Helpless (12 page)

Jill opened her bedroom door with an exasperated sigh and slipped past Tom before he could stop her. She went straight into her mother’s bedroom, where she once again closed the door behind her. Jill slept in her mother’s bed some nights, but Tom never let on that he knew. If she wanted to open up about her feelings, he figured she’d do so in her own time.

Tom knocked. “I’m not giving up until you talk to me.”

When Jill didn’t respond, Tom pressed his ear against the door and could hear the shower running. Tom trotted downstairs. With a few turns of a knob, he shut off the hot water. It took a few minutes for the water in the pipes to go completely cold. Once it did, Tom heard Jill shriek, curse, and finally open the bedroom door. She had on her mother’s green terry-cloth bathrobe, the one Tom had bought for Kelly a year before the divorce. Jill’s hair looked a tangled, wet mess, with soapy remains throughout.

“That’s not fair.”

“Neither is ignoring me.”

“Turn the hot water back on.” Jill tried to pass him, but this time, Tom blocked her way. Jill sighed loudly. “Fine,” she said. “What is it you want to know?”

“Where were you and who drove you home?”

“At a friend’s house and a friend. There. Happy?”

“No. Which friend’s house, and who’s the guy with the Mustang? I sure as heck hope he’s young enough to still have a curfew.”

“Why? You afraid of another old guy competing with you for all the young girls?” Jill saw the hurt in his eyes and gave a slight smile of victory.

“Craig Powers thought you might have started all this,” Tom said.

Jill’s face turned a bright shade of red before her color drained. Tom hadn’t meant to say it, but Jill made it impossible not to become confrontational. Tom watched as she shook with rage.

“That’s disgusting! Why did he even say that?”

“He was thinking you did it to get me in trouble. I told them they were wrong. You’d never do anything like that. Even if you hate me.”

“I do hate you,” Jill said, but quietly, without much emotion.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” Tom replied. “But I need your help, Jill. I’m going to go on the offensive and find out who posted that garbage. But you have to believe me. I would never do such a thing, and I would never do anything to hurt you. I love you more than anything in the world. You are my world.” If Tom could have one dying wish, at that moment it would be for Jill to let him embrace her. He knew better than to ask. He lifted her chin.

“Mitchell Boyd,” Jill said, pulling her chin away.

“What?”

“You asked where I was and who drove me home. I was with Mitchell Boyd.”

“Roland Boyd’s son?” Tom wanted desperately for it to be another Mitchell Boyd from another town, though that was more than unlikely.

“Yeah. But we’re just friends, so don’t worry.”

Tom was worried. Very worried, in fact. Mitchell’s reputation made it impossible for a father not to worry. He cursed himself, because he was the one who had brought Jill to Boyd’s house. “I don’t approve.”

“I don’t care,” Jill said.

An hour later, Tom and Jill had come to a truce of sorts. After their big blowout, he’d gone to the basement and returned carrying a large whiteboard that he used to map out different plays for the team. On that whiteboard, Tom had drawn a soccer goal. In front of the goal he drew a large square, creating an obstacle in the way of two stick figures that he’d also drawn. Tom drew a bow behind the head of the smaller of the two stick figures.

Jill realized that bow was meant to signify her. “I’m not a ten-year-old girl,” she said, but not angrily.

“Humor me for a second. When we can’t figure out something going wrong on the pitch, we always draw it out. It helps us to visualize the challenge and search out solutions.”

“So you want to draw out our issues?” Jill asked.

Tom nodded. “And together we’ll look for ways to get around them.”

Jill went silent.

Tom smiled, undeterred. “I think trust is our number one challenge.” He wrote the word
trust
in the center of the square. “On the field you’ve got to trust your teammates. You’ve got to believe that they’ll be in position to receive your pass. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a team. What’s it going to take to get you to trust me, Jill?”

Jill thought awhile before answering. “Time,” she said.

Tom nodded and wrote the word
time
on the whiteboard. He drew an arrow from the word to the stick figure representing himself. “That’s on me, Jill,” he said. “Over time I’ve got to earn your trust. I accept that. But you also have to earn mine. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were hurt. Or worse. I had no idea who you were with. To make this work, we need to trust each other. So I’m just asking, what could you have done that would have helped me?”

