Trout chose not to answer, not even to look up, probing instead with a fingernail for a speck of something between his front teeth.

As soon as Bullard and Gurney had taken their seats, Clegg entered the room and placed a sheet of paper before the lieutenant, which she scanned with a curious frown. “Does this mean you’ve started making the warning calls?”

“Initial calls to establish contact,” said Clegg, “to find out quickly who’s reachable and who isn’t. We’re telling live contacts we’ll be getting back to them within the hour with information related to the case. With our voice-mail contacts, we’re asking for callbacks.”

Bullard nodded, her eyes running down the sheet again. “According to this you’ve spoken directly to Ruth Blum’s sister en route from Oregon to Aurora, to Larry Sterne in Stone Ridge, and to Jimi Brewster in Turnwell. What about the rest of the people on this list?”

“Callback requests have been left on the voice mails of Eric Stone, Roberta Rotker, and Paul Mellani.”

“Do we have their e-mail addresses?”

“I believe Kim Corazon supplied them for everyone on her contact list.”

“Then follow up your voice mails immediately with e-mails. Anyone we don’t hear back from within the next half hour, we follow up again. Tell Carly she’s got fifteen minutes to give me a draft. If we don’t get a response to the second message, we need to dispatch troopers to each physical address.”

After Clegg hurried out of the room, Bullard took a deep breath, sat back in her chair, and gazed thoughtfully at Trout. “Getting back to more difficult questions, do you have any ideas regarding the motive behind Ruth Blum’s murder?”

“It’s what I said before. Just look at the Shepherd’s message.”

“I have it memorized.”

“Then you know the motive as well as I do. The debut of The Orphans of Murder on RAM the other night hit his most sensitive nerve and brought the whole kill-the-rich mission back to life.”

“Dr. Holdenfield? You agree with that?”

Rebecca nodded stiffly. “In general, yes. More specifically, I’d say that the TV program brought his resentment back to life. It broke whatever dam had been holding the emotion in check for the past ten years. Then the rage began to flow again into his social-injustice fixation, and the murder was the result.”

“Interesting way of seeing it,” said Bullard. “Dave? How do you see it?”

“Cool, calculated, risk-averse—the opposite of Rebecca’s description. Zero rage. Total rationality.”

“And the totally rational motive for killing Ruth Blum would be …?”

“To stop the work being done on Orphans, because it posed a threat to him.”

“That threat being …?”

“Either something that Kim might discover as she continued the interviewing process or something that a viewer might realize while watching the series on TV.”