The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “What’s called the power of deduction.” Machado continues looking at my niece as if she might not be a waste of his time.

  She’s in faded jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt that is tight and could use ironing, and tactical boots. I’m aware of the big ring on her index finger as she moves the wireless mouse. I smell her cologne, and I can tell when she wants people to leave us alone because she has something important on her mind.

  “If someone stole her identity,” Machado is saying, “then this person wasn’t going to show up at Howie’s house and hand him a check, right? Safest thing would be to mail it. My guess is it’s the same thing this person was doing with her other bills. Forging checks and mailing them, and the bank probably wasn’t going to question checks made out to the gas, electric, and telephone companies. But they might pull up her signature card when someone walks in and looks like a homeless person.”

  “It’s not a good forgery, hardly a serious attempt at it,” Lucy says.

  I have two transparent plastic bags side by side, the check Howard Roth never cashed, and an earlier canceled one that Machado found in a file of bank statements inside Peggy Stanton’s house.

  “Not signed but written or basically drawn.” She moves close to me, her eyes locked on Toby as he finally leaves.

  “I didn’t realize she was a handwriting expert,” Machado says, and now he’s openly flirting with my niece.

  “I don’t have to be an expert.” She gets up and shuts her door, and Machado watches her as if she’s a tartar. “Somebody lousy.”

  “Maybe he got better at it,” I reply. “June first was early on.”

  Lucy sits back down. “Since when is Toby in charge of mail?”

  “I sent Bryce on an errand,” I reply. “He’s taking Shaw to the vet. In fact, I’m hoping he’ll fall in love with her and decide Indy needs a sister.”

  “The shaft of the letter P?” Lucy slides the plastic bags closer.

  She isn’t going to talk about Toby in front of Machado. She’s got something to tell me.

  “Slants differently, and you can see where the person hesitated,” she says. “Thinking it instead of doing it, and the line is slightly crooked, the shaft is. Plus, her t has a high cross bar and the other doesn’t. Her a is well formed, and the other’s not. Her n looks more like a w, and the tops are pointed, and the other’s rounded.” She shows us as she describes it, adding, “Just my thoughts. I’m not an expert.”

  “You ever testify in court about this stuff?” Machado can’t take his eyes off her.

  “I never testify in court about anything.”

  “I don’t get it. You’d be great in court.”

  “They can’t stipulate me.”

  “Why not?”

  She doesn’t answer. Lucy was fired by law enforcement. She’s a hacker. A shrewd attorney would destroy her on the witness stand.

  “What’s going on?” I say to her, since she’s the one who has been texting, saying she needs to see me.

  “When you’re done?” It’s her way of telling me that Sil Machado needs to leave.

  thirty

  LUCY EXPLAINS THAT PEGGY STANTON IS CONNECTED TO the paleontologist missing in Alberta, Canada.

  The fake Twitter page used to dupe Marino was set up by the same person who e-mailed the video clip of the jetboat on the Wapiti River, my niece says. The footage was recorded on Emma Shubert’s iPhone around the time she vanished thousands of miles northwest of here.

  “The Twitter account with the handle Pretty Please was opened August twenty-fifth, and Twitter verified it by e-mail sent to BLiDedwood.” Lucy spells the username. “The avatar is a photo of Yvette Vickers when she was in her heyday in the fifties.”

  I reply I don’t know who that is, as I look around the space my niece is in.

  “A B-list actress Marino wouldn’t be familiar with. I wasn’t, either. I had to use facial-recognition software to figure it out,” Lucy says. “She’s believed to have died of natural causes in 2010, was dead the better part of a year before her body was discovered in her run-down Los Angeles home. She was mummified.”

  “It’s probably not a coincidence that she was picked for the avatar.” I think of what Benton said.

  A serial killer. Someone older. He targets mature women who represent someone powerful he’s obsessed with destroying.

  “All Marino’s going to see when he gets the first tweet from Peggy Lynn Stanton is a picture of a beautiful sexy woman,” Lucy is saying. “Someone who describes herself as into things old with character and she doesn’t mind keeping score because hers is impressive.”

