While still in her teens she landed on the young and filthy-rich list, she likes to quip, and began to indulge her passion for helicopters, motorcycles, speedboats, jets and other fast machines. She can pilot pretty much anything, and I focus my attention on her all-wheel-drive FF with its long sloping nose parked silently, darkly on the grass. She drove it to work this morning, and the reason I’m certain of this is because the Ferrari was picked up by the CFC security cameras while I was upstairs in my office, sitting at my desk with its multiple computer displays.

On one of them I watched Lucy drive her four-hundred-thousand-dollar so-called family car inside the bay where ambulances and other transport vehicles pick up and deliver bodies. Not even the cops can park in there, and I was unhappily reminded that often she tucks her expensive modes of transportation out of the dirt and grime, out of the weather. It’s rather selfish, and now and then some members of the staff make comments. But that’s not what has me thinking about this now. It’s the flight suit she has on.

When the cameras picked up Lucy this morning as she climbed out of her electric-blue 650 horsepower V-12 coupe, she was wearing ripped-up jeans, a baggy T-shirt and sneakers. I remember she was holding a large coffee, and slung over a shoulder was her tactical black backpack, roomy with lots of compartments, basically a portable office and armory.

Now that I’m thinking about it, the backpack is what she typically carries when she’s flying somewhere. Then at some point today she changed into one of her flame-resistant flight suits in lightweight khaki Nomex, the CFC crest embroidered in red and blue on the left chest pocket. It’s not uncommon for her to fly her twin-engine bird whenever and wherever she pleases.

But it’s late. It’s pitch dark. We’re in the middle of an extreme weather alert and a difficult death scene. Her mother is on a plane headed to Boston. I don’t understand.

“I’m wondering why you changed your clothes.” I bring it up tactfully, and she looks down at her flight suit as if she’s forgotten what she has on. “Are you flying somewhere? Or maybe you were earlier?”

But it wouldn’t make sense. At its most miserable today the temperature crept past a hundred degrees with more than 70 percent humidity. The hotter and more humid it is, the less efficient the helicopter, and Lucy is meticulous about weather conditions. She has to factor in payload, torque, engine temperatures, and I think back to how many times I was around her today.