“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.