must be looking for something in particular.”
“Everything I have is legal and has nothing to do with the Copperhead shootings,” Lucy says, “which they damn well know were committed with the Precision Guided Firearm recovered from Bob Rosado’s yacht. They confirmed it’s the weapon two months ago so why are they still looking? If they’re looking for anyone it should be his rotten little shit of a son, Troy. He’s at large. Carrie’s at large. He’s probably the latest Clyde to her Bonnie, and where’s the FBI? Here on my property. This is harassment. It’s about something else.”
“I got a couple shotguns you can borrow,” Marino offers. “And a thumpin’ four-fifty Bushmaster.”
“That’s all right. I’ve got more than they’re bargaining for,” she says. “They have no idea what they’re missing, what they’re walking right past.”
“Please don’t poke a stick at them,” I warn her. “Don’t give them cause to hurt you.”
“Hurt? I think hurt is the point and it’s already started.” Her bright green eyes look at me. “They want me hurt. They intend to leave me unprotected so I can’t take care of my family, my home. They’re hoping all of us will end up defeated, annihilated, at each other’s throats. Better yet, dead. They want all of us murdered.”
“You need something all you gotta do is ask,” Marino says. “With the likes of Carrie on the loose you should have more firepower than just your handguns.”
“They’ll take those next if they haven’t already,” she replies, and it really is outrageous that they listed handguns on the warrant. “Plus they’re bagging up all of my kitchen cutlery, the Shun Fuji santoku knives you gave to us,” she says to me, adding yet another outrage.
As far as we know, Carrie Grethen’s recent deadly rampage includes a stabbing with a tactical knife. There’s no evidence, not even a hint that Lucy had anything to do with it, and her guns and the cutlery are completely inconsistent with the characteristics of the murder weapons. To clean out her gun vault, her kitchen is absurd.
For an instant Carrie’s recent victims parade through my mind, seemingly random people until I realized each of them had a connection to me, even if remotely. They never knew what hit them, except for Rand Bloom, the sleazy insurance investigator she stabbed and left on the bottom of a swimming pool. He would have had a moment if not several of terror, panic and pain.
But Julie Eastman, Jack Segal, Jamal Nari and Congressman Rosado didn’t suffer. They were going about their business one second and then nothingness, annihilation, and I envision the Carrie I saw on video touching the back of her neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae. Even then she knew about the sweet spot for a hangman’s fracture and that such a catastrophic injury literally causes instant death.
She’s back. She’s alive and more dangerous than she ever was and even as I’m thinking this I’m washed over by doubt. What if all of us are being tricked? I can’t prove I’ve seen or heard from Carrie Grethen since the 1990s. She’s left no real evidence that connects her with a crime spree that began late last year. What if it’s not her who sent the video to me from Lucy’s phone?
I look at my niece.
“From the beginning,” I say to her. “What happened?”
Lucy sits on her big rock and explains that this morning at exactly 9:05 her house phone rang.
The number is unlisted and unpublished but that wouldn’t stop the FBI from getting it, and it doesn’t stop her from foiling their efforts and then some. She has communication technology that can easily outsmart anyone attempting to catch her by surprise, and in a matter of seconds she knew the identity of the caller was Special Agent Erin Loria, a recent transfer to the FBI’s Boston Division, thirty-eight years old, born in Nashville, Tennessee, black hair, brown eyes, five-ten, 139 pounds—and as I hear Lucy say this I don’t show my shock.
I don’t let on that I know who Erin Loria is. I don’t react as Lucy goes on to explain that when Erin was in range of the security cameras, facial recognition software verified that she is indeed Erin Loria, a former beauty queen, a graduate of Duke University and its law school before she signed on with the Bureau in 1997. She was a street agent for a while, married to a hostage negotiator who left the Bureau and joined a law firm. They lived in Northern Virginia, had no kids, divorced in 2010, and soon after she married a federal judge twenty-one years her senior.
“Which one?” Marino asks.
“Zeb Chase,” Lucy says.
“No way. Judge NoDoz?”
He’s called that for the opposite reason people might expect, and I remember his small predatory eyes beneath heavy lids as he slumped on the bench, his chin almost on his chest like a black-robed vulture waiting for something to die. It was easy to misconstrue his posture as relaxed or half asleep when in fact he couldn’t have been more alert or aggressive, waiting for attorneys, for expert witnesses to make a miscalculated move. Then he would dive-bomb, snatching them up to swallow alive.
In my earliest years in Virginia when he was still a U.S. attorney, we worked many cases together. Even though my findings usually supported the prosecution, Zeb Chase and I often clashed. I seemed to annoy him and he got only more hostile once he was on the bench. To this day I have no idea why, and I distantly recall that he might just hold the record for the judge who most frequently threatened to hold me in contempt. Now he’s married to Erin Loria who has her own history with Lucy and therefore de facto has one with me. My internal weather vane moves. It points. I can’t tell at what. Maybe I don’t want to know.
“So Special Agent Loria moved to Boston and her husband the judge is still in Virginia,” Marino assumes.
“It’s not like he can pick up and come after her,” Lucy replies and she’s right.
Judge Chase’s duty station would be the Eastern District of Virginia, where he will hold his seat until he resigns, dies or is removed from office. He can’t pick up and relocate to Massachusetts even though his wife did. At least I can be grateful for that.
“Are you certain of the year Erin Loria started with the FBI?” I ask Lucy. “Nineteen-ninety-seven? As in the year you were there?”
“Not the only year I was there,” she says as I think about Erin Loria being married to a federal official who was appointed by the White House.
That’s not good. It’s not good at all. She’ll claim that he has no more influence in her cases than Benton has in mine. She’ll swear His Honor has no professional involvement with her, that both of them stay completely within the legal boundaries and guidelines. Of course it isn’t true. It never is.
“I realize you were at Quantico before and after 1997,” I’m commenting to Lucy as my thoughts continue to slam into each other like billiard balls. “That once you got started with the FBI you never really left.”
“Until they ran me out of Dodge,” she says as if it’s nothing that for all practical intents and purposes she was fired. “Even before I was an agent I was there summers, holidays, most weekends, every spare minute I had. You probably remember. I’d start arranging my classes so I could leave Charlottesville early Thursday morning and not come back until late Sunday. I was at Quantico more than I was in college.”
“Jesus,” Marino mutters. “Erin Loria was there when you were. And
