Chaos

  I keep my eyes on her and don’t say a word. There’s not much to say. She’s either right or she isn’t, and I have nothing to add.

  “Hell no,” she answers her own question. “We know Carrie better than that by now. She’s been industrious while she’s been away.” Lucy’s tone lacerates. “And her newest minion is some techy-geek anonymous worm who calls himself Tailend Charlie,” she adds, and for an instant I’m stunned by her jealousy.

  Lucy is threatened by my latest cyber-stalker because so far she’s failed at tracking him, and Lucy doesn’t fail. Yet she’s rather much failed at everything she’s attempted since Tailend Charlie’s mocking communications began. Failure is Lucy’s Kryptonite. She can’t endure it.

  “I don’t know who he is but Carrie isn’t working alone,” Lucy says as I’m distracted by my phone on the countertop.

  The display suddenly has illuminated for no apparent reason.

  I pick it up, unlocking it, taking a look. The ringer is turned on, the ring tone on vibrate, exactly as I set them. Apparently I haven’t missed any more calls due to some sort of glitch, and nothing looks out of the ordinary.

  I place the phone back on the counter I’m leaning against, and it unsettles me that Ruthie Briggs hasn’t tried me again. Nor has she texted or e-mailed.

  “After a while certain things can suddenly make more sense.” Lucy is talking about Natalie’s death a year ago almost to the week, on September 18, and I’m becoming obsessed with the damn tent.

  It’s now past ten and nothing from Rusty and Harold. Not a peep from anyone. What the hell could be taking so long? I start to send Marino another message but I hold my horses. I don’t need to drive everyone crazy. When they’re ready for me, they’ll let me know.

  “Janet had been careful about getting the necessary passwords,” Lucy is talking about Natalie’s electronic devices now. “I just figured she was so overwhelmed she forgot or wrote down something wrong.”

  After Natalie died it turned out Janet and Lucy couldn’t access the most important device of all: the personal laptop that had been in Natalie’s bedroom and later in the hospice facility. The password she’d given Janet didn’t work.

  “And getting into it wasn’t a piece of cake.” Lucy avoids the word hack. “Natalie worked in digital accounts management. She was computer savvy.”

  I look at Lucy as she talks, and her eyes are windows to the carnage inside her. It wouldn’t show up on a CT scan. It wouldn’t be visible in an autopsy. But evidence of the massacre is beneath the surface like the footprint of a fort rotted away centuries ago and buried by layers of sediment and soil. Lucy has rebuilt her big powerful life on top of what Carrie ruined, and were the two of them face-to-face in mortal combat, I no longer wonder who would emerge liberated and whole.

  I’m confident that neither of them would.

  “I honestly thought Natalie was going overboard in her worries about spying,” Lucy continues to explain, and I can tell she feels guilty. “I worried she was getting demented, that the cancer had spread to her brain.”

  “Understandably,” I reply, but what I’m thinking is there are some things that can’t be restored anymore.

  There are some battles that can’t be won. And if I imagine Lucy and Carrie in a duel, who would kill whom anyway? I hope I’m wrong. I hope it won’t prove to be the case that they can’t go on without each other. What would motivate either of them in their endless bloody tennis match if the other wasn’t across the net? I don’t know the answer but as Benton likes to say about dysfunction, It’s hard to give up your iron lung.

  “I remember you telling me that Natalie had covered her computer cameras with tape,” I bring that up. “A lot of people do it but apparently she didn’t until she knew she was dying.”

  “She put black tape over the webcams on her desktop, a tablet and also the laptop,” Lucy replies. “It’s an easy low-tech way to prevent someone from using your own computer to spy on you. Natalie routinely disabled built-in cameras on any personal electronic device she owned because she knew they can be activated remotely. And if the hacker is really skilled he can remotely alter the camera chip, disabling the indicator light so it no longer turns on when you’re being secretly recorded.”

  “So taping over the camera lens was added for good measure,” I reply.

