“I never assumed you did,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine why you would type in these commands. You of all people would know Lori Petersen’s case isn’t in yet. Someone else is responsible, someone other than the clerks up front or the other doctors. Except for your PC and the one in the morgue, everything else is a dumb terminal.”
A dumb terminal, she went on to remind me, is rather much what it sounds like-a brainless unit consisting of a monitor and a keyboard. The dumb terminals in our office were linked to the server in Margaret’s office. When the server was down or frozen, as was true when it was in answer mode, the dumb terminals were down or frozen, too. In other words, they’d been out of commission since late Friday-before Lori Petersen’s murder.
The data base violation had to have occurred over the weekend or at some point earlier today.
Someone, an outsider, got in.
This someone had to be familiar with the relational data base we used. A popular one, I reminded myself, and not impossible to learn. The dial-up number was Margaret’s extension, which was listed in the HHSD’s in-house directory. If you had a computer loaded with a communications software package, if you had a compatible modem, and if you knew Margaret was the computer analyst and tried her number, you could dial in. But that’s as far as you would get. You couldn’t access any office applications or data. You couldn’t even get into the electronic mailboxes without knowing the user names and passwords.
Margaret was staring at the screen through her tinted glasses. Her brow was slightly furrowed and she was nipping at a thumbnail.
I pulled up a chair and sat down. “How? The user name and password. How did anyone have access to these?”
“That’s what I’m puzzling over. Only a few of us know them, Dr. Scarpetta. You, me, the other doctors, and the people who enter the data. And our user names and passwords are different from the ones I assigned to the districts.”
Though each of my other districts was computerized with a network exactly like ours, they kept their own data and did not have on-line access to the Central Office data. It wasn’t likely in fact, I did not think it was possible-that one of my deputy chiefs from one of the other offices was responsible.
I made a lame suggestion.
“Maybe someone guessed and got lucky.”
She shook her head. “Next to impossible. I know. I’ve tried before when I’ve changed someone’s electronic mail password and can’t remember what it is. After about three tries, the computer isn’t very forgiving, the phone line’s disconnected. In addition, this version of the data base doesn’t like illegal log-ons. If you type in enough of them when you’re trying to get into SQL or into a table, you get a context error, whack the pointers out of alignment and crash the data base.”
“There’s no other place the passwords might be?” I asked. “No other place in the computer, for example, where someone might be able to find out what they are? What if the person were another programmer . . .
“Wouldn’t work.”
She was sure. “I’ve been careful about it. There is a system table where the user names and passwords are listed, but you could get into that only if you know what you’re doing. And it doesn’t matter anyway because I dropped that table a long time ago to prevent this very sort of problem.”
I didn’t say anything.
She was tentatively searching my face, looking for a sign of displeasure, for a glint in my eyes telling her I was angry or blaming her.
“It’s awful,” she blurted out. “Really. I don’t have a clue, don’t know what all the person did. The DBA isn’t working, for example.”
“Isn’t working?”
The DBA, or data base administrator, was a grant giving select persons, such as Margaret or me, authority to access all tables and do anything we wished with them. For the DBA not to be working was the equivalent of being told the key to my front door no longer fit. “What do you mean it isn’t working?”