Stan Kaminsky, Police Chief in Morristown, N.J., died of a massive heart attack seven hours after catching the biggest – and strangest – case of his career and one hour after calling his friend Drew McLogan, an ex-television producer staying at Kaminsky’s house, and asking McLogan for help in the case.

"I need to run," Kaminsky concluded their phone call at 4:00 a.m. after suggesting a few people McLogan should talk to starting that morning. "Should be home in a couple. We can talk more then. Thanks."

Strange, McLogan thought as Kaminsky hung up. He immediately felt uneasy. As it turns out, those were the last words he ever heard his friend speak.

He didn’t know half of how strange things were.

***

Seven hours earlier, McLogan, standing in the parking lot of a restaurant across the street from the Morristown train station. He was watching as the 9:22 p.m. New Jersey Transit train inched out of the Morristown commuter station through a cloud of steam. The overhead lighting was poor – probably a third of the bulbs were out or missing – and the night was dark and cold (as February 1991 had been all month), giving the steam that was wafting up from beneath the train an eerie quality as it climbed toward the pavilion protecting the track.

Inside, the riders – the scattered few who were heading toward Manhattan at that time of night – stared down, either napping or reading that day's newspaper. No one seemed to be looking out the window. No reason to, really; why look back when you are leaving?

The giant locomotive strained, groaning loudly as its stainless- steel wheels struggled to pull the tons of machinery above them and the passenger coaches behind. As the engine reached the end of the concrete platform, however, the revolutions of the wheels increased in intensity, the pounding noise became more regular, and the resistance disappeared. By the time the third car reached the end of the platform and disappeared behind the small strip mall that bordered the station's east side, the train appeared to be nearly at top speed.

McLogan watched the train disappear into the night, and all that was left were a few steam clouds that gently played with the hanging lights and formed odd-shaped figures. A vapor-like warmth raced through him and then quickly surrounded his body as if a protective cover had been draped over him and tightly wrapped around him.

A shell.

Maybe a shield.

The whistle sounded, startling him. He felt his shoulders jump an inch or two. Suddenly, he was cold again. And the night was dark. He shivered. He looked away from the station and back over his left shoulder where Kaminsky stood smiling at him.

"Another one's leaving in 30 minutes," Kaminsky said. "Want to wait?"

McLogan was embarrassed. Once again. He had planned to be on the train heading back into Manhattan. But he was frozen by indecision and hesitancy. As these episodes became more and more frequent in the past months, he had often wondered how strange he looked to others. How transparent he had become. How visible his fears and confusion were to those who were only casually looking at him. Now, here he was, standing in a restaurant parking lot, ignoring his friend, while he stared across a busy street at a train like a scared eight-year-old.

"There's just something about trains and airplanes, watching them leave. It's almost mesmerizing. Sometimes I think there is no better feeling. Sorry."

"No need to," Kaminsky said and looked at his friend, who had walked over and taken a seat on the bumper of Kaminsky's van. McLogan looked like a man on an extended vacation. His curly brown hair, flecks of gray visible at the sideburns, already was crawling over the tops of his ears and collar. He had grown a decent salt-and-pepper beard. His jeans had seen better days, as had his nondescript winter coat.

McLogan looked back at Kaminsky.

Kaminsky was surprised at how much his friend had aged in the months since he last saw him. His face was drawn, and his eyes were tired. He was thinner but didn't look any healthier.

"It was really good to see you," McLogan said. "I'm glad this worked out."

Kaminsky turned back toward the rear of the van, saying, "I'm always here, Mac. You want to talk, I'm here to talk. You want to scream, I’ve got a garage. You want to keep to yourself, I'm not going to butt in. It's up to you." His voice had a sing-song quality.

McLogan stared at Kaminsky. The look was warm and genuine.

"Yeah, well, sometimes, I wish somebody would butt in."

"I know that feeling. You know that. You're the one who helped me."

McLogan acknowledged Kaminsky's response without speaking. He remembered how broken Kaminsky had been when Margaret died five years earlier. He remembered how lovingly this giant of a man spoke about his wife.

Kaminsky asked, "And if I did? If I did butt in?"

"I'd probably get pissed off." A slight smile. McLogan shifted his weight on the bumper. "I'm famous for my temper, remember?"

Kaminsky suddenly wheeled to his left and kicked his right boot into the van's left rear tire. "For Christ's sake, Mac, you're not exactly at the felon level ... yet. Don't throw that line of crap at me."

That's not what the New York Police Department thought, McLogan wanted to say. But the sight of burly Kaminsky, the highly respected police chief of this midsized New Jersey bedroom community, kicking a tire in a restaurant parking lot was more than McLogan could handle. He laughed out loud. He stood and walked over to his friend and put his arm around his burly shoulder.

