The ID said it was Kyle Gurney.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Dad! You sound sleepy. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No problem. Where are you? What’s up?”

“I’m here in my apartment watching this special legal-issues interview show? Criminal Conflict? There’s this lawyer being interviewed who keeps mentioning your name.”

“What? What lawyer?”

“Some guy by the name of Bincher. Rex, Lex, something like that?”

“On television?”

“On your favorite channel. RAM-TV. Simultaneous webcast on their website.”

Gurney grimaced. Even if he hadn’t had such horrendous trouble with RAM-TV during the Good Shepherd investigation, the idea that anyone was talking about him on the trashiest, most slanted cable news channel in the history of broadcasting would have been repellent. And what the hell was Bincher up to, anyway?

“This thing with the lawyer is on right now?”

“As we speak. A friend of mine happened to be watching it and heard them mention the name Gurney. So he called me, and I turned it on. Just go to their website and click on the ‘Live Stream’ button.”

Gurney got up from the bed, hurried into the den, and followed Kyle’s instructions on his laptop—alternately speculating on Bincher’s likely game and reliving the experience he’d had with RAM-TV’s creepy programming chief just a few months earlier.

On his third try he got to the program. The screen showed two men sitting in angular chairs on opposite sides of a low table that held a pitcher of water and two glasses. At the base of the screen, white letters on a bold red stripe spelled out CRIMINAL CONFLICT. Below that, moving letters on a blue stripe appeared to be scrolling an endless series of panicky news flashes about every form of turmoil, disaster, and disagreement in the world—a terrorist nuclear threat, a toxic tilapia scare, a celebrity altercation involving colliding Porsches.

Holding a few sheets of paper in his hand, looking seriously concerned in the vacuous style of TV interviewers everywhere, the man on the left was leaning toward the man on the right. Gurney had tuned in as the interviewer was in midsentence:

“… quite an indictment of the system, Lex, if I may use that legal term.”

The man across the table, already leaning forward himself, leaned farther forward. He was smiling, but the expression appeared to be nothing more than a perfunctory baring of unfriendly teeth. His voice was sharp, nasal, and loud. “Brian, in all my years of criminal defense experience, I’ve never encountered a more egregious example of rotten police work. An absolute subversion of justice.”

Brian looked appalled. “You’d started itemizing some of the problems just before the break, Lex. Crime scene contradictions, perjury, missing records of witness interviews—”