“What information would be so important that someone would be willing to pay thousands of dollars for it and then murder a pregnant woman?” Lucy asked bluntly.
We did not know, but we had a guess. The common denominator, once again, seemed to be Ronnie Joe Waddell.
“Susan didn’t forget to print Waddell or whoever it was that was executed,” I said. ”She deliberately didn’t print him.”
“That’s the way it looks,” Wesley agreed. “Someone else asked her to conveniently forget to print him. Or to lose his cards in the event that you or another member of your staff printed him.”
I thought of Ben Stevens. The bastard.
“And this brings us back to what you and I concluded last night, Kay,” Wesley went on. “We need to go back to ‘the night Waddell was supposed to have been executed and determine who it was they strapped in the chair. And a place to start is AFIS. What we want to know is if and what records were tampered with.”
He was talking to Lucy now. “I’ve got it set up for you to go through the journal tapes, if you’re willing.”
“I’m willing,” Lucy said. “When do you want me to start?”
“You can start as soon as you want because the first step will involve only the telephone. You need to call Michele. She’s a systems analyst for Department of Criminal Justice Services and works out of the State Police headquarters. She’s involved with AFIS and will go into detail with you about how everything works. Then she’ll begin mounting the journal tapes so you can access them.”
“She doesn’t mind my doing this?” Lucy asked warily.
“On the contrary. She’s thrilled. The journal tapes are nothing more than audit logs, a record of changes made to the AFIS data base. They’re not readable, in other words. I think Michele called them ‘hex dumps’ if that means anything to you.”
“Hexadecimal, or base sixteen. Hieroglyphics, in other words,” Lucy said. “It means that I’ll have to decipher the data and write a program that will look for anything that’s gone against the identification numbers of the records you’re interested in.”
“Can you do it?” Wesley asked.
“Once I figure out the code and record layout. Why doesn’t the analyst you know do it herself?’
“We want to be as discreet as possible. It would attract notice if Michele suddenly abandoned her normal duties and started wading through journal tapes ten hours a day. You can work invisibly from your aunt’s home computer by dialing in on a diagnostic line.”
“As long as when Lucy dials in it can’t be traced back to my residence,” I said.
“It won’t be,” Wesley said.
“And no one is likely to notice that someone from the outside is dialing into the State Police computer and wading through the tapes?” I asked.
“Michele says she can maneuver it so there’s no problem.”
Unzipping a pocket of his ski jacket, Wesley slipped out a card and gave it to Lucy. “Here are her work and home phone numbers.”
“How do you know you can trust her?” Lucy asked. “If tampering has gone on, how do you know she’s not involved?”
“Michele has never been good at lying. From the time she was a little girl she would stare down at her feet and turn as red as Rudolf’s nose.”
“You knew her when she was a little girl?” Lucy looked baffled.
“And before,” Wesley said. “She’s my eldest daughter.”
9
After much debate, we came up with what seemed a reasonable plan. Lucy would stay at the Homestead with the Wesleys until Wednesday, allowing me a brief period to grapple with my problems without worrying about her welfare. After breakfast, I drove off in a gentle snow that by the time I reached Richmond had turned to rain.
By late afternoon, I had been to the office and the labs. I had conferred with Fielding and several of the forensic scientists, and had avoided Ben Stevens. I returned not a single reporters call and ignored my electronic mail, for if the health commissioner had sent me a communication, I did not want to know what it said. At half past four I was filling my car with gas at an Exxon station on Grove Avenue when a white Ford LTD pulled in behind me. I watched Marino get out, hitch up his trousers, and head to the men’s room. When he returned a moment later, he covertly glanced around as if worried that someone might have observed his trip to the toilet. Then he strolled over to me.