“I know it seems complicated,” she says. “But it’s really not, and I’ll give you the broad strokes because I know what happened, am absolutely clear about it. The bad guy creates an account with the username BLiDedwood on August twenty-fifth. The Internet service provider, the IP, dead-ends at a proxy server, this one in Berlin.”

A proxy server Lucy has hacked into. “Sent from where?” I ask. “Obviously not from Germany.”

“Logan Airport. Same as later. That’s what he does. He captures their wireless.”

“Then he wasn’t setting up the account in Alberta, Canada, on August twenty-fifth.”

“Definitely not,” Lucy says. “He was back in this area and close enough to the airport to pick up the wireless signal.”

A boat, I’m reminded, and I send Ernie Koppel an e-mail about the swipe of what looks like garish green paint.

Anything at all from the barnacle, the broken piece of bamboo? I write to him.

“This person then creates Peggy Stanton’s Twitter account that same day, on August twenty-fifth,” Lucy continues to explain, “and submits the e-mail username BLiDedwood so Twitter can contact that address, making sure it exists, before verifying the account.”

Something old, something new, Ernie writes back almost instantly.

“Then very recently the bad guy deletes that e-mail account, BLiDedwood, and uses a different application to create a new anonymous account with the same name but a different extension, this one stealthmail,” Lucy says, as another message from Ernie lands on my phone.

If we ever find the boat, we can definitely match it. Will call when back in the lab.

“So he waits twenty-nine minutes and sends the video file and jpg to you and then the account is gone like a bridge blown out,” Lucy says. “Again, he was physically close enough to Logan Airport to send the e-mail to you from their wireless network.”

“Which also is in the area where Peggy Stanton’s body was found in the bay, maybe dumped there, possibly around the same time that e-mail was sent to me, about the same time Marino’s flight from Tampa arrived,” I reply. “I don’t understand the motive.”

“Games.” Lucy is calmly quiet, like stagnant weather before a violent storm. “We don’t know what his fantasies are, but he’s getting off on all of this.”

Someone who mocks.

“Whatever he does to his victims, it’s part of a much bigger picture,” she says, in the same tone. “The prelude, the aftermath are obsessions. It isn’t just the capturing and the killing. You don’t have to be a profiler to know that.”

He’s killed before and will kill again, or maybe already has.

“An attempt to frame Marino?” I ask.

“To fuck him up, anyway. It must be fun to cause so much trouble,” she says angrily. “I’ve let Benton know he probably should get down here.”

“Does he know about Emma Shubert’s phone?”