"If I tried to?" I puzzled. "If I tried to what, Lucy?"

"If you tried to get somebody first."

She angrily wiped away tears, her narrow chest heaving. I stared blindly at the family circus on TV and didn't know what to say. My impulse was to retreat to my office and shut the door, to lose myself in my work for a while, but hesitantly I moved over and pulled her close. We sat like this for the longest time, saying nothing.

I wondered who she talked to at home. I couldn't imagine her having any conversations of substance with my sister. Dorothy and her children's books had been lauded by various critics as "extraordinarily insightful" and "deep" and "full of feeling."

What a dismal irony. Dorothy gave the best she had to juvenile characters who didn't exist. She nurtured them. She spent long hours contemplating their every detail, from the way their hair was combed to the clothes they wore, to their trials and rites of pa.s.sage. All the while Lucy was starved for attention.

I thought of the times Lucy and I spent together when I lived in Miami, of the holidays with her, my mother and Dorothy. I thought of Lucy's last visit here. I couldn't recall her ever mentioning the names of friends. I don't think she had any. She would talk about her teachers, her mother's ragtag a.s.sortment of "boyfriends," Mrs. Spooner across the street, Jake the yardman and the endless parade of maids. Lucy was a tiny, bespectacled know-it-all whom older children resented and children her age didn't understand. She was out of sync. I think I was exactly like her when I was her age.

A peaceful warmth had settled over both of us. I said into her hair, "Someone asked me a question the other day."

"About what?"

"About trust. Someone asked me who I trusted more than anybody else in the world. And you know what?"

She leaned her head back, looking up at me.

"I think that person is you."

"Do you really?" she asked, incredulously. "More than anybody?"

I nodded and quietly went on, "That being the case, I'm going to ask you to help me with something."

She sat up and stared at me, her eyes alert and utterly thrilled. "Oh, sure! Just ask me! I'll help you, Auntie Kay!"

"I need to figure out how someone managed to break into the computer downtown."

"I didn't do it," she instantly blurted out, a stricken look on her face. "I already told you I didn't."

"I believe you. But someone did it, Lucy. Maybe you can help me figure it out?"

I didn't think she could but had felt an impulse to give her a chance.

Energized and excited again, she said confidently, "Anybody could do it because it's easy."

"Easy?"

I had to smile.

"Because of System/Manager."

I stared at her in open astonishment. "How do you know about System/Manager?"

"It's in the book. He's G.o.d."

At times like these I was reminded, if not unnerved. Lucy's IQ. The first time she was given an IQ test she scored so high the counselor insisted on testing her again because there had to be "some mistake."

There was. The second time Lucy scored ten points higher.

"That's how you get into, SQL to begin with," she was rattling on. "See, you can't create any grants unless you got one to start with. That's why you've got System/Manager. G.o.d. You get into SQL with Him, and then you can create anything you want."

Anything you want, it dawned on me. Such as all of the user names and pa.s.swords a.s.signed to my offices. This was a terrible revelation, so simplistic it had never occurred to me. I supposed it never occurred to Margaret either.

"All someone's got to do is get in," Lucy matter-of-factly went on. "And if he knows about G.o.d, he can create any grant he wants, make it the DBA, and then he can get into your data base."

In my office, the data base administrator, or DBA, was "DEEP/THROAT."

Margaret did have a sense of humor now and then.

"So you get into SQL by connecting System/Manager, then you type in: GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE, DBA TO AUNTIE IDENTIFIED BY KAY."

"Maybe that's what happened," I thought out loud. "And with the DBA, someone not only could view but actually alter the data."

"Sure! He could do anything because G.o.d's told him he can. The DBA is Jesus."

Her theological allusions were so outrageous I laughed in spite of myself.

"That's how I got into SQL to begin with," she confessed. "Since you didn't tell me any pa.s.swords or anything. I wanted to get into SQL so I could try out some of the commands in the book. I just gave your DBA user name a pa.s.sword I made up so I could get in."

"Wait a minute," I slowed her down. "Wait a minute! What do you mean you a.s.signed a pa.s.sword you made up to my DBA user name? How did you know what my user name is? I didn't tell you."

She explained, "It's in your grants file. I found it in the Home directory where you have all the INP's for the tables you created. You have a file called *Grants. SQL' where you created all the public synonyms for your tables."

