Unnatural Exposure

'Ukrops. I'd give anything to have a store like that in my neighborhood. So this person wrapped the victim in a drop cloth and then dismembered her through it?' she asked as she cut her meat.

'That's certainly the way it's looking.'

'What does Wesley say?' She met my eyes.

'I haven't had a chance to talk to him yet.' This wasn't quite true. I had not even called. For a moment, Lucy was silent. She got up and brought a bottle of Evian to the table.

'So how long do you plan to run from him?'

I pretended not to hear her, in hopes she would not start in.

'You know that's what you're doing. You're scared.'

'This is not something we should discuss,' I said. 'Especially when we're having such a pleasant evening.'

She reached for her wine.

'It's very good, by the way,' I said. 'I like pinot noir because it's light. Not heavy like a merlot. I'm not in the mood for anything heavy right now. So you made a good choice.'

She stabbed another bite of steak, getting my point.

'Tell me how things are going with Janet,' I went on. 'Mostly doing white-collar crime in D.C.? Or is she getting to spend more time at ERF these days?'

Lucy stared out the window at the moon as she slowly swirled wine in her glass. 'I

should get started on your computer.'

While I cleaned up, she disappeared into my office. I did not disturb her for a very long time, if for no other reason than I knew she was put out with me. She wanted complete openness, and I had never been good at that, not with anyone. I felt bad, as if I had let down everyone I loved. For a while, I sat at the kitchen desk, talking to Marino on the phone, and I called to catch up with my mother. I put on a pot of decaffeinated coffee and carried two mugs down the hall.

Lucy was busy at my keyboard, glasses on, a slight frown furrowing her young, smooth brow as she concentrated. I set her coffee down and looked over her head at what she was typing. It made no sense to me. It never did.

'How's it going?' I asked.

I could see my face reflected in the monitor as she struck the enter key again, executing another UNIX command.

'Good and not good,' she replied with an impatient sigh. 'The problem with applications like AOL is you can't track files unless you get into the original programming language. That's where I am now. And it's like following bread crumbs through a universe with more layers than an onion.'

I pulled up a chair and sat next to her. 'Lucy,' I said, 'how did someone send these photographs to me? Can you tell me, step by step?'

She stopped what she was doing, slipping off her glasses and setting them on the desk. She rubbed her face in her hands and massaged her temples as if she had a headache.

'You got any Tylenol?' she asked.

'No acetaminophen with alcohol.' I opened a drawer and got out a bottle of Motrin instead.

'For starters,' she said, taking two, 'this wouldn't have been easy if your screen name wasn't the same as your real one: KSCARPETTA.'

'I made it easy deliberately, for my colleagues to send me mail,' I explained one more time.

'You made it easy for anyone to send you mail.' She looked accusingly at me. 'Have you gotten crank mail before?'

'I think this goes beyond crank mail.'

'Please answer my question.'

'A few things. Nothing to worry about.' I paused, then went on, 'Generally after a lot of publicity because of some big case, a sensational trial, whatever.'

'You should change your user name.'

'No,' I said. 'Deadoc might want to send me something else. I can't change it now.'

'Oh great.' She put her glasses back on. 'So now you want him to be a pen pal.'

'Lucy, please,' I quietly said, and I was getting a headache, too. 'We both have a job to do.'

She was quiet for a moment. Then she apologized. 'I guess I'm just as overly protective of you as you've always been of me.'

'I still am.' I patted her knee. 'Okay, so he got my screen name from the AOL

directory of subscribers, right?'

She nodded. 'Let's talk about your AOL profile.'

'There's nothing in it but my professional title, my office phone number and address,' I said. 'I never entered personal details, such as marital status, date of birth, hobbies, et cetera. I have more sense than that.'

'Have you checked out his profile?' she asked. 'The one for deadoc?'

'Frankly, it never occurred to me that he would have one,' I said.

Depressed, I thought of saw marks I could not tell apart, and felt I had made yet one more mistake this day.

'Oh, he's got one, all right.' Lucy was typing again. 'He wants you to know who he is. That's why he wrote it.'

She clicked to the Member Directory, and when she opened deadoc's profile, I could not believe what was before my eyes. I scanned key words that could be searched by anyone interested in finding other users to whom they applied.

Attorney, autopsy, chief, Chief Medical Examiner, Cornell, corpse, death, dismemberment, FBI, forensic, Georgetown, Italian, Johns Hopkins, judicial, killer, lawyer, medical, pathologist, physician, Scuba, Virginia, woman.

The list went on, the professional and personal information, the hobbies, all describing me.

'It's like deadoc's saying he's you,' Lucy said.

I was dumbfounded and suddenly felt very cold. 'This is crazy.'

Lucy pushed back her chair and looked at me. 'He's got your profile. In cyberspace, on the World Wide Web, you're both the same person with two different screen names.'

'We are not the same person. I can't believe you said that.' I looked at her, shocked.

'The photographs are yours and you sent them to yourself. It was easy. You simply scanned them into your computer. No big deal. You can get portable color scanners

for four, five hundred bucks. Attach the file to the message ten, which you send to

KSCARPETTA, send to yourself, in other words…'

'Lucy,' I cut her off, 'for God's sake, that's enough.' She was silent, her face without expression.

'This is outrageous. I can't believe what you're saying.' I got up from the chair in disgust.

'If your fingerprints were on the murder weapon,' she replied, 'wouldn't you want me to tell you?'

'My fingerprints aren't on anything.'

'Aunt Kay, I'm just making the point that someone out there is stalking you, impersonating you, on the Internet. Of course you didn't do anything. But what I'm trying to impress upon you is every time someone does a search by subject because they need help from an expert like you, they're going to get deadoc's name, too.'

'How could he have known all this information about me?' I went on. 'It's not in my profile. I don't have anything in there about where I went to law school, medical school, that my heritage is Italian.'

'Maybe from things written about you over the years.'

'I suppose.' I felt as if I were coming down with something. 'Would you like a nightcap? I'm very tired.'

But she was lost again in the dark space of the UNIX environment with its strange symbols and commands like cat,:q! and vi.

'Aunt Kay, what's your password in AOL?' she asked.

'The same one I use for everything else,' I confessed, knowing she would be annoyed again.

'Shit. Don't tell me you're still using Sinbad.' She looked up at me.

'My mother's rotten cat has never been mentioned in anything ever written about me,' I defended myself.

I watched as she typed the command password and entered Sinbad.

'Do you do password aging?' she asked as if everyone should know what that meant.

'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'Where you change your password at least once a month.'

'No,' I said.

'Who else knows your password?'

'Rose knows it. And of course, now you do,' I said. 'There's no way deadoc could.'

'There's always a way. He could use a UNIX password-encryption program to encrypt every word in a dictionary. Then compare every encrypted word to your password…'

'It wasn't that complicated,' I said with conviction. 'I bet whoever did this doesn't know a thing about UNIX.'