Patricia Cornwell - Cause Of Death

"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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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 amp;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?"