A minute or two later, when Kim came back downstairs, he was still staring at the shelves without really seeing anything. His mind was elsewhere—trying to get a grip on the elements of the drama he and Kim would be staging that evening, the drama on which so much depended.

Her arrival in the kitchen in a pair of jeans and a loose sweatshirt brought him back to the present.

“You want something to eat?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

Kyle entered the room behind her. “I guess you guys heard the news.”

Kim’s expression froze. “What news?”

“Another murder—the wife of one of the people you were talking to. Lila Sterne.”

“Oh, God, no!” Kim grabbed the edge of the sink island.

“This was on the radio?” asked Gurney.

“On the Internet. Google News.”

“What did they say? Any details?”

“Just that she’d been stabbed to death with an ice pick sometime last night. ‘Police are at the scene, investigation ongoing. Monster on the loose.’ A lot of drama, not a lot of facts.”

“Shit,” Gurney muttered. Hearing the news a second time somehow made it worse, deepening his sense of the situation accelerating out of control.

Kim looked lost.

Gurney went over to her, put his arms around her. She hugged him with a fierceness that startled him. When she released him, she took a deep breath and stepped back.

“I’m okay,” she said, answering his unasked question.

“Good. Because later we both need to be fully functional.”

“I know.”

Kyle frowned. “Fully functional? For what?”

Gurney explained as calmly and reasonably as he could his general objective and its reliance on the eavesdropping equipment in Kim’s apartment. He was conscious of trying to make it sound like a more coherent strategy than it really was. He wondered whom he was trying to convince—Kyle or himself.

“Tonight?” said Kyle incredulously. “You plan on doing this tonight?”

“Actually,” said Gurney, feeling again the terrible pressure of time closing in on him, “we should be leaving for Syracuse as soon as we can.”

Kyle looked very worried. “Are you guys … prepared? I mean, this sounds like a huge deal. Do you have any idea what you’re actually going to be saying—what it is you want the Shepherd to overhear?”

Gurney tried again for a tone of reassurance. “The way I see it—and I admit that a lot will have to be improvised as we go along—we show up at Kim’s apartment in the middle of discussing the meeting we had today with Rudy Getz. Kim is telling me she wants to end the Orphans series on RAM. I’m arguing that maybe she shouldn’t be so quick to turn her back on it.”

“Wait a minute,” said Kyle. “Why would you say that?”