Cruel and Unusual ks-4

by Patricia Cornwell

  “He could have dragged him back there in the woods.”

  “There's a fence.”

  “It's not very high, maybe five feet high,” I pointed out. “At the very least, he could have left the body behind the Dumpster. As it was, if you drove back here, the body was in plain sight.”

  Marino looked around in silence, shining the flashlight through the chain-link fence. Raindrops streaked through the narrow beam like a million small nails driven down from heaven. I could barely bend my fingers. My hair was soaked and icy water was trickling down my neck. We returned to the car and he switched the heater up high.

  “Trent and his guys are all hung up on the Dumpster theory, the location of its door and so on,” he said. “My personal opinion is the Dumpster's only role in this is it was a damn easel for the squirrel to prop his work of art against.”

  I looked out through the rain.

  “The point is,” he went on in a hard voice, “he didn't bring the kid back here to conceal the body but to make sure it was found. But the guys with Henrico just don't see it. I not only see it, I feel it like something breathing down the back of my neck.”

  I continued staring out at the Dumpster, the image of Eddie Heath's small body propped against it so vivid it was as if I had been present when he was found. The realization struck me suddenly and hard.

  “When was the last time you went through the Robyn Naismith case?” I asked.

  “It doesn't matter. I remember everything about it,” Marino said, staring straight ahead. “I was waiting to see if it would cross your mind. It hit me the first time I came out here.”

  3

  That night I built a fire and ate vegetable soup in front of it as freezing rain mixed with snow. I had switched off lamps and drawn draperies back from the sliding glass doors. Grass was frosted white, rhododendron leaves curled tight, winter-bare trees backlit by the moon.

  The day had drained me, as if a greedy, dark force had sucked the light right out of my being. I felt the invasive hands of a prison guard named Helen, and smelled the stale stench of hovels that once had housed remorseless, hateful men. I remembered holding slides up to lamplight in a hotel bar in New Orleans at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences' annual meeting. Robyn Naismith's homicide was then unsolved, and to discuss what had been done to her as Mardi Gras revelers loudly drifted past had somehow seemed ghastly.

  She had been beaten and bullied, and stabbed to death, it was believed, in her living room. But it was Waddell's postmortem acts that had shocked people most, his uncommon and creepy ritual. After she was dead, he undressed her. If he raped her, there was no evidence of it. His preference, it seemed, was to bite and repeatedly penetrate the fleshier parts of her body with a knife. When her friend from work stopped by to check on her, she found Robyn's battered body propped against the television, head drooping forward, arms by her sides, legs straight out, and clothing piled nearby. She looked like a bloody, life-size doll returned to its place after a session of make-believe and play that had turned into a horror.

  The court testimony of a psychiatrist was that after Waddell had murdered her, he was overcome by remorse and had sat talking to her body for perhaps hours. A forensic psychologist for the Commonwealth speculated quite the opposite, that Waddell knew Robyn was a television personality and his act of propping her body against the television set was symbolic. He was watching her on TV again and fantasizing. He was returning her to the medium that had brought about their introduction, and this, of course, implied premeditation. The nuances and twists in the endless analyses got only more complicated with time.

  The grotesque display of that twenty-seven-Year-old anchorwoman's body was Waddell's special signature. Now a little boy was dead ten years later and someone had signed his work - on the eve of Waddell's execution - the same way.

  I made coffee, poured it into a thermos, and carried it into my study. Sitting at my desk, I booted up my computer and dialed into the one downtown. I had yet to see the printout of the search Margaret had conducted for me, though I suspected it was one of the reports in the depressingly large stack of paperwork that had been in my box late Friday afternoon. The output file, however, would still be on the hard disk.

  At the UNIX log-in I typed my user name and password and was greeted by the flashing word mail. Margaret, my computer analyst, had sent me a message.

  “Check flesh file,” it read “That's really awful,” I muttered, as if Margaret could hear.

  Changing to the directory called Chief, where Margaret routinely directed output and copied files I had requested, I brought up the file she had named Flesh.

  It was quite large because Margaret had selected from all manners of death and then merged the data with what she had generated from the Trauma Registry. Unsurprisingly, most of the cases the computer had picked up were accidents in which limbs and tissue had been lost in vehicular crashes and misadventures with machines. Four cases were homicides in which the bodies bore bite marks. Two of those victims had been stabbed, the other two strangled. One of the victims was an adult male, two were adult females, and one was a female only six years old. I jotted down case numbers and ICD-9 codes.

  Next I began scanning screen after screen of the Trauma Registry's records of victims who had survived long enough to be admitted to a hospital. I expected the information to be a problem, and it was. Hospitals released patient data only after it had been as sterilized and depersonalized as operating rooms. For purposes of confidentiality, names. Social Security numbers, and other identifiers were stripped away. There was no common link as the person traveled through the paperwork labyrinth of rescue squads, emergency rooms, various police departments, and other agencies. The sorry end of the story was that data about a victim might reside in six different agency data bases and never be matched, especially if there had been any entry errors along the way. It was possible, therefore, for me to discover a case that aroused my interest without having much hope of figuring out who the patient was or if he or she had eventually died.

