Chaos

CHAPTER 25

I DON’T RECALL SEEING BLACK tape over the camera lens on the silver frame of Natalie’s personal computer. But I’m remembering other things that were going on at the time.

Almost concurrently, Lucy was finding oddities in the CFC computer system. Then as more weeks passed she confirmed that someone had hacked into our e-mail and possibly the database. Months later after Natalie died, Lucy began to find other reasons for concern, she says.

“I was going through her computer logs, checking all processes that were running and at what times of day and night,” she explains, and it’s the first I’ve heard her go into detail about what she did back then. “And I found possible indicators of Trojan horses, of malware parading as legitimate programs, of a number of things.”

“I assume you discussed this with Janet?” I ask because Lucy’s never discussed it with me.

“I told her I wasn’t sure. For example, there can be lots of explanations for a corrupt registry file. There can be more than one reason for a number of things. And if there’s no cause for suspicion because you’re far more worried about losing somebody you love and dealing with her seven-year-old kid? Then maybe you’re not really looking either.”

“But now you’re suspicious.”

“It’s gone way beyond that.”

“You’ve decided it was Carrie who was hacking. It was Carrie who was spying on Natalie, and basically on all of us.” I don’t ask because it’s not a question.

“She was probably using a RAT, a Remote Administrator Tool to control Natalie’s computer or computers.” Lucy moves around the small galley as she talks, opening cabinets and cupboards like a fidgety kid. “And who knows how long it had gone on.”

“How old was Natalie’s laptop?”

“She’d refurbish and upgrade her personal computers, keeping them for a while. The one in question was six years old at the time, and some of the questionable files went back that far. So it’s possible she was being hacked even earlier but those computers or devices are long gone. I can’t check.”

“If Carrie had been monitoring Natalie for at least six years,” I reply, “then it wasn’t triggered by her diagnosis or even by you and Janet getting back together. None of that had happened yet.”

It’s not adding up that the spying went on for an extended period of time. If it continued even after Janet and Lucy broke up well over a decade ago, why would Carrie still be watching Natalie? As I remember it, Carrie found her boring and referred to her as The Old Shoe. But clearly there’s a lot I don’t know, and I don’t want to interrogate my niece.

I’ve never been given a satisfactory explanation for why she and Janet reconnected several years ago after more than a decade of being apart. I don’t know if they were in contact all along or whose idea it was to get back together. But one day Janet reappeared, and next I knew Natalie was in hospice care and Desi was living here.

“Carrie’s an addict, you know,” Lucy then says as she walks into the main area of the trailer, her booted feet loud on the shiny steel floor. “She’s addicted to us. In a sick way we’re all she’s got.”

“She doesn’t have us. She’s never had us.” I feel myself harden with anger.

Lucy sits down at a workstation and wakes up the computer mounted on the built-in desk.

“Somewhere mixed in with her mutated alchemy is this raging insatiable need to be important to someone.” Lucy types a password. “And when she’s in control of her victim-because everyone she partners with is a victim-she couldn’t be more important to that person. For a while she’s God. But then it always ends the same way. And she’s alone again. The irony is, she needs us.”

“She’s not God and I don’t give a damn what she needs.” I return to the same bolted-down chair I was sitting in earlier.

“Benton says if you can’t see her as a human, you’ll never figure her out.” Lucy’s eyes meet mine. “And if you never figure her out, you’ll never stop her.”

I take a look at my phone again. Nothing. What the hell is going on? And I halfway expect that we’re going to open the trailer door and find the entire park has vanished. As if we’re in some hideous twilight zone and are being controlled remotely the same way Natalie’s laptop may have been.

“Even if Carrie’s behind all this, please explain how she would know the first thing about my father.” I’m thinking of the canned recordings that sound like him, and I type a text to Marino as I talk. “If she’s partnered with some other deranged person, how would he or she know?” I say to Lucy. “My father wasn’t recorded, as far as I know, and Carrie never met him. She hadn’t even been born by the time he died.”

“I have to think there must be something of him out there somewhere,” Lucy says, and it’s not the first time she’s said it.

“I’m not aware of it.”

“You’ve never heard a recording of him but you can still hear him in your head.”

“Like it was yesterday.”

“What about Mom?”

“I don’t know what Dorothy remembers.”

“And there’s no way she has a recording or knows about one?”

“She wasn’t helpful. I asked her that a few days ago when we were discussing her trip.” I didn’t tell her why I was curious.

“There must be some kind of recording somewhere,” Lucy says. “There has to be, and if there is? All someone had to do was get hold of it and pull out phonetic blocks and fabricate sentences. You could do the same thing to synthesize a voice speaking in Italian.”

“Why can’t we find this person?” I ask her point-blank. “What’s so different this time that you haven’t been able to trace a single communication from Tailend Charlie?”

“I think we’re dealing with someone who’s setting up virtual machines. If it were me, that’s what I’d do.”

“Please explain what you mean.”

“It means we’re sort of screwed,” she says.

“WHAT YOU DO IS hack into some open machine or network. University campuses are prime targets for this, and we’ve got more than our share around here,” Lucy explains what she believes Tailend Charlie is doing.

“Once you create your own virtual machine, you use it to create a virtual mail server,” she adds. “After every e-mail you eradicate the server and create a new one, and this goes on and on into perpetuity.”

“And there’s no trail, no IP or anything?” I assume.

“Maybe there will be an IP in the packet logs of routers along the way. But it’s the worst kind of wild-goose chase. Every time you track down an e-mail it’s gone and a new one pops up from a totally different location.”

