“When we talked a couple hours ago I was preoccupied with the nine-one-one call.” Lucy tucks the tin back in a cargo pocket, buttoning the flap. “I was tied up with trying to figure out what the hell happened, who was behind it and why. I can’t do everything at once.”

“Not even you can.” I move the mint to the other side of my mouth and take a sip of water.

She goes on making her case, claiming that early this evening we were attacked simultaneously on multiple fronts—and she uses that word again.

Multiple.

“The timing is deliberate. I believe we’re talking about connected attacks that involve the same person or persons. And that suggests to me there are more on the way,” she adds.

But the real problem isn’t what’s been done or might be next. Or how. Or why. It’s the who in the equation, and all along I’ve maintained it’s obsessive and dangerous to assume that behind every aberrant act is the same diabolical puppeteer.

I’m not naïve about Carrie Grethen. I’m intimately familiar with her nefarious proclivities and treacherous capabilities. I know what it is to be physically mauled by her, almost die at her hands, and work her crime scenes and autopsy her victims.

So it’s not as if she’s an abstraction to me. But unfortunately she’s not the only horror show, and I open the text that just landed. Marino writes:

A clusterf**k. Stay put for now. Nothing U can do.

I wish he hadn’t called the scene out here a clusterfuck. I hope that doesn’t come home to roost at some point.

“Suffice it to say that what little I could decipher in the audio file was worse than usual.” Lucy continues telling me about the latest harassment from Tailend Charlie. “It’s too close for comfort, and no telling about the rest of it.”

“What does Benton say?” I ask.

“I wasn’t going to get into it with him on the phone, not with other people around, especially a bunch of suits,” she answers, and I puzzle over how she can know who he’s with if he didn’t say. “And I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring up the stuff about Natalie,” she adds to my astonishment.

“You mean Janet, not Natalie.” I assume Lucy has misspoken.

“I mean Natalie,” Lucy says. “You’ll get it when you start thinking about her last few months, when Janet and I were frequently in and out of Virginia. Then you and Benton were with Natalie a number of times late in the game when she was in hospice in particular, and if you think back to some of the things she was saying? They take on a very different meaning now, a disgusting one.”