We returned to Quantico shortly after three, and when I tried to reach Wesley, he was not in. I left a message for him to find me at ERF, where I planned to spend the next few hours with my niece.
No engineers or scientists were on her floor because it was a holiday weekend, and we were able to work alone and in quiet.
'I could definitely get global mail out,' Lucy said, sitting at her desk. She glanced at her watch. 'Look, why not just throw something out there and see who bites?'
'Let me try the chief from Seattle again.'
I had his number on a slip of paper and called it. I was told he had left for the day.
'It's very important that I reach him,' I explained to the answering service. 'Perhaps he can be reached at home?'
'I'm not at liberty to give that out. But if you'll give me your phone number, when he calls in for his messages…'
'I can't do that,' I said as my frustration grew. 'I'm not at a number he can call.' I told her who I was, adding, 'What I'm going to do is give you my pager number. Please have him call me and then I'll call him.'
That didn't work. An hour later my pager remained silent.
'She probably didn't get it straight about putting pound signs after everything,' Lucy said as she cruised around inside CAIN.
'Any strange messages anywhere?' I asked.
'No. It's a Friday afternoon and a lot of people are on holiday. I think we should send something out over Prodigy and see what comes back.'
I sat next to her.
'What's the name of the group?'
'American Academy of Gold Foil Operators.'
'And their highest concentration is Washington State?'
'Yes. But it can't hurt to include the entire West Coast.'
'Well, this will include the entire United States,' Lucy said as she typed Prodigy and entered her service ID and password. 'I think the best way to do this is through the mail.' She pulled up a Jump Window. 'What do you want me to say?' She looked over at me.
'How about this? To all American Academy of Gold Foil Operators. Forensic pathologist desperately needs your help ASAP. And then give them the information to contact us.'
'All right. I'll give them a mailbox here and carbon copy it to your mailbox in Richmond.' She resumed typing. 'The replies may come in for a while. You may find you get a lot of dentists for pen pals.'
She tapped a key as if it were a coda and pushed back her chair. 'There. It's gone,' she said. 'Even as we speak, every Prodigy subscriber should have a New Mail message. Let's just hope someone out there is playing with their computer and can help.'
Even as she spoke, her screen suddenly went black, and bright green letters started flowing across it. A printer turned on.
'That was quick,' I started to stay.
But Lucy was out of her chair. She ran to the room where CAIN lived and scanned her fingerprint to get in. Glass doors unlocked with a firm click and I followed her inside. The same writing was flowing across the system monitor, and Lucy snatched a small beige remote control off the desk and pressed a button. She glanced at her Breitling and activated the stopwatch.
'Come on, come on, come on!' she said.
She sat before CAIN, staring into the screen as the message flowed. It was one brief paragraph repeated numerous times. It said:
— - -MESSAGE PQ43 76301 001732 BEGINS- - -TO: - All COPS FROM: - CAIN
— - -MESSAGE PQ43 76301 001732 ENDS- - -
I looked at the shelves of modems filling one wall, at lights flashing. Though I was not a computer expert, I saw no correlation between their activity and what was occurring on screen. I looked around some more and noticed a telephone jack below the desk. A cord that was plugged into it disappeared beneath the raised floor, and I found that odd.
Why would a device plugged into a telephone jack be stored beneath a floor? Telephones were on tables and desks. Modems were on shelves. I got down and lifted a panel that covered a third of the floor inside CAIN's room.
'What are you doing?' Lucy exclaimed, unable to take her eyes off the screen.
The modem beneath the floor looked like a small cube puzzle with rapid flashing lights.
'Shit!' Lucy said.
I looked up. She stared at her watch and wrote something down. The activity on the screen had stopped. The lights on the modem quit flashing.
'Did I do something?' I asked in dismay.
'You bastard!' She pounded her fist on the desk, and the keyboard jumped. 'I almost had you. One more time and I would have had your ass!'
I got up. 'I didn't disconnect anything, I hope?' I said.
'No. Dammit! He logged off. I had him,' she said, still staring at her monitor as if the green words might begin to flow again.
'Gault?'
'CAIN's imposter.' She blew out a big breath of air and looked down at the naked guts of the creation she had named after the world's first murderer. 'You found it,' she blandly said. 'That's pretty good.'
'That's how he's been getting in,' I said.
'Yes. It's so obvious no one noticed.'
'You noticed.'
'Not at first.'
'Carrie put it there before she left last fall,' I said.
Lucy nodded. 'Like everybody else, I was looking for something more technologically recondite. But it was brilliant in its simplicity. She hid her own private modem and the dial-in is the number of a diagnostics line almost never used.'
'How long have you known?'
'As soon as the weird messages started, I knew.'
'So you just had to play the game with him,' I said, upset. 'Do you realize how dangerous this game is?' I asked.
She began typing. 'He tried it four times. God, we were close.'
