“Jesus.” He sat up slowly on the couch, rubbing his neck. “Dozed off.”
“You certainly did. Anyway, dinner’s ready.”
She returned to the kitchen. He stretched, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face. When he joined her at the table, she’d already laid out two large bowls of steaming fish chowder, two green salads, and a plate of buttery garlic bread.
“Smells good,” he said.
“Have you reported the bugs to the police?”
“What?”
“The listening devices, the trapdoor in the ceiling-has anyone notified the police?”
“Why are you asking about that now?”
“Just wondering. That stuff is against the law, right? Bugging someone’s apartment? If it’s a crime, shouldn’t it be reported?”
“Yes and no. Should be, maybe. But in most cases there’s no legal requirement to report a criminal act, unless the failure could be interpreted as impeding an ongoing investigation.”
She stared at him, waiting.
“In this situation, if I were the investigating officer, I’d want everything left as is.”
“Why?”
“It’s a potential asset. A working bug that the bugger doesn’t know has been blown can give you a resource later for trapping him.”
“How?”
“By letting him listen to a setup conversation that would then make him do something that would identify or incriminate himself. So it could be useful. But that might not be the way Schiff or other detectives in the Syracuse PD would see it. They might just stomp in and blow the whole thing. Once I tell Schiff, it’s out of my control, and right now I’d like to hang on to every little plus I can.”
She nodded and sampled her chowder. “It’s good. Try it before it gets cold.”
He took his first spoonful and agreed it was very good indeed.
She broke off a chunk of garlic bread. “While you were napping, I read that thing you left on the coffee table by the couch, with your questions about the case.”
“I wanted you to.”
“You’re sure that the murders aren’t about what everyone thinks they’re about?”
“Sure enough.”
“You’re coming at the case like it was brand-new?”
“A brand-new case that just happens to be ten years old.”
She studied her spoon. “If you’re starting back at square one, I guess the most basic question would be, why do people murder other people?”
“Apart from sacred-mission delusions, the main motives are sex, money, power, and revenge.”
“Which do you think it is?”
“Given the range of victims, it’s hard to imagine it being sex.”
“I bet it’s about money,” said Madeleine. “A lot of money.”
“Why?”
She gave a little shrug. “Luxury cars, expensive guns, rich victims-just seems like that’s what it’s all about.”
“But not about hating it? Hating the power of money? Or eliminating greed?”
“Oh, gosh, no. Probably just the opposite.”
Gurney smiled. He had the feeling that Madeleine might be onto something.
“Finish your chowder,” she said. “You don’t want to miss the first episode of
They didn’t have a television, but they did have a computer, and RAM News, in addition to putting the program on its cable channels, had advertised a simultaneous webcast.
As they sat in front of the iMac in the den, Gurney navigated through the RAM website. He was always appalled by new evidence of how trashy the media world had become. And it kept getting worse. Moronic sensationalism was like a ratchet that turned in only one direction. And RAM’s toxic programming was leading the descent into the pit.
A home page consisting mainly of a huge red, white, and blue logo-“RAM NEWS NETWORK: THE WORLD WITHOUT THE SPIN”-was followed by a page that featured their most popular offerings. He scrolled quickly through the listings in his search for
SECRETS AND LIES: What the Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You
SECOND OPINION:
APOCALYPSE NOW:
Gurney pressed on grimly to the next page of the website, where, at the top of a list of news specials, he found
Ten minutes later, at 7:00 P.M. precisely, the first episode began. The screen was almost completely dark. The eerie cry of an owl suggested that the viewer was looking at a country road at night. A man walked out of the darkness into a narrow area of illumination cast by the headlights of a car parked on the grassy shoulder. The bone structure of the man’s face in the angled headlights created the sharp shadows of a face in a thriller film.
He started to speak in a slow, portentous voice. “Exactly ten years ago, in the spring of the year 2000, in the rural hills of upstate New York, on a lonely road like this one, on a moonless night, with the chill of winter still in the air, the horror began. Bruno and Carmella Mellani were returning to their country home from a christening party in the city, perhaps discussing the happy events of the day, the dear friends and relatives they hadn’t seen for so long, when another car came rapidly up behind them, then began to pass them on a long, dark curve. But when that strange, speeding car came abreast of Bruno and Carmella Mellani…”
The scene on the screen changed to the dimly lit interior of a moving vehicle at night, a driver and a passenger in the front seat, unrecognizable in the darkness. They were speaking, laughing softly. A few seconds later, the headlights of a vehicle behind them were visible. The approaching headlights grew brighter, moving to the left side of their car, suggesting that the pursuing vehicle was about to pass. Then there was a sudden flash of white light on the screen, with the simultaneous explosive sound effect of a gunshot, followed by the tire screech of a vehicle out of control, prolonged metallic crashing sounds, and the shattering of glass.
The narrator returned to the screen. He bent over and picked up a piece of twisted debris from the ground, brandishing it as though it were a significant piece of evidence from the crime he was describing. “The Mellani car flew off the road. It was so badly mangled that the first responders had trouble identifying the make and model. A third of Bruno Mellani’s head was blown away by the impact of a bullet from a huge handgun. Carmella Mellani’s injuries put her into a coma that she remains in to this day.”
Staring at the computer screen, Madeleine screwed up her face in disgust. She seemed to be finding the RAM approach more disturbing than the event it was depicting.
The narrator went on to give super-dramatic descriptions of the five other Good Shepherd shootings, culminating in a long description of the Harold Blum fiasco that led to the unraveling of Max Clinter’s career and life.
“God,” said Madeleine, “this stuff is way over the top.”
Gurney nodded.
The camera zoomed in to a medium shot of the narrator-turned-host, sitting in an interview environment with two men. “Ten years,” he said. “Ten years, and yet to some of us it seems so recent. You may be asking, why revisit that horror now? The answer is simple: because a ten-year anniversary is a natural stopping point, a point at which we often find it appropriate to pause and look back on triumphs and tragedies alike.”
The host addressed a dark-complected man in one of the chairs across from him. “Dr. Mirkilee, your specialty is forensic psycholinguistics. Could you explain that term to our audience?”
“Of course. It’s finding the thinking in the words.” His voice was small, quick, precise, very Indian. A subtitle appeared on the bottom of the screen: DR. SAMMARKAN MIRKILEE, PH.D.
