“These are terrible accusations,” I say to him, as I stare out my window.

“What’s terrible is what Luke reminds you of,” Marino says. “A time you don’t need to be dwelling on now that things are good. Why the hell do you want a reminder of those old days when everything was fucked up and you were blaming yourself for Benton being dead or at least thinking he was, blaming yourself for everything, including Lucy? She doesn’t want it, either. She doesn’t want you getting all hung up again about her and how it’s somehow your fault.”

“I wasn’t thinking about such things,” I reply, but now I will, since he’s managed to remind me.

Lucy’s early days at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility in Quantico have not been foremost on my mind for a very long time, but he has conjured up the Lucy from back then and the reminder isn’t a happy one. A troubled teenager whose computer skills were savant-esque, she almost single-handedly created the FBI’s Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, CAIN, while falling in love with a psychopath who nearly destroyed all of us.

I got her that FBI internship, I remember saying bitterly to Anna as we sat in her living room close to the fire with the lights out because I’ve always found it easier to talk in the dark. I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt.

Didn’t quite lead to what you intended, did it?

Carrie used her. . . .

Made Lucy gay?

You don’t make people gay, I said, and Anna the psychiatrist abruptly got up, the firelight moving on her proud fine face, and she walked away, as if she had another appointment.

“I know you don’t want to hear it.” Marino keeps talking. “But I’m going to point out that you hired Luke in early July and this dinosaur lady disappeared barely six weeks later from the very area where they’re extracting the oil his father’s invested in.”

The entire region of northwest Canada is dependent on natural gas and oil production, he says, and if the completion of that pipeline gets blocked, Luke’s father probably stands to lose a fortune—a fortune that would be inherited by Luke.

“All of it,” Marino says. “He’s the only one left. And we know the e-mail with the cut-off ear and maybe Emma Shubert in the jetboat was sent to you from Boston, from Logan. Where the hell was Luke yesterday at six-thirty p.m.?”

“How would Emma Shubert’s disappearance relate to the pipeline being further delayed or blocked?” I ask him. “Explain how what you’re suggesting makes sense at all or is anything more than wild theorizing. Because in my mind if it turns out that she’s been murdered and it’s connected to the pipeline, that will only outrage the detractors, the environmentalists more. It certainly can’t improve public sentiment if the brutal death of a paleontologist is connected with it.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” he says. “Like those investors who bet against the housing market and made a killing because it collapsed.”