The Bone Bed

figure out the actual location it was sent from—”
    “Lucy,” I interrupt her. “I don’t want you taking extreme measures.”
    She’s already taken them.
    “There are a ton of these anonymous freebies available,” she continues, as if she’s not done what I know she has.
    “I don’t want you helping yourself to some proxy server in Italy or anywhere else,” I tell her flatly.
    “The e-mail was sent to you by someone who had access to Logan’s wireless,” she says, to my astonishment.
    “It was sent from the airport?”
    “The video clip was e-mailed to you from Logan Airport’s wireless network not even seven fucking miles from here,” she confirms, and it’s no wonder she’s entertaining the possibility it might be someone in our own backyard.
    I think about my chief of staff, Bryce Clark, of Pete Marino, and several forensic scientists in my building. Members of the CFC staff were in Tampa, Florida, last week for the International Association for Identification’s annual meeting, and all of them flew back into Boston yesterday around the same time this e-mail was anonymously sent to the CFC.
    “At some point prior to six o’clock last night,” Lucy explains, “this person logged on to Logan’s free wireless Internet. The same thing passengers do thousands of times a day. But it doesn’t mean the person who sent the e-mail was physically in a terminal or on a plane.”
    Whoever it is could have been in a parking garage, she says, or on a sidewalk, possibly in a water taxi or on a ferry in the harbor, anywhere the wireless signal reaches. Once this person was connected, he created a temporary e-mail account called
BLiDedwood @Stealthmail
, possibly using word-processing software to write the subject line in Eurostile, and cutting and pasting it into the e-mail.
    “He waited twenty-nine minutes before sending it,” Lucy says. “Just a shame he has the satisfaction of knowing it was opened.”
    “How would this person know I opened the e-mail?”
    “Because he didn’t get a bounce-back
nondelivery
notification message,” she replies. “Which he would have gotten just seconds before the account self-destructed. He has no reason not to assume the e-mail was received and opened.”
    Her tone is different. What she’s saying sounds like a reprimand.
    “The bounce-back is instant and automatic for harassing or virus-infected communications sent to the CFC’s main address,” she reminds me. “The purpose is to give the sender the impression that the e-mail couldn’t be delivered
.
But in fact with rare and unfortunate exception, suspicious e-mails go directly into what I call quarantine so I can see whatever it is and assess the threat level,” she emphasizes, and I realize what she’s getting at. “I didn’t see this particular e-mail because it wasn’t quarantined.”
    The rare and unfortunate exception she’s talking about is myself.
    “The firewalls I’ve set up recognized the e-mail as legit because of the subject heading
Attention Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta
,” she says, as if it’s my fault, and it is. “Something directed to your personal attention doesn’t get spammed or temporarily outboxed in quarantine because that’s been your directive to me. Against my wishes, remember?”
    She holds my gaze, and she’s right, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
    “You see the consequences of my allowing you to cheat what I’ve secured?” she asks.
    “I understand your frustration, Lucy. But it’s the only way a lot of people, particularly police and families, can reach me when they don’t know my direct CFC contact information,” I say what I’ve said before. “They send something to my attention and I certainly don’t want it spammed.”
    “It’s just too bad that you’re the one who opened it first,” Lucy says. “Of course, typically Bryce probably would have before you had the chance.”
    “I’m glad he didn’t.” My chief of staff is very sensitive and more than a little squeamish.
    “Right. He didn’t because he was on his way back from a trip. He and several others had been out of pocket for a week,” Lucy says, as if the timing wasn’t an accident.
    “Are you worried that whoever sent the e-mail knows what’s going on at the CFC?” I ask.
    “It worries me, yes.”
    She rolls a chair close, refills our shot glasses, and I smell the fresh grapefruit scent of her cologne, and I always know when my niece has been on the