“It suits me fine if you stick with robots,” I said, and we were in the kitchen now. “Something smells good. What did you fix your tired, old aunt to eat?”
“Fresh spinach sautéed in a little garlic and olive oil, and fillets that I’m going to throw on the grill. This is my one day a week to eat beef, so tough luck if it’s not yours. I even sprung for a bottle of really nice wine, something Janet and I discovered.”
“Since when can FBI agents afford nice wine?”
“Hey,” she said, “I don’t do too bad. Besides, I’m too damn busy to spend money.”
Certainly, she didn’t spend it on clothes. Whenever I saw her, she was either in khaki fatigues or sweats. Now and then she wore jeans and a funky jacket or blazer, and made fun of my offers of hand-me-downs. She would not wear my lawyerly suits and blouses with high collars, and frankly, my figure was fuller than her firm, athletic one. Probably nothing in my closet would fit.
The moon was huge and low in a cloudy, dark sky. We put on jackets and sat out on the deck drinking wine while Lucy cooked. She had started baked potatoes first, and they were taking a while, so we talked. Over recent years, our relationship had become less mother-daughter as we evolved into colleagues and friends. The transition was not an easy one, for often she taught me and even worked on some of my cases. I felt oddly lost, no longer certain of my role and power in her life.
“Wesley wants me to track this AOL thing,” she was saying. “Sussex definitely wants CASKU’s help.”
“Do you know Percy Ring?” I asked as I thought of what he had said in my office, infuriated again.
“He was in one of my classes and was obnoxious, wouldn’t shut up.” She reached for the bottle of wine. “What a peacock.”
She began filling our glasses. Raising the hood of the grill, she poked potatoes with a fork.
“I believe we’re ready,” she said, pleased.
Moments later, she was emerging from the house, carrying the fillets. They sizzled as she placed them on the grill. “Somehow he figured out you’re my aunt.” She was talking about Ring again. “Not that it’s a secret, and he asked me about it after class once. You know, if you tutored me, helped me out with my cases, like I couldn’t possibly do what I’m doing on my own, that sort of thing. I just think he picks on me because I’m a new agent and a woman.”
“That may be the biggest miscalculation he’s ever made in his life,” I said.
“And he wanted to know if I was married.” Her eyes were shadowed as porch lights shone on one side of her face.
“I worry about what his interest really is,” I commented.
She glanced at me as she cooked. “The usual.” She shrugged it off, for she was surrounded by men and paid no attention to their comments or their stares.
“Lucy, he made a reference to you in my office today,” I said. “A veiled reference.”
“To what?”
“Your status. Your roommate.”
No matter how often or delicately we talked about this, she always got frustrated and impatient.
“Whether it’s true or not,” she said, and the sizzling of the grill seemed to match her tone, “there would still be rumors because I’m an agent. It’s ridiculous. I know women married with kids, and the guys think all of them are gay, too, just because they’re cops, agents, troopers, Secret Service. Some people even think it about you. For the same reason. Because of your position, your power.”
“This is not about accusations,” I reminded her, gently. “This is about whether someone could hurt you. Ring is very smooth. He comes across as credible. I expect he resents that you’re FBI, HRT and he’s not.”
“I think he’s already demonstrated that.” Her voice was hard.
“I just hope the jerk doesn’t keep asking you out.”
“Oh, he already is. At least half a dozen times.” She sat down. “He’s even asked Janet out, if you can believe that.” She laughed. “Talk about not getting it.”
“The problem is I think he does get it,” I said, ominously. “It’s like he’s building a case against you, gathering evidence.”
“Well, gather away.” She abruptly ended our discussion. “So tell me what else went on today.”
I told her what I had learned at the labs, and we talked about fibers embedded in bone and Koss’s analysis of them as we carried steaks and wine inside. We sat at the kitchen table with a candle lit, digesting information few people would serve with food.
“A cheap motel curtain could have a backing like that,” Lucy said.
“That or something like a drop cloth, because of the paint-like substance,” I replied. “The spinach is wonderful. Where did you get it?”
“Ukrop’s. I’d give anything to have a store like that in my neighborhood. So this person wrapped the victim in a drop cloth and then dismembered her through it?” she asked as she cut her meat.
“That’s certainly the way it’s looking.”
“What does Wesley say?” She met my eyes.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet.” This wasn’t quite true. I had not even called.
For a moment, Lucy was silent. She got up and brought a bottle of Evian to the table. “So how long do you plan to run from him?”
I pretended not to hear her, in hopes she would not start in.
“You know that’s what you’re doing. You’re scared.”
“This is not something we should discuss,” I said. “Especially when we’re having such a pleasant evening.”
She reached for her wine.
“It’s very good, by the way,” I said. “I like pinot noir because it’s light. Not heavy like a merlot. I’m not in the mood for anything heavy right now. So you made a good choice.”
She stabbed another bite of steak, getting my point.
“Tell me how things are going with Janet,” I went on. “Mostly doing white-collar crime in D.C.? Or is she getting to spend more time at ERF these days?”
