"My guess is that since he cleaned up after himself, this thing with the books probably isn't ritual. He was trying to throw the police off somehow. I think it's staging."
"How would that do anything?" Stiner asked, puzzled.
Lockwood moved away from them and stood looking out the window. He could see down into the still-wet street and he wondered if the killer had watched her from there. Her desk was near the window. After a minute, Karen moved over to where he was standing and noticed a frown on his face. "What is it?" she asked.
"Karen, did you ever take any pre-med when you were getting your doctorates?"
Malavida was standing next to them, listening.
"They aren't that kind of doctorates."
"Well, I've been to maybe a hundred autopsies," he continued, still looking down into the street. "You have any idea how hard it is to sever somebody's arms like that? How long it takes? You need bone saws and clamps, extremely sharp instruments. Those photographs show clean incisions. Clean bone cuts. This guy didn't do this in a frenzy. This was methodical. I just.** "
They stood in silence and waited for him to finish his thought.
"… Okay, so he comes in, sets off the alarm at seven-thirty. He kills her, surgically removes both arms, brands her, then arranges the body with books… then bags all this up, cleans up the site, and leaves. All of this in fifteen minutes?" He turned now to face them. "That sound right to you?"
"Liver temperature is just approximate. It could be longer," Karen said.
"You know why he might have arranged the body like that? With the books under it?" Lockwood said, looking at the place on the floor where her body was found.
"No, why?"
"This is just a guess, but maybe he was trying to drain it so it wouldn't register lividity."
"Lividity?" Karen said. "If I remember correctly, lividity doesn't take place for eight or nine hours. So why would he worry about lividity? When the police arrived, her liver temp was still one hundred and one degrees. The liver is a chemical factory, the hottest organ in the body. In a normal human, it is one hundred and two degrees, and cools at one point five degrees per hour. That means the police found her body less than an hour after he killed her."
Malavida was again very impressed. Karen Dawson really knew her stuff.
"If he couldn't have done these amputations in fifteen minutes, then maybe the whole timetable is off," Lockwood continued.
"How could it be off? The burglar alarm marks the entry," Karen replied.
"I don't know… Maybe he changed the timetable somehow." Malavida sat down at one of the desks, took the plastic cover off the computer, and turned it on… The PC booted up and the screen said:
hoyt login:
He typed in:
root
And the computer said:
Password:
He typed the most common supervr password, which was:
GOD
And the computer responded:
You are logged in to host hoyt as root. Good evening, root.
Malavida smiled, then scanned the directories on the host computer. He saw one called /urs/bin/building and moved into that directory. There he saw a program, EnviroLog, which he knew contained all of the major systems in the building including phone, security, fire, etc. He typed:
EnviroLog
And in a few seconds the system said:
EnviroLog Version 3.1.2 Enter your password:
"I could get into the guts of this thing if I had my tool kit," he said, "but I left it on the plane…"
"What are you looking for?" Karen asked.
"I won't know till I see it. But we already know this guy is a master hacker, and all these new buildings are run by computers. I was thinking, what if he gronked that alarm, triggered it somehow, then bogused the time when it started ringing…? That wouldn't be hard to do. He could set a different time of death by accessing the security program for the building. I can crack in here by random trial and error, but it could take hours. The other way is, we get the building supervr outta the sack and try to get him to do it, but he won't probably get here for an hour. Then he's gonna wanna get permission from the building's owner, who won't get in till noon. So why don't we save all the hassle and get my metal suitcase full of cracker-jacks."
Lockwood looked at his watch and then at one of the patrolmen who was standing near the elevator, staring at his shoes. It was already 4:30 in the morning. Lockwood was supposed to be in the D. C. fifth-floor conference room at 9:00 A. M. to face his IA trial board. If he missed that, he'd be dust. He wondered why he didn't give a damn. "Could one of your guys run Miss Dawson out to the airport and back?" he finally asked a patrolman, who glanced at Stiner. Stiner nodded his approval and Karen left with him.
Forty minutes later, she was back with Malavida's metal suitcase. The Chicano cracker opened it up and started selecting disks. The sun was just coming up on the cloudy horizon as he started, hunched over his keyboard. He was still in handcuffs. Malavida knew he needed to get them off if he was going to get loose from Lockwood. He looked over at the Customs agent. "Can't we lose the jewelry, Hoss?" He said, smiling. "I'm not going nowhere."
Lockwood hesitated.
"For God's sake," Karen said sharply. "What are you worried about? You've got a gun. Where's he gonna go?"
Malavida held up his manacled hands, and finally Lockwood unhooked the handcuffs from the waist chain to give him more mobility, but he didn't take them off.
"You're very careful, Zanzo," Malavida said as he turned back to the computer and Karen glowered at Lockwood.
Malavida had tried the system supervr password, GOD, but the EnviroLog program's password was different and would have to be obtained from scratch. He worked patiently as time clicked silently off everybody's wristwatch.
At 5:50, Lockwood picked up the phone, dialed the Executive Air Terminal, and got Red on the line. When Karen had returned to get Malavida's suitcase, she'd seen him sleeping there on the sofa and decided not to wake him.
"Look, this is taking a bit longer than I thought," he told the pilot.
"I gotta go at six-thirty, John. I got the D. O. C. coming back to Washington. I'm on standby for him. If I'm not in the Ready Room when he calls to use his bird, my ass gets transferred back out in the field, and I'll be taking nut-pucker rides under Doper Cessnas again. This is the best job I've had in this outfit and I'm not gonna lose it."
"Six-forty-five," Lockwood pleaded.
"I'm wheels-up at six-thirty, with or without ya."
At six-thirty, just as Red roared down the Atlanta runway in the empty Citation and lifted off for Washington, D. C., Malavida finally got into the building computer and began surfing around in the security system, while Lockwood and Karen and Detective Stiner all watched over his shoulder. He accessed the records for Saturday morning, April 13, the day the police thought Candice had been killed. The security profile for that morning showed that the Center Street fire door alarm had gone off at 7:30 A. M., just as the police said. Malavida moved on. When he finally got to the environmental log, he wasn't paying too much attention so he almost missed it. He had already scrolled that log off the screen when his mind caught up with his vision. Had he seen a slight jitter on one of the log files? He opened it again and began to study the information more carefully. He saw that the building environment was broken up into forty different zones. The one that said 4-W had a slight quiver when he scrolled by it. He leaned in and looked at it more carefully. Then he backed the log up to April 12 and looked at 4-W.
"What is it?" Karen asked.
"I don't know. There's a phase jitter on this EnviroLog data. On 4-W, for April thirteenth… but not on the twelfth. Snoopy smells dogshit."