"Thanks, Stan," he said, smiling broadly. "That’s a vision that I won’t quickly forget." He then quickly added: "I could do without the angry emotions, but I wouldn’t mind developing some positive emotions again."

"You will," Kaminsky said. "You actually are and probably aren’t even noticing it. You'll get there. Trust me, I’ve been on the same journey. It’s worth the trip."

McLogan shook his head. "I know, and thanks. Tonight – seeing you and talking – was a big help."

"Good, I'm glad." He paused. "Stick with it. It'll get better again."

"I'm going to. Unfortunately, I just move at the pace of a dinosaur."

Kaminsky reached his left hand up to his right shoulder, where McLogan's hand rested, and placed his on top. "Let's go home," Kaminsky said. "You obviously aren’t leaving tonight. We both know that. A good night’s sleep isn’t going to hurt either one of us. You can go back into the city tomorrow."

They turned to get into the van.

***

The nurses' station on Four East in Memphis' Baptist Hospital was quiet. Jamie Questlow was sitting at the built-in desk, her long legs propped up on the two-drawer file cabinet to her right, her shoes resting on that day's edition of the Commercial-Appeal. Her legs and feet had been bothering her all evening, ever since she came on at 4:00 p.m. She had just returned from Utah, and after five days of skiing, her sore muscles had cried out to her all evening; this was her first day back in the Intensive Care Unit. She looked at the wall clock directly opposite the desk, high on the white wall. 11:30 p.m. Not long to go now.

Beryl Minniefield stood directly across from Jamie, her left arm – elbow, to be exact – resting on the main counter of the station. Beryl had nursed at Baptist for 11 years, since just after the birth of her son Dexter. For seven years, she had worked the overnight so that Dexter and then LuAnne, who was now eight, could be looked after at night by her husband D.L., who drove for the Shelby County Road Department from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Two years ago, when the kids were nine and six, Beryl switched over to the second shift. She left the house at 4:00 p.m., D.L. was back home by 5:00 p.m., and Dexter and LuAnne were only alone for an hour each day. It was working out well: The kids were helping a great deal around the house, LuAnne was actually getting her father's dinner warmed each day, and D.L. and Beryl were allowed to sleep together during the week.

Tonight, ICU had been fairly quiet and uneventful. The two cardiac-care cases in A43 and A45 were resting comfortably, and each patient had already been seen by the resident on call. The only possible problem, Beryl had told Jamie when they both came on, was Mae Lonergan, the 78-year-old widow in the room just around the corner from the station. Terrible situation, Beryl had said, shaking her head from side to side with an emotion not usually expressed by most jaded nurses. Just terrible. The poor old lady had been brought into the Emergency Room four nights earlier, following a home invasion, with a pair of surgical scissors stuck into her right armpit, causing a tear of her axillary artery and massive blood loss. She made it through extensive surgery but had been in and out of consciousness since.

The Memphis and Shelby County police departments – and the forensic evidence technicians – had been all over the hospital in the first couple of days after Mae had been brought in.

Beryl had noticed that she hadn't had any visitors. She wondered why and, on the third day, called admissions. Jerry Breen, the assistant director, looked up Mae's record and told Beryl that Mae didn't have any visitors because she apparently didn't know anyone in Memphis. He added that when he was interviewed by the police, he heard that Mae had only moved here three weeks ago from New Jersey.

"I'm going to go check on A41," Beryl said, grabbing her clipboard file and heading toward Mae Lonergan's room. "Want to go with me?"

Jamie sat up and started to rise before thinking better about the effort required.

"No, I'll stay here," she said, propping her legs back up. "I can't move."

***

Despite their friendship, McLogan always wondered about his relationship with Kaminsky, thinking, Why does this guy like me? It didn't make sense: Kaminsky was the exact opposite of McLogan. McLogan deliberately hid in the shadows, but Kaminsky always managed to be larger than life – regardless of the circumstance. The 235 pounds he carried on his 5-foot-10 frame were not the only reason.

Only the most obvious.

With Kaminsky, other things also were special. His sky-blue eyes sparkled with emotions. He had a smile that was versatile enough to win over five-year-olds on the street as well as scheming and calculating town council members at budget-setting time. A deeply resonant baritone that turned heads and sounded authoritative, despite its musical cadence, even when Kaminsky was bluffing.

Kaminsky also possessed an ethical barometer that should be the envy of any person. And that’s the part that McLogan found most appealing and intriguing.

McLogan had met Kaminsky seven years earlier when he was working as a news producer in New York for 60 Minutes and working on a story on small-town police forces. The two, the 31- year-old and the 48-year-old, had quickly and surprisingly become close.

