“I have to think there must be something of him out there somewhere,” Lucy says, and it’s not the first time she’s said it.

“I’m not aware of it.”

“You’ve never heard a recording of him but you can still hear him in your head.”

“Like it was yesterday.”

“What about Mom?”

“I don’t know what Dorothy remembers.”

“And there’s no way she has a recording or knows about one?”

“She wasn’t helpful. I asked her that a few days ago when we were discussing her trip.” I didn’t tell her why I was curious.

“There must be some kind of recording somewhere,” Lucy says. “There has to be, and if there is? All someone had to do was get hold of it and pull out phonetic blocks and fabricate sentences. You could do the same thing to synthesize a voice speaking in Italian.”

“Why can’t we find this person?” I ask her point-blank. “What’s so different this time that you haven’t been able to trace a single communication from Tailend Charlie?”

“I think we’re dealing with someone who’s setting up virtual machines. If it were me, that’s what I’d do.”

“Please explain what you mean.”

“It means we’re sort of screwed,” she says.

“WHAT YOU DO IS hack into some open machine or network. University campuses are prime targets for this, and we’ve got more than our share around here,” Lucy explains what she believes Tailend Charlie is doing.

“Once you create your own virtual machine, you use it to create a virtual mail server,” she adds. “After every e-mail you eradicate the server and create a new one, and this goes on and on into perpetuity.”

“And there’s no trail, no IP or anything?” I assume.

“Maybe there will be an IP in the packet logs of routers along the way. But it’s the worst kind of wild-goose chase. Every time you track down an e-mail it’s gone and a new one pops up from a totally different location.”

“It sounds like something Carrie would do,” I admit. “It’s technology I can imagine her knowing about.”

“You can pretty much take it to the bank that she knows the same things I do,” Lucy says reluctantly, and it’s hard for her to give Carrie that much credit.

It’s even harder for me to hear it. Then Lucy brings up Bryce and I’ve been waiting for her to get around to him. She says he has no concept of who he leaks intel to in the course of what he considers normal conversations.

“Including the detail about a fake tattoo, which couldn’t have been visible to anyone who might have been watching.” Lucy picks up her phone. “He would have had to pull down his sock, and even so, the tattoo is small and faded after he scrubbed the hell out of it.”