“Tell me about it,” Lobo was saying as they walked and icy wind blasted in from the Sound, through the fence and between berms. “You buy these perfectly legal Spoof Cards and can make any number you want appear in the caller ID screen of whoever you’re calling and trying to spoof.”
Marino contemplated that if Dodie Hodge had a connection to Warner Agee, who obviously had a connection to Carley Crispin, whose show Agee had been on multiple times this fall, and Dodie had called last night, maybe the three of them were connected. This was crazy. How could Agee, Dodie, and Carley be connected, and why? It was like all those offshoots on the data wall at RTCC. You search one name and find fifty others linked to it, reminding him of Saint Henry’s Catholic School, of the cluttered tree branches he’d draw on the chalkboard when he was forced to diagram compound sentences in English class.
“A couple months ago,” Lobo went on, “my phone rings and there’s this number on my caller ID. It’s the number for the fucking switchboard at the White House. I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ So I answer and it’s my ten-year-old daughter trying to disguise her voice, and she says, ‘Please hold for the president.’ I’m not amused. This is my cell phone I use for work, and it’s like my heart stopped for a minute.”
If there was one name all the offshoots had in common, Marino asked himself, what would it be?
“Turns out she got the Spoof Card and the idea from one of her friends, some boy who’s maybe eleven,” Lobo said. “You go on the Internet, the number for the White House is right there. It’s fucked up. Like every time we figure out how to stop this bullshit, there’s something else out there to defeat our efforts.”
Hannah Starr, Marino decided. Except now it seemed that the one thing everybody had in common was the Doc, he worried. That’s why he was walking through the explosives range in the freezing cold at dawn. He turned up the collar of his coat, his ears so cold they were about to fall off.
He said to Lobo, “Seems like if you buy a SpoofCard, you can get traced through the carrier.”
Ann Droiden was walking toward the white metal day box with an empty milk jug. She held it under a tank and started filling it with water.
“If the carrier’s served with a subpoena, maybe you’ll get lucky, but that’s assuming you’ve got a suspect. You got no suspect, how the hell do you know who the fake number traces back to, especially if they don’t use their own phone to make the call? It’s a fucking nightmare,” Lobo said. “So this Dodie Hodge lady, saying she’s clever, at least as clever as a ten-year-old, could have spoofed to get us off the scent. Maybe she spoofed when she called The Crispin Report last night, and it looks like she’s at the Hotel Elysée when, truth is, we don’t know where the hell she is. Or maybe she was setting up this Agee guy you were telling me about. Maybe she didn’t like him, like a really bad practical joke. But the other thought is what makes you so sure she sent the singing card, for example?”
“She’s singing on it.”
“Who says?”
“ Benton. He should know, since he spent time with her in the bin.”
“Doesn’t mean she’s the one who sent the card. We should be careful of assumptions, that’s all. Shit, it’s cold. And nothing we do out here lets me wear gloves that are worth a damn.”
Droiden set the jug of water on the ground near a big black hard case that held twelve-gauge shotgun cartridges and components of the PAN disrupter, the water cannon. Nearby was a portable metal magazine and several Roco gear and equipment bags, big ones that likely held more equipment and gear, including the bomb disposal suit and helmet she’d be putting on when she was set up and ready to retrieve the package from the day box. She squatted by the open case and picked up a black plastic plug, a screw-on breech, and one of the shotgun cartridges. A diesel engine sounded in the distance-an EMS ambulance showing up, parking on the dirt road, at the ready in case all didn’t go according to plan.
“Again,” Lobo said, removing a bag from his shoulder, “I’m not saying this Dodie lady used a SpoofCard. I’m just saying that caller ID doesn’t mean shit anymore.”
“Don’t talk to me about it,” Droiden said, plugging one end of the tubing. “My boyfriend got spoofed, some asshole he has a restraining order against. She calls him and the caller ID says it’s his mother.”
“That’s too bad,” Marino said. He didn’t know she had a boyfriend.
“It’s like these anonymizers people use so you can’t trace their IP, or you do and think they’re in another country when they’re your next-door neighbor.” She inserted the shotgun round into the breech, which she screwed to the plugged back end of the tube. “You can’t be sure anything’s what it appears to be when it’s got to do with phones, with computers. Perps wear cloaks of invisibility. You don’t know who’s doing what, and even if you do, it’s hard to prove. Nobody’s accountable anymore.”
Lobo had removed a laptop computer from his bag and was turning it on. Marino wondered why a computer was okay out here and not his phone. He didn’t ask. He was in overload, like his engine might overheat any minute.
“So I don’t need a suit on or anything,” he said. “You sure there’s nothing in there like anthrax or some chemical that’s going to give me cancer?”
“Before I put the package in the day box last night,” Droiden said, “I checked it out soup to nuts with the FH Forty, the Twenty-two-hundred R, and APD Two thousand, a high-range ion chamber, a gas monitor, every detector you can think of, in part because of the target.”
She meant Scarpetta.
“It was taken seriously, to say the least,” Droiden went on. “Not that we’re lax out here on any given day, but this is considered special circumstances. Negative for biological agents, at least any known ones like anthrax, ricin, botulism, SEB, and plague. Negative for alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron radiation. No CW agents or irritants. No nerve or blister agents-again, no known ones. No toxic gases, such as ammonia, chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide. No alarms went off, but whatever’s in the package is off-gassing something. I could smell it.”
“Probably what’s in the vial-shaped thing,” Marino said.
“Something with a foul smell, a fetid, tarry-type odor,” she answered. “Don’t know what it is. None of the detectors could identify it.”
“At least we know what it’s not,” Lobo said. “Which is somewhat reassuring. Hopefully it’s nothing to worry about.”
“Maybe picking up on a contaminant out here?” Marino was thinking about all the different devices that were rendered safe on the range. Decades of bombs and pyrotechnics being shot with water cannons and detonated.
“Like we’re saying, we didn’t get a reading,” Droiden said. “In addition, we account for potential interference vapors that can cause false positives. Devices we’ve rendered safe out here that might off-gas anything from gasoline to diesel fuel to household bleach? There wouldn’t be enough of an interferent vapor at this point for detectable levels. Nothing false-alarmed last night, although cold temperatures aren’t ideal, the LCDs sure as hell don’t like the weather out here, and we weren’t going to carry the frag bag inside any sort of shelter when we don’t know what type of device we might be dealing with.”
She tilted the PAN disrupter, pointing it almost straight up, and filled it with water, then plugged the front end with a red cap. She leveled the steel tube and tightened the clamps. Reaching back into the open case, she picked out a laser aiming device that slid over the tip of the barrel like a bore sight. Lobo set the laptop on a sandbag, an x-ray of Scarpetta’s package on the screen. Droiden would use the image to map a targeting grid that she would align with the laser sight so she could take out the power source-button batteries-with the water cannon.