking shit," Nash says, "and that's a realistic-type death scene."

What he tells me about crib death is that it occurs most between two and four months after birth. Over 90 percent of deaths occur before six months. Most researchers say that beyond ten months, it's almost impossible. Beyond a year old, the medical examiner calls the cause of death "undetermined." A second death of this nature in a family is considered homicide until proven otherwise.