'Oh great.' She put her glasses back on. 'So now you want him to be a pen pal.'

'Lucy, please,' I quietly said, and I was getting a headache, too. 'We both have a job to do.'

She was quiet for a moment. Then she apologized. 'I guess I'm just as overly protective of you as you've always been of me.'

'I still am.' I patted her knee. 'Okay, so he got my screen name from the AOL

directory of subscribers, right?'

She nodded. 'Let's talk about your AOL profile.'

'There's nothing in it but my professional title, my office phone number and address,' I said. 'I never entered personal details, such as marital status, date of birth, hobbies, et cetera. I have more sense than that.'

'Have you checked out his profile?' she asked. 'The one for deadoc?'

'Frankly, it never occurred to me that he would have one,' I said.

Depressed, I thought of saw marks I could not tell apart, and felt I had made yet one more mistake this day.

'Oh, he's got one, all right.' Lucy was typing again. 'He wants you to know who he is. That's why he wrote it.'

She clicked to the Member Directory, and when she opened deadoc's profile, I could not believe what was before my eyes. I scanned key words that could be searched by anyone interested in finding other users to whom they applied.

Attorney, autopsy, chief, Chief Medical Examiner, Cornell, corpse, death, dismemberment, FBI, forensic, Georgetown, Italian, Johns Hopkins, judicial, killer, lawyer, medical, pathologist, physician, Scuba, Virginia, woman.

The list went on, the professional and personal information, the hobbies, all describing me.

'It's like deadoc's saying he's you,' Lucy said.

I was dumbfounded and suddenly felt very cold. 'This is crazy.'

Lucy pushed back her chair and looked at me. 'He's got your profile. In cyberspace, on the World Wide Web, you're both the same person with two different screen names.'

'We are not the same person. I can't believe you said that.' I looked at her, shocked.

'The photographs are yours and you sent them to yourself. It was easy. You simply scanned them into your computer. No big deal. You can get portable color scanners

for four, five hundred bucks. Attach the file to the message ten, which you send to

KSCARPETTA, send to yourself, in other words…'

'Lucy,' I cut her off, 'for God's sake, that's enough.' She was silent, her face without expression.

'This is outrageous. I can't believe what you're saying.' I got up from the chair in disgust.

'If your fingerprints were on the murder weapon,' she replied, 'wouldn't you want me to tell you?'

'My fingerprints aren't on anything.'

'Aunt Kay, I'm just making the point that someone out there is stalking you, impersonating you, on the Internet. Of course you didn't do anything. But what I'm trying to impress upon you is every time someone does a search by subject because they need help from an expert like you, they're going to get deadoc's name, too.'

'How could he have known all this information about me?' I went on. 'It's not in my profile. I don't have anything in there about where I went to law school, medical school, that my heritage is Italian.'

'Maybe from things written about you over the years.'

'I suppose.' I felt as if I were coming down with something. 'Would you like a nightcap? I'm very tired.'

But she was lost again in the dark space of the UNIX environment with its strange symbols and commands like cat,:q! and vi.

'Aunt Kay, what's your password in AOL?' she asked.

'The same one I use for everything else,' I confessed, knowing she would be annoyed again.

'Shit. Don't tell me you're still using Sinbad.' She looked up at me.

'My mother's rotten cat has never been mentioned in anything ever written about me,' I defended myself.

I watched as she typed the command password and entered Sinbad.

'Do you do password aging?' she asked as if everyone should know what that meant.

'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'Where you change your password at least once a month.'

'No,' I said.

'Who else knows your password?'

'Rose knows it. And of course, now you do,' I said. 'There's no way deadoc could.'

'There's always a way. He could use a UNIX password-encryption program to encrypt every word in a dictionary. Then compare every encrypted word to your password…'

'It wasn't that complicated,' I said with conviction. 'I bet whoever did this doesn't know a thing about UNIX.'

Lucy closed what she was doing, and looked curiously at me, swiveling the chair around. ' Why do you say that?'

'Because he could have washed the body first so trace evidence didn't adhere to blood. He shouldn't have given us a photo of her hands. Now we may have her prints.' I was leaning against the door frame, holding my aching head. 'He's not that smart.'

'Maybe he doesn't think her prints will ever matter,' she said, getting up. 'And by the way,' she said as she walked by. 'Almost any computer book's going to tell you it's stupid to choose a password that's the name of your significant other or your cat.'

'Sinbad's not my cat. I wouldn't have a miserable Siamese that always gives me the fisheye and stalks me whenever I walk into my mother's house.'

'Well, you must like him a little bit or you wouldn't have wanted to think of him every time you log on to your computer,' she said from down the hall.

'I don't like him in the least,' I said.

The next morning, the air was crisp and clean like a fall apple, stars were out, traffic mostly truckers in the midst of long hauls. I turned off on 64 East, just beyond the state fairgrounds, and minutes later was prowling rows in short-term parking at the Richmond International Airport. I chose a space in S because I knew it would be easy for me to remember, and was reminded of my password again, of other obvious acts of carelessness caused by overload.

As I was getting my bag out of the trunk, I heard footsteps behind me and instantly wheeled around.

'Don't shoot.' Marino held up his hands. It was cool enough out that I could see his breath.

'I wish you'd whistle or something when you walk up on me in the dark,' I said, slamming shut the trunk.

'Oh. And bad people don't whistle. Only good guys like me do.' He grabbed my suitcase. 'You want me to get that, too?'

He reached for the hard, black Pelican case I was taking with me to Memphis today, where it already had been numerous times before. Inside were human vertebrae and bone, evidence that could not leave me.

'This stays handcuffed to me,' I said, grabbing it and my briefcase. 'I'm really sorry to put you out like this, Marino. Are you sure it's necessary for you to come along?'

We had discussed this several times now, and I did not think he should accompany me. I did not see the point.

'Like I told you, some squirrel's playing games with you,' he said. 'Me, Wesley, Lucy, the entire friggin' Bureau think I should come along. For one thing, you've made this exact same trip in every case, so it's gotten predictable. And it's been in the papers that you use this guy at LTT.'

Parking lots were well lit and full of cars, and I could not help but notice people slowly driving past, looking for a place that wasn't miles from the terminal. I wondered what else deadoc knew about me, and wished I had worn more than a trench coat. I was cold and had forgotten my gloves.

'Besides,' Marino added, 'I've never been to Graceland.' At first, I thought he was joking.

'It's on my list,' he went on.

'What list?'

'The one I've had since I was a kid. Alaska, Las Vegas and the Grand Ole Opry,' he said as if the thought filled him with joy. 'Don't you have some place you would go if you could do anything you want?'