So I didn’t give my presentation to influential people, and here I am resting peacefully in bed with two dogs. I can’t think of anything much better than that. Janet and Desi have been kind and thoughtful about looking after me, and Dorothy is around somewhere. Benton and Lucy should be home any minute, having left the helicopter behind in D.C. because of the weather. We’ll have a wonderful brunch in a little while. I should get going, and I feel strangely lightweight as if someone turned down gravity.

It’s as if the reign of terror has been lifted with the dry spell, the heat wave, as if the balance of life has been restored, and I feel happy in a way I’ve not been in a long while. Carrie Grethen was badly sliced up and burned, her skull fractured by the mechanical monster of her own design. When she’s sufficiently recovered she’ll be held in isolation at the local state psychiatric hospital, in a maximum security forensic unit for the criminally insane. She can’t hurt anyone now, and her partner Theo Portison is in jail, neither going anywhere except to trial.

Meanwhile the police and FBI will continue their search for any other foot soldiers she may have recruited here or abroad. Lucy suspects Carrie can operate her drones remotely the same way military operators do. She could have had one docked in the Bethesda area and piloted it from South Florida to fly to Briggs’s house and kill him. After that Carrie boarded the plane in Fort Lauderdale and enjoyed her friendly flight with my sister. I can’t wait to hear what Dorothy has to say about that. Since I got shocked unconscious, I’ve not talked to her much.

I check my e-mail. My office is working overtime, and another note from Ernie confirms what we suspected, that the same panguite fingerprint we found in the Molly Hinders case was also present in the whitish linear burns on Elisa Vandersteel’s body. Both women were electrocuted by carbon nanotube conductors that were retracted by spools into a monster drone powered by capacitors and coated in a thermal protective paint that includes panguite. The weights at the ends of the conductors, what resemble sinkers, also contain panguite.

Benton says making a weapon out of something stolen from his powerful brother was Theo’s way of appropriating what he perceives as rightfully his. “Sort of like Jacob stealing Esau’s birthright,” my husband said, and he also believes that the murders in Cambridge were target practice, in a sense, except the selection of the women was emotionally driven by Theo’s tendency toward erotomania and sexual violence.