  “The Twitter account was opened two days after Emma Shubert disappeared from the campsite in Grande Prairie.” I make that observation as I’m making other ones.

  Lucy’s office is Spartan, brightly lit, with silvery electronic equipment that does what she directs, and thick hanks of bundled cables, docks for charging various devices, routers, scanners, and very little paper. There are no photographs, nothing personal, as if she has no life, and I know better. She has something, and I’m constantly aware of the large signet ring on her index finger, a rose-gold ring that I don’t believe is hers. I’ve never known her to wear another person’s ring, and I’m going to find out.

  “Two days was enough time for someone to abduct and kill Emma Shubert and get back to this area,” Lucy speculates. “But what the hell’s the connection? Why was he up there in the land of dinosaurs and tar sands, and what does it have to do with a victim in Cambridge?”

  “You’re absolutely sure it’s Emma Shubert’s phone?” I ask. “That he’s got her iPhone?”

  “Yes, and I’m going to explain it.”

  “The Canadian police, the FBI . . . ?” A serial killer, I again think, and those who count don’t know the details Lucy is telling me.

  “I can’t tell them for a fact that Emma Shubert and Peggy Stanton are linked,” Lucy replies, and I understand it, but I’ll have to do something, and she knows I will.

  She can’t tell police or the Feds unless she explains how she came to her conclusions.

  “Of course, we don’t know what happened to Emma Shubert, but I’m guessing nothing good,” Lucy says, and she’s somber and hard, her determination unyielding.

  “Well, she’s either a victim or involved in all this,” I comment.

  “Since it appears no one has heard from her for two months, I’d say it’s one or the other. She’s either not innocent or she’s dead.”

  “Marino wouldn’t be familiar with the actress’s photo used in the avatar, or he wasn’t?” I want to know what Lucy has told him.

  “He doesn’t know, didn’t know,” she says. “He tweeted Pretty Please twenty-seven times thinking it was a hot young woman named Peggy Stanton. He’s enraged about it. We were having it out last night because it’s made him feel stupid. At this point it’s lost him his job. He’s fucking crazed, ready to kill someone.”

  “He never tried to look her up? He never tried to find her address, her phone number, to verify who she is? Jesus, what kind of detective, what kind of investigator, is he?” I can’t help but feel frustrated and angered by his carelessness.

  “He wasn’t being an investigator when he was tweeting,” Lucy says. “He was being lonely.”

  What kind of world do we live in? I think.

  “A lot of people on these social networking sites don’t research whoever they’re tweeting or direct-messaging or making comments to. They arrange to meet and haven’t a clue. Unbelievable how trusting people are.”

  “Desperate is what comes to mind.”

  “Stupid,” she says. “Really stupid. And I told him.”

  “Marino should know better.” Damn him.

  “Nothing in Peggy Stanton’s profile suggests she’s local or from Massachusetts.” Lucy indicates what’s on a computer screen. “I’m not sure Marino was doing much more than cyber-flirting.”

  “Cyber-flirting? You could be flirting with a
damn serial killer or a terrorist.”

  “Obviously, that’s why he’s in this trouble,” she says. “I’m not sure he was serious about actually meeting her or dating her. They never arranged anything that might have worked. It was all talk. He thought it was safe.”

  “He told you they never arranged anything, or you can tell from the tweets?”

  “Twenty-seven from him,” she repeats. “Eleven from her, from whoever was impersonating her. There’s nothing to suggest they ever got together, although he bragged to her he was going to Tampa and maybe she’d want to, quote, ‘drop by for some fun and sun.’”

  “Did he say when he was going?” I think of the timing again. “When he was arriving and departing?”

  The video clip was e-mailed to me not even an hour after Marino’s plane landed in Boston this past Sunday after he’d been in Tampa for a week.

  “You got it,” Lucy says. “He gave the info in a tweet and she never answered. Like I said, it was all talk. But you can see why it’s a problem for the police, for the FBI.”

