Postmortem

Chapter 14

I couldn't sleep all night. My mind wouldn't shut down and I tossed miserably between unsettling realities and savage dreams. I shot somebody and Bill was the medical examiner called to the scene. When he arrived with his black bag, he was accompanied by a beautiful woman I did not know…

My eyes flew open in the dark, my heart squeezed as if by a cold hand. I got out of bed long before my alarm went off and drove to work in a fog of depression.

I don't know when in my life I'd ever felt so lonely and withdrawn. I scarcely spoke to anyone at the office, and my staff began to cast nervous, strange glances my way.

Several times I came close to calling Bill, my resolve trembling like a tree about to fall. It finally fell shortly before noon. His secretary brightly told me "Mr. Boltz" was on vacation and wouldn't be back until the first of July.

I left no message. The vacation wasn't planned, I knew. I also knew why he didn't say a word about it to me. In the past he would have told me. The past was past. There would be no resolution or lame apologies or outright lies. He'd cut me off forever because he couldn't face his own sins.

After lunch I went upstairs to serology and was surprised to find Betty and Wingo with their backs to the door, their heads together as they looked at something white inside a small plastic bag.

I said, "Hello," and came inside.

Wingo nervously tucked the bag in a pocket of Betty's lab coat, as if slipping her money.

"You finished downstairs?" I pretended I was too preoccupied to have noticed this peculiar transaction.

"Uh, yeah. Sure am, Dr. Scarpetta," he quickly replied, on.his way out. "McFee, the guy shot last night released him a little while ago. And the burn victims coming in from Albemarle won't be in till four or so."

"Fine. We'll hold them until the morning."

"You got it," I heard him say from the hallway.

Spread out on the wide table in the center of the room was the reason for my visit. The blue jumpsuit. It looked flat and mundane, neatly smoothed out and zipped up to the collar. It could have belonged to anybody. There were numerous pockets, and I think I must have checked each one half a dozen times hoping to find anything that might hint at who he was, but they were empty. There were large holes cut in the legs and sleeves where Betty had removed swatches of bloodstained fabric.

"Any luck grouping the blood?" I asked, trying not to stare at the plastic bag peeking out of the top of her pocket.

"I've got some of it worked out." She motioned me to follow her to her office.

On her desk was a legal pad scribbled with notes and numbers that would look like hieroglyphics to the uninitiated.

"Henna Yarborough's blood type is B," she began. "We're lucky on that count because it's not all that common. In Virginia, about twelve percent of the population's type B. Her PGM's one plus, one-minus. Her PEP is A-one, EAP is CB, ADA-one and AK-one: The subsystems, unfortunately, are very common, up there in the eighty-nine percent and above of Virginia's population. "

"How common is the actual configuration?"

The plastic peeking out of the top of her pocket was beginning to unsettle me.

She started stabbing out digits on a calculator, multiplying the percentages and dividing by the number of subsystems she had. "About seventeen percent. Seventeen out of a hundred people could have that configuration."

"Not exactly rare," I muttered.

"Not unless sparrows are rare."

"What about the bloodstains on the jumpsuit?"

"We were lucky. The jumpsuit must have already air-dried by the time the street person found it. It's in amazingly good shape. I got all the subsystems except an EAR It's consistent with Henna Yarborough's blood. DNA should be able to tell us with certainty, but we're talking about a month to six weeks."

I commented abstractedly, "We ought to buy stock in the lab."

Her eyes lingered on me and grew soft. "You look absolutely ragged, Kay."

"That obvious, is it?"

"Obvious to me."

I didn't say anything.

"Don't let all this get to you. After thirty years of this misery, I've learned the hard way…"

"What's Wingo up to?" I foolishly blurted out.

Surprised, she faltered. "Wingo? Well…"

I was staring at her pocket.

She laughed uneasily, patted it. "Oh, this. Just a little private work he's asked me to do."

That was as much as she intended to say. Maybe Wingo had other real worries in his life. Maybe he was having an HIV test done on the sly. Good God, don't let him have AIDS.

Gathering my fragmented thoughts, I asked, "What about the fibers? Anything?"

Betty had compared fibers from the jumpsuit to fibers left at Lori Petersen's scene and to a few fibers found on Henna Yarborough's body.

"The fibers found on the Petersen windowsill could have come from the jumpsuit," she told me, "or they could have come from any number of dark blue cotton-polyester blend twills."

