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Adam had been living with our dad in Calabasas, near Los Angeles, while he took a prelaw program at Pierce College. He hadn’t come home the night before, which my father said wasn’t like him. I tried to offer reassurance, but what could I say when I really didn’t know anything about the situation?

Dad’s concern turned out to be appropriate. For several miserable days, he was beside himself at hearing no word from Adam. I tried to console and reassure him while I made anxious calls to Uncle Mitchell and Adam’s friend Kent and paged Adam himself over and over and over.

A few days later my dad called, sobbing and distraught. He had just gotten a phone call from the police. They had found Adam, in the passenger seat of his car, parked at a major druggie hangout, Echo Park. He was dead of a drug overdose.

Though Adam and I had grown up separately, in different cities except for a short period when we both lived with our father in Atlanta, in the last couple of years we had grown very close, half-brothers who had become closer than many blood brothers. When I had first started getting to know him in Los Angeles, I couldn’t stand any of the music he cared about—rap and hip-hop, anything by 2 Live Crew, Dr. Dre, or N.W.A. But the more of it I heard when we were together, the more it grew on me, and music became part of the bond that drew us to each other.

And now he was gone.

My father and I had had an up-and-down relationship, but I felt he needed me now. I got in touch with my Probation Officer and gained permission to return to LA for a time to help my dad cope with Adam’s death and work his way out of the depression he seemed to be in, even though I knew that this would heighten my own sadness. A day later I was in my car, heading west on I-15 out of the desert for the five-hour pull to Los Angeles.

The drive gave me time to think. Adam’s death just didn’t seem to make sense. Like a lot of kids, he had gone through a rebellious period. At one point he had dressed to emulate his favorite “Goth” bands and was really embarrassing to even be seen with in public. He wasn’t getting along with our dad at all then, and had moved in with my mom and me for a while. But more recently, in college, he seemed to have found himself. Even if he used drugs recreationally, it just didn’t make sense to me that he would have overdosed. I had seen him recently, and there hadn’t been anything in his behavior that even hinted at his being an addict. And my dad had told me that the cops hadn’t found any needle marks when they discovered Adam’s body.

Driving into the night to join my father, I began to think about whether I might be able to use my hacking skills to find out who Adam had been with that night and where he had been.

Late in the evening after the dull drive from Las Vegas, I pulled up at my dad’s apartment on Las Virgenes Road in the town of Calabasas, about forty-five minutes up the coast from Santa Monica and a dozen miles inland from the ocean. I found him absolutely devastated about Adam, harboring a suspicion of foul play. The normal routine of Dad’s life—running his general contracting business, watching the TV news, reading the newspaper over breakfast, taking trips to the Channel Islands to go boating, going to occasional synagogue services—was torn apart. I knew my moving in with him would pose challenges—he was never an easy man to deal with—but I wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. He needed me.

When he opened the door to greet me, I was shocked by how distraught he looked, how gray his face was. He was an emotional wreck. Balding now, clean-shaven and of medium build, he seemed suddenly shrunken.

The cops had already told him, “This isn’t the kind of case we investigate.”

But they had found that Adam’s shoes were tied as if by a person facing him, not the way he would have tied them by himself. And closer examination had revealed one needle puncture in his right arm, which would make sense only if someone else had given him the