'For a while you thought Carrie was doing this,' I said.
'She set it up, but I don't think she's the one getting in.'
'Why not?'
'Because I've been following this intruder day and night. This is someone unskilled.' For the first time in months, she spoke her former friend's name. 'I know how Carrie's mind works. And Gault's too narcissistic to let anyone be CAIN except him.'
'I got a note, possibly from Carrie, that was signed CAIN,' I said.
'And I'll bet Gault didn't know she mailed it. And I'll also bet that if he found out, he took that little pleasure away from her.'
I thought of the pink note we suspected Gault had spirited away from Carrie at Sheriff Brown's house. When Gault placed it in the pocket of the bloody pajama top, the act certainly served to reassert his dominance. Gault would use Carrie. In a sense, she always waited in the car except when he needed her help to move a body or perform a degrading act.
'What just happened here?' I said.
Lucy did not look at me when she answered, 'I found the virus and have planted my own. Every time he tries to send a message to any terminal connected to CAIN, I have the message replicate itself on his screen - like it's bouncing back in his face instead of going out anywhere. And he gets a prompt that says Please Try Again. So he tries again. The first time this happened to him, the system icon gave him a thumbs-up after two tries, so he thought the message was sent.
'But when he tried the next time, the same thing happened, but I made him try one additional time. The point is to keep him on the line long enough for us to trace the call.'
'Us?'
Lucy picked up the small beige remote control I had seen her grab earlier. 'My panic button,' she said. 'It goes via radio signal straight to HRT.'
'I assume Wesley has known about this hidden modem since you discovered it.'
'Right.'
'Explain something to me,' I said.
'Sure.' She gave me her eyes.
'Even if Gault or Carrie had this secret modem and its secret number, what about your password? How could either of them log on as a superuser? And aren't there UNIX commands you could type that would tell you if another user or device was logged on?'
'Carrie programmed the virus to capture my username and password whenever I changed them. The encrypted forms were reversed and sent to Gault via E-mail. Then he could log on as me, and the virus wouldn't let him log on unless I was logged on, too.'
'So he hides behind you.'
'Like a shadow. He's used my device name. My same username and password. I figured out what was going on when I did a WHO command one day and my username was there twice.'
'If CAIN calls users back to verify their legitimacy, why hasn't Gault's telephone number shown up on ERF's monthly bill?'
'That's part of the virus. It instructs the system on callbacks to bill the call to an AT amp;T credit card. So the calls never showed up on the Bureau's bills. They show up on the bills of Gault's father.'
'Amazing,' I said.
'Apparently, Gault has his father's phone card number and PIN.'
'Does he know his son has been using it?'
A telephone rang. She picked it up.
'Yes, sir,' she said. 'I know. We were close. Certainly, I will bring you the printouts immediately.' She hung up.
'I don't think anyone's told him,' Lucy said.
'No one here has told Peyton Gault.'
'Right. That was Mr. Wesley.'
'I must talk to him,' I said. 'Do you trust me to take him the printouts?'
Lucy was staring at the monitor again. The screen saver had come back on, and brilliant triangles were slowly slipping through and around each other like geometry making love.
'You can take it to him,' she said, and she typed Prodigy. 'Before you go… Wow, you've got new mail waiting.'
'How much?' I moved closer to her.
'Oops. Just one so far.' She opened it.
It read: What is gold foil?
Lucy said, 'We're probably going to get a lot of that.'
Sally was working the front desk again when I walked into the Academy lobby, and she let me through without the bother of registration and a visitors' pass. I walked with purpose down the long tan corridor, around the post office and through the gun cleaning room. I will always love the smell of Hoppes Number 9.
A lone man in fatigues was blasting compressed air into the barrel of a rifle. Rows of long black countertops were bare and perfectly clean, and I thought of years of classes, of the men and women I had seen, and of the times I had stood at a counter cleaning my own handgun. I had watched new agents come and go. I had watched them run, fight, shoot and sweat. I had taught them and cared.
I pressed the elevator button, boarded and went down to the lower level. Several profilers were in their offices, and they nodded at me as I walked by. Wesley's secretary was on vacation, and I passed her desk and knocked on the shut door. I heard Wesley's voice. A chair moved and he walked to the door and pulled it open.
'Hello,' he said, surprised.
'These are the printouts you wanted from Lucy.' I handed them over.
'Thank you. Please come in.' He slipped on reading glasses, reviewing the message Gault had sent.
His jacket was off, a white shirt wrinkled around woven leather suspenders. Wesley had been perspiring and he needed to shave.
'Have you lost more weight?' I asked.
'I never weigh myself.' He glanced at me over the top of his glasses as he seated himself behind his desk.
'You don't look healthy.'
'He's decompensating more,' he said. 'You can see that from this message. He's getting more reckless, more brazen. I would predict that by the end of the weekend, we will nail his location.'
