“The crest for the AFME.” She indicates the dead man’s hand on the computer screens. “And Wild Bill Hickok, or Billy, was murdered in Deadwood, South Dakota. For your benefit? Yes, Aunt Kay. I just hope it’s not someone in our own backyard.”

“Why would you entertain the slightest suspicion that it might be?”

“Using a temporary free e-mail address that self-destructs or deletes itself in thirty minutes?” Lucy considers. “Okay, not all that unusual, could be anyone. Then this person routes the e-mail to you through a free proxy server, this particular one a high-anonymity type with an unavailable host name. Located in Italy.”

“So no one can respond to the e-mail because the temporary account is deleted after thirty minutes and is gone.”

“That’s the point.”

“And no one can track the IP and trace where the e-mail was actually sent from.” I follow her logic.

“Exactly what the sender is banking on.”

“We’re supposed to assume the e-mail was sent by someone in Italy.”

“Specifically, Rome,” she tells me.

“But that’s a ruse.”

“Absolutely,” she says. “Whoever sent it definitely wasn’t in Rome at six-thirty last night our time.”

“What about the font?” I return to the e-mail and look at the subject line.

ATTENTION CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER KAY SCARPETTA

“Is there any significance?” I ask.

“Very retro. Reminiscent of the fifties and sixties, big squarish shapes with rounded corners supposedly evocative of TV sets from that era. Your era,” she teases.

“Please don’t hurt me this early in the morning.”

“Eurostile was created by Italian type designer Aldo Novarese,” she explains, “the font originally made for a foundry in Turin, Nebiolo Printech.”

“And you think this means what?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “They basically manufacture paper and high-end technologically advanced printing machines.”

“A possible Italian connection?”

“I doubt it. I think whoever sent the e-mail to you assumed you couldn’t trace the actual IP,” she says, and I know what’s next.

I know what she’s done.

“In other words,” she continues, “we wouldn’t figure out the actual location it was sent from—”

“Lucy,” I interrupt her. “I don’t want you taking extreme measures.”

She’s already taken them.

“There are a ton of these anonymous freebies available,” she continues, as if she’s not done what I know she has.

“I don’t want you helping yourself to some proxy server in Italy or anywhere else,” I tell her flatly.

“The e-mail was sent to you by someone who had access to Logan’s wireless,” she says, to my astonishment.

“It was sent from the airport?”

“The video clip was e-mailed to you from Logan Airport’s wireless network not even seven fucking miles from here,” she confirms, and it’s no wonder she’s entertaining the possibility it might be someone in our own backyard.

I think about my chief of staff, Bryce Clark, of Pete Marino, and several forensic scientists in my building. Members of the CFC staff were in Tampa, Florida, last week for the International Association for Identification’s annual meeting, and all of them flew back into Boston yesterday around the same time this e-mail was anonymously sent to the CFC.