Here She Lies

the last of the afternoon, I fanned the book open on my chest and closed my eyes, too. It was Tuesday evening and we hadn’t slept more than a few hours since Sunday night. I thought about Lexy, recalled the bright lines of her face when she smiled, the incredible softness of her skin, the powdery smell of her neck, the salty taste of her tears when I kissed her cheeks as she cried. It was the smiling face I settled on as I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, hours later, the night outside the windows was solidly black and Bobby was gone, no longer at my feet.
    I got up and saw that the police were gone, too, and had left everything more or less in place. Then, nearing the kitchen, I heard voices.
    Bobby and Gabe Lazare stood together in front of the microwave, which was elevated above the stovetop; something inside slowly rotated and the appliance’s feeble light cast them as Vermeer milkmaids at a window, somber faces aglow. Lazare was holding a piece of paper, with Bobby reading along.
    Beside them, on the kitchen counter, lay Julie’s sleek pink cell phone. I felt a lump in my stomach when I saw it — this explained why she hadn’t answered any of our calls — and when I saw my wallet next to the phone the lump dissolved to bile. I swallowed it back. Why should it be any surprise that Julie had abandoned her phone or stolen my wallet? Why should I feel shocked by the sight of these two objects? I flashed back to Gatsby’s, where I’d last seen my wallet on Thursday. When had she taken it from me? Somehow I had missed the significant event of my sister stealing from me, over and over and over. Had getting my driver’s license and Social Security card been Julie’s final step in becoming me? Had leaving her phone behind been a step in un becoming herself?
    I picked up the wallet — mine, but its discovery held no comfort for me. Opening it, I found exactly what I now expected: nothing. All my ID had been removed, even the little photo I carried of Bobby and Lexy.
    “Where was it?” I asked.
    In a strange, choreographed movement, they looked over at once. They seemed surprised to see me. I must have slept longer than I’d thought.
    “Buried under one of the slabs of slate on the patio,” Bobby said. “The police tracked the cell phone’s satellite signal and found the wallet with it.”
    “Heard from Agent Smith.” Lazare rustled the paper in his hand, which I now saw was a printed e-mail. “He’s been busy. Seems it was Julie who wrote those love letters. And she was tracking the GPS in the Audi, so she knew you were on your way back. Wonder if taking off like that was a change of plans — maybe she couldn’t face you, knowing you had been arrested, that it went that far.”
    I couldn’t know what Julie was thinking, not exactly, but his hypothesis felt right. “Or maybe,” I said, “taking Lexy was never a plan at all. Maybe she just did it.”
    “Maybe,” Lazare said.
    I put the wallet down and joined them in front of the microwave so I could read the e-mail. It was littered with acronyms, words and phrases that would have seemed like another language if I hadn’t just read that book. She had amassed a collection of identities, not just mine or Thomas Soiffer’s, by way of parts and pieces of information. She phished for suckers, key-logged for PINs, sent Trojan horses into private kingdoms. She had encrypted lists of MMNs (mother’s maiden name); cobs (changes of billing capability with a PIN included so you could get at someone’s bank account or credit card by using the PIN to change the mailing address); dumps (a credit card number); drops (a safe address, such as a post office box, to collect statements and deliveries); and algos (algorithms for encoding the magnetic strip on the back of a creditcard). Smith’s sign-off suggested that Julie might have even been a rather large fish in a growing sea, saying that it looked like she might have “successfully hit an aggregator.”
    “What does that mean?” I asked, touching my fingertip to that last line.
    “Aggregators are companies that collect consumer data,” Lazare explained. “Cyber thieves love them because they don’t have to work so hard to gather all the information they need; it’s all in one place. Remember that scandal a couple of years ago? When that company, ChoicePoint, actually sold information to con artists posing as marketing executives?”
    I not only remembered — I had just read about it in the