“Good morning, glad to see you back. One nasty bug. My wife had it.” His cheeks are rosy and round, tightly framed by white polyethylene, the same flashspun material used to wrap buildings, boats, and cars.
“Don’t catch it.”
“I’ve been spared so far, thank you, God. I saw what’s parked in the bay. That’s some ride you’ve got,” he says this to Lucy. “I was looking for the gun turret.”
“You have to order it special,” she says.
“When you get a minute?” I grab disposable gowns and shoe covers off a cart. “Obviously this isn’t a routine motor vehicle fatality. It’s quite the workup.”
“One more pass of the driver’s seat and you can fume it for prints,” he calls out to other scientists as he dims the lights.
“Did he have his seat belt on?” I tie my gown in back.
“Side impact — being belted wasn’t going to help him. Take a look at the left rear tire,” Ernie says.
I slip on shoe covers that make papery sounds as I move close to the car to see what he’s talking about. The tire is flat. That’s as much as I can tell.
“It was punctured with some type of sharp tool,” he explains.
“Are we sure it didn’t happen during the accident? For example, if he ran over a sharp piece of metal? Tires often are flat in bad accidents.”
“It’s too clean a puncture for that and it’s in the sidewall, not the tread,” Ernie says. “I’m thinking something like an ice pick that caused a slow leak and he lost control of his car. There’s a transfer of paint on the rear bumper, which I also find interesting. Unless the damage was already there? And I doubt that as meticulous as this car was.”
I see what he’s talking about, a small dent with a transfer of what looks like a reflective red paint.
“He may have had a flat tire and been swiped by someone,” I suggest.
“I don’t think so, not as low to the ground as this car is.” Lucy pulls shoe covers on. “If it was hit, it was by something else low to the ground or maybe a larger vehicle with a bumper guard. Some of them are reflective.” She takes a closer look. “Especially with gangs who trick their cars out like crazy, usually SUVs.”
“Give me one sec.” Ernie bends back inside the car, moving the wand, and I resume talking to Lucy about Gail Shipton.
It’s a subject I’m not finished with yet.
“A notebook was recovered from her purse,” I begin.
“Which was where?”
“The killer left it near the scene. Obviously he wanted it to be found. There was no money in her wallet but it’s hard to know if anything else was missing. Apparently he wasn’t interested in her notebook.”
I open the photograph I took at the construction site and show her the page with the odd encryption.
61: INC 12/18 1733 (<18m) REC 20-8-18-5-1-20.
“The last entry she made in it,” I explain. “Apparently right after she got off the phone with you, possibly moments before she was abducted. A small black notebook with pages that look like graph paper and there were stickers, red ones with an X in the middle. Do you have any ideas?”
“Sure.” Lucy works her arms into the sleeves of the gown, the synthetic material making slippery, crinkly sounds. “It’s a note in her rudimentary code that a first grader could break.”
“Sixty-one?” I start at the beginning of the encrypted string, standing shoulder to shoulder with Lucy, both of us looking at the picture on my phone.
“It’s her code for me,” she says as if it’s perfectly reasonable that Gail would have assigned a code to her. “The letters in my name correspond to numbers. L-U-C-Y is twelve, twenty-one, three, and twenty-five. If you add them up it equals sixty-one.”
“Did she inform you she had a code for you?”
“Nope.”
“INC is an incoming call,” I assume, “and twelve-eighteen is the date, which was yesterday, and the military time of seventeen-thirty-three.”
“Correct,” Lucy answers. “We talked for less than eighteen minutes, and REC means received, and in this case the rest of the numbers are the code for Threat. Same thing, the numbers correspond to letters of the alphabet. In summary I called her and she recorded the conversation as a threat. I threatened her. That’s the takeaway message, which of course is a lie.”
“Who was supposed to get this takeaway message?”
“It’s intended for whoever she might sic on me eventually. Her encryption isn’t meant to be secure,” Lucy says as if it’s nothing, as if Gail Shipton was a simpleton. “In fact, just the opposite. She wanted someone to find this and figure it out. She wanted it to be evidence at some point. She was cutting pages out of the notebook in case I ever got my hands on it. I wouldn’t find the incriminating entries, so she assumed. I wouldn’t know she was making false entries about me in a record she was keeping.”
“The notebook entries were meant to be evidence in her lawsuit or a different one?” I don’t understand.
“She probably wanted to intimidate me eventually and I just sat back and watched. She’d get a settlement from Double S and then she’d want what’s next. She’d make the claim she’d invented every aspect of the drone phone. She wouldn’t have to pay a dime, would simply own all of it.” Lucy speaks calmly, matter-of-factly. “And she’d claim credit for work she could never do on her own. That would have been almost as valuable as the money. She wasn’t exactly feeling great about herself. The whole thing’s pathetic.”
“If she was cutting out the negative entries about you,” I reply, “then what was the evidence she intended to intimidate you with?”
“First of all, it’s a joke.”
“I fail to see anything funny about it.”
“It’s no damn wonder she got taken advantage of,” Lucy says. “The reason the pages look like graph paper is because they’re from a smart notebook. What she would do is photograph every page, digitizing her entries, including her fraudulent ones, so they could be searched by keywords or tags like the sticker with the X. Then she’d remove the paper and ink false entries about me by cutting out the pages she’d photographed so that the only record to turn up would be the electronic one.”
“Which you were aware of.” I know what that means.
It’s exactly as I suspect. Whatever Gail was up to, no matter how clever she believed she was, Lucy was onto all of it. She wouldn’t hesitate to search Gail’s pocketbook or her car or apartment for that matter. It would be business as usual for her to hack into whatever she wanted, and I recall what Marino said about there being not a single photograph on Gail’s phone. Lucy had deleted them, including ones Gail had taken of the lies she recorded in her notebook.
“She was building a case against me and had been for months. Pretty soon she would have what she wanted and I needed to be out of her way, or at least that was what she’d fooled herself into believing,” Lucy says in a measured way that is meant to hide what hurt must be buried somewhere. “You know what Nietzsche said. Be careful who you pick as an enemy because that’s who you become most like.”
“I’m sorry she became your enemy.”
“I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about Gail and Double S. She was well on her way to becoming just as bad as they are.”
I watch a fingerprint examiner work dials on a distribution box connected to thick bright red power cords snaking over the epoxy-painted floor. Cyanoacrylate humidifiers, evaporators, and fans begin to whir as Ernie heads in our direction, pulling off his gloves and dropping them into the trash. I hand him packaged evidence and a pen.