‘I suppose.’ I felt as if I were coming down with something. ‘Would you like a nightcap? I’m very tired.’
But she was lost again in the dark space of the UNIX environment with its strange symbols and commands like cat, :q! and vi.
‘Aunt Kay, what’s your password in AOL?’ she asked.
‘The same one I use for everything else,’ I confessed, knowing she would be annoyed again.
‘Shit. Don’t tell me you’re still using Sinbad.’ She looked up at me.
‘My mother’s rotten cat has never been mentioned in anything ever written about me,’ I defended myself.
I watched as she typed the command password and entered Sinbad.
‘Do you do password aging?’ she asked as if everyone should know what that meant.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Where you change your password at least once a month.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Who else knows your password?’
‘Rose knows it. And of course, now you do,’ I said. ‘There’s no way deadoc could.’
‘There’s always a way. He could use a UNIX password-encryption program to encrypt every word in a dictionary. Then compare every encrypted word to your password . . .’
‘It wasn’t that complicated,’ I said with conviction. ‘I bet whoever did this doesn’t know a thing about UNIX.’
Lucy closed what she was doing, and looked curiously at me, swiveling the chair around. ‘ Why do you say that?’
‘Because he could have washed the body first so trace evidence didn’t adhere to blood. He shouldn’t have given us a photo of her hands. Now we may have her prints.’ I was leaning against the door frame, holding my aching head. ‘He’s not that smart.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t think her prints will ever matter,’ she said, getting up. ‘And by the way,’ she said as she walked by. ‘Almost any computer book’s going to tell you it’s stupid to choose a password that’s the name of your significant other or your cat.’
‘Sinbad’s not my cat. I wouldn’t have a miserable Siamese that always gives me the fisheye and stalks me whenever I walk into my mother’s house.’
‘Well, you must like him a little bit or you wouldn’t have wanted to think of him every time you log on to your computer,’ she said from down the hall.
‘I don’t like him in the least,’ I said.
The next morning, the air was crisp and clean like a fall apple, stars were out, traffic mostly truckers in the midst of long hauls. I turned off on 64 East, just beyond the state fairgrounds, and minutes later was prowling rows in short-term parking at the Richmond International Airport. I chose a space in S because I knew it would be easy for me to remember, and was reminded of my password again, of other obvious acts of carelessness caused by overload.
As I was getting my bag out of the trunk, I heard footsteps behind me and instantly wheeled around.
‘Don’t shoot.’ Marino held up his hands. It was cool enough out that I could see his breath.
‘I wish you’d whistle or something when you walk up on me in the dark,’ I said, slamming shut the trunk.
‘Oh. And bad people don’t whistle. Only good guys like me do.’ He grabbed my suitcase. ‘You want me to get that, too?’
He reached for the hard, black Pelican case I was taking with me to Memphis today, where it already had been numerous times before. Inside were human vertebrae and bone, evidence that could not leave me.
‘This stays handcuffed to me,’ I said, grabbing it and my briefcase. ‘I’m really sorry to put you out like this, Marino. Are you sure it’s necessary for you to come along?’
We had discussed this several times now, and I did not think he should accompany me. I did not see the point.
‘Like I told you, some squirrel’s playing games with you,’ he said. ‘Me, Wesley, Lucy, the entire friggin’ Bureau think I should come along. For one thing, you’ve made this exact same trip in every case, so it’s gotten predictable. And it’s been in the papers that you use this guy at LTT.’