He studied me for a moment. He was analyzing. 'Why this victim?' he asked.
'I thought I'd just explained that.'
'Be careful,' he said. 'Be careful that your motivation isn't subjective.'
'What are you suggesting?'
'Lucy.'
I felt a rush of irritation.
'Lucy could have been as badly head injured as this woman was,' he said. 'Lucy's always been an orphan, of sorts, and not so long ago she was missing, wandering around in New England, and you had to go find her.'
'You're accusing me of projecting.'
'I'm not accusing you. I'm exploring the possibility with you.'
'I'm simply attempting to do my job,' I said. 'And I have no desire to be psychoanalyzed.'
'I understand.' He paused. 'Do whatever you need to do. I'll help in any way I can. And I'm sure Pete will, too.'
Then we switched to the more treacherous subject of Lucy and CAIN, and this Wesley did not want to talk about. He got up for coffee as the phone in the outer office rang, and his secretary took another message. The phone had not stopped ringing since my arrival, and I knew it was always like this. His office was like mine. The world was full of desperate people who had our numbers and no one else to call.
'Just tell me what you think she did,' I said when he got back.
He set my coffee before me. 'You're speaking like her aunt,' he said.
'No. Now I'm speaking like her mother.'
'I would rather you and I talk about this like two professionals,' he said.
'Fine. You can start by filling me in.'
'The espionage that began last October when ERF was broken into is still going on,' he said. 'Someone is inside CAIN.'
'That much I know.'
'We don't know who is doing it,' he said.
'We assume it's Gault, I suppose,' I said.
Wesley reached for his coffee. He met my eyes. 'I'm certainly no expert in computers. But there's something you need to see.'
He opened a thin file folder and withdrew a sheet of paper. As he handed it to me I recognized it as a printout from a computer screen.
'That's a page of CAIN's audit log for the exact time that the most recent message was sent to the VICAP terminal in the Transit Police Department's Communications Unit,' he said. 'Do you notice anything unusual?'
I thought of the printout Lucy had shown me, of the evil message about 'Dead Cops.' I had to stare for a minute at the log-ins and log-outs, the IDs, dates and times before I realized the problem. I felt fear.
Lucy's user ID was not traditional in that it was not comprised of the initial of her first name and first seven letters of her surname.
Instead, she called herself LUCYTALK, and according to this audit trail she had been signed on as the superuser when CAIN had sent the message to New York.
'Have you questioned her about this?' I asked Wesley.
'She's been questioned and wasn't concerned because as you can see from the printout, she's on and off the system all day long, and sometimes after hours, as well.'
'She is concerned. I don't care what she said to you, Benton. She feels she's been moved to the security floor so she can be watched.'
'She is being watched.'
'Just because she was signed on at the same time the message was sent to New York doesn't mean she sent it,' I persisted.
'I realize that. There's nothing else in the audit log to indicate she sent it. There's nothing to indicate anybody sent it, for that matter.'
'Who brought this to your attention?' I then asked, for I knew Wesley did not routinely look at audit logs.
'Burgess.'
'Then, someone from ERF brought it to his attention first.'
'Obviously.'
'There are still people over there who don't trust Lucy, because of what happened last fall.'
His gaze was steady. 'I can't do anything about that, Kay. She has to prove herself. We can't do that for her. You can't do that for her.'
'I'm not trying to do anything for her,' I said hotly. 'All I ask is fairness. Lucy is not to blame for the virus in CAIN. She did not put it there. She's trying to do something about it, and frankly, if she can't, I don't think anyone will be able to help. The entire system will be corrupted.'
He picked up his coffee but changed his mind and set it back down.
'And I don't believe she's been put on the security floor because some people think she's sabotaging CAIN. If you really thought that, you'd send her packing. The last thing you'd do is keep her here.'
'Not necessarily,' he said, but he could not fool me.
'Tell me the truth.'
He was thinking, looking for a way out.
'You assigned Lucy to the security floor, didn't you?' I went on. 'It wasn't Burgess. It wasn't because of this log-in time you just showed me. That's flimsy.'