Cause of Death

  "Why don't you walk me to the Rotunda." I got up, and so did they. "Marino should be back with the car." I hugged Janet and her hair smelled like lemon. "You take care and come see me more often," I said to her. "I consider you family. Lord knows it's about time I had some help in taking care of this one." I smiled as I put my arm around Lucy.

  Outside in the sun, the afternoon was warm enough for only sweaters, and I wished I could stay longer. Lucy did not linger during our brief walk, and I could tell she was anxious about anyone seeing us together.

  "It's just like the old days," I said lightly to hide my hurt.

  "How's that?" she asked.

  "Your ambivalence about being seen with me."

  "That's not true. I used to be proud of it."

  "And now you're not," I said with irony.

  "Maybe I'd like you to feel proud to be seen with me,"

  she said. "Instead of it always the other way. That's what I meant."

  "I am proud of you and always have been, even when you were such a mess that sometimes I wanted to lock you in the basement."

  "I believe that's called child abuse."

  "No, the jury would vote for aunt abuse in your case.

  Trust me," I said. "And I'm glad you and Janet seem to be getting along. I'm glad she's back from Aspen and the two of you are together."

  My niece stopped and looked at me, squinting in the sun.

  "Thanks for what you said to her. Right now, especially, that meant a lot."

  "I spoke the truth, that's all," I said. "Maybe someday her family will speak it, too."

  We were in sight of Marino's car, and he was sitting in it, as usual, and puffing away.

  Lucy walked up to his door. "Hey Pete," she said, "you need to wash your ride."

  "No, I don't," he grumbled as he immediately tossed the cigarette and got out.

  He looked around, and the sight of him hitching up his pants and inspecting his car because he could not help himself was too much. Lucy and I both laughed, and then he tried not to smile. In truth, he secretly enjoyed it when we teased. We bantered a little bit more, and then Lucy left as a late-model gold Lexus with tinted glass drove past. It was the same one we had seen earlier on the road, the driver obliterated by glare.

  "This is beginning to get on my nerves." Marino's eyes followed the car.

  "Maybe you should run the plate number," I stated the obvious.

  "Oh, I already done that." He started the car and began backing out. -DMV's down."

  DMV was the Department of Motor Vehicles computer, and it was down a lot, it seemed. We headed back up to the reactor facility, and when we got there, Marino again refused to go inside. So I left him in the parking lot, and this time the young man in the control room behind glass told me I could enter unescorted.

  "He's down in the basement," he said with eyes on his computer screen.

  I found Matthews in the low background counting room again, sitting before a computer screen displaying a spectrum in black and white.

  "Oh, hello," he said, when he realized I was beside him.

  "Looks like you've had some luck," I said. "Although I'm not sure what I'm seeing. And I might be too early."

  "No, no, you're not too early. These vertical lines here indicate the energies of the significant gamma rays detected. One line equals one energy. But most of the lines we're seeing here are for background radiation." He showed me on the screen. "You know, even the lead bricks don't get rid of all of that."

  I sat next to him.

  "I guess what I'm trying to show you, Dr. Scarpetta, is that the sample you brought in isn't giving off high-energy gamma rays when it decays. If you look here on this energy spectrum--he was staring at the screen--it looks like this characteristic gamma ray on the spectrum is for uranium two-thirty-five." He tapped a spike on the glass.

  "Okay," I said. "And what does that mean?"

  "That's the good stuff." He looked over at me.

  "Such as is used in nuclear reactors," I said.

  "Exactly. That's what we use to make fuel pellets or rods. But as you probably know, only point three percent of uranium is two-thirty-five. The rest is depleted."

  "Right. The rest is uranium two-thirty-eight," I said.

  "And that's what we've got here."

  "If it isn't giving off high-energy gamma rays," I said.

  How can you tell that from this energy spectrum?"

  "Because what the germanium crystal is detecting is uranium two-thirty-five. And since the percentage of it is so low, this indicates that the sample we're dealing with must be depleted uranium."

  "It couldn't be spent fuel from a reactor," I thought out loud.

  "No, it couldn't," he said. "There's no fission material mixed in with your sample. No strontium, cesium, iodine, barium. You would have already seen those with SEM."

  "No isotopes like that came up," I agreed. "Only uranium and other nonessential elements that you might expect with soil tracked in on the bottom of someone's shoes."

  I looked at peaks and valleys of what could have been a scary cardiogram while Matthews made notes.

  "Would you like printouts of all of this?" he asked.

  "Please. What is depleted uranium used for?"

  "Generally, it's worthless." He hit several keys.

  "if it didn't come from a nuclear power plant, then from where?"

