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breathing?”
    â€œNo,” Kevin said.
    But try as she might, she, too, misunderstood many of his responses. “Did he just fall over? . . . Do you know what happened to him? . . . Heart attack? . . . Did you say ‘a gun’?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhere is the gun?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œBut you think he shot himself?”
    These details would all be sorted out later, but there was still the matter of the locked main gate leading into the community, which the police and paramedics couldn’t open without some assistance.
    â€œDo you know how to open the gate?” the dispatcher asked.
    Although it took nearly five minutes for the dispatchers to decipher Kevin’s cry for help, they were able to alert some bike patrol officers in the area, who were the first to gain entrance through the main gate and pedal over to the McLaughlin house. But by the time paramedics arrived and rolled Bill onto his back, they realized there was no point in trying to revive him. He was gone.
    It was maddening for Kevin not to be able to communicate better with the dispatchers. He told his sisters that he was angry he hadn’t been able to do more to help his father. However, the minutes that ticked by while he was on the phone didn’t make much difference to his father’s chances of survival.
    The autopsy showed that any one of the six 9mm Federal Hydra-Shok bullets fired into Bill’s chest could have been the fatal shot, killing him almost immediately. The hollow-point bullets, designed to tear through tissue as the tips mushroomed upon impact, had torn right through Bill’s heart and upper torso. Based on the “stippling” marks on his skin—a circular pattern of dots created by firing a gun at close range—the coroner said that at least two of the bullets, presumably the last two, were fired from about two feet away. All the shots were fired from front to back, downward and to the left. Because Bill stood at nearly five feet ten inches, this indicated that the killer was probably taller than he was.
    The 911 tape was tragic to hear in 1994, and even though seventeen years had passed by the time Kevin’s mostly incomprehensible statements reverberated throughout a Santa Ana courtroom, they still ripped open the emotional scars in Bill’s family and close friends.
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    After climbing over the wall into the McLaughlins’ front yard, the bike patrol officers saw that the front door was wide open, and a silver key was stuck in the lock. A gold key also lay on the doormat, apparently dropped by the shooter in his haste to flee. Both keys looked new—they were shiny and had the small temporary rings that some hardware stores attach to freshly ground copies.
    The police soon learned that the gold key opened a pedestrian-access gate across the cul-de-sac, which led to an asphalt path for biking, jogging, and walking. The gate was kept locked, but the spring wasn’t so tight that it couldn’t be accidentally left ajar or finessed to keep it propped open. On either side of the gate was a chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire, that surrounded the community. Today, that fence has been replaced by a higher and more substantial plaster wall, which is covered with a thick, prickly layer of bougainvillea.
    In 1994, the jogging path wound around to a flight of stairs up to a sidewalk that took pedestrians across the four-lane Newport Boulevard Bridge and over the Newport Channel to Lido Marina Village. At the time, the Lido area had a bustling Mediterranean plaza, with a cluster of popular restaurants and nightclubs, including the Thunderbird.
    The homeowners’ association for Balboa Coves, which consisted of sixty-eight bayfront homes, limited the distribution of keys to residents. And even then only a few were given to each family. For security reasons, copies of the keys were supposed to be stamped “do not duplicate,”