Let the Devil Sleep Read Free Page A

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 Kimthat 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 academicproject, 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