  "Most likely a facility that does isotopic separation."

  "Such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee," I suggested.

  "Well, they don't do that anymore. But they certainly did for decades, and they must have warehouses of uranium metal. Now there also are plants in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky."

  "Dr. Matthews," I said. "It appears someone had depleted uranium metal on the bottom of his shoes and tracked it into a car. Can you give me any logical explanation as to how or why?"

  "No." His expression was blank. "I don't think I can."

  I thought of the jagged and spherical shapes the scanning electron microscope had revealed to me, and tried again.

  "Why would someone melt uranium two-thirty-eight? Why would they shape it with a machine?"

  Still, he did not seem to have a clue.

  "is depleted uranium used for anything at all?" I then asked.

  "In general, big industry doesn't use uranium metal," he answered. "Not even in nuclear power plants, because in those the fuel rods or pellets are uranium oxide, a ceramic."

  "Then maybe I should ask what depleted uranium metal could, in theory, be used for," I restated.

  "At one time there was some talk by the Defense Department about using it for armor plating on tanks. And it's been suggested that it could be used to make bullets or other types of projectiles. Let's see. I guess the only other thing we know that it's good for is shielding radioactive material."

  "What sort of radioactive material?" I said as my adrenal glands woke up. "Spent fuel assemblies, for example?"

  "That would be the idea if we knew how to get rid of nuclear waste in this country," he wryly said. "You see, if we could remove it to be buried a thousand feet beneath Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for example, then U-238 could be used to line the casks needed for transport."

  "In other words," I said, "if the spent assemblies are to be removed from a nuclear power plant, they will have to be put in something, and depleted uranium is a better shield than lead."

  He said this was precisely what he meant, and receipted my sample back to me, because it was evidence and one day could end up in court. So I could not leave it here, even though I knew how Marino would feel when I returned it to his trunk. I found him walking around, his sunglasses on.

  "What now?" he said.

  "Please pop the trunk."

  He reached inside the car and pulled a release as he said. "I'm telling you right now, that it ain't going in no evidence locker in my precinct or at HQ. No one's going to cooperate, even if I wanted them to."

  "it has to be stored," I simply said. "There's a
twelvepack of beer in here."

  "So I didn't want to have to bother stopping for it later."

  "One of these days, you're going to get in trouble." I shut the trunk of his city-owned police car.

  "Well, how about you store the uranium at your office," he said.

  "Fine." I got in. "I can do that."

  "So, how was it?" he asked, starting the engine.

  I gave him a summary, leaving out as much scientific detail as I could.

  "You're telling me that someone tracked nuclear waste into your Benz?" he asked, baffled.

  "That's the way it appears. I need to stop by and talk to Lucy again."

  "Why? What's she got to do with it?"

  "I don't know that she does," I said as he drove down he mountain. "I have a rather wild idea."

  I hate it when you get those."

  Janet looked worried when I was back at their door, this time with Marino.

  "Is everything all right?" she asked, letting us in.

  "I think I need your help," I said. "Strike that. What I mean is that both of us do."

  Lucy was sitting on the bed, a notebook open in her lap.

  She looked at Marino. "Fire away. But we charge for consultations."

  He sat by the fire, while I took a chair close to him.

  "This person who has been getting into CP&L's computer," I said. "Do we know what else he has gotten into besides customer billing?" -f can't say we know everything," Lucy replied. "But the billing is a certainty, and customer info is in general."

  "Meaning what?" Marino asked.

  "Meaning that the information about customers includes billing addresses, phone numbers, special services, energyuse averaging, and some customers are part of a stocksharing program-" . "Let's talk about stock sharing," I stopped her. "I'm involved in that program. Part of my check every month buys stock in CP&L, and therefore the company has some financial information on me, including my bank account and social security number." I paused, thinking. "Could that sort of thing be important to this hacker?"

  "Theoretically, it could," Lucy said. "Because you've got to remember that a huge database like CP&L's isn't going to reside in any one place. They've got other systems with gateways leading to them, which might explain the hacker's interest in the mainframe in Pittsburgh."

  "Maybe it explains something to you," said Marino, who always got impatient with Lucy's computer talk. "But it don't explain shit to me."

  "If you think of the gateways as major corridors on a map-like 1-95, for example," she patiently said, "then if you go from one to the other, theoretically you could start cruising the global web. You could pretty much get into anything you want."

  "Like what?" he asked. "Give me an example that I can relate to."

  She rested the notebook in her lap and shrugged. "If I broke into the Pittsburgh computer, my next stop would be at AT&T."

  "That computer's a gateway into the telephone system?" I asked.

