Porterfield’s initial report lay inside, along with Archie’s confession and Gloria’s statement.The first thing I noticed as I read through the file was that there’d been no call summoning Wallace Porter-field to the Kellogg house that night. He’d simply descended upon it from out of the snowy darkness.The time was 5:14 A.M., a very strange time indeed for the sheriff to have seen what he claimed he saw as he made his early-morning rounds, first patrolling back and forth along the deserted, snowbound streets of Kingdom City before extending his vigilance northward, along County Road.As he’d neared the mailbox at the end of the driveway at 1411, his statement said, he’d noticed an old Ford parked beside the tall hedge that bordered the grounds of Horace Kellogg’s home.The house itself was ablaze with lights so that it shone out of the blackness, a circumstance Porterfield found suspicious given the hour and his longtime familiarity with the routine of his old friend; the fact, as he carefully noted in his report, was that Horace and Lavenia Kellogg were both “early-to-bed types.”Even so, it was less the lighted house that attracted Porterfield’s attention than the car he saw parked beside the hedge.And so he’d pulled up behind the Ford rather than turning into the Kelloggs’ driveway.
