username BLiDedwood on August twenty-fifth. The Internet service provider, the IP, dead-ends at a proxy server, this one in Berlin.”
A proxy server Lucy has hacked into. “Sent from where?” I ask. “Obviously not from Germany.”
“Logan Airport. Same as later. That’s what he does. He captures their wireless.”
“Then he wasn’t setting up the account in Alberta, Canada, on August twenty-fifth.”
“Definitely not,” Lucy says. “He was back in this area and close enough to the airport to pick up the wireless signal.”
A boat, I’m reminded, and I send Ernie Koppel an e-mail about the swipe of what looks like garish green paint.
Anything at all from the barnacle, the broken piece of bamboo? I write to him.
“This person then creates Peggy Stanton’s Twitter account that same day, on August twenty-fifth,” Lucy continues to explain, “and submits the e-mail username BLiDedwood so Twitter can contact that address, making sure it exists, before verifying the account.”
Something old, something new, Ernie writes back almost instantly.
“Then very recently the bad guy deletes that e-mail account, BLiDedwood, and uses a different application to create a new anonymous account with the same name but a different extension, this one stealthmail,” Lucy says, as another message from Ernie lands on my phone.
If we ever find the boat, we can definitely match it. Will call when back in the lab.
“So he waits twenty-nine minutes and sends the video file and jpg to you and then the account is gone like a bridge blown out,” Lucy says. “Again, he was physically close enough to Logan Airport to send the e-mail to you from their wireless network.”
“Which also is in the area where Peggy Stanton’s body was found in the bay, maybe dumped there, possibly around the same time that e-mail was sent to me, about the same time Marino’s flight from Tampa arrived,” I reply. “I don’t understand the motive.”
“Games.” Lucy is calmly quiet, like stagnant weather before a violent storm. “We don’t know what his fantasies are, but he’s getting off on all of this.”
Someone who mocks.
“Whatever he does to his victims, it’s part of a much bigger picture,” she says, in the same tone. “The prelude, the aftermath are obsessions. It isn’t just the capturing and the killing. You don’t have to be a profiler to know that.”
He’s killed before and will kill again, or maybe already has.
“An attempt to frame Marino?” I ask.
“To fuck him up, anyway. It must be fun to cause so much trouble,” she says angrily. “I’ve let Benton know he probably should get down here.”
“Does he know about Emma Shubert’s phone?”
“I’ve suggested it’s a possibility they might want to check out, that it might connect everything to her. I’ve not stated anything as a fact.”
A mature accomplished woman, a paleontologist who takes boats to dig sites and works outdoors and is skilled in labs, I contemplate. She’s described by her colleagues as driven, indefatigable, passionate about dinosaurs, and a proactive environmentalist.
“The MAC address, the Machine Access Code, is the same for e-mails she sent, for any apps and data she downloaded before she vanished, and I didn’t tell Benton that.” Lucy continues to describe what she knows but can’t relay in detail to the FBI. “It’s the same MAC for the video file and jpg of the severed ear sent to you. The same MAC for this Twitter account.” She means Peggy Stanton’s fake account.
“Let’s talk about Twitter.” It’s my way of asking but not wanting details I’m better off not having.
When my niece says hypothetically, it usually means it’s what she did, and I leave it alone. I don’t question.
“Find someone who works for Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, any of these social networks,” she says. “There are employee lists, people who work in various capacities, and their titles and even detailed descriptions of their level of importance. Getting employee info isn’t hard, and I work my way up the chain of people a certain employee follows and is followed by, and I send a link to click on and when they do it gives me their password unbeknownst to them. And then I log on as that person.”
She tells me she leapfrogs from one impersonation to the next, and it’s hard for me to listen to what she thinks is perfectly acceptable behavior.
“And finally the system admin believes it’s a high-level colleague sending her something important she needs to look at,” she admits. “Click. And now I’m in her computer, which has all sorts of proprietary, sensitive information.