Actually, I hadn't created those tables. Margaret did last year and I loaded my home computer with the boxes of backup diskettes she gave me. Was it possible there was a similar "Grants" file in the OCME computer? I took hold of Lucy's hand and we got up from the couch. Eagerly, she followed me into my office. I sat her down in front of the computer and pulled up the ottoman.

We got into the communications software package and typed in the number for Margaret's office downtown. We watched the countdown at the bottom of the screen as the computer dialed. Almost immediately it announced we were connected, and several commands later the screen was dark and flashing with a green C prompt. My computer suddenly was a looking gla.s.s. On the other side were the secrets of my office ten miles from here.

It made me slightly uneasy to know that even as we worked the call was being traced. I'd have to remember to tell Wesley so he didn't waste his time figuring out that the perpetrator, in this instance, was me.

"Do a find file," I said, "for anything that might be called *Grants.'

Lucy did. The C prompt came back with the message "No files found."

We tried again. We tried looking for a file called "Synonyms" and still had no luck. Then she got the idea of trying to find any file with the extension "SQL" because ordinarily that was the extension for any file containing SQL commands, commands such as the ones used to create public synonyms on the office data tables. Scores of file names rolled up the screen. One caught our attention. It was called "Public. SQL."

Lucy opened the file and we watched it roll past. My excitement was equaled by my dismay. It contained the commands Margaret wrote and executed long ago when she created public synonyms for all of the tables she created in the office data base commands like CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM CASE FOR DEEP.CASE.

I was not a computer programmer. I'd heard of public synonyms but was not entirely sure what they were.

Lucy was flipping through a manual. She got to the section on public synonyms and confidently volunteered, "See, it's neat. When you create a table, you have to create it under a user name and pa.s.sword."

She looked up at me, her eyes bright behind her thick gla.s.ses.

"Okay," I said. "That makes sense."

"So if your user name is *Auntie' and your pa.s.sword is *Kay,' then when you create a table called *Games' or something, the name the computer gives it is really *Auntie.Games.'

It attaches the table name to the user name it was created under. If you don't want to bother typing in *Auntie.Games' every time you want to get into the table, you create a public synonym. You type the command CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM GAMES FOR AUNTIE.GAMES. It sort of renames the table so it's just called *Games.'"

I stared at the long list of commands on the screen, a list revealing every table in the OCME computer, a list revealing the DBA user name each table was created under.

I puzzled, "But even if someone saw this file, Lucy, he wouldn't know the pa.s.sword. Only the DBA user name is listed, and you can't get into a table, such as our case table, without knowing the pa.s.sword."

"Wanna bet?"

Her fingers were poised over the keys. "If you know the DBA user name, you can change the pa.s.sword, make it anything you want and then you can get in. The computer doesn't care. It lets you change pa.s.swords anytime you want without messing up your programs or anything. People like to change their pa.s.swords for security reasons."

"So you could take the user name *Deep' and a.s.sign it a new pa.s.sword and get into our data?"

She nodded.

"Show me."

She looked at me with uncertainty. "But you told me not to ever go into your office data base."

"I'm making an exception this one time."

"And if I give *Deep' a new pa.s.sword, Auntie Kay, it will get rid of the old one. The old one won't be there anymore. It won't work."

I was jolted by the memory of what Margaret mentioned when we first discovered someone tried to pull up Lori Petersen's case: something about the DBA pa.s.sword not working, causing her to have to connect the DBA grant again.

"The old pa.s.sword won't work anymore because it's been replaced by the new one I made up. So you can't log on with the old one."

Lucy glanced furtively at me. "But I was going to fix it."

"Fix it?" I was barely listening.

"Your computer here. Your old pa.s.sword won't work anymore because I changed it to get into SQL. But I was going to fix it, you know. I promise."

"Later," I quickly said. "You can fix it later. I want you to show me exactly how someone could get in."

