‘And this was done over the telephone, basically,’ Wesley said.
‘Right.’
‘What about tracing that?’
‘Squad Nineteen’s already on it.’ Lucy referred to the FBI unit that investigated illegal uses of the Internet.
‘I’m not sure what the crime would be in this case,’ Wesley pointed out. ‘Obscenity, if the photos are fakes, and unfortunately, that isn’t illegal.’
‘The photographs aren’t fake,’ I said.
‘Hard to prove.’ He held my gaze.
‘What if they’re not fake?’ Ring asked.
‘Then they’re evidence,’ Wesley said, adding after a pause, ‘A violation of Title Eighteen, Section Eight-seventy-six. Mailing threatening communications.’
‘Threats towards who?’ Ring asked.
Wesley’s eyes were still on me. ‘Clearly, towards the recipient.’
‘There’s been no blatant threat,’ I reminded him. ‘All we want is enough for a warrant.’
‘We got to find the person first,’ Ring said, stretching and yawning in his chair like a cat.
‘We’re watching for him to log on again,’ Lucy replied. ‘It’s being monitored around the clock.’ She continued hitting keys on her laptop, checking the constant flow of messages. ‘But if you imagine a global telephone system with some forty million users, and no directory, no operators, no directory assistance, that’s what you’ve got with the Internet. There’s no list of membership, nor does AOL have one, unless you voluntarily choose to fill out a profile. In this case, all we have is the bogus name deadoc.’
‘How did he know where to send Dr Scarpetta’s mail?’ Grigg looked at me.
I explained, and then asked Lucy, ‘This is all done by charge card?’
She nodded. ‘That much we’ve traced. An American Express Card in the name of Ken L. Perley. A retired high-school teacher. Norfolk. Seventy, lives alone.’
‘Do we have any idea how someone might have gotten access to his card?’ Wesley asked.
‘It doesn’t appear Perley uses his credit cards much. Last time was in a Norfolk restaurant, a Red Lobster. This was on October second, when he and his son went out to dinner. The bill was twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents, including the tip, which he put on AmEx. Neither he nor the son remembers anything unusual that night. But when it was time to pay the bill, the credit card was left on the table in plain view for quite a long interval because the restaurant was very busy. At some point while the card was out, Perley went to the men’s room, and the son stepped outside to smoke.’
‘Christ. That was intelligent. Did someone from the wait staff notice anyone coming over to the table?’ Wesley said to Lucy.
‘Like I said, it was busy. We’re running down every charge made that night to get a list of customers. Problem’s going to be the people who paid cash.’
‘And I suppose it’s too soon for the AOL charges to have come up on Perley’s American Express,’ he said.
‘Right. According to AOL, the account was just opened recently. A week after the dinner at the Red Lobster, to be exact. Perley’s being very cooperative with us,’ Lucy added. ‘And AOL is leaving the account open without charge in the event the perpetrator wants to send something else.’
Wesley nodded. ‘Though we can’t assume it, we should consider that the killer, at least in the Atlantic landfill case, may have been in Norfolk as recently as a month ago.’
‘This case is definitely sounding local.’ I made that point again.
‘Possible any of the bodies could have been refrigerated?’ Ring asked.
‘Not this one,’ Wesley was quick to answer. ‘Absolutely not. This guy couldn’t stand looking at his victim. He had to cover her up, cut through the cloth, and my guess is, didn’t go very far away to dispose of her.’
‘Shades of “The Tell-Tale Heart,”‘ Ring said.
Lucy was reading something on her laptop screen, quietly hitting keys, her face tense. ‘We just got something from Squad Nineteen,’ she said, continuing to scroll down. ‘Deadoc logged on fifty-six minutes ago.’ She looked up at us. ‘He sent e-mail to the president.’
The electronic mail was sent directly to the White House, which was no great feat since the address was public and readily available to any user of the Internet. Once again, the message was oddly in lowercase and used spaces for punctuation, and it read: apologize if not I will start on france.