Visiting Berkeley, a French Mathematician, Robert Lavoisier, crosses paths by chance with Elizabeth Cromwell, a professional dominant, in a vacant house in Montclair, California. The owner of the house is dead. As Lavoisier leaves he invites Cromwell to join him at a bar. When she arrives later at the bar, she is told that a man inside has died of a heart attack. She leaves, not knowing that Lavoisier has been murdered. Lavoisier's car is found two blocks from his house, his cell phone and wallet tucked in a seat compartment, but his laptop is missing. In his search for the laptop, a mathematician at UC Berkeley, a close friend of Lavoisier, believes that Elizabeth stole it, but on meeting her realizes his error. At a second meeting with her he realizes that it is the strangeness of Elizabeth's encounter with Lavoisier that is the vital piece of information that any explanation of Lavoisier's murder must contend with. On the resonance of a phrase, "Partitions of Unity." they are led to a paper in a psychoanalytic journal that resolves the separate mysteries that encompass the death of Lavoisier. In the process they discover each other.