  “At the time it just seemed wacky.”

  “But what if it wasn’t?”

  “That’s why we’re talking about this,” Lucy says. “I should have taken her seriously. If she hadn’t been so sick and saying such weird shit, I would have.”

  “Did she ever mention concerns about Carrie?”

  “No reason. All of us thought she was out of the picture for good.”

  “Because she was locked up in a forensic facility for the criminally insane,” I presume. “And then after she escaped she got killed. Or that’s what we believed.”

  “Like the rest of us, Natalie was convinced Carrie went up in flames with Newton Joyce when his helicopter crashed off the coast of North Carolina,” Lucy says.

  “Who did she think was spying on her?”

  “The Feds. Or maybe a foreign government, other lawyers, lobbyists, reporters. You name it. The law firm she was with dealt with a lot of heavy-hitting politicos.”

  “And when she was moved to the hospice facility, this personal laptop went with her.” I envision it on the bedside table where Lucy had set it up.

  CHAPTER 25

  I DON’T RECALL SEEING BLACK tape over the camera lens on the silver frame of Natalie’s personal computer. But I’m remembering other things that were going on at the time.

  Almost concurrently, Lucy was finding oddities in the CFC computer system. Then as more weeks passed she confirmed that someone had hacked into our e-mail and possibly the database. Months later after Natalie died, Lucy began to find other reasons for concern, she says.

  “I was going through her computer logs, checking all processes that were running and at what times of day and night,” she explains, and it’s the first I’ve heard her go into detail about what she did back then. “And I found possible indicators of Trojan horses, of malware parading as legitimate programs, of a number of things.”

  “I assume you discussed this with Janet?” I ask because Lucy’s never discussed it with me.

  “I told her I wasn’t sure. For example, there can be lots of explanations for a corrupt registry file. There can be more than one reason for a number of things. And if there’s no cause for suspicion because you’re far more worried about losing somebody you love and dealing with her seven-year-old kid? Then maybe you’re not really looking either.”

  “But now you’re suspicious.”

  “It’s gone way beyond that.”

  “You’ve decided it was Carrie who was hacking. It was Carrie who was spying on Natalie, and basically on all of us.” I don’t ask because it’s not a question.

  “She was probably using a RAT, a Remote Administrator Tool to control Natalie’s computer or computers.” Lucy moves around the small galley as she talks, opening cabinets and cupboards like a fidgety kid. “And who knows how long it had gone on.”

  “How old was Natalie’s laptop?”

  “She’d refurbish and upgrade her personal computers, keeping them for a while. The one in question was six years old at the time, and some of the questionable files went back that far. So it’s possible she was being hacked even earlier but those computers or devices are long gone. I can’t check.”

  “If Carrie had been monitoring Natalie for at least six years,” I reply, “then it wasn’t triggered by her diagnosis or even by you and Janet getting back together. None of that had happened yet.”

  It’s not adding up that the spying went on for an extended period of time. If it continued even after Janet and Lucy broke up well over a decade ago, why would Carrie still be watching Natalie? As I remember it, Carrie found her boring and referred to her as The Old Shoe. But clearly there’s a lot I don??
?t know, and I don’t want to interrogate my niece.

  I’ve never been given a satisfactory explanation for why she and Janet reconnected several years ago after more than a decade of being apart. I don’t know if they were in contact all along or whose idea it was to get back together. But one day Janet reappeared, and next I knew Natalie was in hospice care and Desi was living here.

  “Carrie’s an addict, you know,” Lucy then says as she walks into the main area of the trailer, her booted feet loud on the shiny steel floor. “She’s addicted to us. In a sick way we’re all she’s got.”

  “She doesn’t have us. She’s never had us.” I feel myself harden with anger.

  Lucy sits down at a workstation and wakes up the computer mounted on the built-in desk.