In court, I dismally thought, the comparison's not going to mean a thing because the twill is about as generic as dimestore typing paper - you start looking for it and you're going to find it all over the place. It could have come from someone's work pants. It could, for that matter, have come from a paramedic's or cop's uniform.

There was another disappointment. Betty was sure the fibers I found on Henna Yarborough's body were not from the jumpsuit.

"They're cotton," she was saying. "They may have come from something she was wearing at some point earlier in the day, or even a bath towel. Who knows? People carry all sorts of fibers on their person. But I'm not surprised the jumpsuit didn't leave fibers."

"Because twill fabrics, such as the fabric of the jumpsuit, are very smooth. They rarely leave fibers unless the fabric comes in contact with something abrasive."

"Such as a brick window ledge or a rough wooden sill, as in Lori's case."

"Possibly, and the dark fibers we found in her case may have come from a jumpsuit. Maybe even this one. But I don't think we're ever going to know."

I went back downstairs to my office and sat at my desk for a while, thinking. Unlocking the drawer, I pulled out the five murdered women's cases.

I began looking for anything I might have missed. Once again, I was groping for a connection.

What did these five women have in common? Why did the killer pick them? How did he come in contact with them? There had to be a link. In my soul, I didn't believe it was a random selection, that he just cruised around looking for a likely candidate. I believed he selected them for a reason. He had some sort of contact with them first, and perhaps followed them home.

Geographics, jobs, physical appearances. There was no common denominator. I tried the reverse, the least common denominator, end I continued to go back to Cecile Tyler's record.

She was black. The four other victims were white. I was bothered by this in the beginning, and I was still bothered by it now. Did the killer make a mistake? Perhaps he didn't realize she was black. Was he really after somebody else? Her friend Bobbi, for example? I flipped pages, scanning the autopsy report I'd dictated. I perused evidence receipts, call sheets and an old hospital chart from St. Luke's, where she'd been treated five years earlier for an ectopic pregnancy. When I got to the police report, I looked at the name of the only relative listed, a sister in Madras, Oregon. From her Marino got information about Cecile's background, about her failed marriage to the dentist now living in Tidewater.

X rays sounded like saw blades bending as I pulled them out of manila envelopes and held them up, one by one, to the light of my desk lamp. Cecile had no skeletal injuries other than a healed impaction fracture of her left elbow. The age of the injury was impossible to tell but I knew it wasn't fresh. It could go back too many years to matter.

Again, I contemplated the VMC connection. Both Lori Petersen and Brenda Steppe had recently been in the hospital's ER. Lori was there because her rotation was trauma surgery. Brenda was treated there after her automobile accident. Perhaps it was too farfetched to think Cecile might have been treated there as well for her fractured elbow. At this point, I was willing to explore anything.

I dialed Cecile's sister's number listed on Marino's report.

After five rings the receiver was picked up.

"Hello?"

It was a poor connection and clearly I'd made a mistake.

"I'm sorry, I must have the wrong number," I quickly said.

"Pardon?"

I repeated myself, louder.

"What number were you dialing?"

The voice was cultured and Virginian and seemed that of a female in her twenties.

I recited the number.

"That's this number. With whom did you wish to speak?"

"Fran O'Connor," I read from the report.

The young, cultured voice replied, "Speaking."

I told her who I was and heard a faint gasp. "As I understand it, you are Cecile Tyler's sister."

"Yes. Dear Lord. I don't want to talk about it. Please."

"Mrs. O'Connor, I'm terribly sorry about Cecile. I'm the medical examiner working her case, and I'm calling to find out if you know how your sister fractured her left elbow. She has a healed fracture of her left elbow. I'm looking at the X rays now."

Hesitation. I could hear her thinking.

"It was a jogging accident. She was jogging on a sidewalk and tripped, landing on her hands. One of her elbows was fractured from the impact. I remember because she wore a cast for three months during one of the hottest summers on record. She was miserable."

"That summer? Was this in Oregon?"

"No, Cecile never lived in Oregon. This was in Fredericksburg, where we grew up."

"How long ago was the jogging accident?"

Another pause. "Nine, maybe ten years ago."

"Where was she treated?"

"I don't know. A hospital in Fredericksburg. I can't remember the name."

