I glanced over at the Clary house as curtains moved in the kitchen window.
“Jesus, I’m out of here.” Marino headed across the street.
“You want me to alert Neils about her car?” I called after him.
“Yeah,” he yelled back. “That’d be good.”
My house was lit up when I got home and good smells came from the kitchen. A fire blazed and two places had been set on the butler’s table in front of it. Dropping my medical bag on the couch, I looked around and listened. From my study across the hall came the faint, rapid clicking of keys.
“Lucy?” I called out, slipping off my gloves and unbuttoning my coat.
“I’m in here.”
Keys continued to click.
“What have you been cooking?”
“Dinner.”
I headed for my study, where I found my niece sitting at my desk staring intensely at the computer monitor. I was stunned when I noticed the pound sign prompt. She was in UNIX. Somehow she had dialed into the computer downtown.
“How did you do that?” I asked. “I didn’t tell you the dial-in command, user name, password, or anything.”
‘You didn’t have to tell me. I found the file that told me what the bat command is. Plus, you’ve got some programs in here with your user name and password coded in so you don’t get prompted for them. A good shortcut but risky. Your user name is Marley and password is brain.”
“You’re dangerous.” I pulled up a chair.
“Who’s Marley?”
She continued to type.
“We had assigned seating in medical school. Marley Scates sat next to me in labs for two years. He’s a neurosurgeon somewhere.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“We never dated.”
“Was he in love with you?”
“You ask too many questions, Lucy. You can’t just ask people anything you want.”
“Yes I can. They don’t have to answer.”
“It’s offensive.”
“I think I’ve figured out how someone got into your directory, Aunt Kay. Remember I told you about users that came with the software?”
“Yes.”
“There’s one called demo that has root privileges but no password assigned to it. My guess is that this is what somebody used and I’ll show you what probably happened.”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard without pause as she talked. “What I’m doing now is going into the system administrator’s menu to check out the log-in accounting. We’re going to search for a specific user. In the case, root. Now we’ll hit g to go and boom. There it M She ran her finger across a line on the screen. .
“On December sixteenth at five-oh-six in the afternoon, someone logged in from a device called t-t-y-fourteen. This person had root privileges and we’ll assume is the person who went into your directory. I don’t know what he looked at. But twenty minutes later, at five twenty-six, he tried to send the note ‘I can’t find it’ to t-t-y-oh-seven and inadvertently created a file. He logged out at five-thirty-two, making the total time of the session twenty-six minutes. And it doesn’t appear anything was printed, by the way. I took a look at the printer spooler log, which shows files printed. I didn’t see anything that caught my attention.”
“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. Someone tried to send a note from t-t-y-fourteen to t-t-y-oh seven, “ I said.
“Yes. And I checked. Both of those devices are terminals.”
“How can we determine whose office those terminals are in?” I asked.
“I’m surprised there’s not a list somewhere in here. But I haven’t found it yet. If all else fails, you can check the cables leading to the terminals. Usually, they’re tagged. And if you’re interested in my personal opinion, I don’t think your computer analyst is the spy. In the first place, she knows your user name and password and would have no need to log in with demo. Also, since I assume the mini is in her office, then I also assume she uses the system terminal.”
“She does.”
“The device name for your system terminal is t-t-y-b.”
“Good.”
“Another way to figure out who did this would be to sneak into someone’s office when they aren’t there but are logged in. All you’ve got to do is go into UNIX and type ‘who am I’ and the system will tell you.”