Eleventh Hour

hour later, she was headed for San Francisco.

TWENTY-FIVE
    LOS ANGELES
    Savich and Sherlock were back the next morning with coffee and bagels.
    “Nonfat cream cheese,” Sherlock said, pulling out a plastic knife. “Dillon refuses to allow any high cholesterol in his unit.”
    Savich, who’d been studying Dane’s face, said, “We’ve decided that you two are going to stay in today. Sorry about that, Nick, but Dane will doubtless try to go find the bad guys unless someone with staunch resolve keeps him here. You willing to take on the job?”
    “Yes, he will do as he’s told,” Nick said as she gave Dane a bagel smeared with cream cheese.
    He took one bite and turned green.
    “You’re still nauseous?” Sherlock said. “Not to worry, it’ll ease off soon.”
    “How do you know?” Dane asked, staring at Sherlock. “Don’t tell me you’ve been around another gunshot wound?”
    “Well, the thing is,” Sherlock said, paused, looked at her husband, then quickly away. “I sort of got a knife thrown into my arm once—a very long time ago.”
    “Yeah, a really long time,” Savich said. “All of two and a half years ago.”
    “Well, it was before we were married and it feels like we’ve been married forever.” She gave her husband a fat smile and said to Dane, “True, it wasn’t much fun, but I was up and working again within two, three days.”
    “I think she felt nauseous,” Savich said, his voice emotionless as a stick, “because the doctor gave her four shots in the butt. I remember that I cherished every yell.”
    Sherlock cleared her throat. “That is neither here nor there, the whole thing’s best forgotten.”
    Savich said, “Forget the four shots in your butt or the knife wound?” He was trying for a light touch, but Dane heard the fear in his voice, a fear he still hadn’t gotten over. He’d felt that fear for his brother when they’d been younger, whenever Michael had put himself in harm’s way, something both of them did playing football, white-water rafting, mountain climbing. They’d done so much together before and during college. Then came Michael’s time in the seminary and Dane’s trip to Case Western to become a lawyer, something he’d hated to his bones. At least it hadn’t taken him all that long to realize he wanted to be a cop.
    Sherlock said, “Okay, no more about that incident. We’ve got a murderer who’s running scared, so scared that he tried an insane stunt yesterday. He’s insane, desperate, or both. We’ve been trying to find out what Linus Wolfinger did during that year after he graduated and before he came to work here and met Mr. Burdock, the owner of Premier Studios.”
    “And not having much luck,” Savich said. “MAX is pretty upset about the whole thing. He just can’t seem to find anything, as of yet—no credit-card trail, no employment trail, no purchase of a vehicle.”
    Sherlock said, “So we’ve decided to ask him, straight up. What do you think, Dane?”
    “Why not the direct approach?” Dane said and shrugged. “It’ll give us a story to check, not that it’ll matter. I’m beginning to believe that none of them is telling the truth.”
    “At least everyone is consistent,” Savich said.
    Sherlock’s cell phone trilled the leading notes to the X-Files theme. “Hello?”
    “This is Belinda Gates. We’re in really deep trouble here. Maybe.”
    “What happened?”
    “I was watching a cable station last night, nine o’clock. I saw The Consultant, the third episode.”
    “Oh no,” Sherlock said, “we are in trouble.”

    Three hours later, LAPD Detective Flynn, feeling harassed, said to the group of ten people crowded into Dane’s Holiday Inn room, “The program director, Norman Lido, of KRAM, channel eight locally, said Frank Pauley from Premier Studios sent him the episode and gave him permission to show it, told him they’d canceled the show, but maybe KRAM would like to pick it up. He liked the episode, showed it last night. This particular cable channel reaches about eight million people here in southern California.”
    “Didn’t the idiot know why the show had been pulled?” Dane said. “The whole world knows.”
    “Claims he didn’t know,” Flynn said, shrugged. “Of course he’s lying through his teeth. Why, I ask you, would any person with any sense of ethics want to air this show?”
    The answer was money, of course, but it hung in the air, unspoken. He’d probably been paid a bundle to show