Alvin Melleth

But Stephanie seems skeptical.

Sure.

Greg seems open to this idea, only there's a wrinkle.

Stephanie tells us she's leaving the nightly news.

Roughly two weeks from now, she'll no longer be at KVIA.

Sure, the new anchor could maybe take the story, but there's no guarantee.

As they talk about timing, Greg suddenly veers into trying to sell Stephanie on what he sees as the problems in the case.

Greg whips out the manila envelope with George Hall's signed declaration inside.

He starts quoting from it.

A lot of it is pretty dry.

Details about George Hall's interactions with the authorities, the terms of his parole.

I realize this is a version of the pitch he might have given Montoya if he'd gotten a meeting yesterday.

It's just a torrent of raw information.

It's exhausting.

Greg is saying, I know people believe this about the case, that David Wood must have done it because after he was arrested, the police didn't find any more bodies in the desert.

But it's not true.

They actually did find at least one body while David Wood was on trial.

As I'm listening, I realize this is what Greg's up against, a double-barrel problem.

People think they know what happened, but they're missing crucial information.

And while Greg himself has mastered that information, he's spent less time figuring out how to distill it into a good story.