Read Let the Devil Sleep for Free Online

couch.
    After they’d each eaten a slice and washed it down with some soda, she said, “Okay. Where do you want to start?”
    “You had this idea about talking to the families of murder victims. So I assume the first thing you had to do was figure out which murders to pick?”
    “Right.” She was watching him intently.
    “There’s no shortage of homicide cases. Even if you limited yourself to New York State, even to a single year, you’d have hundreds to choose from.”
    “Right.”
    He leaned forward. “So tell me how you made your choices. What were the criteria?”
    “The criteria changed along the way. At first I wanted to include all kinds of victims, all kinds of homicides, all kinds of families, different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different lengths of time between the crime and now. Total variety! But Dr. Wilson kept telling me, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ Minimize the variables, he said. Look for a hook, make it easy for the viewer to understand. ‘The narrower the focus, the sharper the point.’ Like maybe the dozenth time he said that, I got it. Everything started connecting, falling into place. And after that I was like, ‘
Yes!
This is it! I know exactly what I’m going to do!’ ”
    As Gurney listened to her, he felt strangely touched by her enthusiasm. “So what did the final criteria turn out to be?”
    “Pretty much everything Dr. Wilson said: Minimize the variables. Narrow the focus. Find a hook. Once I started thinking that way, the answer just sort of materialized. I saw that I could zero the whole project in on the victims of the Good Shepherd.”
    “The guy who shot a bunch of Mercedes drivers eight or nine years ago?”
    “Ten.
Exactly
ten years ago. His attacks all occurred in the spring of the year 2000.”
    Gurney sat back in his chair, nodding thoughtfully, recalling the infamous series of six shootings that had half the Northeast afraid to drive at night. “Interesting. So the nature of the initiating event is the same in all six instances, elapsed time from the crime to the present is the same, same shooter, same motive, same level of investigative attention.”
    “Right! And the same failure to bring the killer to justice—the same lack of closure, the same open wound. It makes the Good Shepherd case a perfect way to examine how different families react over time to the same catastrophe, how they live with the loss, how they deal with the injustice, what it does to them—especially what it does to the children. Different outcomes to the same tragedy.”
    She stood and went to the filing cabinet next to the table-desk. She removed a shiny blue folder and handed it to Gurney. On the coverwas a label with bold type that read, THE ORPHANS OF MURDER, A DOCUMENTARY PROPOSAL BY KIM CORAZON .
    Perhaps because she noticed his gaze settle on “Corazon,” she said, “Did you think my name was Clarke?”
    He thought back to the time when Connie had interviewed him for the
New York
magazine profile. “I think Clarke was the only family name I heard mentioned.”
    “Clarke is Connie’s maiden name. She went back to it when she divorced my father, when I was a kid. His name was—
is
—Corazon. And so is mine.” Under the thin surface of this factual statement, there was an obvious resentment. He wondered if that resentment was the cause of her reluctance to refer to Connie as “Mom” or “Mother.”
    Gurney had no desire to probe that area. He opened the folder, saw that it held a thick document, well over fifty pages. The cover page repeated the title. The second page provided a table of contents: “Concept,” “Documentary Overview,” “Style and Methodology,” “Case-Selection Criteria,” “The Good Shepherd Homicide Victims and Circumstances,” “Prospective Interviewees,” “Contact Summaries and Status,” “Initial Interview Transcripts,” “TGSMOI (Appendix).”
    He went through the contents list again, more slowly. “You wrote this? Organized it