Lucy stared out the window at the moon as she slowly swirled wine in her glass. “I should get started on your computer.”
While I cleaned up, she disappeared into my office. I did not disturb her for a very long time, if for no other reason than I knew she was put out with me. She wanted complete openness, and I had never been good at that, not with anyone. I felt bad, as if I had let down everyone I loved. For a while, I sat at the kitchen desk, talking to Marino on the phone, and I called to catch up with my mother. I put on a pot of decaffeinated coffee and carried two mugs down the hall.
Lucy was busy at my keyboard, glasses on, a slight frown furrowing her young, smooth brow as she concentrated. I set her coffee down and looked over her head at what she was typing. It made no sense to me. It never did.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
I could see my face reflected in the monitor as she struck the enter key again, executing another UNIX command.
“Good and not good,” she replied with an impatient sigh. “The problem with applications like AOL is you can’t track files unless you get into the original programming language. That’s where I am now. And it’s like following bread crumbs through a universe with more layers than an onion.”
I pulled up a chair and sat next to her. “Lucy,” I said, “how did someone send these photographs to me? Can you tell me, step by step?”
She stopped what she was doing, slipping off her glasses and setting them on the desk. She rubbed her face in her hands and massaged her temples as if she had a headache.
“You got any Tylenol?” she asked.
“No acetaminophen with alcohol.” I opened a drawer and got out a bottle of Motrin instead.
“For starters,” she said, taking two, “this wouldn’t have been easy if your screen name wasn’t the same as your real one: KSCARPETTA.”
“I made it easy deliberately, for my colleagues to send me mail,” I explained one more time.
“You made it easy for anyone to send you mail.” She looked accusingly
at me. “Have you gotten crank mail before?”
“I think this goes beyond crank mail.”
“Please answer my question.”
“A few things. Nothing to worry about.” I paused, then went on, “Generally after a lot of publicity because of some big case, a sensational trial, whatever.”
“You should change your user name.”
“No,” I said. “Deadoc might want to send me something else. I can’t change it now.”
“Oh great.” She put her glasses back on. “So now you want him to be a pen pal.”
“Lucy, please,” I quietly said, and I was getting a headache, too. “We both have a job to do.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she apologized. “I guess I’m just as overly protective of you as you’ve always been of me.”
“I still am.” I patted her knee. “Okay, so he got my screen name from the AOL directory of subscribers, right?”
She nodded. “Let’s talk about your AOL profile.”
“There’s nothing in it but my professional title, my office phone number and address,” I said. “I never entered personal details, such as marital status, date of birth, hobbies, et cetera. I have more sense than that.”
“Have you checked out his profile?” she asked. “The one for deadoc?”
“Frankly, it never occurred to me that he would have one,” I said.
Depressed, I thought of saw marks I could not tell apart, and felt I had made yet one more mistake this day.
“Oh, he’s got one, all right.” Lucy was typing again. “He wants you to know who he is. That’s why he wrote it.”
She clicked to the Member Directory, and when she opened deadoc’s profile, I could not believe what was before my eyes. I scanned key words that could be searched by anyone interested in finding other users to whom they applied.
Attorney, autopsy, chief, Chief Medical Examiner, Cornell, corpse, death, dismemberment, FBI, forensic, Georgetown, Italian, Johns Hopkins, judicial, killer, lawyer, medical, pathologist, physician, scuba, Virginia, woman.
The list went on, the professional and personal information, the hobbies, all describing me.
“It’s like deadoc’s saying he’s you,” Lucy said.
I was dumbfounded and suddenly felt very cold. “This is crazy.”
Lucy pushed back her chair and looked at me. “He’s got your profile. In cyberspace, on the World Wide Web, you’re both the same person with two different screen names.”
“We are not the same person. I can’t believe you said that.” I looked at her, shocked.
“The photographs are yours and you sent them to yourself. It was easy. You simply scanned them into your computer. No big deal. You can get portable color scanners for four, five hundred bucks. Attach the file to the message ten, which you send to KSCARPETTA, send to yourself, in other words . . .”
“Lucy,” I cut her off, “for God’s sake, that’s enough.”
She was silent, her face without expression.
“This is outrageous. I can’t believe what you’re saying.” I got up from the chair in disgust.
“If your fingerprints were on the murder weapon,” she replied, “wouldn’t you want me to tell you?”
“My fingerprints aren’t on anything.”
“Aunt Kay, I’m just making the point that someone out there is stalking you, impersonating you, on the Internet. Of course you didn’t do anything. But what I’m trying to impress upon you is every time someone does a search by subject because they need help from an expert like you, they’re going to get deadoc’s name, too.”
“How could he have known all this information about me?” I went on. “It’s not in my profile. I don’t have anything in there about where I went to law school, medical school, that my heritage is Italian.”
“Maybe from things written about you over the years.”
“I suppose.” I felt as if I were coming down with something. “Would you like a nightcap? I’m very tired.”
