Justice at Risk by John Morgan Wilson Page A

about it for a while. So we tried it.”
    “How did it go?”
    “We never really kissed. Somebody came in, one of the video library guys. He almost caught us. After he left, I told Tommy I was tired and wanted go home.”
    “Alone?”
    “To be with Cheryl. My girlfriend.”
    “When was that?”
    “Last Wednesday. It was the last time I saw Tommy.” He swallowed hard, looked away. “The last time I’ll ever see him.”
    “Did you tell the cop about your relationship with Callahan?”
    “Not about the kissing stuff. I told him we worked late that night. He asked me if I was gay. I told him no, that I had a girlfriend. That was about it.”
    He asked me if he could use the bathroom. I pointed to the hallway and told him to take a left. While he was gone, I tried to absorb the extent of his innocence, which wasn’t easy. All around me, in the musty, kitsch-filled living room, walls were covered with framed photos of friends Maurice and Fred had lost over the years; most of the faces were male, on the shy side of fifty, men who had passed in the last two decades. Jacques’s face was among them, a man who had packed a lifetime of emotional and physical experience into his twenty-nine years, before the virus had claimed him. Graff seemed like someone from another planet.
    When he came back, it looked as if he’d blown his nose and washed his face. I’d turned up the volume on the television set to hear the eleven o’clock news. One of the promos mentioned a mutilated body discovered that morning in a shallow grave in the Angeles National Forest.
    “You may not want to see this, Peter.”
    “No, I’m OK with it. I figure it’s going to get worse, anyway. As more information comes out.”
    Toward the end of the show, after using the sensational torture angle as a teaser before two commercial breaks, the “news team,” as the Eyewitless News readers referred to themselves, covered Callahan’s murder in about twenty seconds. The only video they had was footage of a group of detectives and criminalists on a mountain roadside, clustered around a body covered by a coroner’s blanket—not enough to warrant even half a minute.
    I glanced with sympathy in Peter’s direction.
    “You’d think they could give the poor guy more than twenty seconds.”
    “Without pictures, you don’t get on the air. That’s the way it works.”
    The brief segment didn’t tell us any more than we already knew, and I did some channel surfing with the remote control to see if we could find more complete coverage elsewhere. We didn’t. As I clicked through the channels, we landed on a late-night syndicated show called On Patrol . Graff reached for my hand, holding it on the remote, stopping the clicker.
    “Tommy worked on this show almost fifteen years ago.”
    “That’s a coincidence, coming on right after the report of his death.”
    “Not really. On Patrol is on five nights a week in reruns. It’s so popular, the station runs it twice, in the afternoon and again late at night. A new episode airs each week, on Sundays, opposite 60 Minutes . It’s pretty hard to miss.”
    “Somebody’s getting rich from it.”
    “The executive producer. That’s the one who always cleans up when the show goes into reruns. No more production costs, just syndication fees rolling in from a couple of hundred stations around the country.”
    I’d seen the show before. As Graff said, it was hard to miss. It was one of those so-called “reality” shows, with a camera operator riding along with the cops in their patrol cars and chasing after them as they ran down suspects. It looked like a lot of similar documentary-style shows glutting the airwaves, only maybe more exciting and better edited. I said as much to Graff.
    “This was the original,” he said, “the show that started that whole reality trend. It was a breakthrough when it first went on the air. A really simple concept—a good camera guy following cops in action, and some sharp video