  "It's one of them. And that's one of the suspicions Jan and I have been working on-that this hacker's trying to figure out ways to steal electricity and phone time."

  "Of course, at the moment this is just a theory," Janet said. "So far, nothing has come up that might tell us what the hacker's motive is. But from the FBI's perspective, the break-ins are against the law. That's what counts."

  "Do you know which CP&L customer records were accessed?" I asked.

  "We know that this person has access to all customers," Lucy replied. "And we're talking millions. But as for individual records that we know were looked at in more detail, those were few. And we have them."

  "I'm wondering if I could see them," I said.

  Lucy and Janet paused.

  "What for?" Marino asked as he continued to stare at me. "What are you getting at, Doc?"

  "I'm getting at that uranium fuels nuclear power plants, and CP&L has two nuclear power plants in Virginia and one in Delaware. Their mainframe is being broken into. Ted Eddings called my office with radioactivity questions. In his home PC he had all sorts of files on North Korea and suspicions that they were attempting to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium in a nuclear reactor."

  "And the minute we start looking into anything in Sandbridge we get a prowler," Lucy added. "Then someone slashes our tires and Detective Roche threatens you. Now Danny Webster comes to Richmond and ends up dead and it appears that whoever killed him tracked uranium into your car." She looked at me. "Tell me what you need to see."

  I did not require a complete customer list, for that would be virtually all of Virginia, including my office and me.

  But I was interested in any detailed billing records that were at'Lussed, and what I was shown was curious but short. Out of five names, I recognized all but one.

  "Does anybody know who Joshua Hayes is? He has a post office box in Suffolk," I said.

  "All we know so far," said Janet, "is that he's a farmer."

  "All right," I moved on. "We've got Brett West, who is an executive at CP&L. I can't remember his title." I looked at the printout.

  "Executive Vice President in charge of Operations," Jan et said.

  "He lives in one of those brick mansions near you, Doc," Marino said. "In Windsor Farms."

  "He used to. If you study his billing address," Janet pointed out, "you'll see it changed as of last October. It appears he moved to Williamsburg."

  There were two other CP&L executives whose records had been perused by whoever was illegally prowling the Internet. One was the CEO, the other the president. But it was the identity of the fifth electronic victim that truly frightened me.

  "Captain Green." I stared at Marino, stunned.

  His face was vague. "I got no idea who you're talking about."

  "He was present at the Inactive Ship Yard when I got Eddings' body out of the water," I said. "He's with Navy Investigative Services."

  "I hear you." Marino's face darkened, and Lucy and Janet's IOC case dramatically shifted before their eyes.

  "Maybe it's not surprising this person breaking in would be curious about the highest-ranking officials of the corporation he's violating, but I don't see how NIS fits in," Janet said.

  "I'm not sure I want to know how it might," I said.

  "But if what Lucy has to say about gateways is relevant, then maybe the final stop for this hacker is certain people's telephone records."

  "Why?" Marino asked.

  "To see who they were calling." I paused. "The son of information a reporter might be interested in, for example."

  Getting up from the chair, I began to pace about as fear tingled along my nerves. I thought of Eddings poisoned in his boat, of Black Talons and uranium, and I remembered that Joel Hand's farm was in Tidewater somewhere.

  "This person named Dwain Shapiro who owned the bible you found in Eddings' house," I said to Marino. "He allegedly died in a carjacking. Do we have any further information on that?"

  "Right now we don't."

  "Danny's death could have been signed out as the same sort of thing," I said.

  "Or yours could have. Especially because of the type of car. If this were a hit, maybe the assailant didn't know that Dr. Scarpetta isn't a man," Janet said. "Maybe the gunman was cocky and only knew what you would be driving."

  I stopped by the hearth as she went on.

  "Or maybe the killer didn't figure out Danny wasn't you until it was too late. Then Danny had to be dealt with."

  "Why me?" I said. "What would be the motive?"

  It was Lucy who replied, "Obviously, they think you know something."

  "They?"

  "Maybe the New Zionists. The same reason they killed Ted Eddings," she said. "They thought he knew something or was going to expose something."

  I looked at my niece and Janet as my anxieties got more inflamed.

  "For God's sake," I said to them with feeling, "don't do anything more on this until you talk to Benton or someone, Damn! I don't want them thinking you know something, too."

  B
ut I knew Lucy, at least, would not listen. She would be on her keyboard with renewed vigor the moment I shut the door.

  "Janet?" I held the gaze of my only hope for their playing it safe. "Your hacker is very possibly connected to people being murdered."

  "Dr. Scarpetta," she said, "I understand."