He was married. I was divorced and not seeing anyone. His poor wife. Benton and I had been lovers for almost five years before he finally admitted it to her, feigning that his adultery had just begun because their marriage had gotten stale, lifeless.

And nobody knew? Pete Marino? Lucy? Your

secretary, Rose?

I’ve always wondered if Rose suspected it. Just something

about the way she’d act when Benton would show up for yet

another case discussion, or when I was on my way to Quantico for yet another consultation. She died of cancer last summer. So you can’t ask her.

Doesn’t sound as if working with the dead makes

you sexually inhibited.

Quite the opposite. When you’ve explored every inch of the human body so many times that you haven’t the least bit of self-consciousness or revulsion about it, there isn’t anything out of bounds sexually, and there’s plenty of experimentation to be had… .

“Can you forward this to Kay?” Berger said when the section of text abruptly stopped. “So when she gets a chance, maybe she can give it her attention. Maybe she’ll have thoughts, insights we don’t.”

“Supposedly from one of the interviews this past Thanksgiving,” Lucy said. “Which I know she didn’t give. Not that she’d ever talk like this to anyone.”

“I’m noticing a creative use of fonts. Your opinion?”

“The writer, Terri or whoever, does a lot with fonts,” Lucy agreed.

She was doing her best to be calm, but she was outraged. Berger sensed it, and she was waiting. In the past, Lucy’s anger was something to be feared.

“And in my opinion, there’s symbolism involved,” Lucy was saying. “In this phony interview, for example, when Terri’s asking questions, I’m going to say it’s Terri, the font is Franklin Gothic and it’s in bold. Arial in smaller type for my aunt’s phony answers.”

“Then symbolically, Terri has superseded Kay in importance,” Berger said.

“It’s worse than that. For your purists in the word-processing world, Arial has a very bad rep.” Lucy studied text as she talked. “It’s been called homely, common, lacking in character, and is considered a shameless imposter. There are plenty of articles about it.”

She avoided Berger’s eyes.

“An imposter?” Berger prodded her. “As in plagiarism, copyright violation? What are you talking about?”

“It’s considered a rip-off of Helvetica, which was developed in the nineteen-fifties and became one of the most popular typefaces in the world,” Lucy said. “To the untrained eye, there’s no difference between Helvetica and Arial. But to a purist, a professional printer or print designer, Arial’s a parasite. The irony? Some young designers think Helvetica is based on Arial instead of the other way around. Do you see the significance symbolically? Because it’s scary, at least to me.”