“A more pressing concern is Jean-Baptiste,” Benton said, because police, the FBI were looking for Dodie, but no one was looking for Chandonne.
“No notes so far but a couple toy guns,” O’Dell said to Stockman as agents and cops from the Joint Bank Robbery Task Force searched Dodie’s house and sent electronic information in real time. “Bingo,” Stockman then said as he read. “Drugs. Looks like Granny does coke. Plus, she’s a smoker. Hey, Benton. To your knowledge, does Dodie smoke French cigarettes? Gauloises? I know I didn’t pronounce that right.”
“She may have had someone staying with her,” Stockman said, as he replied to his colleagues in the field.
Benton said, “I’m going to stop listening for a minute.”
It was a line that worked almost without exception. When people were arguing and distracted and their agendas were breaking the surface and blowing like whales, if Benton announced he was going to stop listening, everybody stopped talking.
“I’m going to say what I think, and you need to hear this because it will help you understand what you’re about to see when these links are made, are on the wall,” Benton said. “How are we doing with our tree diagram?” he pointedly asked.
“Anybody besides me need some coffee?” O’Dell said in frustration. “Too damn much going on at once, and I need to visit the little boys’ room.”
20
On the eighth floor of the OCME’s DNA Building, Scarpetta, Lucy, and Marino were alone inside a lab used for scientific training. Criminal cases weren’t analyzed in here, but the regulations for working in a clean-room environment still applied.
The three of them were difficult to recognize in disposable protective gowns, hair and shoe covers, masks, gloves, and safety glasses they had donned in the bio vestibule before passing through an air lock into an uncontaminated work space equipped with the latest assay technology, what Marino called contraptions: genomic analyzers, gene amplifiers, centrifuges, vortex mixers, real-time rotary cyclers, and extraction robots for handling large volumes of liquids, such as blood. He moved about restlessly, rustling and making papery sounds, tugging at blue Tyvek and poking and prodding his safety glasses and mask and what he referred to as his “shower cap,” constantly readjusting this and that as he griped about his garb.
“You ever put paper shoes on a cat?” His face mask moved as he talked. “The thing runs around like hell trying to shake them off? That’s what I fucking feel like.”
“I didn’t torture animals, set fires, or wet my bed when I was a kid,” Lucy said, picking up a micro USB cable she had sterilized and wrapped.
In front of her on a brown paper-covered counter were two MacBooks that had been wiped off with isopropyl alcohol and enclosed in transparent polypropylene, and the BioGraph watchlike device, which had been swabbed for DNA late yesterday in the evidence exam room down the hall and was now safe for handling. Lucy plugged the cable into the BioGraph and connected it to one of the laptops.
“Like plugging in your iPod or iPhone,” she said. “It’s syncing with something. What have we got?”
The screen went black and prompted her for a username and password. In a banner at the top was a long string of zeros and ones that Scarpetta recognized as binary code.
“That’s odd,” she said.
“Very odd,” Lucy said. “It doesn’t want us to know its name. It’s encrypted in binary, which is meant to be a deterrent, to be off-putting. If you’re one of these people who surf the Net and somehow find this site, you have to go to some trouble to even have a hint what you’ve landed on. Even then, you can’t get into it unless you’re authorized or have a skeleton key.”
Skeleton key was one of her euphemisms for hack.
“I’m betting this binary-code address doesn’t convert into text that spells BioGraph, either.” Lucy typed on the other MacBook and opened a file. “If it did, my search engines would have found it, because they sure as hell know how to look for bit strings and their represented words or sequences.”
“Jesus,” Marino said. “Already I got no damn idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
He had been slightly nasty from the instant Scarpetta had met him downstairs in the lobby and escorted him to the eighth floor. He was upset about the bomb. He wasn’t going to tell her that, but after twenty years, he didn’t have to tell her. She knew him better than he knew himself. Marino was irritable because he was scared.
“I’ll start over and try to move my lips when I talk this time,” Lucy sniped back at him.
“Your mouth is covered. I can’t see your lips. I got to take off this cap at least. It’s not like I have any hair. I’m starting to sweat.”
“Your bald head will shed skin cells,” Lucy said. “Probably why you have such a dust problem in your apartment. This so-called watch was designed to sync with a laptop, is interfaceable with just about any kind of computer device because of the micro USB port. Probably because all kinds of people are wearing these so-called watches, collecting data just like Toni Darien was. Let’s convert binary to ASCII.”
She typed the string of ones and zeros into a field on the other MacBook and hit the return key. Instantly, the code was translated into text that gave Scarpetta pause-in fact, gave her the creeps.
It spelled Caligula.
“Wasn’t he the Roman emperor who burned down Rome?” Marino said.
“That was Nero,” Scarpetta said. “Caligula was probably worse. Probably the most demented, depraved, sadistic emperor in the history of the Roman Empire.”
“What I’m waiting for right now,” Lucy said, “is to bypass the username and password. To put it very simply, I’ve hijacked this site and what’s in the BioGraph so the programs on my server can help us out.”
“I think I saw a movie about him,” Marino said. “He had sex with his sisters and lived in the palace with his horse or something. Maybe he had sex with the horse, too. An ugly bastard. I think he was deformed.”
Scarpetta said, “A rather chilling name for a website.”
“Come on.” Lucy was impatient with the computer, with the programs working invisibly to grant her access to what she wanted.
“I told you about walking back and forth from there by yourself,” Marino said to Scarpetta, and he was thinking about the bomb, about what he’d just experienced at Rodman’s Neck. “When you’re on live TV, you should have security. Maybe you won’t argue about it anymore.”
He was assuming if he’d escorted her last night, he would have recognized that the FedEx package was suspicious and never would have let her touch it. Marino felt responsible for her safety, had a habit of going overboard about it, when the irony was, the most unsafe she’d ever been was with him not all that long ago.
“Caligula is probably the name of a proprietary project.” Lucy was busy on the other MacBook. “That’s my guess.”
“Thing is, what next?” Marino said to Scarpetta. “I feel like somebody’s warming up to something. That singing card Benton got yesterday at Bellevue. Then not even twelve hours later, the FedEx bomb with a voodoo doll. Jesus, it stunk. Can’t wait to hear what Geffner says.”
Geffner was a trace evidence examiner at the NYPD crime labs in Queens.
“I called him on my way over here and said he better start looking through the microscope the minute the bomb debris hits the door.” Marino glanced at his blue-paper sleeve, shoved it up with a latex-sheathed hand to check his watch. “He should be looking at it now. Hell, we should call him. Jesus. It’s almost noon. Like hot asphalt, rotten eggs, and dog shit, like a really filthy fire scene, like someone used an accelerant to burn up a friggin’ latrine. I almost gagged, and it takes a lot to make me puke. Plus dog fur. Benton ’s patient? The whack job who called you on CNN? Hard for me to wrap my mind around her making something like that. Lobo and Ann said it was really nicely done.”