PrologueMel kissed me goodbye softly before she crept out of the house in the pre-dawn hours. She didn’t know I was awake...I couldn’t sleep. I was worried about her going all the way down to the Big Sandy Federal Penitentiary to talk to a lifer on a long shot to get the information she needed to find his own son, Ryan McClarnan, and arrest him for his crimes. I’ve been in supermax prisons before – not a place you want to make a habit of visiting. She’d never been inside any jail but the Muskingum County jail that she operates as the County Sheriff. Supermax penitentiaries are a beast. The first time I’d ever interviewed a convict in one, it was perspective changing.
No one else was home. Kris, Mel’s twin sister, had stayed the night with her boyfriend and Kris’s teenagers, Beth and Cole,
