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gun rack and the right to bear arms is the only right anyone within a hundred miles gives a damn about.
    Governor Johnson is greeting veterans at a reception in the senior center. A thin old man in a loose-fitting World War II uniform offers him a moose burger and they kid each other about war. The governor gives the crowd the standard “All veterans are heroes and our nation must never forget them.” The camera pans the knotty pine-paneled room as the vets applaud. The décor is early hunting lodge: deer and moose heads mounted on the walls along with Minnesota’s state fish, the walleye. Governor Johnson pauses between handshakes to point his thumb and forefinger at the head of a twelve-point buck. “Bang, bang, bang,” he says. “Get you next season.”
    The camera catches Sergeant Hugh Boyer, the governor’s bodyguard and driver, breaking his usual stoic stance to roll his baby blue eyes.
    I rewound the tape and watched it again. Boyer and I shared enough off-the-record chats about Governor Johnson that I know that he knows the governor is so very full of shit. The only one who doesn’t know that is the governor. Even so, Boyer should be smarter than to let it show in public.
    Boyer used to be the state’s top highway crash investigator and having him babysit Governor Johnson was a waste of talent. He was temporarily drafted for the bodyguard job a year earlier when the gov’s main muscle got caught driving drunk one weekend. The State Patrol bosses suspected that Boyer was a media source, though they preferred to call it violating the Minnesota Data Practices Law, an act punishable by a thousand-dollar fine and up to ninety days in jail.
    “They’re just doing this to flush you out,” I told him. “They’ll set you up with an irresistible but fake tip to see if it shows up during sweeps month. Then they’ll have the proof that you’re a leak.”
    “You’re probably right, Riley,” he said to me. “But it’s a chance to get out of writing up fatals for a few months.”
    Protecting the state’s highest elected official is just a minor duty of the Minnesota State Patrol. Their most visible role is cracking down on speeders, but officers also investigate fatal traffic accidents. Boyer, their best accident reconstructionist, could read skid marks like a TV anchor could read a teleprompter.
    We had met four years earlier after a rock star’s stretch limo hit a school bus. I could see how tracing small body outlines in chalk on blacktop roads might start to wear on a guy, but I was still sore when Boyer decided that the best way to avoid being caught leaking stuff to the media was to stop leaking stuff to the media.
    On the tape, the governor moves down the hall. So does the camera. A sign reads BILL’S BARBERSHOP . The shot is wide and wobbly because the photographer, Chuck Hudella, is trying to get ahead of the group by walking backward. He doesn’t notice, in the far corner of the screen, Governor Johnson carelessly giving press secretary Poppy Jones a little squeeze on the ass. Bodyguard Boyer apparently does and gives a slight shake of his head toward the governor, who responds by briefly flashing what looks like his middle finger. None of this made news because what happens later on the tape made everything else irrelevant.
    The governor gives a high five to a three-year-old boy getting a crew cut. The kid is perched on a board across the top of the barber chair. Suddenly the boy slides out of frame as an explosion rocks the room.
    The camera shuts down briefly. Screams are the only thing heard when the tape rolls again. It’s dark and dusty.
    “What’s goin’ on? Anybody know what’s goin’ on?”
    I can’t see who is yelling, but I recognized Chuck’s voice. The old-time photog had a reputation among the reporters at Channel 3 of being difficult to work with because he disliked using a tripod—a fault that sometimes resulted in shaky stand-ups. Stubbornly, he’d brace his elbow on the