Lucy’s index finger tap-tapped, a bulky silver ring on it. She had on a watch that Berger didn’t recognize, but it looked military, with its black face and luminous dial and rubber strap.

Lucy caught Berger looking at it and said, “Maybe you’re familiar with illumination technology? Gaseous tritium, a radioactive isotope that decays and causes the numbers and other markings on the watch to glow so they’re easy to read in the dark? I bought it myself. You buy your Blancpain yourself? Or was it a gift?”

“It was a gift to myself from myself. A reminder that time is precious.”

“And mine’s a reminder that we should utilize what other people fear, because you don’t fear something unless it’s powerful.”

“I don’t feel compelled to prove a point by wearing a radioactive watch,” Berger said.

“A total, at most, of twenty-five millicuries, or an exposure of maybe point-one micro sievert over the period of a year. Same thing one gets from normal radiation. Harmless, in other words. A good example of people shunning something because they’re ignorant.”

“People call me a lot of things, but not ignorant,” Berger said. “We need to get started on the laptops.”

“The artificial system I’ve developed—am developing, actually,” Lucy said, “because the possibilities are infinite, and when considering infinity, one has to ask if by its very nature it transforms what’s artificial into something real. Because to me, artificial is finite. So to me, it follows that infinite will no longer be artificial.”

“We need to get into this dead lady’s laptops,” Berger said.

“You need to understand what we’re doing,” Lucy said.

Her green eyes looked at Berger.

“Because it will be you explaining everything in court, not me,” Lucy said.

She started moving through the PowerPoint. Berger didn’t interrupt her this time.

“Wet mind, another bit of jargon you don’t know,” Lucy said. “The way our brain recognizes voices, faces, objects, and orients them into a context that’s meaningful, revealing, instructive, predictive, and I can tell you’re not looking at any of this or even listening.”

She removed her hands from the keyboard and studied Berger as if she were a question to be answered.

“What I want from you is straightforward,” Berger said. “To go through e-mail, all files of any description, re-create all deletions, recognize any patterns that might tell us the slightest thing about who, what, when, where. If she were murdered by somebody she knew, chances are good there’s something in there.” She indicated the packaged evidence on the table by the door. “Even if this is a stranger killing, there may be something she mentioned somewhere that could clue us in as to where this person might have come across her or where she came across him. You know how it works. You’ve been an investigator more years than you’re old.”

“Not exactly.”