The police considered my car and motorcycle forensic artifacts. They were off-limits. When they allowed me to leave after that first interrogation, I found myself alone on the sidewalk trying to integrate the everyday hustle indifferently buzzing around me. What to do and where to go of secondary consequence since I had limited means to get there.

Luckily, I did have one good friend to rely on, a man who shaped metal into meaning from his home-based studio. I knew I could call him there. We had shared meals with his wife, partied together and as a foursome attended shows and events. The news of her murder sat him down speechless. I thought we had been disconnected, he paused that long before finally saying, "Where are you?" Though I was a little over an hour away, he dropped everything and showed up within forty-five minutes. Without hesitation, he drove me to the office of an attorney I had picked out of the telephone directory.

Then tossing in the roaring white waters of grief, fear, guilt and the encroaching sorrow that would soon take up residence, I was alternating between ramblings and intervals of head-in-hand trance. My pal handled the situation expertly though. He listened when I gibbered and stayed quietly close when I shut down. I spent many of the dark hours with him and his wife over the next several weeks.

With the passing of a few months and my ordeal subsiding, a shadow oddly began to creep over my relationship with the guy who had been my true friend in need, a savior in a way. At first, I couldn't quite put my finger on it, only the sense of some metastatic blight. Instead of his steadfast companionship drawing us closer, I found myself confoundingly recoiling. Despite my better sentiments and tremendous sense of gratitude, a distancing drift was taking hold. It began with not returning a phone call here or there or inexplicably making up a lame excuses to avoid visiting. Like an airplane clearing storm clouds, it finally came to me. I was undeniably developing a measure of dread just thinking about the guy, who, for Christ's sake, had done me a solid for the ages. Without a doubt, I owed it to the both of us to come to terms with my budding phobia.

Not a whole lot of cerebration was required once I delved into an examination of my behavior. My hero, similar to the selflessness of those who risked entering Chernobyl and Fukushima, had exposed himself to the massive radioactivity of the murder. He had bathed in the blast and been terminally irradiated with all of its toxic memories. He had become a panorama of the wretched visions I desperately wanted to dispel. The guilt and shame of my failing were devastating, yet psychologically easier to cope with than the vague spectacles that persistently hovered over his shoulder. He noticed of course. How could he not. He was too perceptive, too attuned to the shift in our friendship to miss the widening gap. He tried valiantly to reach out, but I was already too far gone, too hopelessly lost in my own madness.

When she was buried, the gathering was greater than I could have ever imagined, nearing one hundred, maybe more. I was amazed at how phenomenally many people were touched by her life, how far beyond the small, insular cone of the funneled world I occupied. Little did I then know there were even further extents to which the network reached. It took months to materialize, but my friend and I, like entangled quantum particles, had been instantly changed by her murder. More than the taking of her life, it had also demanded the unwitting sacrifice of my dear friend as well.