Let the Devil Sleep

“No! I can’t believe I said that. That sounds so manipulative. That’s awful. You’re making that up, aren’t you?” She was full of cheerful indignation. Connie never remained off balance for long.

“So what can I do for you?”

“You did make it up! I knew it!”

“As I said, what can I do for you?”

“Well, now I’m embarrassed to say it, but it really is a huge, huge favor.” She paused. “You remember Kim?”

“Your daughter?”

“My daughter who adores you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, David, David, David, all the women love you, and you don’t even notice.”

“I think I was in the same room with your daughter once, when she was… what, maybe fifteen?” His recollection was of a pretty but very serious-looking girl at lunch with him and Connie at Connie’s house, hovering at the periphery of their conversation, hardly saying a word.

“Actually, she was seventeen. And okay, maybe ‘adore’ is too gushy a word. But she thought you were really, really smart-and to Kim that means a lot. Now she’s twenty-three, and I happen to know she still has a very high opinion of Dave Gurney, Supercop.”

“That’s very nice, but… I’m getting a little lost here.”

“Of course you are, because I’m making such a mess of asking you for the super-huge favor. Maybe you ought to sit down-this could take a few minutes.”

Gurney was still standing by the sink in the bathroom. He walked out through the bedroom and across the hall into the den. He had no desire to sit. Instead he stood by the back window. “Okay, Connie, I’m sitting,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing bad, really. It’s overwhelmingly good. Kim has an incredible opportunity. Did I ever tell you she was interested in journalism?”

“Following in her mother’s footsteps?”

“God, don’t ever say that to her, she’d switch careers overnight! I think her greatest goal is total independence from her mother! And forget about footsteps. She’s on the verge of a major leap. So let me get down to the nitty-gritty here, before I lose you completely. She’s completing a master’s program in journalism at Syracuse. That’s not far from you, right?”

“It’s not exactly in the neighborhood. Maybe an hour and forty-five minutes away.”

“Okay, not too terribly far. Not much worse than my commute to the city. So anyway, for her final degree project she came up with an idea for a kind of reality miniseries about murder victims-well, actually, not the victims themselves, but the families, the children. She wants to look at the long-term effects of having a parent murdered, without any resolution.”

“Without-”

“Right-they’d all be cases where the killer was never caught. So the wound would never really have healed. No matter how much time passes, it remains the single biggest emotional fact in their lives-a giant force field that changes everything forever. She’s calling the series The Orphans of Murder. Is that great or what?”

“Sounds like an interesting idea.”

“Very interesting! But I’m leaving out the dynamite part. It’s not just an idea. It’s actually going to happen! It started out as an academic project, but her thesis adviser was so impressed that he helped her develop her outline into an actual proposal. He even got her to nail down some of her intended participants with exclusivity agreements so she’d be protected. Then he passed the proposal along to a production contact of his at RAM-TV. And guess what? The RAM guy wants it! Overnight this thing has been transformed from a frigging term paper into the kind of professional exposure that people with twenty years’ experience would kill for. RAM is the hottest thing out there.”

In Gurney’s opinion RAM was the organization most responsible for turning traditional news programming into a noisy, flashy, shallow, poisonously opinionated, alarmist carnival-but he overcame the temptation to say so.

“So now you’re wondering,” Connie went on excitedly, “what all this has to do with my favorite detective, right?”

“I’m waiting.”

“Couple of things. First, I need you to look over her shoulder.”

“Meaning what?”

“Just meet with her? Get a sense of what she’s doing? See if it reflects the world of homicide victims as you know it? She’s got this one big chance. If she doesn’t make too many mistakes, the sky’s the limit.”

“Hmm.”

“Does that little grunt mean you’ll do it? Will you, David, please?”

“Connie, I don’t know a damn thing about journalism.” What he did know mostly disgusted him, but again he kept quiet.

“She’s got the journalism part down pat. And she’s as smart as anyone I know. But she’s still a kid.”

“Then what do I bring to the table? Old age?”

“Reality. Knowledge. Experience. Perspective. The incredible wisdom that comes from… how many homicide cases?”

He didn’t think that was a real question, so he didn’t try to answer it.

Connie continued with even more intensity. “She’s super capable, but ability isn’t the same as life experience. She’s in the process of interviewing people who’ve lost a parent or some other loved one to a murderer. She needs to be in a realistic frame of mind for that. She needs a broad view of the territory, you know what I mean? I guess what I’m saying is that so much is at stake, she needs to know as much as she possibly can.”

Gurney sighed. “God knows there’s a ton of stuff out there on grief, death, loss of a loved-”

She cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, I know-the pop-psych stages of grief, five stages of horseshit, whatever. That’s not what she needs. She needs to talk to someone who knows about murder, who’s seen the victims, talked to the families, looked in their eyes, the horror-someone who knows, not someone who wrote a frigging book.” There was a long silence between them. “So will you do it? Just meet with her once, just look at what she’s got and where she plans to go with it. See if it makes sense to you?”

As he stared out the den window at the back pasture, the idea of meeting with Connie’s daughter to review her entry ticket into the world of trash television was one of the least appealing prospects on earth. “You said there were a couple of things, Connie. What’s the second one?”

“Well…” Her voice weakened. “There may be an ex-boyfriend problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“That’s the question. Kim likes to sound invulnerable, you know? Like she’s not afraid of anything or anybody?”

“But…?”

“But at the very least, this asshole has been playing nasty little tricks on her.”

“Like what?”

“Like getting into her apartment and moving things around. There was something she started to tell me about a knife disappearing and later reappearing, but when I tried to get her to tell me more about it, she wouldn’t.”

“Then why do you think she brought it up?”

“Maybe she wants help, and at the same time she doesn’t want it, and she can’t make up her mind which it is.”

“Does the asshole have a name?”

“Robert Meese is his real name. He calls himself Robert Montague.”

“Is this somehow connected with her TV project?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling that the situation is worse than she’s willing to admit. Or at least admit to me. So… please, David? Please? I don’t know who else to ask.”