One night in December, I was standing in heavy rain, under an umbrella, in a dark Manila alleyway, outside a house known to be a drug den, waiting with “the night shift,” the photographers and reporters on the crime beat, on the off chance of being shown upstairs to the scene of the killings. We knew the story in outline only: four men had been getting ready for a pot-smoking session on the second floor when a masked intruder burst in and shot them all dead. There was one witness, a sixteen-year-old boy, but he was said to be too shocked to speak.