Cecile's impaction fracture wasn't treated at VMC, and the injury had occurred much too long ago to matter. But I no longer cared.

I never met Cecile Tyler in life.

I never talked to her.

I just assumed she would sound "black."

"Mrs. O'Connor, are you black?"

"Of course I'm black."

She sounded upset.

"Did your sister talk like you?"

"Talk like me?" she asked, her voice rising.

"I know it seems an odd question…"

"You mean did she talk white like me?" she went on, outraged. "Yes! She did! Isn't that what education's all about? So black people can talk white?"

"Please," I said with feeling. "I certainly didn't intend to offend you. But it's important…" I was apologizing to a dial tone.

Lucy knew about the fifth strangling. She knew about all of the slain young women. She also knew I kept a.38 in my bedroom and had asked me about it twice since dinner.

"Lucy," I said as I rinsed plates and loaded them in the dish washer, "I don't want you thinking about guns. I wouldn't own one if I didn't live alone."

I'd been strongly tempted to hide it where she would never think to look. But after the episode with the modem, which I had guiltily reconnected to my home computer days ago, I vowed to be up front with her. The.38 remained high on my closet shelf, inside its shoebox, while Lucy was in town. The gun wasn't loaded. These days, I unloaded it in the morning and reloaded it before bed. As for the Silvertip cartridges-those I hid where she would never think to look.

When I faced her, her eyes were huge. "You know why I have a gun, Lucy. I think you understand how dangerous they are…"

"They kill people."

"Yes," I replied as we went into the living room. "They most certainly can."

"You have it so you can kill somebody."

"I don't like to think about that," I told her seriously.

"Well, it's true," she persisted. "That's why you keep it. Because of bad people. That's why."

I picked up the remote control and switched on the television.

Lucy pushed up the sleeves of her pink sweatshirt and complained, "It's hot in here, Auntie Kay. Why's it always so hot in here?"

"Would you like me to turn up the air-conditioning?"

I abstractedly flipped through the television schedule.

"No. I hate air-conditioning."

I lit a cigarette and she complained about that, too.

"Your office is hot and always stinks like cigarettes. I open the window and still it stinks. Mom says you shouldn't smoke. You're a doctor and you smoke. Mom says you should know better."

Dorothy had called late the night before. She was somewhere in California, I couldn't remember where, with her illustrator husband. It was all I could do to be civil to her. I wanted to remind her, "You have a daughter, flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. Remember Lucy? Remember her?"

Instead, I was reserved, almost gracious, mostly out of consideration for Lucy, who was sitting at the table, her lips pressed together.

Lucy talked to her mother for maybe ten minutes, and had nothing to say afterward. Ever since, she'd been all over me, critical, snappish and bossy. She'd been the same way during the day, according to Bertha, who this evening had referred to her as a "fusspot."

Bertha told me Lucy had scarcely set foot outside my office. She sat in front of the computer from the moment I left the house until the moment I returned. Bertha gave up calling her into the kitchen for meals. Lucy ate at my desk.

The sitcom on the set seemed all the more absurd because Lucy and I were having our own sitcom in the living room.

"Andy says it's more dangerous to own a gun and not know how to use it than if you don't own one," she loudly announced.

"Andy?" I said absentmindedly.

"The one before Ralph. He used to go to the junkyard and shoot bottles. He could hit them from a long ways away. I bet you couldn't."

She looked accusingly at me.

"You're right. I probably couldn't shoot as well as Andy."

"See!"

I didn't tell her I actually knew quite a lot about firearms. Before I bought my stainless-steel Ruger.38, I went down to the indoor range in the basement of my building and experimented with an assortment of handguns from the firearms lab, all this under the professional supervision of one of the examiners. I practiced from time to time, and I wasn't a bad shot. I didn't think I would hesitate if the need ever arose. I also didn't intend to discuss the matter further with my niece.

Very quietly I asked, "Lucy, why are you picking on me?"

"Because you're a stupid ass!" Her eyes filled with tears. "You're just an old stupid ass and if you tried to, you'd hurt yourself or he'd get it away from you! And then you'd be gone, too! If you tried to, he'd shoot you with it just like it happens on TV!"

"If I tried to?" I puzzled. "If I tried to what, Lucy?"

"If you tried to get somebody first."

