Annie Lennox was playing in the background, and Lucy was in her glass cockpit, surrounded by three video displays as large as most living room flat screens. In the soft light, her profile was well defined, her brow smooth, her nose aquiline, her face intense, as if there was nothing she’d rather do than navigate through what was already giving Berger a headache. A real one. The kind that always ended the same way, with her lying down in a dark room, holding hot compresses over her eyes.

She stood next to Lucy’s chair, rifling through her briefcase, hoping a Zomig might be lurking somewhere, because that was the only medication that worked. The blister pack she found tucked between the pages of a legal pad was empty.

Lucy was explaining more than Berger really wanted to know about what the neural networking program was acquiring from one of the laptops found in Terri Bridges’s apartment, and the technology involved. Berger was frustrated that Lucy refused to start on the second laptop—one that apparently had been solely dedicated to the Internet. She was anxious for Marino to call with the e-mail passwords. The question was whether she would still be here when he did. The bigger question was why she was here at all. A part of her knew, and she was unsettled by everything and nothing, and didn’t know what to do. She and Lucy had a striking problem on their hands. They had more than one.

“Ordinarily, when you delete a file in an operating system, you’ve got a good chance of getting the data back if the recovery is attempted quickly,” Lucy was saying.

Berger sat back down next to her. Bright white bits and pieces of text, fractured sentences and words, reconnected in the blackness of electronic space. She thought about putting on her tinted sunglasses. She had a feeling it wouldn’t help. This was going where it was going, and she wasn’t going to stop it.

Had she sincerely intended to stop it, she wouldn’t have taken a taxi to the Village tonight, no matter the crisis, the urgency, and the logic in what Lucy had told her over the phone, when she’d called to suggest Berger take a look at what was developing. She’d been alone with Lucy before, but that was years ago, when Scarpetta’s astonishingly complicated and high-risk niece was too young and Berger had been too married. One thing she didn’t do was violate contracts or lose cases because of technicalities.

She had no contract now, and Lucy was older, and the only technicality was whatever Berger decided to manufacture.