“It might simply have been a matter of practicality,” Benton says. “Chanel hadn’t been here for a long time. So Carrie appropriated her property and then murdered her when she showed up.”

“Something made her decide it though.” Lucy walks back to us and sits. “And my theory is when Carrie hung around after she shot you”—she directs this at me, reaching for the bottle of Freisa d’Asti in the ice bucket—“she watched Chanel help you to the surface, basically save your life and that marked Chanel for death.”

The same way Carrie marked you, and I push that from my mind. I don’t want to imagine Lucy’s tattooed dragonfly. I don’t want to envision Carrie slashing her with the same Swiss Army knife that she fashioned into a cruel mobile some seventeen years later.

“I’m not saying she wasn’t going to annihilate Chanel eventually,” Lucy adds.

“She would have,” Benton says. “But when she watched Chanel save Kay’s life it pushed her over the edge. As much as we can simplify what is anything but simple when you’re dealing with an offender like this.”

Two months and one week ago when I almost died I didn’t know that other dive boats in the area belonged to special ops. In retrospect I’m not at all surprised because Benton knows how dangerous Carrie is. He wouldn’t allow us to dive a hundred feet down into dark murky water without making sure we were safe. As it turned out we weren’t. Certainly the two police divers weren’t. The tactical divers were a day late and a dollar short, to quote Marino. But they helped save my life after I was shot—specifically Chanel Gilbert did.

“Why might that have prompted Carrie to kill her?” Donoghue is asking. “I’m trying to understand the reason.”

“You’re probably not going to,” I reply.

“Jealousy. Resentment.” Benton sips his drink. “Chanel was the hero. She stole Carrie’s thunder. That’s as close as we’re probably going to get to what goaded Carrie into it. There’s no fortune cookie formula.”

“That’s the hard part,” Lucy says. “We don’t know the details and might never. For example I’m not sure of the relationship between Carrie and Chanel.”

“Did they have one?” Donoghue asks.

“That’s what I’m getting at,” Lucy says. “They could have.”

“One of the problems with people in the intelligence community is they never seem to know whose side they’re on,” Janet says as I get up to see about dinner, and I just can’t listen anymore. “It’s a squirrely way to live,” she adds, and I carry my drink toward the back door.