“Call, I guess,” Jill said. “I should have told you where I was. But I was upset.”

Tom wrote
call
under Jill’s stick figure.

With his hand, he erased a small corner of the square with the word
trust
in it. “Even if you’re upset, we’re still on the same team. Shutting me out won’t change that fact. We’ve got a long way to go to get past this obstacle.” Tom dotted the square with the point of his dry-erase marker to emphasize his point. “But I think this is a start.”

“Tell me again you had nothing to do with what happened to Mom.”

“Honey, I had nothing to do with it,” Tom said. “And I need you to trust me on that.” He tapped the marker against the written word
trust
on the whiteboard and forced a hug out of her. It was a brief, strained embrace, but it lasted long enough to give him hope.

Chapter 16

R
ainy felt whole-body tired. Lately, she’d been working way too much OT. She’d put a bug in Clarence Stern’s ear about needing help with some imaging work. She didn’t mention the images were from a series Tomlinson told her not to bother Stern about.

“No can help,” Stern had said during one of their passing hallway conversations. “These days I’ve got to schedule time to take a piss.”

Rainy remained convinced that one or more of these images would eventually leave the closed circles of the child porn trade for wider distribution across the Internet. It was only a matter of time before there was another Melanie Smyth, she had warned Tomlinson. But Tomlinson didn’t share her sense of urgency. If the pictures had been of a bomb, no doubt her boss would have made Stern pee in a cup until he tracked down the source.

But this was terrorism of a different kind.

When Rainy’s cell phone rang, she answered it without checking the number or thinking about who might be calling.

“Rainy, it’s Clarence. I’ve got a trade to offer.”

Rainy’s heart skipped a beat.

“Talk,” she said.

“Do you have any plans tonight?”

“No,” Rainy lied. She had a blind date that would need to be canceled.

“Then come up to my office, and let’s make a deal.”

Stern’s office was a spacious, refurbished conference room on the sixth floor of their new building. The agency might have preached fiscal responsibility, but such frugality was not on display in Stern’s world. The Lair looked like an Atari 2600 to Stern’s Xbox 360. Stern sat on his swivel chair with his back to Rainy. His head bobbed to whatever beat thumped in his headphones. The array of computer monitors cast his body’s heavyset outline in a bright blue glow.

In Stern’s case, Rainy figured the Bureau decided to ignore their physical fitness requirement in exchange for his boundless talent. The man’s round physique suggested he would struggle to pull a cumulative score above a six on the physical fitness test. Rainy’s last score of thirty, by contrast, was reported to be among the highest of all female agents.

Rainy tapped Stern on the shoulder. Stern slowly pulled the headphones off his head. Even though he’d invited her up, Stern looked irritated by her intrusion, but he looked irritated by just about everything.

“What’s the trade?” Rainy asked.

“I’ve got four arms’ worth of work here and two arms to do it all.”

“You want my arms?” Rainy asked.

Stern nodded. “Not in a physical sense. Do you know how to log surveillance video?”

“It’s not rocket science,” said Rainy.

“It’s six hours of tape.”

Rainy groaned. “Six hours? That’s torture.”

“You do six hours of logging for me, and I’ll ID as many of the girls in that new series you found.”

“You’re that tired of my bugging you?”

“I’m that tired of logging surveillance video,” Stern replied.

“Deal,” said Rainy.

Rainy returned to Stern’s office twenty minutes later and handed him a thumb drive. The Lair offered a protective environment for safeguarding her evidence. She preferred not to take evidence out of the Lair, but saw no alternative. If she wanted Stern’s help, she had to take the risk.

“Okay, you start logging. I’ll work my magic. Take a seat.”

Rainy pulled up a chair beside Stern and set about the arduous task of logging.

“Note the time each person enters and exits the apartment building. Here are snaps of our delightful suspects. Match them to the people coming and going, and write your findings in the logbook here. Simple enough.”

“Don’t you have somebody to do this for you?” Rainy asked with a sigh of desperation.

