Bones to Ashes

Ryan joined us. Floating one brow, he brushed flour from my nose.

I narrowed my eyes in a “don’t say it” warning.

Ryan handed me a towel, then scanned the small assemblage beside the bowl.

“USB flash drive,” I said. “Sixteen gigabytes.”

“That’s massive.”

“You could store the national archives on this thing.”

Ryan indicated that I should bring the thumb drive to the computer. Chenevier returned to the bedroom.

I passed the drive to Lesieur. She thumbed a button, and a USB connector slid from one end.

“We got paper for this?”

Ryan nodded

Reaching under the workstation, Lesieur inserted the drive into the CPU tower.

The computer ding-donged, then a box appeared requesting a password.

“Try using Cormier,” Ryan said.

Lesieur shot him a “you’ve got to be kidding” look.

“Try it.”

Lesieur typed C-O-R-M-I-E-R.

The screen changed. A new box stated that a removable device had been detected, and that the disk contained more than one type of content.

“What a bonehead.” Lesieur hit several keys.

Columns of text appeared. Folders. Files. Dates.

Lesieur opened a file. Another. Ryan and I leaned in for a better view of the screen.

“I’ll be at this awhile.” As before, her message was not subtle.

Ryan and I returned to the kitchen.

Several cabinets and a silo of cereal and cracker boxes later, Lesieur spoke. Ryan and I went to her.

“OK. Here’s my take. Everything looks innocent enough on the surface. Tax returns. Business files. But I think your guy’s got another whole layer buried in the unused space of his thumb drive.”

Ryan and I must have looked blank.

“Some of the newer encryption programs provide plausible deniability by creating two layers. The user stores some innocuous files in the first layer. Tax returns, business contacts, information a reasonable person might want to encrypt. The second layer is a disk volume hidden in the ‘unused’ space of the drive.”

“So Cormier uses a simple password for layer one because he doesn’t really care about those files,” I guessed. “It’s a cover. He’s really concerned about layer two.”

“Exactly. With this type of setup, if someone starts poking around, they see some files, some open space, everything looks copasetic. When they view the open area of the disk byte by byte, all they find is gibberish.”

“That’s not suspicious?” Ryan asked.

Lesieur shook her head. “Operating systems don’t normally delete deleted files. They just change a marker that says, ‘This file has been deleted and can be written over.’ Everything that was in the file is still on the drive until its space is needed, so if you look at the unused areas on a normal disk drive, you’ll see bits and pieces of old files. Remember Ollie North?”

Ryan and I both said yes.

“That’s how Irangate investigators recovered information Ollie had deleted. Without those chunks of old files, whether plain text or recognizably patterned computer data, pure gibberish stands out for what it lacks.”

Lesieur cocked her chin at the monitor. “The giveaway with your guy is that I’m finding megabyte after megabyte of gibberish.”

“So you suspect there are encrypted files, but you can’t read them.”

“C’est ça. Your guy’s running Windows XP. When used with a sufficiently long and completely random password, even the tool that comes with XP Pro creates encryption that can be a bitch to crack.”

“You tried typing in ‘Cormier’?” Ryan asked.

“Oh yeah.”

Lesieur checked her watch, then stood.

“A mondo thumb drive stashed in a flour bin. Double-layered encryption. This guy’s hiding something he sincerely doesn’t want found.”

“Now what?” Ryan asked.

“If your warrant allows, confiscate the hardware. We’ll get whatever it is he’s snaked away.”

At one, Ryan and I left Chenevier and Pasteur to finish and lock up. I drove straight to Cormier’s studio. It was like moving from the cool of the arctic to the heat and grime of the tropics.

Hippo was wearing another aloha shirt. Red turtles and blue parrots, all damp and wilted. He’d finished two more cabinets.

I told him about the thumb drive. His response was immediate.

“The guy’s into porn.”

“Maybe.”

“What? You think he’s storing church music?”

Since images and videos require a lot of disk space, I, too, suspected porn. But I bristle at knee-jerk reactions.

“We shouldn’t jump to judgment,” I said.

Hippo blew air through his lips.

To avoid an argument, I changed the subject.

“Ever hear of an island called Île-aux-Becs-Scies?”

“Where?”

“Near Miramichi.”

Hippo thought a moment, then shook his head.

“What does the name mean?”

“I think a bec scie is some kind of duck.”

Something rolled over in my hindbrain.

Duck Island? What?

I chose a cabinet and began pulling file after file.

Kids. Pets. Couples.

I found it hard to concentrate. Was I really championing judicious thinking? Or was I in denial? Cormier a pornographer. Cormier a photographer of women and children. Were the implications simply too awful?

And why the heads-up from my subconscious? Duck Island?

Partly heat. Partly hunger. A headache began organizing on the right side of my skull.