Kaminsky was drawn to the big-city journalist because his honesty appeared to come easily to him and because he seemed to care genuinely about the people who were being interviewed and portrayed in the report. McLogan, in turn, found Kaminsky to be unique in the best sense of the word. Here was a municipal official who not only wasn't afraid of scrutiny, he welcomed it – believing it might help him to become a better cop.

"Chief, would you be comfortable on camera?" McLogan had cautiously asked Kaminsky when the segment was first proposed. "It would make our story stronger. What do you think?"

"Hell, yes," Kaminsky had responded without hesitation. "Of course, I'm not afraid. Those things I'm doing right will make our department look good. Those I'm doing bad, I should know about so I can change. It’s a pretty simple decision."

McLogan liked that answer and the many more that followed during the actual taping. The report was a success, and Kaminsky's candidness was a major reason.

Even after the segment ran, the two had remained friendly, getting together every three of four months for dinner and talking on the phone occasionally. When Kaminsky’s daughter Stephanie got married, McLogan and his wife Kay attended. And when Margaret Kaminsky died of cancer five years ago, McLogan and Kay attended the services, and McLogan then stayed in town, and he and Kaminsky spent the next three days together.

They stayed up late, McLogan listening to Kaminsky colorfully and with great affection tell story after story about his wife and their 25 years of marriage. McLogan hadn't said much those evenings; mostly, he listened. Apparently, that was what Kaminsky needed most. What Kaminsky didn't know – at that time, anyway – was that McLogan needed the stories, too.

Three years later, when Kay and one-year-old Allison were sideswiped and killed on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, Kaminsky was the first person McLogan called from the police station. After going to the morgue and identifying his wife – who had been shining in the glow of motherhood only a day earlier – lying dead on a cold, stainless-steel slab, McLogan had kissed her goodbye and stoically walked out of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. Turning onto Columbus Avenue, he began to shake, spasms taking control of his entire body, and perspiration quickly drenched his slacks and shirt. At the corner, he grabbed a mesh litter basket to keep from falling. The sidewalk had become uneven; the mild breeze was as powerful as an evening storm. Holding onto the rim of the basket with both hands, he saw in his mind's eye a curly-haired little boy crying, left alone with no parents to look after him.

He threw the basket, and it crashed into and then bounced off of the front window of a delicatessen. By the time the police arrived, McLogan was sitting on the sidewalk, shaking uncontrollably, his hands pressed together around Kay's broken watch, which had been given to him at the morgue.

Passersby reacted in typical New York style; some completely ignoring him and some asking if he needed help. When McLogan's response to the police officer's approach was to attempt to tackle him around the knees, the next step was a trip to the local precinct house.

A one-year probation followed; Kaminsky’s intervention prevented things from being worse.

Until recently, they hadn't spoken for about nine months, or ever since McLogan left CBS. One day, when management started to squeeze just as hard as his personal life was squeezing him, and there weren't any good reasons to stay around, McLogan said, Screw it, I quit, and walked out. A half-hour later, he was telling his super on West 64th Street that he would be gone for a while; he wasn't sure exactly how long, and hey, don’t let anyone enter my condo. He went upstairs, grabbed some clothes and personal files, and walked out. After another 45 minutes, he was in an Avis car, looking for the New England Thruway. By dinnertime, McLogan was passing through Bridgeport, Connecticut, his mind preoccupied with tomorrows rather than yesterdays.

It was that impulsive, that simple, and that risky.

The next several months passed without a major hitch, McLogan spending the late spring in a small dumpy motel on Route 28 in Yarmouth before putting his $82,000 savings down in June on a small two-bedroom house in Dennisport. And he focused on nothing more than passing the time, primarily 30-mile bicycle rides along the Cape Cod Rail Trail, venturing midday, daily, from Dennisport through the trees to Nickerson State Park and its throng of hearty campers; and on to Orleans at the Cape's elbow.

Sometimes, McLogan would ride all the way to the Cape Cod National Seashore, out past Eastham, to Nauset Beach. There, he would sit and stare out at the gray, never-ending horizon and let his mind wander to the many thoughts that raced through it at a too-fast pace. There would be no solutions, no remedies, no fixes. Just exploration, introspection, and reflection.

It worked and made him feel better.

At other times, he would fix on Nauset Lighthouse, its steadiness, and dependability causing him to think about all the realities that should have been in his life. His childhood, his parents, his career, and his life with Kay and Allison. All those realities that were his then disappeared or were taken away.

He would do either until he was ready to ride back to Dennisport. Sometimes he would lose track of time, sitting there on the beach, unable to hear much around him.

The audio thing, that was another on the long list.

Ever since he was a kid, McLogan had found that times of intense pressure or nervousness would cause him to hear a haunting – and frightening – humming sound. It was external. He had experienced it ever since he was a little boy. And now, the only way he knew how to make the sound go away was to go to Nauset Beach.