She angrily wiped away tears, her narrow chest heaving. I stared blindly at the family circus on TV and didn't know what to say. My impulse was to retreat to my office and shut the door, to lose myself in my work for a while, but hesitantly I moved over and pulled her close. We sat like this for the longest time, saying nothing.

I wondered who she talked to at home. I couldn't imagine her having any conversations of substance with my sister. Dorothy and her children's books had been lauded by various critics as "extraordinarily insightful" and "deep" and "full of feeling."

What a dismal irony. Dorothy gave the best she had to juvenile characters who didn't exist. She nurtured them. She spent long hours contemplating their every detail, from the way their hair was combed to the clothes they wore, to their trials and rites of passage. All the while Lucy was starved for attention.

I thought of the times Lucy and I spent together when I lived in Miami, of the holidays with her, my mother and Dorothy. I thought of Lucy's last visit here. I couldn't recall her ever mentioning the names of friends. I don't think she had any. She would talk about her teachers, her mother's ragtag assortment of "boyfriends," Mrs. Spooner across the street, Jake the yardman and the endless parade of maids. Lucy was a tiny, bespectacled know-it-all whom older children resented and children her age didn't understand. She was out of sync. I think I was exactly like her when I was her age.

A peaceful warmth had settled over both of us. I said into her hair, "Someone asked me a question the other day."

"About what?"

"About trust. Someone asked me who I trusted more than anybody else in the world. And you know what?"

She leaned her head back, looking up at me.

"I think that person is you."

"Do you really?" she asked, incredulously. "More than anybody?"

I nodded and quietly went on, "That being the case, I'm going to ask you to help me with something."

She sat up and stared at me, her eyes alert and utterly thrilled. "Oh, sure! Just ask me! I'll help you, Auntie Kay!"

"I need to figure out how someone managed to break into the computer downtown."

"I didn't do it," she instantly blurted out, a stricken look on her face. "I already told you I didn't."

"I believe you. But someone did it, Lucy. Maybe you can help me figure it out?"

I didn't think she could but had felt an impulse to give her a chance.

Energized and excited again, she said confidently, "Anybody could do it because it's easy."

"Easy?"

I had to smile.

"Because of System/Manager."

I stared at her in open astonishment. "How do you know about System/Manager?"

"It's in the book. He's God."

At times like these I was reminded, if not unnerved. Lucy's IQ. The first time she was given an IQ test she scored so high the counselor insisted on testing her again because there had to be "some mistake."

There was. The second time Lucy scored ten points higher.

"That's how you get into, SQL to begin with," she was rattling on. "See, you can't create any grants unless you got one to start with. That's why you've got System/Manager. God. You get into SQL with Him, and then you can create anything you want."

Anything you want, it dawned on me. Such as all of the user names and passwords assigned to my offices. This was a terrible revelation, so simplistic it had never occurred to me. I supposed it never occurred to Margaret either.

"All someone's got to do is get in," Lucy matter-of-factly went on. "And if he knows about God, he can create any grant he wants, make it the DBA, and then he can get into your data base."

In my office, the data base administrator, or DBA, was "DEEP/THROAT."

Margaret did have a sense of humor now and then.

"So you get into SQL by connecting System/Manager, then you type in: GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE, DBA TO AUNTIE IDENTIFIED BY KAY."

"Maybe that's what happened," I thought out loud. "And with the DBA, someone not only could view but actually alter the data."

"Sure! He could do anything because God's told him he can. The DBA is Jesus."

Her theological allusions were so outrageous I laughed in spite of myself.

"That's how I got into SQL to begin with," she confessed. "Since you didn't tell me any passwords or anything. I wanted to get into SQL so I could try out some of the commands in the book. I just gave your DBA user name a password I made up so I could get in."

"Wait a minute," I slowed her down. "Wait a minute! What do you mean you assigned a password you made up to my DBA user name? How did you know what my user name is? I didn't tell you."

She explained, "It's in your grants file. I found it in the Home directory where you have all the INP's for the tables you created. You have a file called 'Grants. SQL' where you created all the public synonyms for your tables."

Actually, I hadn't created those tables. Margaret did last year and I loaded my home computer with the boxes of backup diskettes she gave me. Was it possible there was a similar "Grants" file in the OCME computer? I took hold of Lucy's hand and we got up from the couch. Eagerly, she followed me into my office. I sat her down in front of the computer and pulled up the ottoman.

