Gurney heard Kim asking Kyle who he was talking to, Kyle’s voice saying, “My dad.” Kim sniffling in the background, blowing her nose. The sound of the phone being handed from one to the other. Muffled voices. More nose blowing, throat clearing.

Finally she was speaking to him. “Dave?”

“I’m here.”

“This is a nightmare. I can’t believe it’s happening. I want to go to sleep and wake up again and discover that none of it is real.”

“I hope you’re not blaming yourself for what happened to Ruth.”

“Of course I am!”

“You’re not responsible for—”

Kim interrupted, her voice rising. “She wouldn’t be dead if I hadn’t talked her into doing this stupid program!”

“You’re not responsible for her death, and you’re not responsible for what RAM News did with your interview, or what they put in, or how they—”

“They cut my interview in half and surrounded it with all that pompous nonsense from their so-called experts.” She made the word sound like someone spitting. “Oh, God, I just want to disappear. I want to erase everything. Erase everything that killed Ruthie.”

“A murderer killed her.”

“But it wouldn’t have happened if—”

“Listen to me, Kim. A murderer killed Ruth Blum. A murderer with his own agenda. Probably the same murderer who killed her husband ten years ago.”

She didn’t say anything. He could hear her breathing. Slow, shaky breaths. When she finally spoke, her near hysteria had declined into plain misery. “It’s what Larry Sterne kept telling me—it all turned out to be true. He said RAM would twist everything and make it cheap and ugly and awful. He said they’d be better at using me than I’d be at using them, that all they cared about was getting the largest possible audience, that the price of my project would outweigh its rewards. And he was right. Totally right.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Do? I want to get as far away from RAM as I can. I want out.”

“Have you told Rudy Getz?”

“Yes.” There was something uncertain in her voice.

“Yes … but?”

“I called him this morning—before I got your message about Ruth. I told him how disappointed I was, that the program was nothing like what we’d talked about.”

“And?”

“I told him if that’s the way it was going to be, then I didn’t want to do it.”

“And?”

“He said that he wanted me to meet with him, it wasn’t something we could resolve on the phone, we had to talk about it face-to-face.”

“You agreed to meet with him?”

“Yes.”

“Did you speak to him again, after you found out about Ruth’s murder?”

“Yes. He said that made it even more important for us to get together. He said the murder was a multiplier.”

“A what?”