The last sound anyone wants to hear is a firetruck siren. But last fall, that unsettling sound rang in the middle of the night as a three-alarm fire leaped from an apartment building in midtown Sacramento to the roof of J Street Recorders, home of the multiplatinum blues metal band Tesla.

“Why don’t we start at the top and work our way down?” The voice of Greg Kelly echoes as he stands in the empty lobby of his brand-new office building. He’s ready to begin the tour.

Scott Steele rushed his daughter to the hospital one night because her ear infection wouldn’t heal.

Somebody stole Derek Finstad’s backpack.

He left it in the locker room at a gym in Yuba City, where he works. But when he went to retrieve it, the backpack — with his keys, checkbook and other materials — was gone. Finstad wasn’t happy.

When his mother fell for the second time, Steve Smith was ready to put the plan in motion.

Markus Bokisch has grown into the kind of man who doesn’t mind having his wife in his business. But it didn’t happen overnight.

The year was 1943, the world was at war and Dick Bertolucci cruised the streets of Sacramento in his first car — a black ’33 Chevy Roadster. He was 13 and didn’t have a license.

Amid the country’s worst economy in decades, Michael Genovese was offered more work, and he refused.

Wearing coveralls and galoshes caked in manure and mud, a father and son attach suction devices to the teats of ailing cows.