But she was lost again in the dark space of the UNIX environment with its strange symbols and commands like cat, :q! and vi.
“Aunt Kay, what’s your password in AOL?” she asked.
“The same one I use for everything else,” I confessed, knowing she would be annoyed again.
“Shit. Don’t tell me you’re still using Sinbad.” She looked up at me.
“My mother’s rotten cat has never been mentioned in anything ever written about me,” I defended myself.
I watched as she typed the command password and entered Sinbad.
“Do you do password aging?” she asked as if everyone should know what that meant.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Where you change your password at least once a month.”
“No,” I said.
“Who else knows your password?”
“Rose knows it. And of course, now you do,” I said. “There’s no way deadoc could.”
“There’s always a way. He could use a UNIX password-encryption program to encrypt every word in a dictionary. Then compare every encrypted word to your password . . .”
“It wasn’t that complicated,” I said with conviction. “I bet whoever did this doesn’t know a thing about UNIX.”
Lucy closed what she was doing, and looked curiously at me, swiveling the chair around. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he could have washed the body first so trace evidence didn’t adhere to blood. He shouldn’t have given us a photo of her hands. Now we may have her prints.” I was leaning against the door frame, holding my aching head. “He’s not that smart.”
“Maybe he doesn’t think her prints will ever matter,” she said, getting up. “And by the way,” she said as she walked by. “Almost any computer book’s going to tell you it’s stupid to choose a password that’s the name of your significant other or your cat.”
“Sinbad’s not my cat. I wouldn’t have a miserable Siamese that always gives me the fisheye and stalks me whenever I walk into my mother’s house.”
“Well, you must like him a little bit or you wouldn’t have wanted to think of him every time you log on to your computer,” she said from down the hall.
“I don’t like him in the least,” I said.
The next morning, the air was crisp and clean like a fall apple, stars were out, traffic mostly truckers in the midst of long hauls. I turned off on 64 East, just beyond the state fairgrounds, and minutes later was prowling rows in short-term parking at the Richmond International Airport. I chose a space in S because I knew it would be easy for me to remember, and was reminded of my password again, of other obvious acts of carelessness caused by overload.
As I was getting my bag out of the trunk, I heard footsteps behind me and instantly wheeled around.
“Don’t shoot.” Marino held up his hands. It was cool enough out that I could see his breath.
“I wish you’d whistle or something when you walk up on me in the dark,” I said, slamming shut the trunk.
“Oh. And bad people don’t whistle. Only good guys like me do.” He grabbed my suitcase. “You want me to get that, too?”
He reached for the hard, black Pelican case I was taking with me to Memphis today, where it already had been numerous times before. Inside were human vertebrae and bone, evidence that could not leave me.
“This stays handcuffed to me,” I said, grabbing it and my briefcase. “I’m really sorry to put you out like this, Marino. Are you sure it’s necessary for you to come along?”
We had discussed this several times now, and I did not think he should accompany me. I did not see the point.
“Like I told you, some squirrel’s playing games with you,” he said. “Me, Wesley, Lucy, the entire friggin’ Bureau think I should come along. For one thing, you’ve made this exact same trip in every case, so it’s gotten predictable. And it’s been in the papers that you use this guy at UT.”
Parking lots were well lit and full of cars, and I
could not help but notice people slowly driving past, looking for a place that wasn’t miles from the terminal. I wondered what else deadoc knew about me, and wished I had worn more than a trench coat. I was cold and had forgotten my gloves.
“Besides,” Marino added, “I’ve never been to Graceland.”
At first, I thought he was joking.
“It’s on my list,” he went on.
“What list?”
“The one I’ve had since I was a kid. Alaska, Las Vegas and the Grand Ole Opry,” he said as if the thought filled him with joy. “Don’t you have some place you would go if you could do anything you want?”
We were at the terminal now, and he held the door.
“Yes,” I said. “My own bed in my own home.”
I headed for the Delta desk, picked up our tickets and went upstairs. Typical for this hour, nothing was open except security. When I placed my hard case on the X-ray belt, I knew what was going to happen.
“Ma’am, you’re going to have to open that,” said the female guard.
I unlocked it and unsnapped the clasps. Inside, nestled in foam rubber, were labeled plastic bags containing the bones. The guard’s eyes widened.
“I’ve been through here before with this,” I patiently explained.
She started to reach for one of the plastic bags.
“Please don’t touch anything,” I warned. “This is evidence in a homicide.”
There were several other travelers behind me, now, and they were listening to every word I said.
“Well, I have to look at it.”
“You can’t.” I got out my brass medical examiner’s shield and showed it to her. “You touch anything here, and I’ll have to include you in the chain of evidence when this eventually goes to court. You’ll be subpoenaed.”
That was as much of an explanation as she needed, and she let me go.
“Dumb as a bag of hammers,” Marino mumbled as we walked.
“She’s just doing her job,” I replied.
“Look,” he said. “We don’t fly back until tomorrow morning, meaning unless you spend the whole damn day looking at bones, we should have some time.”