The Regime: Evil Advances by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins

turning point in last night’s basketball game between …”
    “You see?” the grizzled sports editor would tell the rest of the staff. “Get to the heart of the matter right away. These other stories are fill-in-the-blanks, and I’ve seen ‘em a thousand times.”
    Cameron peppered his pieces with quotes not only from the coaches and players but also from fans and even referees. And his coverage of what might otherwise have been dead-boring school-board meetings crackled with drama, even if he had to embellish it.
    The fly vigorously rubbing his forelegs together on my knee during last night’s meeting of the District 211 school board was the highlight until council member Fred Kinsella referred to the chairwoman with a gender-based epithet. That woke the rest of the board, the fly, and me. The inciting issue was …
    But the story that launched Cameron Williams’s career was one of those serendipitous events that falls into the lap of the person who finds himself in the right place at the right time. He found no joy in the circumstance, however, because the event was tragic almost beyond words.

    He had been lounging in the editorial office, gassing with a couple of photographers, when one was summoned to the scene of a horrible accident. “Wanna come, Cam?” the photog said, strapping on his cameras and grabbing his coat.
    Cameron checked his watch. His ball game didn’t start for another hour, and the scene of the accident was on the way. He followed the photographer to a tiny suburban subdivision that had seen better days. They picked their way around and through emergency vehicles to where an ambulance waited, its lights off. A man leaving for his evening shift at a local factory had backed over and killed his own toddler son in the driveway.
    Cameron immediately began interviewing the first cops on the scene. He was informed that the victim and the father were in the kitchen, and everyone was just giving him a moment before they transported the body to the morgue.
    He signaled the photographer, and they slipped in the kitchen door. The curtains were closed and the room was dark, save for a light directly over the kitchen table, where the tiny body lay, wrapped head to toe in a dirty white sheet. The father sat before his child with his back to Cameron and the photographer, his forehead on the table, shoulders heaving. It was clear he had not heard them enter.
    Cameron glanced at the photographer, who lifted his camera and aimed at the poignant scene. Just then the father slowly lifted his hands and put one atop the covered head of his son and the other over his ankles.

    Cameron could only imagine the perfection of the composition in the frame of the camera.
    The picture would tell the whole story. The room was dingy; the overhead fixture isolated the dead boy and his grieving father, abject with guilt, gently touching—blessing—the child he had killed. Cameron waited and waited for the click of the shutter and hoped it would not interrupt the man’s reverie.
    The photographer stood there for what seemed hours while Cameron remained transfixed, thinking only how sensitive he would have to be to ask the man a question or two once the boy was carried away. It was awful work, a terrible obligation, and yet it was his job.
    Finally Cameron turned and noticed the photographer frozen in the moment. The man lowered his camera, lips pressed tight, and slipped behind Cameron and out the door. He had never pressed the shutter.
    Cameron followed him out. They could fire him, but there was nothing to ask the father. Rather, Cameron followed the photographer all the way back to the office and interviewed him. His short feature entitled “The Greatest Photo I Never Took” was picked up by wire services and papers all over the country, won nine journalism awards, and was a Pulitzer finalist.
    A month later Cameron stood at the window of his dorm room taking in a spectacular lightning-and-thunder storm that threatened