“She’s finishing up in Charlottesville.”
“Finishing up?”
“We know who’s been breaking into CP&L’s computer,” she said. “A woman graduate assistant in nuclear physics. Surprise, surprise.”
“What’s her name?”
“Loren something.” She rubbed her face with her hands.
God, I should never have sat down. You know cyberspace really can make you dizzy if you stay in it too long. Lately, it’s almost been making me sick. U.- She snapped her fingers several times. “McComb. Loren McComb.”
“And she’s how old’?” I asked as I remembered Cleta saying that the name of Eddings’ girlfriend was Loren.
“Late twenties.”
“Where is she from?”
“England. But she’s actually South African. She’s black.”
“Thus explaining her poor character, according to Mrs. Eddings.”
“Huh?” Lucy looked bizarrely at me.
“What about a connection with the New Zionists?” I asked.
“Apparently she got associated with them over the net.
She’s very militant and antigovernment. My theory is she got brainwashed by them the longer they communicated.”
“Lucy,” I said, “I think she was Eddings’ girlfriend and source, and in the end, she may have helped the New Zionists kill him, probably by way of Captain Green.”
“Why would she help him and then do that?”
“She may have believed she had no choice. If she had assisted him with information that could have hurt Hand’s cause, she may have been convinced to help them or they may have threatened her.”
I thought of the Crystal Champagne in Eddings’ refrigerator, and wondered if he had planned to spend New Year’s Eve with his girlfriend.
“How would they have wanted her to help them?” Lucy was asking.
“She probably knew his burglar alarm code, maybe even the combination to his safe.” My final thought was the worst. “She may have been with him in the boat the night he died. For that matter, we don’t know that she wasn’t the one who poisoned him. After all, she’s a scientist.”
“Damn.”
“I’m assuming you’ve interviewed her,” I said.
“Janet has. McComb claims she was on the Internet about eighteen months ago when she came across a note posted on a bulletin board. Allegedly, some producer was working on a movie that had to do with terrorists taking over a nuclear power plant so they could re-create a North Korea situation and get weapons-grade plutonium, et cetera, et cetera. This alleged producer needed technical help, for which he was willing to pay.”
“Did she have a name for whoever this was?” I asked.
“He just always called himsel. “Alias,’ as if to imply he might be famous. She bit big time and the relationship began. She started sending him information from graduate papers she had access to because of her graduate assistantship. She gave this Alias asshole every recipe you might think of for essentially taking over Old Point and shipping fuel assemblies to the Arabs.”
“What about making casks?”
“Right. Steal tons of the depleted uranium from Oak Ridge. Have it sent to Iraq, Algeria, wherever, to be made into the hundred-twenty-five-ton casks. Then ship them back here where they’re stored until the big day. And she went into the whole bit about when uranium turns into plutonium inside a reactor.” Lucy stopped and glanced over at me. “She claims it never occurred to her that what she was doing might be real.”
“And was it real to her when she began breaking into CP&L’s computer?”
“That’s one she can’t explain, nor will she supply a motive.”
“I expect motive is easy,” I said. “Eddings was interested in any phone calls to Arab nations that certain people might have been making. And he got his list via the gateway in Pittsburgh.”
“You don’t think she would have realized that the New Zionists wouldn’t appreciate her helping her boyfriend, who happened to be a reporter?”
“I don’t think she cared,” I angrily said. “I suspect she enjoyed the drama of playing both sides. If nothing else, it had to make her feel very important when she probably had not felt that way before in her quiet academic world. I doubt reality hit until Eddings started poking around NAVSEA, Captain Green’s office or who knows where, and then the New Zionists were tipped that their source, Ms. McComb, was threatening the entire operation.”