The Bone Bed

another espresso brewing.
    “Of course you’re invited.”
    “Along with who else?”
    “A couple of agents from the Boston Field Office. Douglas, I think.” I refer to Douglas Burke, a female FBI agent with a confusing name. “I’m not sure who else. And Benton.”
    “I’m not available,” Lucy answers. “Not if she’s coming.”
    “It really would be helpful if you’d be there. What’s wrong with Douglas?”
    “Something is. No, thanks.”
    Banished by both the FBI and ATF in her earlier law-enforcement life, my niece’s feelings about the Feds generally aren’t charitable, which can be awkward for me, since my husband is an FBI criminal intelligence analyst, or profiler, and I have a special reservist status with the Department of Defense. Both of us are part of what she resents and disrespects, the Feds who rejected her, who fired her.
    Simply put, Lucy Farinelli, my only niece, whom I’ve raised like a daughter, believes rules are for lesser mortals. She was a rogue federal agent and is a rogue technical genius, and my life would feel shattered and vacant if she wasn’t around.
    “We’re dealing with somebody pretty clever.” She emerges from the bathroom carrying two shot glasses and a small steel pitcher.
    “That’s not a good sign,” I reply. “You rarely think anyone is clever.”
    “Someone cunning who is smart on some fronts but too smug to realize how much he doesn’t know.”
    She pours espresso, strong and sweet, with a light brown foamy layer on top, coladas that became a habit when she was with ATF’s Miami Field Office years ago, before she got into a
bad shooting.
    “The address
BLiDedwood
is rather obvious.” She sets a shot glass and the pitcher next to my keyboard.
    “It’s not obvious to me.”
    “Billy Deadwood.” She spells it out.
    “Okay.” I let that sink in. “For my benefit?”
    Lucy comes around to my side of the desk and taps the granite countertop behind me, waking up the two video displays on it. Screensavers materialize in vivid red, gold, and blue, the CFC’s and AFME’s crests side by side, a caduceus and scales of justice, and playing cards, pairs of aces and eights, the
dead man’s hand
that Wild Bill Hickok supposedly was holding during a poker game when he was shot to death in 1876.
    “The crest for the AFME.” She indicates the
dead man’s hand
on the computer screens. “And Wild Bill Hickok, or
Billy,
was murdered in
Deadwood
, South Dakota. For your benefit? Yes, Aunt Kay. I just hope it’s not someone in our own backyard.”
    “Why would you entertain the slightest suspicion that it might be?”
    “Using a temporary free e-mail address that self-destructs or deletes itself in thirty minutes?” Lucy considers. “Okay, not all that unusual, could be anyone. Then this person routes the e-mail to you through a free proxy server, this particular one a high-anonymity type with an unavailable host name. Located in Italy.”
    “So no one can respond to the e-mail because the temporary account is deleted after thirty minutes and is gone.”
    “That’s the point.”
    “And no one can track the IP and trace where the e-mail was actually sent from.” I follow her logic.
    “Exactly what the sender is banking on.”
    “We’re supposed to assume the e-mail was sent by someone in Italy.”
    “Specifically, Rome,” she tells me.
    “But that’s a ruse.”
    “Absolutely,” she says. “Whoever sent it definitely wasn’t in Rome at six-thirty last night our time.”
    “What about the font?” I return to the e-mail and look at the subject line.
    ATTENTION CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER KAY SCARPETTA
    “Is there any significance?” I ask.
    “Very retro. Reminiscent of the fifties and sixties, big squarish shapes with rounded corners supposedly evocative of TV sets from that era.
Your
era,” she teases.
    “Please don’t hurt me this early in the morning.”
    “Eurostile was created by Italian type designer Aldo Novarese,” she explains, “the font originally made for a foundry in Turin, Nebiolo Printech.”
    “And you think this means what?”
    “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “They basically manufacture paper and high-end technologically advanced printing machines.”
    “A possible Italian connection?”
    “I doubt it. I think whoever sent the e-mail to you assumed you couldn’t trace the actual IP,” she says, and I know what’s next.
    I know what she’s done.
    “In other words,” she continues, “we wouldn’t