“Then why leave the BioGraph device on her body?” Lucy said. “Why take the chance someone might do what we’re doing right now?”
Scarpetta said, “It may be that her killer wanted her computer, her phone. But that doesn’t mean there was a single rational reason. Maybe the absence of a reason is why the BioGraph wasn’t removed from her body.”
“There’s always a reason,” Marino said.
“Not the kind of reason you’re talking about, because this may not be the type of crime you’re talking about,” Scarpetta said, and she thought about her BlackBerry.
She reconsidered the motive for the theft, had a feeling she might be wrong about why Carley Crispin wanted the BlackBerry, that it wasn’t simply about what Carley had said when they were walking past Columbus Circle after leaving CNN: “I bet you could talk anybody into it you wanted, with the connections you have.” As if to imply that Scarpetta wouldn’t have a problem enticing guests to appear on a TV show, assuming she had her own show, and from that Scarpetta had assigned a motive to her missing smartphone. Carley wanted information, wanted Scarpetta’s contacts, and maybe she did in fact help herself to scene photographs while she’d had the chance. But possibly the BlackBerry ultimately wasn’t intended for Carley or even Agee but for someone else. Someone cunning and evil. The last person to have the BlackBerry was Agee, and maybe he would have passed it on to a third party had he not killed himself.
“People commit murder and return to the scene of the crime, not always for the sole reason that they’re paranoid and trying to cover their tracks,” Scarpetta explained. “Sometimes it’s to relive a violent act that was gratifying. Maybe in Toni’s case it’s more than one motivation. Her phone, her laptop are souvenirs, and they also were a means of impersonating her before her body was found, to throw us off track about her time of death by pretending to be her and using her cell phone to send a text message to her mother at around eight p.m. Wednesday night. Manipulations, games, and fantasy, emotionally driven, sexually driven, sadistically driven. A blend of motivations that created a malignant discord. Like so much in life. It isn’t just one thing.”
Lucy finished answering the mood rating questions and a Submit box appeared on the screen. She clicked on it and got the confirmation that her completed scales had been successfully sent to the site for review. For review by whom? Scarpetta wondered. A study sponsor who was a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, a research assistant, a graduate student. Who the hell knew, but there would be more than one of them. Probably a large faculty of them. These invisible sponsors could be anyone and could exist anywhere and were engaged in a project that obviously was intended to make predictions about human behavior that would prove useful to someone.
“It’s an acronym,” Lucy said.
On the screen:
THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING IN THE CALCULATED INTEGRATION OF GPS UPLOADED LIGHT AND ACTIVITY STUDY.
“CALIGULA,” Scarpetta said. “I still don’t see why anyone would choose an acronym like that.”
“Suffered chronically from nightmares and insomnia.” Lucy was skimming through files on her other MacBook, Googles about Caligula. “Used to wander the palace all night long waiting for the sun to come up. The name might have to do with that. If, for example, the study’s related to sleep disorders and the effects of light and darkness on moods. His name was derived from the Latin word caliga, which means ‘little boot.’ ”
Marino said to Scarpetta, “Your name means ‘little shoe.’”
“Come on, guys,” Lucy said under her breath, talking to her neural networking programs and search engines. “Sure as hell would be easier if I could take this to my office.” She meant the BioGraph device.
“It’s all over the Internet about Scarpetta meaning ‘little shoe’ in Italian,” Marino went on, his eyes uneasy behind thick plastic. “The little shoe, the little gumshoe, the little lady with the big kick.”
“Now we’re cooking,” Lucy said.
Data were rolling down her screen, a stew of letters, symbols, numbers.
“I wonder if Toni knew exactly what was being collected by the thing she was wearing on her wrist morning, noon, and night,” Lucy said. “Or if whoever killed her did.”
“Unlikely she did,” Scarpetta said. “The details of whatever theory researchers hope to prove aren’t advertised or disseminated publicly. The subjects themselves don’t know the details, only generalities. Otherwise, they can skew the results.”
“Must have been something in it for her,” Marino said. “Wearing that watch all the time. Answering questions every day.”
“She may have had a personal interest in sleep disorders, seasonal affective disorder, who knows what, and saw an ad for a study or someone gave her information. Her mother said she was moody and affected by gloomy weather,” Scarpetta said. “Usually people involved in research studies get paid.”
She thought about the father, Lawrence Darien, and his aggressive attempts at claiming Toni’s personal effects and her dead body. A bioelectrical engineer from MIT. A gambler and a drunk with ties to organized crime. When he’d made a scene at the morgue, maybe what he’d really been after was the BioGraph watch.
“Unbelievable what’s stored inside this thing.” Lucy pulled a stool in front of her MacBooks and sat, looking at raw data that had been stored inside Toni’s BioGraph device. “Obviously a combination actigraphy data logger with a highly sensitive accelerometer or bimorph element in a two-layer piezoelectric sensor that basically measures gross motor activity. I’m not seeing anything that strikes me as military or government.”
“What would you expect?” Marino asked. “If this was CIA or something.”
“Not this. Nothing’s encrypted the way I’m used to seeing when it’s classified by the government as top secret. Not the usual standard three-block ciphers with the bits and block sizes I associate with algorithms used in symmetric key cryptography. You know, these really long keys, longer than forty bits, that are supposed to be exportable but make it really hard for hackers to break the code. That’s not what we’ve got here. This isn’t military or any intelligence-gathering agency. It’s private-sector.”
“I guess we shouldn’t ask why you’d know how the government encrypts its top secret information,” Marino commented.
“The purpose of this thing is to gather data for some type of research, not spying, not war, not even terrorists for once,” Lucy said as data rolled by. “Not intended for the end user but for researchers. Geeks out there crunching data, but for whom? Sleep schedule variability, sleep quantity, daytime activity patterns, correlated to light exposure. Come on, start aggregating it into some sort of order that’s easy to look at.” Talking to her programs again. “Give me charts. Give me maps. It’s sorting by types of data. A lot of data. A ton of it. Recording data every fifteen seconds. Five thousand seven hundred and sixty times a day this thing was capturing God knows how many different types of data. GPS and pedometer readings. Location data, speed, distance, altitude, and the user’s vital signs. Heart rate and SPO-two.”
“SPO-two? You must be mistaken,” Scarpetta said.
“I’m looking at SPO-two,” Lucy said. “Hundreds of thousands of them. SPO-two captured every fifteen seconds.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Scarpetta said. “Where’s the sensor? You can’t measure pulse oximetry, the oxygen saturation of blood, without a sensor of some type. Usually on a fingertip, sometimes a toe, sometimes an earlobe. Has to be a thin part of the person’s anatomy so a light can pass through the tissue. A light comprised of both red and infrared wavelengths that determines the oxygenation, the percentage of oxygen saturation, in your blood.”