"We weren't that way."
"Weren't?"
"Actually, you're one to talk," Lucy says without rancor. "What about you and Jay?"
"He doesn't work for me," I reply. "I certainly don't work for him. I don't want to talk about him, either. We're talking about you."
"I hate it when you dismiss me, Aunt Kay," she quietly says.
"I'm not dismissing you," I offer as an apology. "I just worry when people who work together get too personal. I believe in boundaries."
"You worked with Benton." She points out another of my exceptions to my own rules.
I tap the spoon on the side of the pot. "I've done a lot of things in life that I tell you not to do. I tell you not to do them because I made the mistake first."
"Did you ever moonlight?" Lucy stretches her lower back and rolls her shoulders.
I frown. "Moonlight? Not that I recall."
"Okay. Truth serum time. I'm a felonious moonlighter and Teun's biggest backer_the major stockholder for The Last Precinct. There. The whole truth. You're going to hear it."
"Let's go sit." I direct us to the table and we pull out chairs.
"It all began accidentally," Lucy begins. "A couple years ago, I created a search engine for my own use. Meanwhile, all I was hearing about was the fortunes people were making on Internet technology. So I said what the hell and sold the search engine for three quarters of a million dollars."
I am not shocked. Lucy's earning possibilities have been limited only by the profession she chose.
"Then I got another idea when we seized a bunch of computers during a raid," she continues. "I was helping restore deleted e-mail and it got me thinking about how vulnerable all of us are to having the ghosts of our electronic communications conjured up to haunt us. So I figured out a way to scramble e-mail. Shred it, figuratively speaking. Now there are a number of software packages for that sort of thing. I made a hell of a lot of money off that brainstorm."
There is nothing diplomatic about my next question. Does ATF know she invented technology that might foil law enforcement efforts to restore the e-mail of the bad guys? Lucy replies that someone was going to come up with the technology, and the privacy of law-abiding people needs to be protected, too. ATF doesn't know about her entrepreneurial activities or that she has been investing in Internet inventions and stocks. Until this moment, only her financial adviser and Teun McGovern are privy to the fact that Lucy is a multimillionaire who has her own helicopter on order.
"So that's how Teun was able to start up her own business in a prohibitively expensive city like New York," I figure.
"Exactly," Lucy says. "And it's why I'm not going to fight ATF, or at least one good reason. If I do battle with them, then the truth about what I've been up to on my own time would probably come out. Internal Affairs, the Inspector General's Office, everyone would dig. They'd find more nails to drive into my reputation as they hang me on their bureaucratic, bullshit cross. Why the hell would I want to do that to myself?"
"If you don't fight injustice, others will suffer from it, Lucy. And maybe those people won't have millions of dollars, a helicopter and a company in New York to fall back on as
they try to start a new life."
"That's exactly what The Last Precinct is all about," she replies. "Fighting injustice. I'll fight it in my own way."
"Legally, your moonlighting is not within the scope of the case it appears ATF is making against you, Lucy," the lawyer in me speaks.
"Making money on the side speaks to my veracity, supposedly, though, doesn't it?" She plays the other side.
"Has ATF accused you of lacking veracity? Have they called you dishonest?"
"Well, no. That won't be in any letter from them. For sure. But truth is, Aunt Kay, I broke the rules. You aren't supposed to make money from another source while you're employed by ATF, the FBI or any other federal law enforcement agency. I don't agree with that prohibition. It's not fair. Cops get to moonlight. We don't. Maybe I've always known my days with the feds are numbered." She gets up from the table. "So I took care of my future. Maybe I was just sick of everything. I don't want to spend the rest of my life taking orders from other peo-pie."
"If you want to leave ATF, make it your choice, not theirs."
"It is my choice," she says with a trace of anger. "Guess I'd better get to the store."
I walk her to the door, arm in arm. "Thank you," I tell her. "It means everything to me that you let me know."
"I'm going to teach you how to fly helicopters." She puts on her coat.
"May as well," I say. "I've been in a lot of unfamiliar airspace today. I guess a little more isn't going to matter."
Chapter 6
THE RUDE JOKE FOR YEARS HAS BEEN THAT VIR-ginians go to New York for art and New Yorkers come to Virginia for garbage. Mayor Giuliani almost started another civil war when he made that snipe during his much-publicized war with Jim Gilmore, Virginia's governor at the time, over Manhattan's right to ship megatons of northern trash to our southern landfills. I can only imagine the reaction when word gets out that now we have to go to New York for justice, too. As long as I have been the chief medical examiner of Virginia, Jaime Berger has been the head of the sex crimes unit for the district attorney's office in Manhattan. Although we have never met, we are often mentioned together. It is said that I am the most famous female forensic pathologist in the country and she is the most famous female prosecutor. Until now, the only reaction I might have had to such a claim is that I don't want to be famous and don't trust people who are, and female should not be an adjective. Nobody talks about successful men in terms of a male doctor or male president or male CEO.
Over the past few days, I have spent hours on Anna's computer researching Berger on the Internet. I resisted being impressed but can't help it. I didn't know, for example, that she is a Rhodes scholar or that after Clinton was elected she was short-listed for attorney general and, according to Time magazine, was privately relieved when Janet Reno was appointed instead. Berger didn't want to give up prosecuting cases. Supposedly, she has turned down judgeships and staggering offers from private law firms for the same reason, and is so admired by her peers that they established a public service scholarship in her name at Harvard, where she spent her undergraduate years. Strangely, very little is said about her personal life except that she plays tennis_extremely well, of course. She works out with a trainer three mornings a week at a New York athletic club and runs three or four miles a day. Her favorite restaurant is Primola. I take some comfort in the fact that she likes Italian food.
It is now Wednesday, early evening, and Lucy and I are Christmas shopping. I have browsed and purchased as much as I can stomach, my mind poisoned by worries, my arm itching like mad inside its plaster cocoon, my craving for tobacco akin to lust. Lucy is somewhere inside Regency Mall taking care of her own list, and I search for a spot where I might evade the churning herd. Thousands of people have waited until three days before Christmas to find thoughtful, special gifts for those significant people in their lives. Voices and constant motion combine in a steady roar that shorts out thoughts and normal conversation, and piped-in holiday music jars my already vibrating nerves out of phase. I face plate glass in front of Sea Dream Leather, my back to discordant people who, like unskilled fingers on a piano, rush and stop and force without joy. Pressing my cell phone tight against my ear, I yield to a new addiction. I check my voice mail for what must be the tenth time today. It has become my slender, secret connection to my former existence. Tapping into my messages is the only way I can go home.
There are four calls. Rose, my secretary, checked in to see how I am holding up. My mother left a long complaint about life. AT amp;T customer service tried to reach me about a billing question, and my deputy chief, Jack Fielding, needs to talk to me. I call him right away.