  “It still is?”

  “I don’t know. He never called her, never met her. But he needs to stay in his foxhole right now.”

  “He’s still at your house?”

  “He needs to stay there. Nobody’s going to bother him without our seeing it coming.”

  I’m not sure what she means by that or who might see it coming.

  “The problem is, he wants to go home, and I can’t exactly keep him against his will. The account’s gone now.” She means the BLiDedwood e-mail account is. “The bad guy”—that’s what she calls whoever it is—“created it, then deleted it, right before he e-mailed the video clip to you.”

  “I’m confused,” I admit. “I thought it was created two months ago, at the end of August. Yet I just got the video clip, the e-mail from BLiDedwood, on Sunday.”

  “I know it seems complicated,” she says. “But it’s really not, and I’ll give you the broad strokes because I know what happened, am absolutely clear about it. The bad guy creates an account with the username BLiDedwood on August twenty-fifth. The Internet service provider, the IP, dead-ends at a proxy server, this one in Berlin.”

  A proxy server Lucy has hacked into. “Sent from where?” I ask. “Obviously not from Germany.”

  “Logan Airport. Same as later. That’s what he does. He captures their wireless.”

  “Then he wasn’t setting up the account in Alberta, Canada, on August twenty-fifth.”

  “Definitely not,” Lucy says. “He was back in this area and close enough to the airport to pick up the wireless signal.”

  A boat, I’m reminded, and I send Ernie Koppel an e-mail about the swipe of what looks like garish green paint.

  Anything at all from the barnacle, the broken piece of bamboo? I write to him.

  “This person then creates Peggy Stanton’s Twitter account that same day, on August twenty-fifth,” Lucy continues to explain, “and submits the e-mail username BLiDedwood so Twitter can contact that address, making sure it exists, before verifying the account.”

  Something old, something new, Ernie writes back almost instantly.

  “Then very recently the bad guy deletes that e-mail account, BLiDedwood, and uses a different application to create a new anonymous account with the same name but a different extension, this one stealthmail,” Lucy says, as another message from Ernie lands on my phone.

  If we ever find the boat, we can definitely match it. Will call when back in the lab.

  “So he waits twenty-nine minutes and sends the video file and jpg to you and then the account is gone like a bridge blown out,” Lucy says. “Again, he was physically close enough to Logan Airport to send the e-mail to you from their wireless network.”

  “Which also is in the area where Peggy Stanton’s body was found in the bay, maybe dumped there, possibly around the same time that e-mail was sent to me, about the same time Marino’s flight from Tampa arrived,” I reply. “I don’t understand the motive.”

  “Games.” Lucy is calmly quiet, like stagnant weather before a violent storm. “We don’t know what his fantasies are, but he’s getting off on all of this.”

  Someone who mocks.

  “Whatever he does to his victims, it’s part of a much bigger picture,” she says, in the same tone. “The prelude, the aftermath are obsessions. It isn’t just the capturing and the killing. You don’t have to be a profiler to know that.”

  He’s killed before and will kill again, or maybe already has.

  “An attempt to frame Marino?” I ask.

  “To fuck him up, anyway. It must be fun to cause so much trouble,” she says angrily. “I’ve let Benton know he probably should get down here.”

  “Does he know about Emma Shubert’s phone?”

  “I’ve suggested it’s a possibility they might want to check out, that it might connect everything to her. I’ve not stated anything as a fact.”

  A mature accomplished woman, a paleontologist who takes boats to dig sites and works outdoors and is skilled in labs, I contemplate. She’s described by her colleagues as driven, indefatigable, passionate about dinosaurs, and a proactive environmentalist.

  “The MAC address, the Machine Access Code, is the same for e-mails she sent, for any apps and data she downloaded before she vanished, and I didn’t tell Benton that.” Lucy continues to describe what she knows but can’t relay in detail to the FBI. “It’s the same MAC for the video file and jpg of the severed ear sent to you. The same MAC for this Twitter account.” She means Peggy Stanton’s fake account.

