The Bone Bed

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.
    “It’s pretty simple, really,” Lucy says. “Hypothetically?”
    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. Next I’m in the server.”
    “Does the FBI have any of this same information? Any of it at all?” I’m thinking of Valerie Hahn, and then I’m reminded of Douglas Burke, and she is something dark and ugly spreading over my mood.
    “Don’t know,” Lucy says. “Court orders are a little slower than what I do.”
    I’m not going to respond to that.
    “But Marino’s tweets and the fake person’s tweets? All you’ve got to do is go on their pages. The tweets are there for the world to see,” she says. “It’s just I know where they came from. Real garbage, whoever it is. Unfortunately, someone smart. But arrogant. And arrogance will always get you in the end.”
    I move my chair closer to read the tweets she’s rolling through on the screen, and they make me sad. Peggy Stanton’s impersonator wrote Marino the first time on August twenty-fifth at almost midnight, saying she was a fan.
    Bowled over by U,
she tweeted.
I strike and leave nothing to spare, an honest gal whose only game is right up UR alley.
    Six tweets later she said she was into antiques, collected vintage military buttons and wore them proudly, and this deteriorated into comments that Marino found offensive, if not appalling.
    I’ve got buttons I know U want to push,
she tweeted to him toward the end of their exchanges.
Dead soldiers all over my enviable chest.
    Marino unfollowed her on October tenth.
    “Why?” I try to imagine the