I felt miserable. I wanted to call Marino immediately, but I knew it wasn’t wise. I changed the subject.

“What else have you and Michele been talking about? Anything new with the State Police computers?”

“Nothing good. We’ve tried everything we can think of to figure out who Waddell’s SID number was switched with. But any records marked for deletion were overwritten long ago on the hard disk. And whoever is responsible for the tampering was swift enough to do full system backups after the records were altered, meaning we can’t run SID numbers against an earlier version of CCRE and see who pops up. Generally, you have at least one backup that’s three to six months old. But not so in this case.”

“Sounds like an inside job to me.”

I thought how natural it seemed to be home with Lucy. She no longer was a guest or an irascible little girl. “We need to call your mother and Grans,” I said.

“Do we have to tonight?”

“No. But we do need to talk about your returning to Miami.”

“Classes don’t start until the seventh, and it won’t make any difference if I miss the first few days.”

“School is very important.”

“It’s also very easy.”

“Then you should do something on your own to make it harder.”

“Missing classes will make it harder,” she said.

The next morning I called Rose at eight-thirty, when I knew a staff meeting was in progress across the hall, meaning that Ben Stevens was occupied and would not know I was on the line.

“How are things?” I asked my secretary.

“Awful. Dr. Wyatt couldn’t get here from the Roanoke office because they got snow in the mountains and the roads are bad. So yesterday Fielding had four cases with no one to help him. Plus, he was due in court and then got called to a scene. Have you talked to him?”

“We touch base when the poor man has a moment to get to the phone. This might be a good time for us to track down a few of our former fellows and see if one of them might consider coming here to help us hang on for a while. Jansen’s doing private path in Charlottesville. You want to try him and see if he wants to give me a call.”

“Certainly. That’s a fine idea.”

“Tell me about Stevens,” I said.

“He hasn’t been here very much. He signs out in such an abbreviated, vague fashion that no one is ever sure where he’s gone. I’m suspicious he’s looking for another job.”

“Remind him not to ask me for a recommendation.”

“I wish you’d give him a great one so someone else would take him off our hands.”