EIGHT MINUTES INTO THE VIDEO AND ALL I SEE is Lucy’s empty dorm room. I again try to save the file or pause it. I can’t. It just keeps playing like life passing by with nothing to show for it.

Now nine minutes into the clip and the dorm room is exactly the same, empty and quiet, but in the background the firing ranges are busy. Gunshots pop and I can see glaring light seeping around the edges of the white blinds closed the wrong way. The sun is directly in the windows and I remember Lucy’s room faced west. It’s late afternoon.

Pop-Pop. Pop-Pop.

I detect the rumbling noise of traffic driving by four floors below on J. Edgar Hoover Road, the main drag that runs through the middle of the FBI Academy. Rush hour. Classes ending for the day. Cops, agents coming in from the ranges. For an instant I imagine I smell the sharp banana odor of isoamyl acetate, of Hoppe’s gun-cleaning solvent. I smell burnt gunpowder as if it’s all around me. I feel the sultry Virginia heat and hear the static of insects where cartridge cases shine silver and gold in the sun-warmed grass. It all comes back to me powerfully, and then at last something happens.

The video has a title sequence. It begins to roll by very slowly:

DEPRAVED HEART—SCENE 1

BY CARRIE GRETHEN

QUANTICO, VIRGINIA—JULY 11, 1997

The name is jolting. It’s infuriating to see it in bold red type going by ever so slowly, languidly, dripping down the screen pixel-by-pixel like a slow-motion bleed. Music has been added. Karen Carpenter is singing “We’ve Only Just Begun.” It’s obnoxious to score the video to that angelic voice, to those gentle Paul Williams lyrics.

Such a sweet loving song permuted into a threat, a mockery, a promise of more injury to come, of misery, harassment and possibly death. Carrie Grethen is flaunting and taunting. She’s giving me the finger. I haven’t listened to the Carpenters in years but in the old days I wore out their cassettes and CDs. I wonder if Carrie knew that. She probably did. So this is the next installment of what she must have put into the works a long time ago.