Recently, he had become fascinated with walking through the dunes, especially the part south of the light at the Coast Guard beach. About a mile-and-a-half down the beach, in 1927, Henry Beston, a naturalist-writer, had built a house and written a book entitled "The Outermost House." From that house, which was the easternmost residence in the United States, Beston had written the following: "On its solitary dune, my house faced the four walls of the world."

McLogan really liked that sentence and would think about it as he walked the same dunes that Beston had almost 65 years earlier. He thought about those "four walls" as he walked Nauset Beach, and he considered it a privilege to have the same view. He regarded Henry Beston's dunes as his private place, his own "Outermost House."

One day, a guy at the Cumberland Farms store on 134 asked McLogan why he rode the bike trail so often. McLogan told him that three hours on the trail and a couple of hours at the dunes was a hell of a lot cheaper – and probably more beneficial – than sitting for 50 minutes in a psychiatrist's chair. Besides, he added, rage belongs outside, not in someone's office. The guy paused for a couple of seconds, looking at McLogan and his bike, and then shrugged his stooped shoulders and said, Okay.

McLogan's Cape Cod routine also included writing an occasional free-lance article for the Cape Cod Times, more to pass the time than to pay the bills. It did neither, actually, but it at least gave McLogan an answer to the question, What do you do?, if someone asked him. What did help pay the bills were larger magazine takeouts, including one he did for Boston magazine on the battle between the television newsmagazines: several he did for Inc. magazine on the business prospects of media companies, and some editing work for the Harvard Business Review. The work was enjoyable, time- consuming, and occupied his mind. All good, he thought.

Other than that, the days – the nights, too – were pretty much standard stuff, McLogan trying to work a little on some fiction in the afternoon after his ride, having a couple of Samuel Adams' at Billie's in Harwichport around dinnertime, and mindlessly reading Elmore Leonard novels at night. McLogan liked reading Leonard: clean, concise, and neat.

He had just finished "Freaky Deaky," which opened with "Chris Mankowski’s last day on the job, two in the afternoon, two hours to go, he got a call to dispose of a bomb."

Saying more with fewer words than anyone on earth. McLogan could live the rest of his life doing that.

Finally, after months of self-imposed exile, McLogan figured it was time to make some decisions. That was a decision in itself. For one thing, he was maintaining two residences on no jobs, a ratio that even he knew made no sense. Deciding which one to keep was the issue. Had he really washed his hands of his life in Manhattan? He thought so, but one final step was required – he needed to get rid of that condo on 64th. That would put an end to that life. That McLogan. He wasn't going back to it, anyway, so he might as well sell the place, once and for all.

After all, he had said more than once, there is nothing there anymore. And I'm done settling for nothing.

***

Beryl ran out of A41 and motioned to Jamie. "Call a code, Jame."

Jamie righted herself, swinging her legs back to the floor with great force. The action was painful. "Ooh," she grimaced, picking up the green telephone to her left.

Beryl turned and re-entered Mae Lonergan's room, a limping Jamie already right behind her. It was too late. Mae was not breathing.

Beryl and Jamie approached the bed and started CPR. Beryl looked at Mae and wondered if dying without anyone knowing or caring was any different than dying and leaving behind loved ones. She wondered if Mae had realized it.

The resident on call joined them within 30 seconds. It didn’t matter. CPR and adrenaline didn’t change anything.

The pronounced Mae dead four minutes later.

***

McLogan called Kaminsky and told him that he was coming down to Manhattan to list the condo with a Realtor and to finish off a couple of other business matters. He also wanted to visit the cemetery in Westchester County, where Kay and Allison were buried. To close the loop, he wanted to say but managed not to.

Kaminsky said, "Christ, Mac, as long as you're going to be in the city, make sure you come out this way, and we'll have dinner. Talk a little. Spend some time together."

And, so, here they were, staring at a train. The small-town police chief and the unemployed TV news producer. Talking about their individual emotional pain. Friends, good friends, with very little in common other than a bond that couldn't be explained and wouldn't be challenged. The friendship was real, and Kaminsky and McLogan felt natural, spending time together.

The radio in Kaminsky's van suddenly cut across the parking lot. "Prowlers reported at 37 McDougall. At 37 McDougall. All available patrol cars, please respond."

Kaminsky looked over at McLogan, the two still sitting on the bumper. "I need to go, Mac. Don’t leave town yet." Kaminsky reached into his pocket and handed McLogan a small keychain that included his house key. "Go home to my house. You know where everything is. Use Stephanie’s bedroom upstairs, like you did before. We’ll keep talking after I see what’s going on with this call."

Kaminsky’s face was changing now, from civilian to cop. Serious eyes joining the playful smile.

McLogan nodded. "Sure."

Kaminsky got into his van. McLogan started walking... Kaminsky’s house was only a few blocks away.