“I didn’t see her. Things weren’t so good with us then. She’d asked me to move out and I’d left town to spend time with my sister in Virginia.” Janet’s eyes are on Lucy. “Natalie was in really bad shape. She was in pain. And she was scared. So it was a good time for me to relocate there and as it turned out she didn’t last long.” She looks away from us, her eyes bright with tears. “But I wasn’t happy about the reason I left home. Suffice it to say it was a rough time.”

“I didn’t want Carrie to hurt you,” Lucy says quietly.

“She has anyway.”

“Your problems with Janet and the fact that she’d left town aren’t good for you either,” Donoghue says to Lucy. “You don’t have a witness. Domestic difficulties point to personal instability, which also isn’t helpful. And with your resources you could have climbed out of your helicopter and straight onto a private jet and been in Fort Lauderdale in two and a half to three hours.” She plays the bad guy as if she enjoys it. “Tell me that wasn’t physically possible.”

“It was more than possible in a Citation-Ten. With the winds that day I could have made it to Fort Lauderdale in two hours.”

“So that’s a vulnerability they’ll exploit,” Donoghue informs me. “They’ll poke big holes in the alibi that she wasn’t in Florida when you were attacked. They’ll say she could have been.”

“What about other proof?” I ask Lucy. “I.P. addresses, telephone logs, recordings on your security cameras? Is there anything that would place you here in Concord, for example, here at your house? I realize Janet wasn’t home. But what about anything else that might place you here?”

“You know how good I am at making my life untraceable.”

“You’re so good at it that you sacrifice the chance of ever having an alibi if you need one,” Donoghue says.

“I don’t make it a habit to think in terms of alibis.”

“In this instance that’s too bad.”

“I don’t live a life that requires alibis.”

“But you live a life that seems to require you to cover your tracks, to make sure no one knows where you are or when or why.” Donoghue is sparring with her now.

“Are you asking if there are people out to get me?”

“I’m not asking that,” Donoghue says. “It’s obvious you think so.”

“I know so.”

“What’s important right now is your own relentless privacy measures that make my job difficult.”

“I’m sure there isn’t much about me that wouldn’t make your job difficult.”