Shrew couldn’t stop crying, and she said, “I’m sorry. I’m a little drunk.”

The woman retrieved the can of air freshener from the top of the cash register and headed back to the basement door. She closed it behind her, and Shrew could hear her on the stairs. Shrew and the man in the cowboy hat were alone. He took her arm and walked her out of the shop, where the black Cadillac sedan was parked. The driver in his suit and cap got out and opened the back door for them.

The man in the cowboy hat said to Shrew, “Get in and I’ll drop you off. It’s too cold to be walking. Where do you live?”

Lucy wondered if Oscar Bane was aware that his girlfriend had eighteen e-mail usernames. He was far less complicated and probably more honest. He had only one.

“Each of hers was for a specific purpose,” Lucy was telling Berger. “Voting in polls, blogging, visiting certain chat rooms, posting consumer reviews, subscribing to various online publications, a couple of them for getting online news.”

“That’s a lot,” Berger said, glancing at her watch.

Lucy could think of few people she knew who had a harder time being still. Berger was like a hummingbird that never quite landed, and the more restive she got, the more Lucy slowed things down. She found that quite the irony. Almost always it was the other way around.

“It’s really not a lot these days,” Lucy said. “Her e-mail service, like most of them, was free as long as she didn’t want additional options. But basic accounts? She could open as many as she wanted, all virtually untraceable because she didn’t need a credit card, since there’s no fee, and she wasn’t required to divulge any personal information unless she chose to. All anonymous, in other words. I’ve come across people who have hundreds, are a one-person crowd, their aliases talking to each other, agreeing, disagreeing, in chat rooms, comments sections. Or maybe they’re ordering things or buying subscriptions they don’t want easily linked to them, or who knows what. But with rare exception, no matter how many aliases a person has, usually there’s just one that’s really them, so to speak. The one they use for their normal correspondence. Oscar’s is Carbane, rather straightforward—as it’s the last part of Oscar appended to his surname, unless his hobby is organic chemistry and he’s referencing the systematic analogue of the mononuclear hydride CH-four, or he builds airfield models and is alluding to the carbane struts mounted to biplane wings. Which I sort of doubt. Terri’s is Lunasee, and we should look at those e-mails first.”