you.”
“I should have stayed and sorted it out with her,” I reply. “And if I had, maybe I would have been more aware of what was going on with her physically. Maybe I would have realized she was having symptoms unrelated to alcohol.”
“I wonder if there’s such a thing as Hackers Anonymous,” Lucy muses, as if I didn’t just say what I did. “HA, that’s about right. A joke to think people like me won’t get into something if we can. You can’t cure a chipped plate. All you can do is live with it or throw it out.”
“You’re not a chipped plate.”
“Actually, what she used to call me was a cracked teacup.”
“You’re not that, either, and that’s unkind. It’s a cruel thing to say.”
“It’s true. Living proof.” She indicates the computers on the desk. “You know how easy it was for me to get into her DVR? In the first place, she was careless about passwords. Used the same ones repeatedly so she didn’t forget and lock herself out. The IP address was child’s play. All I did was send myself an e-mail with my iPhone while I was standing under the security camera, and that gave me the static IP address of that connection.”
“You thought to do that while I was inside her apartment?”
“Benton and I were standing out there in the rain, under the overhang.”
I don’t know whether I should be amazed or horrified. “Holding on to my arm, but I was polite about it, civilized about it. He’s lucky I was. I almost wasn’t. He’s damn lucky as hell.”
“He was trying—”
“I had to do something,” Lucy cuts me off. “I saw there was an outdoor bullet camera that looked new — in other words, recently installed — an okay system with a varifocal lens, the sort of thing Marino would pick out, but I wasn’t going to ask him, and I haven’t,” she makes that point again. “And I figured there was a DVR somewhere, and there’s no way I wasn’t going to do something. Who the hell wants to sit around in life waiting for fucking permission? The assholes don’t. The pieces of shit who cause all the trouble don’t. She’s right. I can’t be fixed. Maybe I don’t want to be fixed. I don’t. Hell, no.”
“You were never broken.” I feel the anger again. “
“You didn’t do any harm. She did it to herself.”
“That’s not true. I don’t know what you’ve been told….”
“She did it to herself a long time ago.” Lucy clicks the mouse pad and the paused image of Jaime’s building and the street in front materializes on the MacBook screen. “She filed that flight plan when she decided to lie, and she ended up in a crash even if someone else was at the controls when it happened. I’m aware that literally she was murdered and my philosophical point of view is irrelevant at the moment.”
“That’s the suspicion, but it’s not been proven,” I remind her. “We won’t know until the CDC finishes its analysis. Or maybe we’ll find out about Dawn Kincaid first, assuming we’re dealing with serial poisonings by the same neurotoxin.”
“We do know,” Lucy says flatly. “Someone who thinks she’s smarter than the rest of us. The link, the common denominator, is the prison. Has to be. All of you have that place in common. Even Dawn Kincaid, because her mother is there. Was there. And they were writing to each other, true? Everyone is linked because of the GPFW.”
Party stationery and fifteen-cent stamps come to mind. Something sent from the outside to Kathleen. Maybe she sent something to Dawn. I envision indented writing, the ghostly fragments written in Kathleen’s distinctive hand. A reference to a PNG and a bribe.
“I’m going to get you,” Lucy says to the image of Jaime’s building on the computer screen. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with. It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d stayed with her longer,” she then says to me, but she won’t give me her eyes.
She hasn’t looked at me once since I sat down, and it hurts and unnerves me even though I’m well aware that if Lucy’s been crying she won’t look at anyone.
“She sounded drunk,” Lucy says, as if she knows. “Just shitface drunk, the way she’s sounded before when she’s called.”
“Called when you were together. Or do you mean since then?” My attention returns to the BlackBerry on the desk as it begins to occur to me what has happened.
“You told me she was drunk, or more exactly, you said you thought she was drunk,” Lucy says, as she types. “You never hinted you thought she might be sick or that anything was wrong with her. So you can’t blame yourself. And I know you are. You should have let me go inside her apartment.”
“You know why I couldn’t do that.”
“Why do you shelter me as if I’m ten years old?”
“It wasn’t about sheltering you,” I say, as I feel my honesty flitting away on the sweet breeze of my good intentions. A lie disguised as something lovely and kind. “Well, it was about that more than anything else,” I tell the truth. “I didn’t want you to see what I saw. I wanted your last memory of her—”
“To be what?” Lucy interrupts. “My partner being the prosecutor and telling me why I must never have contact with her again? It wasn’t enough to break up with me, she had to make it sound like a restraining order. You are dirty. You are scary and destructive. You are crazy. Be gone.”
“Legally, you couldn’t be in the apartment, Lucy.”
“You shouldn’t have been in there, either, Aunt Kay.”
“I already was, but you’re right. It poses problems. You don’t want your prints or DNA in there, anything that might cause the police to be interested in you,” I tell her what she already knows. “It was wrong of her to talk to you that way. It was dishonest of her to make you the problem instead of dealing with what was so intolerable to her about her own self. But I should have made sure she was all right before I left. I could have been more careful.”
“What you’re really saying is you could have been more caring.”
“I was very angry, and I didn’t care enough. I’m sorry….”
“Why should you have cared? Why was it up to you to give a shit?”
I search for the true answer, because the right one is false. I should have cared because one should always care about another human being. That’s the right thing to do. But I didn’t. I honestly didn’t give a damn about Jaime last night.
“The irony is, she was done anyway,” Lucy says.
“We don’t get to decide that about anyone. She might not have been done. I’d like to believe she might have had insight at some point along the way. People can change. It’s wrong that someone has robbed her of that chance.” I’m deliberate and careful, as if feeling my way along a stony path that might trip me up and break my bones. “I’m sorry that my last encounter with her had to be so unpleasant, because there were many others that weren’t like that at all. There was a time when she was …”
“I won’t forgive her.”
“It’s easier to be angry than sad,” I say.
“I won’t forgive or forget. She set me up, and she lied. She set you up, and she lied. She began lying so much there was no reference point of truth left, and so she believed her bullshit.”
Lucy moves the cursor to
“That’s not the way she was dressed,” I tell Lucy.
“Stalking,” she says. “Dry runs. So far I’ve found five of them for the last two weeks.”
“Last night she had on a light-colored shirt. So what I just saw on the recording was from when …?” I start to ask, but I’m stopped by the sound of Jaime Berger’s voice.
“… I realize that once again I’m breaking the no-contact rule that I myself made.” The familiar voice drifts out
