Autopsy (Kay Scarpetta, #25)(31)

“Now you’re just showing off.” Lucy is pleased with what she’s wrought, and my fitness tracker alerts me that August Ryan has sent an e-mail.

“This could be important.” I open it. “The recording from the security gate, and we’re going to want to listen.”

“A recording of what?” Lucy asks.

“Not much as it turns out. The cameras at the entrance and exit of Colonial Landing were covered for an interval of almost an hour last Friday night.” I go on to repeat what August told me.

I rationalize that if Marino is working for me again, there’s no reason Lucy can’t. They’re investigative partners, and I could use any help I can get. I forward the file to her, and she opens it on a computer display, clicking on PLAY. All we see is darkness, the muddy image of the road leading to Colonial Landing’s walled brick entrance.

At 5:13 P.M., something is pulled over one camera, then the other, making a quiet crinkly plastic sound exactly as August described. Two minutes later, Gwen Hainey’s code, 1988, is entered, and the entrance gate slides open. There’s no car engine, no sound of anything driving through.

Just the wind and rain, then the faint strains of organ music getting louder, crescendoing like The Phantom of the Opera. But what we’re listening to isn’t Andrew Lloyd Webber.

“Next you hear the entrance gate close, and then nothing,” I say to Lucy. “Apparently, all was quiet until fifty-two minutes later.”

I fast-forward the recording almost to the end. We listen to the noise of the metal exit gate opening. Then the same eerie musical theme is playing again, and it’s enough to make one’s hair stand on end.

“That’s bizarre and rather terrifying. Have you ever heard this music before?” I ask.

“I might have. But horror themes all sound kind of similar to me.” She replays it. “Let’s ask Janet. Can you identify this music?”

“It’s from a TV show called Shock Theater,” she says without pause.

“Never heard of it,” I confess.

“HORROR FLICKS LIKE FRANKENSTEIN, Dracula, The Wolf Man, going back to the late nineteen forties.” Lucy looks at information on her phone that Janet data mines as fast as we can think.

The theme is on YouTube, and as we listen, I’m increasingly alarmed. Sensing the presence of a cunning intelligence, I envision the dead woman sprawled by the railroad tracks, her neck savagely slashed, her head barely attached, her hands gone.

I can see the coppery glint of the penny flattened on the rail as if I’m right there in the stormy dark while a cold rain falls intermittently. And I suggest to my niece that we head home and talk to Benton.

“Let’s see what he has to say and drink a toast before it’s not your birthday anymore.” I check the time, and it’s getting close to eleven. “Janet, thank you for your help,” I say to her as she stares at us with a manufactured Mona Lisa smile, listening on command, blinking as programmed.

“You’re welcome,” she says warmly, her dimples showing again.

“I’ll see you a little later,” Lucy tells her, and I detect the emotion she feels for what isn’t real.

“It appears she’s becoming your personal Google.” I’m somewhat dazed by what I just witnessed, my emotions powerfully impacted by what I know is artificial.

“Pretty soon, everybody’s going to be doing this.” Lucy clicks the mouse, the display blacking out.

“I hope I’m not turning into a Luddite but I find what you’re saying deeply disturbing,” I reply, imagining people downloading an app on their phone so they can commune with cyber ghosts.

I have no doubt the temptation will be overwhelming to conjure up family, friends, enemies, world leaders and celebrities alive and dead, including those you have no connection to, and possibly haven’t met. What an embarrassment of riches for stalkers, for anyone obsessed.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen as technology makes us increasingly detached from others,” I explain. “How dangerous if we can’t tell what’s real from what isn’t. What do we trust?”

“Since social media and the pandemic we’ve already become like that,” Lucy says. “And it depends on your definition of real. Because once you get used to a tool like this, it’s as real as anything gets. But forget privacy anymore. There’s so much out there, you don’t need to hack. Although we can.”

“We?” I ask pointedly, and I know she means Janet.

“This is the way everything is going.” Lucy gets up from her desk. “There’s no choice, and no going back.”

It will become commonplace to continue relationships in cyberspace, she says, as if there can be no question. Life’s disconnects and disappointments will be remedied in ways never believed possible, what’s unbearable becoming a matter of perception and re-creations, the undoable undone.

There will be fixes and patches for ruptures of all descriptions including illness, divorce, disability, bad choices and behavior, ruined opportunities, and most of all death. As miraculous and marvelous as such a renaissance may seem, it’s equally sinister if exploited by the human malware among us.

“Janet and I talk through all kinds of things,” Lucy continues to explain as if it’s normal. “She’s told me plenty that I didn’t know, coming up with things on her own. It’s incredibly helpful, and I feel she’s there, that’s the truth. As crazy as it sounds, we’re pretty much working together like we always did.”