Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“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.”