Postmortem. Patricia Cornwell

I puzzled, “But even if someone saw this file, Lucy, he wouldn’t know the password. Only the DBA user name is listed, and you can’t get into a table, such as our case table, without knowing the password.”

“Wanna bet?”

Her fingers were poised over the keys. “If you know the DBA user name, you can change the password, make it anything you want and then you can get in. The computer doesn’t care. It lets you change passwords anytime you want without messing up your programs or anything. People like to change their passwords for security reasons.”

“So you could take the user name ‘Deep’ and assign it a new password and get into our data?”

She nodded.

“Show me.”

She looked at me with uncertainty. “But you told me not to ever go into your office data base.”

“I’m making an exception this one time.”

“And if I give ‘Deep’ a new password, Auntie Kay, it will get rid of the old one. The old one won’t be there anymore. It won’t work.”

I was jolted by the memory of what Margaret mentioned when we first discovered someone tried to pull up Lori Petersen’s case: something about the DBA password not working, causing her to have to connect the DBA grant again.

“The old password won’t work anymore because it’s been replaced by the new one I made up. So you can’t log on with the old one.”

Lucy glanced furtively at me. “But I was going to fix it.”

“Fix it?” I was barely listening.

“Your computer here. Your old password won’t work anymore because I changed it to get into SQL. But I was going to fix it, you know. I promise.”

“Later,” I quickly said. “You can fix it later. I want you to show me exactly how someone could get in.”

I was trying to make sense of it. It seemed likely, I decided, that the person who got into the OCME data base knew enough about it to realize he could create a new password for the user name found in the Public. SQL file. But he didn’t realize that in doing so he would invalidate the old password, preventing us from getting in the next time we tried. Of course we would notice that. Of course we would wonder about it, and the idea the echo might be on and echoing his commands on the screen apparently didn’t occur to him either. The break-in had to have been a onetime event! If the person had broken in before, even if the echo was off, we would have known because Margaret would have discovered the password “Throat” no longer worked. Why? Why did this person break in and try to pull up Lori Petersen’s case? Lucy’s fingers were clicking away on the keyboard.

“See,” she was saying, “pretend I’m the bad guy trying to break in. Here’s how I do it.”

She got into SQL by typing in System/Manager, and executed a connect/resource/DBA command on the user name “Deep” and a password she made up-“jumble.”

The grant was connected. It was the new DBA. With it she could get into any of the office tables. It was powerful enough for her to do anything she wished.

It was powerful enough for her to alter data.

It was powerful enough, for example, for someone to have altered Brenda Steppe’s case record so that the item “tan cloth belt” was listed in the “Clothing, Personal Effects” field.

Did he do this? He knew the details of the murders he’d committed. ‘He was reading the papers. He was obsessing over every word written about him. He would recognize an inaccuracy in the news accounts before anybody else would. He was arrogant. He wanted to flaunt his intelligence. Did he change my office data to jerk me around, to taunt me? The break-in had occurred almost two months after the detail was printed in Abby’s account of Brenda Steppe’s death.

Yet the data base was violated only once, and only recently.

The detail in Abby’s story could not have come from the OCME computer. Was it possible the detail in the computer came from the newspaper account? Perhaps he carefully went through the strangling cases in the computer, looking for something inconsistent with what Abby was writing. Perhaps when he got to Brenda Steppe’s case he found his inaccuracy. He altered the data by typing “tan cloth belt” over “a pair of nude pantyhose.”

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