“Your electronic communications never come back to a real location and you don’t use your real name if you decide to jet somewhere and don’t want anybody to know. Am I right?”

“Close enough.”

“It’s very hard for spies to have alibis,” Donoghue says to her. “I hope you thought of that when you started living your so-called untraceable life.”

Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

I’M NOT A SPY.” LUCY BEGINS THE NEXT ROUND OF verbal volleys.

“You live like one,” Donoghue says.

“I learned to a long time ago.”

“Did Carrie teach you?”

“I was a college intern, a teenager when I first met her. She taught me a lot of things but nowhere near as much as she takes credit for. When I interned at the ERF …”

“What is that?” Donoghue asks.

“The FBI’s Toyland where the latest greatest technologies are developed for surveillance, biometrics and obviously data management that includes their artificial intelligence network I created in the late nineties. CAIN. That was all mine and Carrie took credit for it. She stole my work.”

“Meaning both of you might be capable of getting into the FBI database. Since both of you created it.”

“Hypothetically,” Lucy says. “But I did most of the creating despite her lies about it.”

“The two of you were close friends for a while.” Donoghue isn’t interested in any credit that might have been stolen. “Until eventually you realized who and what she is.”

“That’s fair to say,” Lucy agrees, and I look at Janet.

I wonder how hard it is for her to be reminded that Carrie was Lucy’s first love. What Carrie says in the videos is true, and I’m not sure Lucy has ever loved anyone else as much. It’s understandable. The first fall is the most intense, the hardest, and when Lucy began as an intern at ERF she was emotionally immature. She was more like a twelve-year-old, and it will forever be her misfortune that the supervisor she was assigned to would end up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. It occurs to me to inquire if Carrie is back on it.

“That’s one way to know if the Bureau takes her existence seriously,” I explain.

“Well too bad. Because she didn’t make the list.” It’s Janet who answers. “They’ve known for more than two months that she was in Russia and Ukraine for the past ten years and now is back in the U.S. And she’s not officially wanted. She’s not been added back to any list anywhere.”

“They’ve known?” Donoghue says pointedly.

“For months at least that she’s now back in the U.S.”

“They’ve known?”

“They know she’s tied to serial murders and that she tried to kill Doctor Scarpetta.” Janet powers forward with her argument, and it’s as if a dim light flicks on in a distant part of my psyche.