up her signature card when someone walks in and looks like a homeless person.”
“It’s not a good forgery, hardly a serious attempt at it,” Lucy says.
I have two transparent plastic bags side by side, the check Howard Roth never cashed, and an earlier canceled one that Machado found in a file of bank statements inside Peggy Stanton’s house.
“Not signed but written or basically drawn.” She moves close to me, her eyes locked on Toby as he finally leaves.
“I didn’t realize she was a handwriting expert,” Machado says, and now he’s openly flirting with my niece.
“I don’t have to be an expert.” She gets up and shuts her door, and Machado watches her as if she’s a tartar. “Somebody lousy.”
“Maybe he got better at it,” I reply. “June first was early on.”
Lucy sits back down. “Since when is Toby in charge of mail?”
“I sent Bryce on an errand,” I reply. “He’s taking Shaw to the vet. In fact, I’m hoping he’ll fall in love with her and decide Indy needs a sister.”
“The shaft of the letter P?” Lucy slides the plastic bags closer.
She isn’t going to talk about Toby in front of Machado. She’s got something to tell me.
“Slants differently, and you can see where the person hesitated,” she says. “Thinking it instead of doing it, and the line is slightly crooked, the shaft is. Plus, her t has a high cross bar and the other doesn’t. Her a is well formed, and the other’s not. Her n looks more like a w, and the tops are pointed, and the other’s rounded.” She shows us as she describes it, adding, “Just my thoughts. I’m not an expert.”
“You ever testify in court about this stuff?” Machado can’t take his eyes off her.
“I never testify in court about anything.”
“I don’t get it. You’d be great in court.”
“They can’t stipulate me.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer. Lucy was fired by law enforcement. She’s a hacker. A shrewd attorney would destroy her on the witness stand.
“What’s going on?” I say to her, since she’s the one who has been texting, saying she needs to see me.
“When you’re done?” It’s her way of telling me that Sil Machado needs to leave.
thirty
LUCY EXPLAINS THAT PEGGY STANTON IS CONNECTED TO the paleontologist missing in Alberta, Canada.
The fake Twitter page used to dupe Marino was set up by the same person who e-mailed the video clip of the jetboat on the Wapiti River, my niece says. The footage was recorded on Emma Shubert’s iPhone around the time she vanished thousands of miles northwest of here.
“The Twitter account with the handle Pretty Please was opened August twenty-fifth, and Twitter verified it by e-mail sent to BLiDedwood.” Lucy spells the username. “The avatar is a photo of Yvette Vickers when she was in her heyday in the fifties.”
I reply I don’t know who that is, as I look around the space my niece is in.
“A B-list actress Marino wouldn’t be familiar with. I wasn’t, either. I had to use facial-recognition software to figure it out,” Lucy says. “She’s believed to have died of natural causes in 2010, was dead the better part of a year before her body was discovered in her run-down Los Angeles home. She was mummified.”
“It’s probably not a coincidence that she was picked for the avatar.” I think of what Benton said.
A serial killer. Someone older. He targets mature women who represent someone powerful he’s obsessed with destroying.
“All Marino’s going to see when he gets the first tweet from Peggy Lynn Stanton is a picture of a beautiful sexy woman,” Lucy is saying. “Someone who describes herself as into things old with character and she doesn’t mind keeping score because hers is impressive.”
“The Twitter account was opened two days after Emma Shubert disappeared from the campsite in Grande Prairie.” I make that observation as I’m making other ones.
Lucy’s office is Spartan, brightly lit, with silvery electronic equipment that does what she directs, and thick hanks of bundled cables, docks for charging various devices, routers, scanners, and very little paper. There are no photographs, nothing personal, as if she has no life, and I know better. She has something, and I’m constantly aware of the large signet ring on her index finger, a rose-gold ring that I don’t believe is hers. I’ve never known her to wear another person’s ring, and I’m going to find out.
“Two days was enough time for someone to abduct and kill Emma Shubert and get back to this area,” Lucy speculates. “But what the hell’s