  “Somewhere mixed in with her mutated alchemy is this raging insatiable need to be important to someone.” Lucy types a password. “And when she’s in control of her victim—because everyone she partners with is a victim—she couldn’t be more important to that person. For a while she’s God. But then it always ends the same way. And she’s alone again. The irony is, she needs us.”

  “She’s not God and I don’t give a damn what she needs.” I return to the same bolted-down chair I was sitting in earlier.

  “Benton says if you can’t see her as a human, you’ll never figure her out.” Lucy’s eyes meet mine. “And if you never figure her out, you’ll never stop her.”

  I take a look at my phone again. Nothing. What the hell is going on? And I halfway expect that we’re going to open the trailer door and find the entire park has vanished. As if we’re in some hideous twilight zone and are being controlled remotely the same way Natalie’s laptop may have been.

  “Even if Carrie’s behind all this, please explain how she would know the first thing about my father.” I’m thinking of the canned recordings that sound like him, and I type a text to Marino as I talk. “If she’s partnered with some other deranged person, how would he or she know?” I say to Lucy. “My father wasn’t recorded, as far as I know, and Carrie never met him. She hadn’t even been born by the time he died.”

  “I have to think there must be something of him out there somewhere,” Lucy says, and it’s not the first time she’s said it.

  “I’m not aware of it.”

  “You’ve never heard a recording of him but you can still hear him in your head.”

  “Like it was yesterday.”

  “What about Mom?”

  “I don’t know what Dorothy remembers.”

  “And there’s no way she has a recording or knows about one?”

  “She wasn’t helpful. I asked her that a few days ago when we were discussing her trip.” I didn’t tell her why I was curious.

  “There must be some kind of recording somewhere,” Lucy says. “There has to be, and if there is? All someone had to do was get hold of it and pull out phonetic blocks and fabricate sentences. You could do the same thing to synthesize a voice speaking in Italian.”

  “Why can’t we find this person?” I ask her point-blank. “What’s so different this time that you haven’t been able to trace a single communication from Tailend Charlie?”

  “I think we’re dealing with someone who’s setting up virtual machines. If it were me, that’s what I’d do.”

  “Please explain what you mean.”

  “It means we’re sort of screwed,” she says.

  “WHAT YOU DO IS hack into some open machine or network. University campuses are prime targets for this, and we’ve got more than our share around here,” Lucy explains what she believes Tailend Charlie is doing.

  “Once you create your own virtual machine, you use it to create a virtual mail server,” she adds. “After every e-mail you eradicate the server and create a new one, and this goes on and on into perpetuity.”

  “And there’s no trail, no IP or anything?” I assume.

  “Maybe there will be an IP in the packet logs of routers along the way. But it’s the worst kind of wild-goose chase. Every time you track down an e-mail it’s gone and a new one pops up from a totally different location.”

  “It sounds like something Carrie would do,” I admit. “It’s technology I can imagine her knowing about.”

  “You can pretty much take it to the bank that she knows the same things I do,” Lucy says reluctantly, and it’s hard for her to give Carrie that much credit.

  It’s even harder for me to hear it. Then Lucy brings up Bryce and I’ve been waiting for her to get around to him. She says he has no concept of who he leaks intel to in the course of what he considers normal conversations.

  “Including the detail about a fake tattoo, which couldn’t have been visible to anyone who might have been watching.” Lucy picks up her phone. “He would have had to pull down his sock, and even so, the tattoo is small and faded after he scrubbed the hell out of it.”

  She explains that when she heard about the 911 call she asked Bryce to take a photograph of the tattoo and e-mail it to her right away. She hands me the phone, and the marijuana leaf above Bryce’s right ankle is Crayola green but dull. It’s about the size of a quail egg.

  Now that I’m looking at the image I’m not surprised that none of us at work today were aware of the inconspicuous temporary tattoo. I don’t see how anyone could notice it without being in close proximity to Bryce as he has his sock pulled down or off. Or maybe the wrong person somehow heard about Bryce’s botched party trick, and from there the detail somehow found its way into the false 911 complaint made to the Cambridge Police Department earlier this evening.

