ELEVEN

Dane swung his legs over the side of the sofa and stood quickly, the blankets falling to the floor at his feet. “You know what?” His sweatpants were low on his belly, and he quickly pulled them back up. He grabbed her hands, covered them. “What, Nick? What do you know?”

“Yes, okay. Listen, you were out like a light last night. I woke up, then couldn’t go back to sleep and so I watched TV, turned down really low. It’s a show, Dane, a TV show on the Premier Channel, a new one, just started probably a couple of weeks ago. It came on at eleven o’clock, called The Consultant. It was about these murders in Chicago and how this special Federal consultant comes in and solves them. It was kind of X-Files-y, you know, unexplained stuff that gives you goose bumps and makes you look toward the window if it’s really dark outside. I wasn’t really paying too much attention until there was this creepy guy in a confessional, and I realized he was talking to a priest about what he’d done, taunting him about the people he’d killed, and then when the priest was pleading with him to stop, he laughed and shot him through the forehead. Dane, it wasn’t about murders in Chicago, it was like the murders right here, in San Francisco.”

Dane rubbed his forehead, dashed his fingers through his hair. He couldn’t get his brain around what she’d just said. It didn’t seem possible. He said finally, “You’re telling me that some asshole murdered my brother because he was following the script of some idiotic TV show?”

“Yes. When the show was over, I watched all the credits and wrote down everything I could.”

Dane dragged his fingers through his hair again, drew a deep breath, and said, “I’m going to order some coffee, then you’re going to tell me everything, every little detail. Oh damn, let me call Delion. You’re pretty sure about this?”

“I’m positive. I just couldn’t believe it. I nearly woke you up, but realized that there wasn’t much of anything you could do at midnight. And you were so tired.”

“It’s okay.”

After arriving at LAX on the 9 a.m. Southwest shuttle from Oakland airport, where Nick was allowed through despite having no ID after Delion filled out papers in triplicate and spoke to two supervisors, Inspector Delion, Special Agent Carver, and the woman they introduced as Ms. Nick Jones, with no designation at all, stepped into Executive Producer Frank Pauley’s corner office with its big glass windows that looked across Pico toward the ocean. You couldn’t see it because the smog was sitting heavy and gray over the city, but you could see the golf course.

Mr. Pauley was slightly built, tall, pleasant looking, and very pale. Surely that shouldn’t be right, Nick thought. Wasn’t everyone in LA supposed to be tanned from head to toe? He looked to be somewhere in his forties, and had a nice smile, albeit a nervous one when he met them. She couldn’t blame him for that.

He shook hands all around, offered them coffee, and pointed them to the very long gray sofa that lined half the wall. It must have been at least eighteen feet long. There were chairs facing that sofa, all of them gray, and three coffee tables spaced out to form separate sitting groups.

Frank Pauley said, waving toward the sofa, “I just took over. I inherited this office and all the gray from the last executive producer. He said he liked a really big casting couch.” He grinned at Nick, who didn’t grin back, and said, “You called, Inspector Delion, because you believe that the murders in The Consultant that played last night are similar to murders that were committed in San Francisco over the last week and a half.”

“That’s right,” Delion said. “But before we discuss any more of this, we’d like to see the show, compare all the points, make a final determination. Ms. Jones is the only one of us who’s seen it so far.”

“This is, naturally, very disturbing. Just a moment, please.” Frank Pauley turned to the gray phone, punched in a couple of buttons.

Nick said, “Thank God you’ve only aired two of the shows.”

Dane said, “We’ll watch both episodes, Mr. Pauley. If we’ve got a match with San Francisco, we’ll find out whether there have been any crimes that follow the first episode. We have no way of knowing whether the murderer would continue if you stop showing the episodes. But I presume the studio will announce that the show’s been canceled?”

Frank Pauley cleared his throat. “Let me be up front here. Our lawyers have recommended that we immediately cancel the show and provide you with complete cooperation. Naturally, the studio is appalled that some maniac would do this, if, indeed, we discover that the episode does match the murders in San Francisco.”

Dane said, “We appreciate it. Naturally you will have to be concerned about legal action.”

“We always are,” Frank Pauley said. “They’re waiting for us in room fifty-one.”

“Room fifty-one?” Nick said.

“A little joke, Ms. Jones, just a little film joke. It’s our own private theater. We can see the first and second episodes now, if you wish.”

Delion said, “Later, perhaps we can see the third episode as well.”

“That’s not a problem,” Pauley said, waving a left hand that sported four diamond rings. Dane felt a man’s instant distaste. Hey, maybe four different wives had given them to him, one never knew, here in LA.

They sat in the small darkened theater and watched the second episode of The Consultant. The city was Chicago, the church, St. John’s, the priest, Father Paul. Dane watched Father Paul as he listened to a man telling him about the murder he’d just committed-an old woman he’d bludgeoned to death, no sport in that, was there? But hey, she was another soul lost from Father Paul’s parish, wasn’t she? Two nights later, a black activist was garroted in front of a club, ah, yes, yet another soul lost from Father Paul’s parish, and what was the priest going to do about it? The murderer mocks the priest’s beliefs, claims the Church is the perfect calling for men who can’t face life, that the priest is nothing but a coward who can’t even tell a soul, because he’s bound by rules that really don’t make a whole lot of sense, now do they?

In the fourth and final meeting, after two more murders, the priest loses it. He sobs, pleading with the murderer, raging against God for allowing this monster to exist, raging against his own deeply held beliefs, hating his own helplessness. The murderer laughs, tells him you live like a coward, you die like a coward, and shoots the priest in the forehead.

Dane leaned forward and shut off the projector. He said to Pauley, “Your writers made a mistake here. A priest is bound to silence only when it is a real confession, that is, when the penitent truly means to repent. In a case like this, where the man is mocking the sacrament itself, the priest isn’t bound to silence.”

Pauley stared at him. “But I thought-”

“I know,” Dane said. “Everybody believes that. But the Church makes that exception. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be out in the hall.”

The truth was, he couldn’t bear the show another minute. He leaned against the wall, his eyes closed, trying to get a grip on himself. But he kept seeing the man firing that gun, shooting the priest in the forehead.

He felt her hand on his arm. They stood still, saying nothing, for a very long time. Finally, Dane drew several deep breaths and raised his head. “Thank you,” he said.

She only nodded.

Delion came out of the small theater. “You didn’t miss much. We have this big-shot consultant dude with some mythical agency in Washington, D.C., come riding into town-the guy’s real sensitive, feels people’s pain, all that crapola-he cleans the whole mess up because the local cops are stupid and don’t have any extrasensory abilities, and he can ‘see’ things, ‘intuit’ things that they can’t. It ended good except for five dead people.”