  “Let’s talk about Twitter.” It’s my way of asking but not wanting details I’m better off not having.

  “It’s pretty simple, really,” Lucy says. “Hypothetically?”

  When my niece says hypothetically, it usually means it’s what she did, and I leave it alone. I don’t question.

  “Find someone who works for Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, any of these social networks,” she says. “There are employee lists, people who work in various capacities, and their titles and even detailed descriptions of their level of importance. Getting employee info isn’t hard, and I work my way up the chain of people a certain employee follows and is followed by, and I send a link to click on and when they do it gives me their password unbeknownst to them. And then I log on as that person.”

  She tells me she leapfrogs from one impersonation to the next, and it’s hard for me to listen to what she thinks is perfectly acceptable behavior.

  “And finally the system admin believes it’s a high-level colleague sending her something important she needs to look at,” she admits. “Click. And now I’m in her computer, which has all sorts of proprietary, sensitive information. Next I’m in the server.”

  “Does the FBI have any of this same information? Any of it at all?” I’m thinking of Valerie Hahn, and then I’m reminded of Douglas Burke, and she is something dark and ugly spreading over my mood.

  “Don’t know,” Lucy says. “Court orders are a little slower than what I do.”

  I’m not going to respond to that.

  “But Marino’s tweets and the fake person’s tweets? All you’ve got to do is go on their pages. The tweets are there for the world to see,” she says. “It’s just I know where they came from. Real garbage, whoever it is. Unfortunately, someone smart. But arrogant. And arrogance will always get you in the end.”

  I move my chair closer to read the tweets she’s rolling through on the screen, and they make me sad. Peggy Stanton’s impersonator wrote Marino the first time on August twenty-fifth at almost midnight, saying she was a fan.

  Bowled over by U, she tweeted. I strike and leave nothing to spare, an honest gal whose only game is right up UR alley.

  Six tweets later she said she was into antiques, collected vintage military buttons and wore them proudly, and this deteriorated into comments that Marino found offensive, if not appalling.

  I’ve got buttons I know U want to push, she tweeted
to him toward the end of their exchanges. Dead soldiers all over my enviable chest.

  Marino unfollowed her on October tenth.

  “Why?” I try to imagine the point of it, and I try to imagine who.

  “We’ve got a problem with Toby, but he’s too damn stupid,” Lucy then says, and I figured she would get to him, based on her demeanor when he appeared at her door with a cartload of boxes.

  “No way he’s doing it,” she adds.

  “Obviously he’s doing something.” I wait for her to tell me what as I wonder why it’s so difficult to find people to trust.

  “You need to be careful about anything you say in front of him or anything he might overhear or see.” Lucy says she started getting suspicious of Toby over recent weeks, about the time Channing Lott’s trial began.

  She would run into Toby in areas of the building where he generally doesn’t need to be. The mailroom, for example, where he started picking up packages that gave him an excuse to stop by the computer lab, various offices, and intake, the autopsy rooms, conference rooms, locker rooms, the break room. Often he was going through the log at the security desk, she describes, as if he was intensely curious about bodies going out and coming in, especially if they were unidentified, in cases that occurred when he wasn’t working.

  “It wasn’t typical,” Lucy says. “At first I thought it’s because of Marino, because of him not bothering with the electronic calendar anymore, staying over, ornamenting, and maybe Toby saw an opportunity. But truth is, he was trumping up reasons to walk in and out of rooms where meetings were going on, where people were talking, where information was out in plain view.”

  She tells me that after I got the disturbing e-mail on Sunday night she decided to look into Toby, who can’t access anything at the CFC, including Investigations, without his key card ID, which has an RFID chip embedded in it. We also have satellite tracking on all our vehicles, she says, but Toby just didn’t think she’d look.

  “I guess it never dawned on him I’d start rolling back the tape and checking what’s been recorded by the cameras and the vehicle GPS locators,” she says, and I recall watching Toby on the security monitors yesterday, when he was inside the bay.