Mary, Mary

Chapter 1 6

AFTER THE INTERVIEW I slouched out to Arnold Griner's desk to touch base with Paul Lebleau, the LAPD tech in charge of tracing Mary Smith's e-mails.

He tapped away on the keyboard of Griner's computer while he spoke to me in a rapid-fire patter. "Two e-mails came through two different proxy servers. First one originated from a cybercafe in Santa Monica. That means Mary Smith could be one of a few hundred people. She's got two different addresses. So far.

Both just generic Hotmail accounts, which tells us nothing really, except we do know that she signed up for the first one from the library at USC. Day before the first message."

I had to concentrate just to follow Lebleau. Did everybody out here have ADD? “What about the second e-mail?” I asked him.

“Transmission didn't originate in the same place as the first one. That much I can tell you.”

“Did it come from the L.A. area? Can you tell me that?”

“Don't know yet.”

“When will you know?”

“Probably end of the day, not that it's going to be much help.” He leaned forward and squinted at several lines of code on the screen. “Mary Smith knows what she's doing.”

There it was again - she. I understood why everyone was using the pronoun. I was doing it, too - but only for the sake of convenience.

That didn't mean I was convinced the killer was a woman, though. Not yet, anyway. The letters to Griner could repre sent some kind of persona. But whose?