“You’re going to get more rain, possibly snow north of the city,” Lucy said. “It will be cleared out by midnight, because the system is weakening as it heads your way.”

“The two of you are staying put, I hope.”

“If I don’t get the chopper out, she’ll be looking for a dog-sled.”

“Call me before you leave, and please be careful,” Scarpetta said. “I’ve got to go, got to talk to Toni Darien’s mother. I miss you. We’ll have dinner, do something soon?”

“Sure,” Lucy said.

She got off the phone and turned the sound up again on YouTube, Mick Fleetwood still going at it on the drums. Both hands on MacBooks as if she was in her own rock concert playing a solo on keyboards, she clicked on another weather update, clicked on an e-mail that had just landed in Hannah Starr’s inbox. People were bizarre. If you know someone has disappeared and might even be dead, why do you continue to send e-mail? Lucy wondered if Hannah Starr’s husband, Bobby Fuller, was so stupid it didn’t occur to him that the NYPD and the district attorney’s office might be monitoring Hannah’s e-mail or getting a forensic computer expert like Lucy to do it. For the past three weeks Bobby had been sending daily messages to his missing wife. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing, wanted law enforcement to see what he was writing to his bien-aimée, his chouchou, his amore mio, the love of his life. If he’d murdered her, he wouldn’t be writing her love notes, right?

From: Bobby Fuller

Sent: Thursday, December 18, 3:24 P.M.

To: Hannah

Subject: Non posso vivere senza di te

My Little One,

I hope you are someplace safe and reading this. My heart is carried by the wings of my soul and finds you wherever you are. Don’t forget. I can’t eat or sleep. B.

Lucy checked his IP address, recognized it at a glance by now. Bobby and Hannah’s apartment in North Miami Beach, where he was pining away while hiding from the media in palatial surroundings that Lucy knew all too well-had been in that same apartment with his lovely thief of a wife not that long ago, as a matter of fact. Every time Lucy saw an e-mail from Bobby and tried to get into his head, she wondered how he would really feel if he believed Hannah was dead.