  Making a note of Trauma Registry records that might prove interesting, I exited the file. Finally, I ran a list command to see what old data reports, memos, or notes in my directory I could remove to free up space on the hard disk. That was when I spotted a file I did not understand.

  The name of it was tty07. It was only sixteen bytes in size and the date and time were December 16, this past Thursday, at 4:26 in the afternoon. The file's contents was one alarming sentence:

  I can't find it.

  Reaching for the phone, I started to call Margaret at home and then stopped. The directory Chief and its files were secure. Though anyone could change to my directory, unless he logged in with my user name and password, he should not be able to list the files in Chief or read them. Margaret should be the only person besides me who knew my password. If she had gone into my directory, what was it she could not find and who was she saying this to? Margaret wouldn't, I thought, staring intensely at that one brief sentence on the screen.

  Yet I was unsure, and I thought of my niece. Perhaps Lucy knew UNDO. I glanced at my watch. It was past eight on a Saturday night and in a way I was going to be heartbroken if I found Lucy at home. She should be out on a date or with friends. She wasn't.

  “Hi, Aunt Kay.” She sounded surprised, reminding me that I had not called in a while.

  “How's my favorite niece?”

  “I'm your only niece. I'm fine.”

  “What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?” I asked.

  “Finishing a term paper. What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?”

  For an instant, I did not know what to say. My seventeen-year-old niece was more adept at putting me in my place than anyone I knew.

  “I'm mulling over a computer problem,” I finally said.

  “Then you've certainty called the right department,” said Lucy, who was not given to fits of modesty. “Hold on. Let me move these books and stuff out of the way so I can get
to my keyboard.”

  “It's not a PC problem,” I said. “I don't guess you know anything about the operating system called UNIX, do you?”

  'I wouldn't call UNIX an operating system, Aunt Kay. It's like calling it the weather when it's really the environment, which is comprised of the weather and all the elements and the edifices. Are you using A-T an' T?”

  “Good God, Lucy. I don't know.”

  “Well, what are you running it on?”

  “An NCR mini.` “Then it's A-T an' T.”

  “I think someone might have broken security,” I said.

  “It happens. But what makes you think it?”

  “I found a strange file in my directory, Lucy. My directory and its files are secure - you shouldn't be able to read anything unless you have my password.”

  “Wrong. If you have root privileges, you're the super user and can do anything you want and read anything you want.”

  “My computer analyst is the only super user.”

  “That may be true. But there may be a number of users who have root privileges, users you don't even know about that came with the software. We can check that easily, but first tell me about the strange file. What's it called and what's in it?”

  “It's called t-t-y-oh-seven and there's a sentence in it that reads: 'I can't find it.'

  “I heard keys clicking.

  “What are you doing?”

  I asked.

  “Making notes as we talk. Okay. Let's start with the obvious. A big clue is the file's name, t-t-y-oh-seven. That's a device. In other words, t-t-y-oh-seven is probably somebody's terminal in your office. It's possible it could be a printer, but my guess is that whoever was in your directory decided to send a note to the device called t-t-y-oh-seven. But this person screwed up and instead of sending a note, he created a file.”

  “When you write a note, aren't you creating a file?” I puzzled.

  “Not if you're just sending keystrokes.”

  “How?”

  “Easy. Are you in UNIX now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Type cat redirect t-t-y-q -” “Wait a minute.”

  “And don't worry about the slash-dev ' “Lucy, slow down.”

  “We're deliberately leaving out the dev directory, which is what I'm betting this person did.”

  “What comes after cat?”

  “Okay. Cat redirect and the device “

  “Please slow down.”

  “You should have a four-eighty-six chip in that thing, Aunt Kay. Why's it so slow?”

  “It's not the damn chip that's slow!”

  “Oh, I'm sorry,” Lucy said sincerely. “I forgot.”

  Forgot what? “Back to the problem,” she went on. “I'm assuming you don't have a device called t-t-y-q, by the way. Where are you?”

  “I'm still on cat,” I said, frustrated. “Then it's redirect… Damn. That's the caret pointing right?”

  “Yes. Now hit return and your cursor will be bumped down to the next line, which is blank. Then you type the message you want echoed to t-t-y-q's screen.”

  “See Spot run,” I typed.

  “Hit return and then do a control C,” Lucy said. “Now you can do an ls minus one and pipe it to p-g and you'll see your file.”

  I simply typed -Is- and caught a flash of something flying by.

  “Here's what I think happened,” Lucy resumed. “Someone was in your directory - and we'll get to that in a minute. Maybe they were looking for something in your files and couldn't find whatever it was. So this person sent a message, or tried to, to the device called t-t-y-oh-seven. Only he was in a hurry, and instead of typing cat redirect slash d-e-v slash t-t-y-oh-seven, he left out the dev directory and typed cat redirect t-t-y-oh-seven. So the keystrokes weren't echoed on t-t-y-oh-seven's screen at all. In other words, instead of sending a message to t-t-y-oh-seven, this person unwittingly created a file called t-t-y-oh-seven.”