“Normally, yes. This week, no.”

Over the next four hours, Stern would groan, pout, shake his head, and grunt, all presumably signals that he had failed to find anything useful. Meanwhile, Rainy kept logging while Stern kept searching. Only once did Rainy see Stern stand up to stretch. On more than one occasion, Stern threw a pencil at his computer monitor, never failing to connect with the eraser end. He kept muttering to himself, “No, not that one,” and then he’d start working with another picture in the batch Rainy had provided.

“What are you looking for?” Rainy asked him after Stern again switched to a new image.

“Something useful,” he said.

Rainy just nodded and resumed her logging duties.

Three hours into his promised six, Stern exclaimed, “I’ve got it!”

Rainy had drifted into a zone of tape logging, and Stern had to repeat himself before she got excited. “You did? Who is she?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“I thought you said you got it.”

“I got how we can do it. I’ve run twenty girls through every sophisticated facial reorganization application we have. I even did some aging analysis in case the picture is an old one.”

Rainy felt a sudden disappointment. She hadn’t thought of that. These girls could be in their twenties by now.

“But you got nothing.”

“Nada. Zilch. Then I figured out what I’ve been doing wrong. I spent so much time focusing on the faces, I’ve been ignoring the setting. Their rooms.”

“Carter and I looked. But we didn’t see anything useful.”

“Well, you can’t enhance pixels the way I can. I’m going to work off this picture. She took it standing in front of her mirror, so I’ve got a lot of the room to work with visible in the reflection. Keep logging. This may take another hour.”

What Stern could do in an hour, Rainy knew, would take normal programmers five times as long to complete. When he announced success, Rainy understood that he’d basically churned out two days’ worth of product in less than half a day’s effort. Rainy positioned her chair closer to Stern so she could get a better look at his screen.

Stern manipulated the image on his monitor to show Rainy an enhanced view of the girl’s bedroom.

“First thing I’m going to do is crop out everything but what’s visible in the mirror,” Stern said. “Then I’m going to flip the image around so that it doesn’t look like a reflection.”

He did both in less than two seconds.

Next, he used his computer mouse to highlight a corner of the room, and the picture zoomed in closer. All Rainy could see were the fuzzy, pixelated outlines of a dresser, mirror, and chair. On the chair she could make out a blue Windbreaker, but it, too, was barely recognizable at the current magnification level.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Rainy said.

“Watch. I’m going to run my script.”

Stern hit a button, and the entire image went black, save for the chair with the Windbreaker on it. Then image magnified tenfold, until Rainy saw what she took to be a design of some sort.

“Is that a logo on the Windbreaker?” she asked with growing excitement.

“Watch,” Stern said.

Stern’s program began to twist, wrap, and stretch the image, while adding new pixels to the design. The transformation took what had been a blurry, shapeless form and rendered it anew. It was now clear and easy to interpret.

“This is how we’ll figure out who this girl is,” Stern said. “You see, the jacket was folded over the chair. What my program just did was to take the pixels that were invisible to us and hypothesize what the lettering would be if the jacket were to be unfolded. It’s a lot of vector analysis, but this is the best match I got. The proportions aren’t right, because the Windbreaker was folded, but at least the lettering is legible.”

Rainy read the words Stern’s program had generated.

“Shilo Wildcats Soccer.”

“Now to Google,” Stern said. He did a few Web searches before finding a picture he thought might be useful.

“What’s that?” Rainy asked.

“A team picture of last year’s girls’ varsity soccer team. Assuming, of course, that ‘Shilo’ is Shilo, New Hampshire. But they are the Wildcats, so ...”

Rainy studied the team photo. She didn’t need to look at the girl’s picture again. Her face was burned into Rainy’s memory. And there she was. Back row. Second to last on the left. Rainy scanned the names of the girls listed in the photograph.

“Her,” Rainy said, tapping a finger on Stern’s spotless monitor. “That’s her! You’re a miracle worker, Clarence, you know that?”

“Nah. I just can’t stand logging video.” Stern leaned in close to read the name for himself. “Yup, that’s her, all right. Lindsey Wells, of Shilo, New Hampshire.”