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.