Kathy Reichs - Bones to Ashes

As though on cue, the techie walked in. Only it wasn’t a guy.

“ Tabarnouche. Traffic’s the shits.” The woman was tall and thin, with lank blond hair that cried out for a stylist. “Already preparation for the festival’s gumming up the streets.”

The Festival international de jazz de Montréal takes place in late June and early July. Every year it paralyzes a major chunk of centre-ville.

The woman extended a hand to Ryan. “Solange Lesieur.”

Ryan and Lesieur shook.

The hand came to me. Lesieur’s grip could have fractured billiard balls.

“This the system?”

Without waiting for an answer, Lesieur seated herself, gloved, and began clicking keys. Ryan and I moved behind her for a better view of the monitor.

“I’ll be awhile.” Lesieur spoke without looking up.

Fair enough. I, too, refused to work with breath on my neck.

Chenevier was still tossing the bedroom. Pasteur had shifted to the bath. Sounds of his search drifted up the hall. The ceramic clunk of a toilet tank cover. The squeak of a medicine cabinet door. The rattle of tablets in a plastic tube.

While gloving, Ryan and I decided to start in the kitchen.

I’d finished going through the refrigerator, when Lesieur spoke.

Abandoning his utensil drawer, Ryan went to her.

I carried on in the kitchen.

Four stainless steel canisters lined one counter. I opened the smallest. Coffee beans. I ran a spoon through them, found nothing of interest.

“This system can accommodate multiple hard drives, boosting capacity to one point five terabytes.”

Ryan asked a question. Lesieur responded.

The second canister contained a brown sugar geodite. I poked at it. If anything was inside, we’d need a hydraulic drill to free it.

Lesieur and Ryan droned on in the next room. I took a moment to listen.

“A gigabyte equals one billion bytes. A terabyte equals one trillion bytes. That’s a friggin’ locomotive. But all this toad’s doing is surfing the Net, storing a few files?”

I refocused on the canisters. The third held white sugar. My spoon churned up no booty.

“He’s not an engineer. He’s not storing videos. Why’s he need all that capacity?” Lesieur.

“Guy’s a gamer?” Ryan.

“Nope.”

The largest canister was filled with flour. Too deep for the spoon.

“And what’s up with the scanner?” Lesieur.

“He’s not storing images?” Ryan.

“None that I’ve found.”

Removing a stack of bowls from an upper cabinet, I extracted the largest and put the others back.

Ryan said something. Lesieur responded. The exchange was lost to the rattling of china.

I grasped the canister in both hands and poured, focusing on the flour cascading over its rim. A white cloud billowed up, dusting my face and hands.

A sneeze threatened.

I set down the canister. Waited. The sneeze made no move.

I resumed pouring. Half. Three-quarters.

The flour was nearly gone when an object dropped into the bowl. Setting the canister on the counter, I studied the thing.

Dark. Flat. About the size of my thumb.

I felt a fizz of excitement.

Though sealed in plastic, the item was familiar.

22

IHURRIED TO THE BEDROOM, FLOUR-COATED HANDS HELD AWAY from my body.

“Find something?” Chenevier asked.

“In a canister. Better shoot it in situ then dust for latents.”

Chenevier followed me back to the kitchen. Scribbling an evidence label, he photographed the bowl from several angles. When he’d finished, I extracted the object, tapped it on the rim, and laid it on the counter.

Chenevier snapped more photos, then checked for prints on the object’s outer surface. There were none. Twirling a finger, he indicated that I should unroll the plastic. I did. He photographed every few inches.

Within minutes, a baggie, an eight-inch length of clear plastic wrap, and a thumb drive lay side by side on the Formica. None yielded prints.

“Got something,” I called into the living room.

Ryan joined us. Floating one brow, he brushed flour from my nose.

I narrowed my eyes in a “don’t say it” warning.

Ryan handed me a towel, then scanned the small assemblage beside the bowl.

“USB flash drive,” I said. “Sixteen gigabytes.”

“That’s massive.”

“You could store the national archives on this thing.”

Ryan indicated that I should bring the thumb drive to the computer. Chenevier returned to the bedroom.

I passed the drive to Lesieur. She thumbed a button, and a USB connector slid from one end.

“We got paper for this?”

Ryan nodded

Reaching under the workstation, Lesieur inserted the drive into the CPU tower.

The computer ding-donged, then a box appeared requesting a password.

“Try using Cormier,” Ryan said.

Lesieur shot him a “you’ve got to be kidding” look.

“Try it.”

Lesieur typed C-O-R-M-I-E-R.

The screen changed. A new box stated that a removable device had been detected, and that the disk contained more than one type of content.

“What a bonehead.” Lesieur hit several keys.

Columns of text appeared. Folders. Files. Dates.

Lesieur opened a file. Another. Ryan and I leaned in for a better view of the screen.

“I’ll be at this awhile.” As before, her message was not subtle.

Ryan and I returned to the kitchen.

Several cabinets and a silo of cereal and cracker boxes later, Lesieur spoke. Ryan and I went to her.

“OK. Here’s my take. Everything looks innocent enough on the surface. Tax returns. Business files. But I think your guy’s got another whole layer buried in the unused space of his thumb drive.”

Ryan and I must have looked blank.

“Some of the newer encryption programs provide plausible deniability by creating two layers. The user stores some innocuous files in the first layer. Tax returns, business contacts, information a reasonable person might want to encrypt. The second layer is a disk volume hidden in the ‘unused’ space of the drive.”

“So Cormier uses a simple password for layer one because he doesn’t really care about those files,” I guessed. “It’s a cover. He’s really concerned about layer two.”

“Exactly. With this type of setup, if someone starts poking around, they see some files, some open space, everything looks copasetic. When they view the open area of the disk byte by byte, all they find is gibberish.”

“That’s not suspicious?” Ryan asked.

Lesieur shook her head. “Operating systems don’t normally delete deleted files. They just change a marker that says, ‘This file has been deleted and can be written over.’ Everything that was in the file is still on the drive until its space is needed, so if you look at the unused areas on a normal disk drive, you’ll see bits and pieces of old files. Remember Ollie North?”

Ryan and I both said yes.

“That’s how Irangate investigators recovered information Ollie had deleted. Without those chunks of old files, whether plain text or recognizably patterned computer data, pure gibberish stands out for what it lacks.”

Lesieur cocked her chin at the monitor. “The giveaway with your guy is that I’m finding megabyte after megabyte of gibberish.”

“So you suspect there are encrypted files, but you can’t read them.”

“ C’est ça . Your guy’s running Windows XP. When used with a sufficiently long and completely random password, even the tool that comes with XP Pro creates encryption that can be a bitch to crack.”

“You tried typing in ‘Cormier’?” Ryan asked.

“Oh yeah.”

Lesieur checked her watch, then stood.