We got into the communications software package and typed in the number for Margaret's office downtown. We watched the countdown at the bottom of the screen as the computer dialed. Almost immediately it announced we were connected, and several commands later the screen was dark and flashing with a green C prompt. My computer suddenly was a looking glass. On the other side were the secrets of my office ten miles from here.

It made me slightly uneasy to know that even as we worked the call was being traced. I'd have to remember to tell Wesley so he didn't waste his time figuring out that the perpetrator, in this instance, was me.

"Do a find file," I said, "for anything that might be called 'Grants.'

Lucy did. The C prompt came back with the message "No files found."

We tried again. We tried looking for a file called "Synonyms" and still had no luck. Then she got the idea of trying to find any file with the extension "SQL" because ordinarily that was the extension for any file containing SQL commands, commands such as the ones used to create public synonyms on the office data tables. Scores of file names rolled up the screen. One caught our attention. It was called "Public. SQL."

Lucy opened the file and we watched it roll past. My excitement was equaled by my dismay. It contained the commands Margaret wrote and executed long ago when she created public synonyms for all of the tables she created in the office data base commands like CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM CASE FOR DEEP.CASE.

I was not a computer programmer. I'd heard of public synonyms but was not entirely sure what they were.

Lucy was flipping through a manual. She got to the section on public synonyms and confidently volunteered, "See, it's neat. When you create a table, you have to create it under a user name and password."

She looked up at me, her eyes bright behind her thick glasses.

"Okay," I said. "That makes sense."

"So if your user name is 'Auntie' and your password is 'Kay,' then when you create a table called 'Games' or something, the name the computer gives it is really 'Auntie.Games.'

It attaches the table name to the user name it was created under. If you don't want to bother typing in 'Auntie.Games' every time you want to get into the table, you create a public synonym. You type the command CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM GAMES FOR AUNTIE.GAMES. It sort of renames the table so it's just called 'Games.'"

I stared at the long list of commands on the screen, a list revealing every table in the OCME computer, a list revealing the DBA user name each table was created under.

I puzzled, "But even if someone saw this file, Lucy, he wouldn't know the password. Only the DBA user name is listed, and you can't get into a table, such as our case table, without knowing the password."

"Wanna bet?"

Her fingers were poised over the keys. "If you know the DBA user name, you can change the password, make it anything you want and then you can get in. The computer doesn't care. It lets you change passwords anytime you want without messing up your programs or anything. People like to change their passwords for security reasons."

"So you could take the user name 'Deep' and assign it a new password and get into our data?"

She nodded.

"Show me."

She looked at me with uncertainty. "But you told me not to ever go into your office data base."

"I'm making an exception this one time."

"And if I give 'Deep' a new password, Auntie Kay, it will get rid of the old one. The old one won't be there anymore. It won't work."

I was jolted by the memory of what Margaret mentioned when we first discovered someone tried to pull up Lori Petersen's case: something about the DBA password not working, causing her to have to connect the DBA grant again.

"The old password won't work anymore because it's been replaced by the new one I made up. So you can't log on with the old one."

Lucy glanced furtively at me. "But I was going to fix it."

"Fix it?" I was barely listening.

"Your computer here. Your old password won't work anymore because I changed it to get into SQL. But I was going to fix it, you know. I promise."

"Later," I quickly said. "You can fix it later. I want you to show me exactly how someone could get in."

I was trying to make sense of it. It seemed likely, I decided, that the person who got into the OCME data base knew enough about it to realize he could create a new password for the user name found in the Public. SQL file. But he didn't realize that in doing so he would invalidate the old password, preventing us from getting in the next time we tried. Of course we would notice that. Of course we would wonder about it, and the idea the echo might be on and echoing his commands on the screen apparently didn't occur to him either. The break-in had to have been a onetime event! If the person had broken in before, even if the echo was off, we would have known because Margaret would have discovered the password "Throat" no longer worked. Why? Why did this person break in and try to pull up Lori Petersen's case? Lucy's fingers were clicking away on the keyboard.

"See," she was saying, "pretend I'm the bad guy trying to break in. Here's how I do it."

She got into SQL by typing in System/Manager, and executed a connect/resource/DBA command on the user name "Deep" and a password she made up-"jumble."

The grant was connected. It was the new DBA. With it she could get into any of the office tables. It was powerful enough for her to do anything she wished.

It was powerful enough for her to alter data.