  “If the person had typed in the proper command and sent the keystrokes, would the message have been saved? “ I asked.

  “No. The keystrokes would have appeared on t-t-yo-h-seven's screen, and would have stayed there until the user cleared it. But you would have seen no evidence of this in your directory or anywhere else. There wouldn't be a file.”

  “Meaning, we don't know how many times somebody might have sent a message from my directory, saying it was-done correctly.”

  “That's right.”

  “How could someone have been able to read anything in my directory?” I went back to that basic question.

  “You're sure no one else might have your password?”

  “No one but Margaret.”

  “She's your computer analyst?”

  “That's right.”

  “She wouldn't have given it to anyone?”

  “I can't imagine that she would,” I said.

  “Okay. You could get in without the password if you have root privileges,” Lucy said. “That's the next thing we'll check. Change to the etc directory and vi the file called Group and look for root group - that's r-o-o-t-g-r-p. See which users are listed after it.”

  I began to type.

  “What do you see?”

  “I'm not there yet,” I said, unable to keep the impatience out of my voice.

  She repeated her instructions slowly.

  “I see three log-in names in the root group,” I said.

  “Good. Write them down. Then colon, q, bang, and you're out of Group.”

  “Bang?”

  I asked, mystified.

  “An exclamation point. Now you've got to vi the password file - that's p-a-s-s-w-d - and see if any of those log-ins with root privileges maybe don't have a password.”

  “Lucy.” I took my hands off the keyboard.

  “It's easy to tell because in the second field you'll see the encrypted form of the user's password, if he has a password. If there's nothing in the second field except two colons, then he's got no password.”

  “Lucy.”

  “I'm sorry, Aunt Kay. Am I going too fast again?”

  “I'm not a UNDO programmer. You might as well be speaking Swahili.”

  “You could learn. UNIX is really fun.”

  “Thank you, but my problem is I don't have time to learn right now. Someone broke into my directory. I keep very confidential documents and data reports in there. Not to mention, if someone is reading my private files, what else is he looking at and who is doing it and why?”

  “The who part is easy unless the violator is dialing in by modem from the outside.”

  “But the note was sent to someone in my office - to a device in my office.”

  “That doesn't mean that an insider didn't get someone from the outside to break in, Aunt Kay. Maybe the person snooping doesn't know anything about UNIX and needed help to break into your directory, so they got a programmer from the outside.”

  “This is serious,” I said.

  “It could be. If nothing else, it sounds to me like your system isn't very secure.”

  “When's your term paper due?” I asked.

  “After the holidays.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “Almost.”

  “When does Christmas vacation start?”

  “It starts Monday.”

  “How would you like to come up here for a few days and help me out with this?” I asked.

  “You're kidding.”

  “I'm very serious. But don't expect much. I generally don't bother with much in the way of decorations. A few poinsettias and candles in the windows. Now, I will cook.”

  “No tree?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “I guess not. Is it snowing?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is.”

  “I've never seen snow. Not in person.”

  “You'd better let me talk to your mother,” I said.

  Dorothy, my only sibling, was overly solicitous when she got on the phone several minutes later.

  “Are you still
working so hard? Kay. You work harder than anyone I've ever met. People are so impressed when I tell them we're sisters. What's the weather like in Richmond?”

  “There's a good chance we'll have a white Christmas.”

  “How special. Lucy ought to see a white Christmas at least once in her life. I've never seen one. Well, I take that back. There was the Christmas I went skiing out west with Bradley.”

  I could not remember who Bradley was. My younger sister's boyfriends and husbands were an endless parade I had stopped watching years ago.

  “I'd very much like Lucy to spend Christmas with me,” I said. “Would that be possible?”

  “You can't come to Miami?”

  “No, Dorothy. Not this year. I'm in the middle of several very difficult cases and have court scheduled virtually up to Christmas Eve.”

  “I can't imagine a Christmas without Lucy,” she said with great reluctance.

  “You've had Christmas without her before. When you went skiing out west with Bradley, for example.”

  “True. But it was hard,” she said, nonplussed. “And every time we've spent a holiday apart, I've vowed to never do it again.”

  “I understand. Maybe another time,” I said, sick to death of my sister's games. I knew she couldn't get Lucy out the door fast enough “Actually, I'm on deadline for this newest book and will be spending most of the holiday in front of my computer anyway,” she reconsidered quickly. “Maybe Lucy would be better off with you. I won't be much fun. Did I tell you that I now have a Hollywood agent? He's fantastic and knows everybody who's somebody out there. He's negotiating a contract with Disney.”

  “That's great. I'm sure your books will make terrific movies.”

  Dorothy wrote excellent children's books and had won several prestigious awards. She was simply a failure as a human being.

  “Mother's here,” my sister said. “She wants to have a word with you. Now listen, it was so good to talk to you. We just don't do it enough. Make sure Lucy eats something besides salads, and I warn you that she'll exercise until it drives you mad. I worry that she's going to start looking masculine.”