Lucy sat on my sofa, eating Twizzlers while two of her laptop screens flickered and flashed with what looked like greetings from Alpha Centauri. I still had ambiguous feelings about using the services of a hacker. I’d had these feeling since first employing the young man who was Lucy’s dark-web mentor, Skittles. Both as a marine and a police detective, I had been trained to believe engaging various human “assets” was the quickest way to the truth or a target or both. Something about using backdoor technology as a surgical tool to cut into and extract the heuristically algorithmic data humans had become made me uncomfortable. It felt invasive, cynical and boorish. Then again, I’d recently given the Internet my full name, credit card number, address and clicked “Yes” to Terms of Service I didn’t read for the purchase a Pendleton “Sea Chief” wool blanket online, absolutely giddy at the promise of next-day delivery.

Lucy demanded I make veggie tacos while she surfed the black waves of the dark net.

Since my kitchen was my sanctuary and cooking my way of attempting to achieve serenity, I obliged her.

Rough-chopped Vidalia onion, red and green pepper, jalapeño and roasted corn sizzling in unsalted butter. I added porcini mushrooms and cut two avocadoes into chunks. I chopped romaine and buttercrunch lettuce and mixed them together. Finally, I rough chopped Roma tomatoes. I’d long ago given up on stopping Lucy from defacing the culinary art of my tacos with big, messy scoops of sour cream; I set out a tub of the vile stuff for her, and while she worked, she dipped each of four tacos at least twice in the foul glop. I suppose I should have been grateful she didn’t eat them the old-school Mexicantown way, like I did when I was growing up; back then ketchup was our salsa.

After an hour, Lucy said, “Bingo, bango, Big Jim’s dango.”

“Got something?”

“I always get something, slick.”

I couldn’t disagree with her.

On her screens were two hospital admission records, both for Victor Michael Bronson.

“Why are there two admission forms?” I said.

“Because the one on the left was deleted,” Lucy said. “Ejected into the airless void of cyberspace. Look at the initial assessment.”

I did: three groupings of two red subdural penetrations around the left pectoral muscle.

Jesus.

He’d been tased.

“They were interrogating him,” I heard myself say.

“Now look at the form on the right,” Lucy said. “Submitted twenty-seven seconds later to Admissions Records Server 898-3C.”

No mention of the red marks. Simply, Male Caucasian, 48. Suspected cardiac arrest.

Whoever had done this had to have been part of Bronson’s security team and, I suspected, in the employ of the man calling himself the Albino.

“Anything else?” I said.

“Holy minestrone,” Lucy said, “that’s not enough?”

“Don’t make me beg, Lucy.”