“Hurt? I think hurt is the point and it’s already started.” Her bright green eyes look at me. “They want me hurt. They intend to leave me unprotected so I can’t take care of my family, my home. They’re hoping all of us will end up defeated, annihilated, at each other’s throats. Better yet, dead. They want all of us murdered.”

“You need something all you gotta do is ask,” Marino says. “With the likes of Carrie on the loose you should have more firepower than just your handguns.”

“They’ll take those next if they haven’t already,” she replies, and it really is outrageous that they listed handguns on the warrant. “Plus they’re bagging up all of my kitchen cutlery, the Shun Fuji santoku knives you gave to us,” she says to me, adding yet another outrage.

As far as we know, Carrie Grethen’s recent deadly rampage includes a stabbing with a tactical knife. There’s no evidence, not even a hint that Lucy had anything to do with it, and her guns and the cutlery are completely inconsistent with the characteristics of the murder weapons. To clean out her gun vault, her kitchen is absurd.

For an instant Carrie’s recent victims parade through my mind, seemingly random people until I realized each of them had a connection to me, even if remotely. They never knew what hit them, except for Rand Bloom, the sleazy insurance investigator she stabbed and left on the bottom of a swimming pool. He would have had a moment if not several of terror, panic and pain.

But Julie Eastman, Jack Segal, Jamal Nari and Congressman Rosado didn’t suffer. They were going about their business one second and then nothingness, annihilation, and I envision the Carrie I saw on video touching the back of her neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae. Even then she knew about the sweet spot for a hangman’s fracture and that such a catastrophic injury literally causes instant death.

She’s back. She’s alive and more dangerous than she ever was and even as I’m thinking this I’m washed over by doubt. What if all of us are being tricked? I can’t prove I’ve seen or heard from Carrie Grethen since the 1990s. She’s left no real evidence that connects her with a crime spree that began late last year. What if it’s not her who sent the video to me from Lucy’s phone?

I look at my niece.

“From the beginning,” I say to her. “What happened?”

LUCY SITS on her big rock and explains that this morning at exactly 9:05 her house phone rang.