SEVEN REASONS

PROLOGUE

Denver, Colorado

Friday September 20th, 21.15

Roxborough Park

There were at least two police cars, four SUVs, a fire truck and two ambulances, parked best on the ground wet with autumn rain. Winter was not yet near but the storm had been raging on the city for a few days. The vehicles were scattered on the grass but were not there to check the level of the river or some natural disaster. What brought those people to stay in the woods during a damn storm was the corpse.

Martin Jamison had been away from home for a week and his body was almost unrecognizable: he seemed to have been pounded for a long time, swollen in several places. The skullcap, half whole, lacked the occipital bone and his brain was lost somewhere in the grass. He was wearing the Denver Nuggets jacket, soaked in blood and dirt to make the colors white, blue and gold a blurring spot.

It was him, surely, Sheriff Dawson said after a look at the photo given by Martin's mother. And there he was, the pupil of the high school, the boy who had stratospheric votes and who held the record of three-point shots at the school championships. Tall, muscular, agile, first. Rigid, still and dead now. The forensics arrived to take pictures, look for some clues among the blades of grass and examine the traces on the corpse. Then came the steel coffin, the extraordinarily claustrophobic one where those who had already crossed the bridge were closed. At one o'clock Martin Jamison was in the coffin going to the morgue to be formally recognized by his parents, leaving the police with a lot of questions and giving Denver citizens something to talk about during breakfast. The body had been found late, despite constant research, maybe because of little information given by parents, or maybe it was the fact that Martin, in fact, was not lacking in anyone.