What a terrible thing to do to an FBI agent who’s not particularly bright or formidable, and as much as I dislike Erin Loria I wouldn’t wish that on her. I can only imagine the international outrage. Even the Bureau might suffer damage if it came out that former beauty queen Special Agent Loria now married to a federal judge was at one time in possession of a machine gun used in the murder of a former world leader. Maybe she’s trying to save her own ass at my niece’s expense. If someone has to go it won’t be Erin Loria. Or that’s what she thinks.

“Carrie has to be talking to someone in government,” Lucy is saying. “How else would they know about the kurz?”

“You’re basing this on a few vague questions Erin asked,” Janet replies. “That’s my impression since I wasn’t present.”

She says it as if she’s creating documentation, and I wonder who Janet is really talking to right now. Lucy? Or the FBI? Or is Janet talking to me?

“Why else would Erin want to know where I was on December twenty-seventh, 2007? She asked me about the machine gun I had quote stolen and hidden in my dorm room. So where’d that come from if not from Carrie?” Lucy works the curved edge of the pry bar between the edges of two tiles.

“I can imagine her saying something like that.”

“Erin asked me what happened to what she called an MP5K prototype, which it wasn’t. It was just a very early model, so early it has a single-digit serial number.”

“It would be just like Carrie to let Erin play around with something long enough to taint her,” Janet says. “Carrie has created a liability. But not just for Erin.”

“Also Benton.” Lucy doesn’t hesitate to say his name.

But so far Janet hasn’t so much as alluded to him. I continue to sense she’s being careful. She’s talking as if she knows the conversation isn’t private.

“Imagine if a gun you’d once had illegally even if only for a day was implicated in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto?” Janet adds.

“Even if Carrie’s lying and planted false reports it’s still a bad story if it gets out.”

“Forgetting the PR nightmare,” Janet says, “there’s not going to be any statute of limitations loophole in a case like that, and that’s exactly why that DoD idiot was here. The FBI is a stalking horse for the DoD, and we’ve seen our share of cases like that. You think you’re doing one thing when you’re really doing something else.”

“Now it’s the Pentagon after me,” Lucy says, and she sounds more annoyed than anything else.

“Something is.” Janet has yet to look at a camera or in the direction of one.