I was trying to make sense of it. It seemed likely, I decided, that the person who got into the OCME data base knew enough about it to realize he could create a new pa.s.sword for the user name found in the Public. SQL file. But he didn't realize that in doing so he would invalidate the old pa.s.sword, preventing us from getting in the next time we tried. Of course we would notice that. Of course we would wonder about it, and the idea the echo might be on and echoing his commands on the screen apparently didn't occur to him either. The breakin had to have been a onetime event! If the person had broken in before, even if the echo was off, we would have known because Margaret would have discovered the pa.s.sword "Throat" no longer worked. Why? Why did this person break in and try to pull up Lori Petersen's case? Lucy's fingers were clicking away on the keyboard.

"See," she was saying, "pretend I'm the bad guy trying to break in. Here's how I do it."

She got into SQL by typing in System/Manager, and executed a connect/resource/DBA command on the user name "Deep" and a pa.s.sword she made up-"jumble."

The grant was connected. It was the new DBA. With it she could get into any of the office tables. It was powerful enough for her to do anything she wished.

It was powerful enough for her to alter data.

It was powerful enough, for example, for someone to have altered Brenda Steppe's case record so that the item "tan cloth belt" was listed in the "Clothing, Personal Effects" field.

Did he do this? He knew the details of the murders he'd committed. *He was reading the papers. He was obsessing over every word written about him. He would recognize an inaccuracy in the news accounts before anybody else would. He was arrogant. He wanted to flaunt his intelligence. Did he change my office data to jerk me around, to taunt me? The breakin had occurred almost two months after the detail was printed in Abby's account of Brenda Steppe's death.

Yet the data base was violated only once, and only recently.

The detail in Abby's story could not have come from the OCME computer. Was it possible the detail in the computer came from the newspaper account? Perhaps he carefully went through the strangling cases in the computer, looking for something inconsistent with what Abby was writing. Perhaps when he got to Brenda Steppe's case he found his inaccuracy. He altered the data by typing "tan cloth belt" over "a pair of nude pantyhose."

Perhaps the last thing he did before logging off was to try to pull up Lori Petersen's case, out of curiosity, if for no other reason. This would explain why those commands were what Margaret found on the screen.

Was my paranoia running off with my reason? Could there be a connection between this and the mislabeled PERK as well? The cardboard file was spangled with a glittery residue. What if it hadn't come from my hands? "Lucy," I asked, "would there be any way to know if someone has altered data in my office computer?"

She said without pause, "You back up the data, don't you? Someone does an export, doesn't he?"

"Yes."

"Then you could get an export that's old, import it into a computer and see if the old data's different."

"The problem," I considered, "is even if I discovered an alteration, I can't say for sure it wasn't the result of an update to the record one of my clerks made. The cases are in a state of constant flux because reports trickle in for weeks, months, after the case has been initially entered."

"I guess you got to ask them, Auntie Kay. Ask them if they changed it. If they say no, and if you find an old export that's different from the stuff in the computer now, wouldn't that help?"

I admitted, "It might."

She changed the pa.s.sword back to what it was supposed to be. We logged off and cleared the screen so no one would see the commands on the OCME computer in the morning.

It was almost eleven o'clock. I called Margaret at home and she sounded groggy as I questioned her about the export disks and asked if she might have anything dating back prior to the time the computer was broken into.

She offered me the expected disappointment. "No, Dr. Scarpetta. The office wouldn't have anything that old. We do a new export at the end of every day, and the previous export is formatted, then updated."

"d.a.m.n. Somehow I've got to get hold of a version of the data base that hasn't been updated for the past several weeks."

Silence.

"Wait a minute," she muttered. "I might have a flat file a"

"Of what?"

"I don't know a" She hesitated. "I guess the last six months of data or so. Vital Statistics wants our data, and a couple of weeks ago I was experimenting, importing the districts' data into one part.i.tion and spooling all the case data off into a file to see how it looks. Eventually, I'm supposed to ship it to them over the phone, straight into their mainframe-"

"How many weeks ago?" I interrupted. "How many weeks ago did you spool it off?"

"The first of the month a let's see, I think I did it around the first of June."

My nerves were buzzing. I had to know. At the very least, my office couldn't be blamed for leaks if I could prove data were altered in the computer after the stories appeared in the papers.

"I need a printout of that flat file immediately," I told her.

There was a long silence. She seemed uncertain when she replied, "I had some problems with the procedure."

Another pause. "But I can give you what I've got, first thing in the morning."

Glancing at my watch, I next dialed Abby's pager number.

Five minutes later, I had her on the line.