cologne. She wondered if a man would bother with cologne if his intention was to murder his lover.
Lucy hung her leather jacket on the coatrack and, without invitation, moved a chair next to Berger and opened a MacBook Air.
“Excuse me,” Berger said, “I’m accustomed to people sitting on the other side of my desk.”
“I need to show you something,” Lucy said. “You’re looking well. The same.”
She openly appraised Berger.
“No, I’m wrong,” Lucy decided. “You look better, maybe even better than the first time we met eight years ago when you had two more skyscrapers several blocks from here. When I’m flying the helicopter and the skyline first comes in view, it still looks like the city’s had its two front teeth knocked out. Then along the Hudson at maybe eight hundred feet and I pass Ground Zero, and it’s still a hole.”
“It’s not something to make light of,” Berger said.
“I’m definitely not making light of it. I just wish it would change. You know. So I don’t keep feeling like the bad guys won?”
Berger couldn’t recall ever seeing Lucy in anything but tactical wear, and the tight threadbare jeans and black T-shirt she had on wouldn’t hide any type of weapon. The way she was dressed didn’t hide much at all, least of all that she had money. Her wide belt was crocodile with a Winston sabertoothed tiger buckle handcrafted of precious metals and stones, and the thick chain around her neck and its turquoise skull pendant was a Winston as well, and considered fine art and as expensive as such. She was remarkably fit and strong, and her mahogany hair with its shades of rose gold had been cut quite short. She could easily pass for a pretty boy model were it not for her breasts.
Berger said, “Terri Bridges’s laptops.”
She pointed to a table near the closed door, to the package wrapped in brown paper and neatly sealed with red evidence tape.
Lucy glanced at the package as if its presence couldn’t have been more obvious.
“I assume you’ve got a search warrant,” she said. “Anybody looked to see what’s on the hard drives yet?”
“No. They’re all yours.”
“When I find out what e-mail accounts she has, we’re going to need legal access to those as well. Quickly. And likely others, depending on who she was involved with—besides the boyfriend at Bellevue.”
“Of course.”
“Once I locate her e-mail hosting provider, check out her history, I’ll need passwords.”
“I know the drill, believe it or not.”
“Unless you want me to hack.” Lucy started typing.
“Let’s refrain from using that word, please. In fact, I never heard you use it.”
Lucy smiled a little as her agile fingers moved over the keyboard. She began a PowerPoint presentation.
Connextions—The Neural Networking Solution
“My God, you’re really not going to do this,” Berger said. “You have any idea how many of these things I see?”
“You’ve never seen this.” Lucy tapped a key. “You familiar with computational neuroscience? Technology based on neural networking? Connections that process information very much the way the brain does.”
Lucy’s index finger tap-tapped, a bulky silver ring on it. She had on a watch that Berger didn’t recognize, but it looked military, with its black face and luminous dial and rubber strap.
Lucy caught Berger looking at it and said, “Maybe you’re familiar with illumination technology? Gaseous tritium, a radioactive isotope that decays and causes the numbers and other markings on the watch to glow so they’re easy to read in the dark? I bought it myself. You buy your Blancpain yourself? Or was it a gift?”
“It was a gift to myself from myself. A reminder that time is precious.”
“And mine’s a reminder that we should utilize what other people fear, because you don’t fear something unless it’s powerful.”
“I don’t feel compelled to prove a point by wearing a radioactive watch,” Berger said.
“A total, at most, of twenty-five millicuries, or an exposure of maybe point-one micro sievert over the period of a year. Same thing one gets from normal radiation. Harmless, in other words. A good example of people shunning something because they’re ignorant.”
“People call me a lot of things, but not ignorant,” Berger said. “We need to get started on the laptops.”
“The artificial system I’ve developed—am developing, actually,” Lucy said, “because the possibilities are infinite, and when considering infinity, one has to ask if by its very nature it transforms what’s artificial into something real. Because to me, artificial is finite. So to me, it follows that infinite will no longer be artificial.”
“We need to get into this dead lady’s laptops,” Berger said.
“You need to understand what we’re doing,” Lucy said.
Her green eyes looked at Berger.
“Because it will be you explaining everything in court, not me,” Lucy said.
She started moving through the PowerPoint. Berger didn’t interrupt her this time.
“Wet mind, another bit of jargon you don’t know,” Lucy said. “The way our brain recognizes voices, faces, objects, and orients them into a context that’s meaningful, revealing, instructive, predictive, and I can tell you’re not looking at any of this or even listening.”
She removed her hands from the keyboard and studied Berger as if she were a question to be answered.
“What I want from you is straightforward,” Berger said. “To go through e-mail, all files of any description, re-create all deletions, recognize any patterns that might tell us the slightest thing about who, what, when, where. If she were murdered by somebody she knew, chances are good there’s something in there.” She indicated the packaged evidence on the table by the door. “Even if this is a stranger killing, there may be something she mentioned somewhere that could clue us in as to where this person might have come across her or where she came across him. You know how it works. You’ve been an investigator more years than you’re old.”
“Not exactly.”
Berger got up from her desk.
“I’ll receipt these to you,” she said. “How did you get here?”
“Since you don’t have a helipad, I took a cab.”
Lucy had closed the office door when she’d come in. They stood in front of it.
“I assumed one of your troops would give me a lift back to the Village and up the stairs, straight into my office,” Lucy said. “And I’ll sign the appropriate paperwork. Pro forma, maintaining the chain of evidence. All those things I learned in law enforcement one-oh-one.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Berger made the phone call.
When she hung up, she said to Lucy, “You and I have one last thing to discuss.”
Lucy leaned against the door, hands in the pockets of her jeans, and said, “Let me guess. That gossip column. Pedestrian programming, I might add. Do you believe in the Golden Rule? Do unto others?”
“I’m not talking specifically about Gotham Gotcha ,” Berger said. “But it raises an important issue I need to tell you about. Marino works for me. I’m taking for granted you can and will handle that.”
Lucy put on her jacket.
“I need your assurance,” Berger said.
“You’re telling me this now?”
“Until earlier this afternoon, I didn’t know there was a reason to have this conversation. By then, you and I had already agreed to meet. That’s the chronology of things. That’s why I’m bringing it up right now.”
“Well, I hope you screen other people better than you did him,” Lucy said.
“That’s a topic for you and Benton, since he’s the one who referred Marino to me last summer. What I
