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.
“W
hatever 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.
He seemed to be arguing with someone on the phone. Something had struck me about it, bothered me. It didn’t seem normal.
“He’s been entering all sorts of areas where he has no business,” Lucy continues. “Your office. Luke’s office.”
“He can’t unlock my office.” It’s not accessible by key card, and I don’t wear such an ID on a lanyard around my neck.
I can unlock any door in the building by scanning my thumb, and Lucy, Bryce, and I are the only staff who have what I call the skeleton key, a biometric one.
“And your door is usually wide open if you’re in the building, or Bryce’s door is wide open,” Lucy points out. “He’s always leaving his door open and also the door connecting your office to his. So Toby finds reasons to deliver things, check on this or that, or asks a question or passes on information or volunteers to take orders for take-out food. Or he simply wanders in and out if he thinks no one’s looking.”
I get up from my chair and reach for the phone as Lucy lets me know the jury is out. For an instant I think she’s talking about Toby, that she’s saying it’s up in the air what to do with him. Then I realize she means something else.
“It’s all over the Internet,” she says, as I dial the extension for the autopsy room. “The jury’s left the courtroom, and the pundits are predicting they’ll find him not guilty.”
I get hold of Luke and ask him to place Howard Roth’s clothing in ID and to e-mail all photographs to me, that I’m coming down now.
“Perhaps Toby? He’s right here. Maybe he can . . . ?” Luke is busy.
“No. I want you to do it personally and lock the door. I don’t want anybody near the clothing and whatever else came in with him.”
“Shorts, socks, a T-shirt, his meds. The police have any other personal effects, his wallet, his house keys, not sure what all.” Luke’s in the middle of an autopsy and doesn’t want to be interrupted, but that’s too bad.
“Thanks. I’ll take a look.”
“I mean, they didn’t
even have to think about it. Not guilty,” Lucy says, when we’re in the corridor, and she shuts her door, making sure it’s locked.
“Is what you suspect about Toby why you were looking around my office yesterday morning? Is he why you were acting as if someone might be spying on me?” I ask.
“Let’s take the stairs.” She heads us to a lighted exit sign. “Someone is spying but not by using surveillance devices. I’ve been checking.” She opens the metal door. “Toby’s not sophisticated enough to plant covert devices, certainly not ones that I’d have a hard time finding, but I’ve been looking. And he’s been spying.”
“Why?”
“How do you think Channing Lott’s helicopter ended up filming you while you were getting the body out of the water yesterday?” she asks.
“Toby was the only person who knew what Marino and I were headed out to do,” I remember. “Except for Bryce. Possibly Luke, if Marino said something when they ran into each other in the parking lot.”
We go down the stairs, and our voices seem loud, bouncing off concrete.
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t give details to Luke.” I’m trying to recall exactly what I said.
I was about to walk into the bay and was startled by him suddenly standing so close we were almost touching, and he asked me where I was going. I told him I was on my way to recover a body from the harbor, and he said he’d be happy to help, reminding me he’s a certified diver. I didn’t say the body was a woman’s. I’m pretty sure I didn’t, but I was distracted by him, the way I’ve been distracted for a while, a way I don’t intend to be distracted by him again.
“Toby was aware hours in advance that you were heading to the Coast Guard base,” Lucy states. “He knew he was going to meet you with the van so he could transport the body. A woman’s body entangled with a turtle.”
“And he somehow contacted Channing Lott’s pilots?” That I don’t believe.
“He contacted Jill Donoghue, who contacted the pilots.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Are you aware he’s applied for a job at her ritzy law firm and that he’s driven company vehicles to her building, to the Prudential Center?” Lucy asks. “Guess he’s forgotten I can look at GPS maps of where everyone goes, and I can look at everybody’s e-mail if they’re dumb enough to use their CFC account for personal communications. I don’t even have to hack.”
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