'Then what?' I was not convinced.
'We deploy HRT.'
'I see,' I said dryly. 'They will rappel from helicopters and blow up the building.'
Wesley glanced at me again. He placed the paperwork on the desk. 'You're angry,' he said.
'No, Benton. I'm angry with you, versus being angry in general.'
'Why?'
'I asked you not to involve Lucy.'
'We have no choice,' he said.
'There are always choices. I don't care what anybody says.'
'In terms of locating Gault, she's really our only hope right now.' He paused, looking directly at me. 'She has a mind of her own.'
'Yes, she does. That's my point. Lucy doesn't have an off button. She doesn't always understand limits.'
'We won't let her do anything that might place her at risk,' he said.
'She's already been placed at risk.'
'You've got to let her grow up, Kay.'
I stared at him.
'She's going to graduate from the university this spring. She's a grown woman.'
'I don't want her coming back here,' I said.
He smiled a little, but his eyes were exhausted and sad. 'I hope she'll be back here. We need agents like her and Janet. We need all we can get.'
'She keeps many secrets from me. It seems the two of you conspire against me and I'm left in the dark. It's bad enough that…' I caught myself.
Wesley looked into my eyes. 'Kay, this has nothing to do with my relationship with you.'
'I would certainly hope not.'
'You want to know everything Lucy is doing,' he said.
'Of course.'
'Do you tell her everything you're doing when you're working a case?'
'Absolutely not.'
'I see.'
'Why did you hang up on me?'
'You got me at a bad time,' he answered.
'You've never hung up on me before, no matter how bad the time.'
He took his glasses off and carefully folded them. He reached for his coffee mug, looked inside and saw it was empty. He held it in both hands.
'I had someone in my office, and I didn't want this individual to know you were on the line,' he said.
'Who was it?' I said.
'Someone from the Pentagon. I won't tell you his name.'
'The Pentagon?' I said, mystified.
He was quiet.
'Why would you be concerned that someone from the Pentagon might know I was calling you?' I then asked.
'It seems you've created a problem,' Wesley simply said, setting the coffee mug down. 'I wish you hadn't started poking around Ft. Lee.'
I was astonished,
'Your friend Dr. Gruber may be fired. I would advise you to refrain from contacting him further.'
'This is about Luther Gault?' I asked.
'Yes, General Gault.'
They can't do anything to Dr. Gruber,' I protested.
'I'm afraid they can,' Wesley said. 'Dr. Gruber conducted an unauthorized search in a military database. He got you classified information.'
'Classified?' I said. 'That's absurd. It's one page of routine information that you can pay twenty dollars to see while you're visiting the Quartermaster Museum. It's not like I asked for a damn Pentagon file.'
'You can't pay the twenty dollars unless you are the individual or have power of attorney to access that individual's file.'
'Benton, we're talking about a serial killer. Has everybody lost their minds? Who the hell cares about a generic computer file?'
The army does.'
'Are we dealing with national security?'
Wesley did not answer me.
When he offered nothing more, I said, 'Fine. You guys can have your little secret. I'm sick and tired of your little secrets. My only agenda is to prevent more deaths. I'm no longer certain what your agenda is.' My stare was unforgiving and hurt.
'Please,' Wesley snapped. 'You know, some days I wish I smoked like Marino does.' He blew out in exasperation. 'General Gault is not important in this investigation. He does not need to be dragged into it.'
'I think anything we know about Temple Gault's family could be important. And I can't believe you don't feel that way. Background information is vital to profiling and predicting behavior.'
'I'm telling you, General Gault is off limits.'
'Why?'
'Respect.'
'My God, Benton.' I leaned forward in my chair. 'Gault may have killed two people with a pair of his uncle's damn jungle boots. And just how is the army going to like it when that hits Time magazine and Newsweek?'
'Don't threaten.'
'I most certainly will. I will do more than threaten if people don't do the right thing. Tell me about the general. I already know his nephew inherited his eyes. And the general was a bit of a peacock, since it seems he preferred being photographed in a splendid mess uniform like Eisenhower would have worn.'
'He may have had an ego but was a magnificent man, by all accounts,' Wesley said.
'Was he Gault's uncle, then? Are you admitting it?'
Wesley hesitated. 'Luther Gault is Temple Gault's uncle.'
'Tell me more.'
'He was born in Albany and graduated from the Citadel in 1942. Two years later, when he was a captain, his division moved to France, where he became a hero in the Battle of the Bulge. He won the Medal of Honor and was promoted again. After the war, he was sent to Ft. Lee as officer in charge of the uniform research division of the Quartermaster Corps.'
'Then the boots were his,' I said.
'They certainly could have been.'
'Was he a big man?'
'I am told that he and his nephew would have been the same size when General Gault was younger.'
