Lucy sat before it on the floor, Indian style, as if she were about to worship the great god of technology. She hit the enter key to turn the screen saver off, and ESA lit up rows of pixels at a time in electric blue, flashing a map of the United States on the next vivid screen. At a prompt, she typed in her user name and password, answered other secure prompts to work her way into the system, invisibly cruising through secret gateways on the Web, passing through one level at a time. When she had logged on to the case repository, she motioned for me to sit next to her.

“I can get you a chair if you want,” she said.

“No, this is fine.”

The floor was hard and unkind to my lower lumbar spine. But I was a good sport. A prompt asked her to enter a word or words or phrases that she wished the system to search for throughout the database.

“Don’t worry about the format,” Lucy said. “The text search engines can handle complete stream of consciousness. We can try everything from the size of the fire hose used to the materials the house was made of—all that fire safety info and stuff that’s in your set forms fire departments fill out. Or you can go with your own key queries.”

“Let’s try death, homicide, suspected arson,” I said.

“Female,” Marino added. “And wealth.”

“Cut, incision, hemorrhage, fast, hot,” I continued thinking.

“What about unidentified,” Lucy said as she typed.

“Good,” I said. “And bathroom, I suppose.”

“Hell, put horses in there,” Marino said.

“Let’s go ahead and give it a shot,” Lucy proposed. “We can always try more words as we think of them.”

She executed a search and then stretched her legs out and rolled her neck. I could hear Janet in the kitchen washing dishes, and in less than a minute, the computer came back with 11,873 records searched and 453 keywords found.

“That’s since 1988,” Lucy let us know. “And it also includes any cases from overseas in which ATF was called in to assist.”

“Can we print out the four hundred and fifty-three records?” I asked.

“You know, the printer’s packed, Aunt Kay.” Lucy looked up apologetically at me.

“Then how about downloading the records to my computer,” I said.

She looked uncertain.

“I guess that’s all right,” she said, “as long as you make sure . . . Oh, never mind.”

“Don’t worry, I’m used to confidential information. I’ll make sure no one else gets hold of them.”

I knew it was stupid when I said it. Lucy stared longingly into the computer screen.

“This whole thing’s UNIX-based SQL.” She seemed to be talking to no one. “Makes me crazy.”

“Well, if they had a brain in their head, they’d have you here doing their computer shit,” Marino said.