“It sounds like something Carrie would do,” I admit. “It’s technology I can imagine her knowing about.”

“You can pretty much take it to the bank that she knows the same things I do,” Lucy says reluctantly, and it’s hard for her to give Carrie that much credit.

It’s even harder for me to hear it. Then Lucy brings up Bryce and I’ve been waiting for her to get around to him. She says he has no concept of who he leaks intel to in the course of what he considers normal conversations.

“Including the detail about a fake tattoo, which couldn’t have been visible to anyone who might have been watching.” Lucy picks up her phone. “He would have had to pull down his sock, and even so, the tattoo is small and faded after he scrubbed the hell out of it.”

She explains that when she heard about the 911 call she asked Bryce to take a photograph of the tattoo and e-mail it to her right away. She hands me the phone, and the marijuana leaf above Bryce’s right ankle is Crayola green but dull. It’s about the size of a quail egg.

Now that I’m looking at the image I’m not surprised that none of us at work today were aware of the inconspicuous temporary tattoo. I don’t see how anyone could notice it without being in close proximity to Bryce as he has his sock pulled down or off. Or maybe the wrong person somehow heard about Bryce’s botched party trick, and from there the detail somehow found its way into the false 911 complaint made to the Cambridge Police Department earlier this evening.

“The pool of suspects should be small,” Lucy concludes. “It had to be someone who knew what Bryce was doing last night.”

“What did he tell you?” I ask.

“That he got a fake tattoo at dinner with friends. Nothing was posted on social media, and he hasn’t a clue how anybody would have known beyond the buddies he was with. That’s the extent of his note to me. I’ve not actually talked to him.”

“Maybe we should.” I take another sip of water and try not to think about how empty my stomach is or how late it’s getting.

I block out the grand cru Chablis Benton and I didn’t drink, and the clammy shoes that feel glued to my bare feet. I keep checking my phone. According to Marino’s latest update a few minutes ago, the tent’s not completely set up yet because there was a problem arranging the panels around several large trees. A section of scaffolding collapsed. Then the canopied roof didn’t fit quite right. Or something like that.

“Have you ever told Bryce that when you were growing up in Miami, some of the kids in school called you a Florida cracker?” Lucy asks that next, and I’m feeling pelted by rotten eggs from my past.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I reply.

“Tailend Charlie again, and he had to get it from somewhere. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Sister Twister and Florida cracker are mentioned in the latest rhyming tripe?”

“Yes,” Lucy says, and indignation stirs in its secret place.

I feel shame that was dormant but the anger is very much alive as my privacy, my past, continues to be invaded, distorted and vandalized by some anonymous bastard bard.

“Let’s get to the bottom of this,” I say from my metal chair as I dig my hands into the pockets of my windbreaker. “Bryce knows something even if he doesn’t think he does. Let’s ask him.”

Several clicks of the mouse, and Lucy opens a file. Then in no time she has my chief of staff Bryce Clark on live video, the app her own enhanced rendition of Skype or FaceTime. She goes straight to the point, asking him if he knows much about my childhood in South Florida. Might he have been discussing it with anyone? Especially recently?

“Well we all know they were as poor as church mice,” he replies. “But I can’t say exactly what she might have mentioned when we’ve just been sitting around shooting the breeze. Is she with you?”

“Yes,” I speak for myself.

“Not that it’s very often we have nothing better to do than sit around the office shooting the breeze, right, Doctor Scarpetta?” He waves, his attractive boyish face staring blearily from the computer display. “Full disclosure?” He holds up a brown bottle of Angry Orchard hard cider with its whimsical scowling-apple-tree label. “My second one but I’m not drinking on the job since I’m home? Even if I’m talking to you?” He’s saying this to me, I think, and I’m not sure if it’s a question or a comment, if he’s being funny or not, and that’s not unusual with him.

“The friends you were telling me about earlier.” Lucy rests her chin on her hand, addressing him on the computer display as if he’s sitting across the desk from her. “Do you talk to them about work?”

“Never inappropriately,” he says, and I can tell from the background that he’s sitting in his living room and has paused the TV.

“What about her?” Lucy says to him as she looks at me.

“Are you suggesting I’m disloyal?” Bryce protests. “Are you saying I’m talking about Doctor Scarpetta behind her back?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m asking questions. Are you sure there’s no possibility one of these friends you had dinner with last night might have posted something about your tattoo online? Not that I’ve seen anything anywhere yet…”

“You won’t because there’s nothing,” he retorts. “Why would it be on the Internet?”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out. How someone might have known about it,” Lucy says.

“Perhaps someone who had no idea it could cause a problem?” I offer him a chance to save face.

“Hell no. Anyone who matters knows that stuff like that can get me into trouble because of who I work for,” he says as if suddenly I’m not present anymore. “That anything can be used against anyone in court.”

He rambles on for a long moment, suggesting in his convoluted way that it’s routine for him to be called to testify in trials and have his credibility attacked. It’s not. He’s never summoned for anything except jury duty, and he’s always excluded.

“Where did you go last night?” Lucy asks him.

“We had two other couples over for Mexican home cooking, our specialty, as you know.” Bryce smiles on the monitor, warmed by the memory. “Firecrackers with fresh jalapeños, a seven-layer dip with my famous guacamole, plus tacos, and the most amazing margaritas made with a really nice añejo tequila that we’ve been saving since Christmas? The one from your mom?”

My mind blanks out for a moment. Then I realize he’s referring to Dorothy. It dawns on me what he’s talking about.