I thought of the photograph of the general in the dress mess jacket. He was slender and not particularly tall. His face was strong, eyes unwavering, but he did not look unkind.
'Luther Gault also served in Korea,' Wesley went on. 'For a while he was assigned to the Pentagon as the assistant chief of staff, then it was back to Ft. Lee as the deputy commander. He finished his career in MAC-V.'
'I don't know what that is,' I said.
'Military Assistance Command - Vietnam.'
'After which he retired to Seattle?' I said.
'He and his wife moved there.'
'Children?'
'Two boys.'
'What about the general's interaction with his brother?'
'I don't know. The general is deceased and his brother will not talk to us.'
'So we don't know how Gault might have wound up with his uncle's boots.'
'Kay, there is a code with Medal of Honor winners. They are in their own class. The army gives them a special status and they are stringently protected.'
'That's what all this secrecy is about?' I said.
'The army isn't keen on having the world know that their Medal of Honor-winning two-star general is the uncle of one of the most notorious psychopaths our country has seen. The Pentagon is not exactly keen on having it known that this killer - as you have already pointed out - may have kicked several people to death with General Gault's boots.'
I got up from my chair. 'I'm tired of boys and their codes of honor. I'm tired of male bonding and secrecy. We are not kids playing cowboys and Indians. We're not neighborhood children playing war.' I was drained. 'I thought you were more highly evolved than that.'
He stood up, too, as my pager went off. 'You're taking this the wrong way,' he said.
I looked at the display. The area code was Seattle, and without asking Wesley's permission I used his phone.
'Hello,' said a voice I did not know.
'This number just paged me,' I was confused.
'I didn't page anybody. Where are you calling from?'
'Virginia.' I was about to hang up.
'I just called Virginia. Wait a minute. Are you calling about Prodigy?'
'Oh. Perhaps you talked to Lucy?'
'LUCYTALK?'
'Yes.'
'We just this minute sent mail to each other. I'm responding to the gold foil query. I'm a dentist in Seattle and a member of the Academy of Gold Foil Operators. Are you the forensic pathologist?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you so much for responding. I'm trying to identify a dead young woman with extensive gold foil restorations.'
'Please describe them.'
I told him about Jane's dental work and the damage to her teeth. 'It's possible she was a musician,' I added. 'She may have played the saxophone,'
There was a lady from out here who sounds a lot like that,'
'She was in Seattle?'
'Right. Everyone in our academy knew about her because she had such an incredible mouth. Her gold foil restorations and dental anomalies were used in slide presentations at a number of our meetings,'
'Do you recall her name?'
'Sorry. She wasn't my patient. But it seems I remember hearing she was a professional musician until she was in some terrible accident. That was when her dental problems began,'
The lady I'm talking about has a lot of enamel loss,' I said. 'Probably from overbrushing,'
'Oh absolutely. The lady out here did, too,'
'It doesn't sound to me as if the lady out there was a street person,' I said.
'Couldn't be. Someone paid for that mouth,'
'My lady was a street person when she died in New York,' I said.
'Geez, that makes me sad. I guess whoever she was, she really couldn't care for herself,'
'What is your name?' I asked.
'I'm Jay Bennett,'
'Dr. Bennett? Do you remember anything else that might have been said during one of these slide presentations?'
A long silence followed. 'Okay, yes. This is very vague,' He hesitated again. 'Oh, I know,' he said. The lady out here was related to someone important. In fact, that might be who she lived with out here before she disappeared.'
I gave him further information so he could call me again. I hung up the phone and met Wesley's stare.
'I think Jane is Gault's sister,' I said.
'What?' He was genuinely shocked.
'I think Temple Gault murdered his sister,' I repeated. 'Please tell me you didn't already know that.'
He got upset.
'I've got to verify her identity,' I said, and I had no emotion left in me right now.
'Won't her dental records do that?'
'If we find them. If she still has X rays left. If the army stays out of my way.'
'The army doesn't know about her.' He paused, and for an instant his eyes were bright with tears. He looked away from me. 'He just told us what he did when he sent the message from CAIN today.'
'Yes,' I said. 'He said CAIN killed his brother. The description of Gault with her in New York sounded more like two men than a woman and a man.' I paused. 'Are there other siblings?'
'Just a sister. We've known she lived on the West Coast but have never been able to locate her because apparently she doesn't drive. DMV has no record of a valid license. Truth is, we've never been certain she is alive.'
I said to him, 'She's not.'
He flinched and looked away.
'She hadn't lived anywhere - at least not in recent years,' I said, thinking of her pitiful belongings and malnourished body. 'She'd been on the street for a while. In fact, I'd say she survived out there all right until her brother came to town.'
His voice caught and he looked wrecked as he said, 'How could anyone do something like that?'
I put my arms around him. I did not care who walked in. I hugged him as a friend.
'Benton,' I said. 'Go home.'