But it doesn’t. It simply raises another legal problem. What right did the FBI have to confiscate anything belonging to Janet? There wasn’t a warrant for her, not that I know about. Of course if they took her firearms then they’ll simply say they needed to test them. What if Lucy had used them in the commission of a crime? What if Janet had for that matter? Agents walking out the door with Janet’s belongings is no different from them walking out with my computer and anything else they seized from the guest bedroom. They’ll assert that when people live together or stay under the same roof then anything on the property is fair game. The FBI can’t know what’s mine, Janet’s or Lucy’s if all of it is in the same location.

I’m not all that surprised the FBI might have decided to send Janet’s guns to the lab. But her mention of it to Lucy strikes me as a strategic sidestep, a non sequitur, a lawyer-speak that is far more deliberate than it might seem. Janet is choosing her words with precision and care, and maybe that simply comes naturally to her when times are stressful. But it strikes me that she’s creating a record, as if someone is listening, and someone is. I am. But who else?

Then she uses the word criminal. She says that what’s happened is criminal but she doesn’t make her meaning clear. Is she referring to what Lucy has done or what the Bureau has? And Lucy’s response is that a person’s rights are honored only in the breach.

“Justice won’t do us any good if we’re dead,” she says, “and they’ll make sure the truth never comes out. If we’re murdered it will have been sanctioned by our own government. Hell yes it’s criminal. They basically have put a hit on us.”

“Technically, legally I’m sure they haven’t,” Janet replies. “I guarantee you they didn’t hire Carrie, they didn’t contract with her to hurt Kay last June or kill us. What they’ve done is far more clever and diabolical. It’s an open invitation to commit a violent act, and yes it’s willful negligence. It’s a complete disregard for human life, the absolute definition of a depraved heart crime,” she adds to my disbelief. “It should be criminal. But it’s the FBI, Lucy. And there’s no accountability unless there is a perceived political obstruction such as an embarrassment to POTUS.”