  “The pool of suspects should be small,” Lucy concludes. “It had to be someone who knew what Bryce was doing last night.”

  “What did he tell you?” I ask.

  “That he got a fake tattoo at dinner with friends. Nothing was posted on social media, and he hasn’t a clue how anybody would have known beyond the buddies he was with. That’s the extent of his note to me. I’ve not actually talked to him.”

  “Maybe we should.” I take another sip of water and try not to think about how empty my stomach is or how late it’s getting.

  I block out the grand cru Chablis Benton and I didn’t drink, and the clammy shoes that feel glued to my bare feet. I keep checking my phone. According to Marino’s latest update a few minutes ago, the tent’s not completely set up yet because there was a problem arranging the panels around several large trees. A section of scaffolding collapsed. Then the canopied roof didn’t fit quite right. Or something like that.

  “Have you ever told Bryce that when you were growing up in Miami, some of the kids in school called you a Florida cracker?” Lucy asks that next, and I’m feeling pelted by rotten eggs from my past.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I reply.

  “Tailend Charlie again, and he had to get it from somewhere. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Sister Twister and Florida cracker are mentioned in the latest rhyming tripe?”

  “Yes,” Lucy says, and indignation stirs in its secret place.

  I feel shame that was dormant but the anger is very much alive as my privacy, my past, continues to be invaded, distorted and vandalized by some anonymous bastard bard.

  “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” I say from my metal chair as I dig my hands into the pockets of my windbreaker. “Bryce knows something even if he doesn’t think he does. Let’s ask him.”

  Several clicks of the mouse, and Lucy opens a file. Then in no time she has my chief of staff Bryce Clark on live video, the app her own enhanced rendition of Skype or FaceTime. She goes straight to the point, asking him if he knows much about my childhood in South Florida. Might he have been discussing it with anyone? Especially recently?

  “Well we all know they were as poor as church mice,” he replies. “But I can’t say exactly what she might have mentioned when we’ve just been sitting around shooting the breeze. Is she with you?”

  “Yes,” I speak for myself.

  “Not that it??
?s very often we have nothing better to do than sit around the office shooting the breeze, right, Doctor Scarpetta?” He waves, his attractive boyish face staring blearily from the computer display. “Full disclosure?” He holds up a brown bottle of Angry Orchard hard cider with its whimsical scowling-apple-tree label. “My second one but I’m not drinking on the job since I’m home? Even if I’m talking to you?” He’s saying this to me, I think, and I’m not sure if it’s a question or a comment, if he’s being funny or not, and that’s not unusual with him.

  “The friends you were telling me about earlier.” Lucy rests her chin on her hand, addressing him on the computer display as if he’s sitting across the desk from her. “Do you talk to them about work?”

  “Never inappropriately,” he says, and I can tell from the background that he’s sitting in his living room and has paused the TV.

  “What about her?” Lucy says to him as she looks at me.

  “Are you suggesting I’m disloyal?” Bryce protests. “Are you saying I’m talking about Doctor Scarpetta behind her back?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m asking questions. Are you sure there’s no possibility one of these friends you had dinner with last night might have posted something about your tattoo online? Not that I’ve seen anything anywhere yet …”

  “You won’t because there’s nothing,” he retorts. “Why would it be on the Internet?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out. How someone might have known about it,” Lucy says.

  “Perhaps someone who had no idea it could cause a problem?” I offer him a chance to save face.

  “Hell no. Anyone who matters knows that stuff like that can get me into trouble because of who I work for,” he says as if suddenly I’m not present anymore. “That anything can be used against anyone in court.”

  He rambles on for a long moment, suggesting in his convoluted way that it’s routine for him to be called to testify in trials and have his credibility attacked. It’s not. He’s never summoned for anything except jury duty, and he’s always excluded.