Lucy inserted an interactive key into a Mul-T- Lock Mortise cylinder, and the alarm system began to beep as she opened the front door. She entered a code on the keypad and the beeping stopped, and she shut the door behind them.

“When you see what I’m talking about, your first impulse will be to fire me,” Lucy said. “But you won’t.”

Shrew considered herself a crackerjack Web administrator, but she was no programmer. She was no information technology expert.

She sat at her computer, watching the Gotham Gotcha home page continue its maniacal loop while a technician from the Web hosting company told her over the phone that the problem was a buffer overflow. He explained that the number of users attempting to access certain information on the site had exceeded the server’s enormous capacity and at this moment the situation was so out of control, millions of people per minute were clicking on a photograph in the dark room, and this, in the technician’s opinion, could mean but one thing: “A worm,” he said. “Or basically, a virus. But nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s really more of a mutant worm.”

“How could a worm, mutant or otherwise, have infiltrated the programming?” Shrew asked.

“It’s likely that a remote unprivileged user somehow executed arbitrary code and exploited the buffer overflow vulnerabilities of the Web proxy server. Whoever did this is extremely sophisticated.”

He went on to say that typically what happened was someone sent an attachment containing a worm that wasn’t recognized by any virus-detection program known to the industry. This worm mimicked users opening an image that took up a lot of space, “such as a photograph,” he said, adding that “this self-replicating worm mimics millions of people opening the same image at the same time, which causes the server to run out of memory, and in addition, it would appear that this worm is also performing the malicious action of destroying data. In other words, it’s an odd mutation of a worm, a macro virus. And possibly a Trojan horse if, for example, it’s also spreading the virus to other programs, which is what I fear.”

He repeatedly emphasized that the saboteur was someone who really knew what he was doing, as if the technician was secretly envious of whoever was clever enough to create such destruction.

Shrew innocently asked which image was the culprit, and he replied unequivocally that the worm was launched by a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. As he continued to explain the havoc caused by the mutant worm, Shrew was imagining the conspiracy behind it. Whoever was involved in Marilyn Monroe’s murder almost half a century ago still had a vested interest in the public’s not knowing the truth.