He leaned back in his chair, stretched and yawned. “Like I said, at least two weeks. Everything’s buried in dummy corporations and blinds. At this point, I can infer a connection between Grief Release and the Church of Truth and Revelation, but I can’t prove it in black and white. The Church, anyway, is safe.”

“But Grief Release?” Angie said.

He smiled. “I can bury them cold.”

“How?” I said.

“Remember what I told you about all the steps in each separate level being essentially the same? Well, if you look at it from a benevolent point of view, they’ve found a technique that works and they just utilize it with different degrees of subtlety depending on the level of grief the particular person is suffering.”

“But if you look at it less benevolently.”

“As any good newspaperman should…”

“Goes without saying…”

“Then,” Richie said, “these people are first-class grifters. Let’s look at the Level Two steps again, bearing in mind that all the other steps in the other levels are the same thing under different names. Step One,” he said, “is Honesty. Essentially what it says—you come clean with your primary counselor about who you are, why you’re there, what’s really bugging you. Then you move onto Nudity, which is stripping your entire inner self bare.”

“In front of whom?” Angie said.

“Just your primary counselor at this point. Basically all the little embarrassing shit you hid during Step One—you killed a cat as a child, fucked around on your wife, embezzled funds, whatever—it’s all supposed to come out during Step Two.”

“It’s supposed to roll off your tongue,” I said. “Just like that?” I snapped my fingers.

He nodded, got up, and refilled his coffee cup. “There’s a stratagem the counselors use in which the client disrobes, as it were, in pieces. You start by admitting something basic—your net worth, perhaps. Then the last time you told a lie. Then maybe something you did in the last week which you feel shitty about. And on and on. For twelve hours.”

Angie joined him at the coffee maker. “Twelve hours?”

He grabbed some cream from the fridge. “More if necessary. I’ve got documentation on those discs of these ‘intensive sessions’ lasting nineteen hours.”

“Is it illegal?” I said.

“For a cop it is. Think about it,” he said and sat back down across from me. “If a cop in this state interrogates a suspect for one second over twelve hours, he’s violated the suspect’s civil rights and nothing that suspect says—before or after the twelve-hour point—is admissible in court. And there’s a good reason for that.”

“Ha!” Angie said.