It was powerful enough, for example, for someone to have altered Brenda Steppe's case record so that the item "tan cloth belt" was listed in the "Clothing, Personal Effects" field.

Did he do this? He knew the details of the murders he'd committed. 'He was reading the papers. He was obsessing over every word written about him. He would recognize an inaccuracy in the news accounts before anybody else would. He was arrogant. He wanted to flaunt his intelligence. Did he change my office data to jerk me around, to taunt me? The break-in had occurred almost two months after the detail was printed in Abby's account of Brenda Steppe's death.

Yet the data base was violated only once, and only recently.

The detail in Abby's story could not have come from the OCME computer. Was it possible the detail in the computer came from the newspaper account? Perhaps he carefully went through the strangling cases in the computer, looking for something inconsistent with what Abby was writing. Perhaps when he got to Brenda Steppe's case he found his inaccuracy. He altered the data by typing "tan cloth belt" over "a pair of nude pantyhose."

Perhaps the last thing he did before logging off was to try to pull up Lori Petersen's case, out of curiosity, if for no other reason. This would explain why those commands were what Margaret found on the screen.

Was my paranoia running off with my reason? Could there be a connection between this and the mislabeled PERK as well? The cardboard file was spangled with a glittery residue. What if it hadn't come from my hands? "Lucy," I asked, "would there be any way to know if someone has altered data in my office computer?"

She said without pause, "You back up the data, don't you? Someone does an export, doesn't he?"

"Yes."

"Then you could get an export that's old, import it into a computer and see if the old data's different."

"The problem," I considered, "is even if I discovered an alteration, I can't say for sure it wasn't the result of an update to the record one of my clerks made. The cases are in a state of constant flux because reports trickle in for weeks, months, after the case has been initially entered."

"I guess you got to ask them, Auntie Kay. Ask them if they changed it. If they say no, and if you find an old export that's different from the stuff in the computer now, wouldn't that help?"

I admitted, "It might."

She changed the password back to what it was supposed to be. We logged off and cleared the screen so no one would see the commands on the OCME computer in the morning.

It was almost eleven o'clock. I called Margaret at home and she sounded groggy as I questioned her about the export disks and asked if she might have anything dating back prior to the time the computer was broken into.

She offered me the expected disappointment. "No, Dr. Scarpetta. The office wouldn't have anything that old. We do a new export at the end of every day, and the previous export is formatted, then updated."

"Damn. Somehow I've got to get hold of a version of the data base that hasn't been updated for the past several weeks."

Silence.

"Wait a minute," she muttered. "I might have a flat file…"

"Of what?"

"I don't know…" She hesitated. "I guess the last six months of data or so. Vital Statistics wants our data, and a couple of weeks ago I was experimenting, importing the districts' data into one partition and spooling all the case data off into a file to see how it looks. Eventually, I'm supposed to ship it to them over the phone, straight into their mainframe-"

"How many weeks ago?" I interrupted. "How many weeks ago did you spool it off?"

"The first of the month… let's see, I think I did it around the first of June."

My nerves were buzzing. I had to know. At the very least, my office couldn't be blamed for leaks if I could prove data were altered in the computer after the stories appeared in the papers.

"I need a printout of that flat file immediately," I told her.

There was a long silence. She seemed uncertain when she replied, "I had some problems with the procedure."

Another pause. "But I can give you what I've got, first thing in the morning."

Glancing at my watch, I next dialed Abby's pager number.

Five minutes later, I had her on the line.

"Abby, I know your sources are sacred, but there's something I must know."

She didn't respond.

"In your account of Brenda Steppe's murder, you wrote she was strangled with a tan cloth belt. Where did you get this detail?"

"I can't-"

"Please. It's very important. I simply must know the source."

After a long pause, she said, "No names. A squad member. It was a squad member, okay? One of the guys at the scene. I know a lot of squad members…"

"The information in no shape or form came from my office?"

"Absolutely not," she said emphatically. "You're worrying about the computer break-in Sergeant Marino mentioned… I swear, nothing I've printed came from that, came from your office."

It was out before I thought twice. "Whoever got in, Abby, may have typed this tan cloth belt detail into the case table to make it appear you got it from my office, that my office is the leak. The detail is inaccurate. I don't believe it was ever in our computer. I think whoever broke in got the detail from your story."

"Good God" was all she said.