Helpless (16 page)

Murphy didn’t respond, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment, either.

“Well, I hope now you’ll really start investigating elsewhere,” said Tom.

Murphy’s eyes narrowed, and he put his face close to Tom’s. “Guys like you always screw up,” Murphy said in a low tone. “That’s been my experience. I want you to know that I’ll be waiting for you to slip, Tom. And when you do, I’ll be right there to slap the cuffs on.”

“Have yourself a good night, Brendan,” Tom said, closing the door behind him.

Rebecca bounded down the stairs just as Tom was coming back up.

“Heading home?” he asked.

Rebecca nodded her head in the direction of Jill’s bedroom. “I think you and Jill could use some alone time,” Rebecca said, buttoning her coat.

“She’s not asleep, is she?” Tom said.

Rebecca shook her head no, kissed Tom on one cheek, and patted him playfully on the other. “You’re a good man, Tom Hawkins,” she said. “A very good man.”

“I try.”

Tom closed the front door and watched through the sidelight window as Rebecca traversed the walkway. He kept watching until she disappeared into the dark of night.

He breathed out the last bits of tension still coiled up inside him.

On his way back up the stairs, Tom’s cell phone buzzed. Strange, because the only person who texted him was Jill. Tom looked at his cell phone’s display screen and saw the familiar text message icon, but an unfamiliar phone number.

Tom clicked the envelope icon and realized a picture was attached to the message. The picture began filling his phone’s display screen, painting rows of colored pixels, like a magician’s curtain being raised to reveal whatever magic lay behind.

Tom’s eyes widened in surprise when the image finished downloading. His heart kicked into overdrive, and his mouth went dry. He read the text message with an open mouth.

I hope you enjoy these!!! XOXO :) UR Eyes Only!

It was a picture of a teenage girl. She was lying naked on a bed. The girl’s back was arched. Her legs were open slightly. One of the girl’s hands was hidden between her knees. The other she extended beyond range of the camera’s lens. The girl’s breasts were showing. Her nipples were erect. Her lips were puckered in a pouty and seductive kiss.

He didn’t know this girl. He’d never seen her before.

Tom’s phone buzzed again.

He looked.

It was another text message. With another picture attached.

Chapter 22

S
eated at her conference table inside her crammed and cramped office, Superintendent Didomenico looked defeated and worn.

“What were these girls doing?” she asked Rainy.

“I believe they were sending text messages with their pictures,” Rainy said. “But there is no way for me to prove it.”

Didomenico, a meticulous woman in her fifties, wore her wavy hair short. The coloring, Rainy observed, was a mix of blond, brown, and—not unexpectedly—a lot of gray. The white piping of her black sweater tastefully matched the single strand of pearls around her neck. Judging by the numerous staff interruptions for which Didomenico had to apologize, the job evidently pulled in more directions than the superintendent had limbs. Yet her face didn’t show the strain, and her eyes remained patient and kind.

The superintendent sifted through dozens of computer printouts of the images Rainy had brought with her. All the images were sanitized in some way, to conceal anything revealing, except for the girls’ faces. That was what she had come to see Didomenico about.

Rainy was convinced that Lindsey’s image belonged to a fetish series, previously unknown to authorities, that was actively being sold to child porn rings on the Web. Teen girls sexting—that was what Rainy believed the multimedia format images to be.

Defense attorneys liked it when their clients were found in possession of only known series. It was easier for them to argue that the evidence had been planted on their clients’ computers. Known images and series were widely available on the Internet and therefore more easily obtained. But a single unknown image put some doubt into that defense. Hundreds of unknown images made that strategy almost laughable.

It was hard to get one’s hands on an unknown series. It took work. It took effort. It took real commitment. Rainy knew how men viewed images like the ones of Lindsey Wells. They were hot, sexy, and alluring. The girls were no longer prepubescent. They were in their late teens, with bodies that were well developed. They could turn on most any man. They certainly did James Mann. It didn’t surprise her in the least that a market existed for these images.

Of the forty girls in what Rainy dubbed James Mann’s Text Image Collection, ten of them (according to the superintendent) attended, or had recently graduated from, Shilo High School. Each girl had taken an image of herself in some stage of undress. And somehow, those images ended up on James Mann’s home computer.

Ten of forty.

“This is very troubling news, Agent Miles,” Didomenico said as she flipped through the picture archive again. “What do we do from here?”

“Well, I’m going to want to speak with the girls individually. I need to know when the pictures were taken. What their ages were at the time. And more importantly, why they took the pictures.”

“You’d question all the girls?” Didomenico said with alarm.

“It’s the only way for me to track down the path these images took. Of course, they could have been emailed. Uploaded to a Web site. They might have even been taken using a Web camera on a site like Chatroulette or Omegle. Hard to tell. I think they were sent by cell phone. But that’s just my theory.”

“Well, in that case, why not just check with the cell phone providers?” Didomenico said.

“Would if I could,” Rainy replied. “But the only cell phone provider that stores that sort of information beyond thirty days is BlackBerry. So even if we did obtain a search warrant for their cell phones, we’d never be able to see the content of the messages the girls sent.”

“I hate the idea of your questioning all these girls. News of that would spread quite quickly, I’m afraid. It could even become a national story, with lasting implications for the girls. What good will come of this, Agent Miles? If you don’t mind my asking.”

That question had given Rainy pause.
What good would come of it?
The Feds had their case. Mann possessed well over a thousand illegal images, enough content to warrant federal prosecution. Add to that interstate trafficking charges, coupled with Lindsey’s official ID, and the USAO had more than enough evidence to proceed with a federal case. But Rainy had a job to do. She would be discreet, of course, but the crime needed to be investigated properly and the girls had a legal right to make their victim impact statements.

It was the law. It was just the way things were done.

“I promise to keep as low a profile as possible. But what if I spoke to the school as a whole?” Rainy asked.

Didomenico looked perplexed. “That sounds worse.”

“It may prevent future incidents,” Rainy suggested. “I can talk to them about the dangers of certain behaviors on the Internet. Perhaps then some of the girls I need to question would actually come to me. That way I wouldn’t have to do as much digging around.”

Didomenico’s expression brightened. “That’s a wonderful idea,” she said.

Rainy left Didomenico’s office with plans to present to the student body her well-traveled talk about cyber safety and the dangers of sexting. She made clear her post-assembly plans to Didomenico. Either the girls involved in the Mann investigation would come to see Rainy, or she’d go to see them.

Chapter 23

J
ill was back in uniform. Tom couldn’t have been more proud of her.

Lindsey Wells took a perfect centering pass from Lauren Grass. She pushed the ball down the right wing and centered it into the middle of the penalty box. Jill Hawkins was in the right place at the right time.

Instincts.

Jill unleashed a rocket of a shot that landed in the back of the net.

“Nicely done, Jill! Very nicely done!” Tom called out.

Jill did her best to smile at the compliment, but Tom could see his daughter’s heart wasn’t in the game. How could it be?

With the social worker’s help, Tom had learned about the eight stages of grief. Shock, stage one, had allowed Jill to function physically in the days immediately following her mother’s death—which was now officially ruled a homicide. She succumbed to tears mixed with anger as she stumbled through the emotional release stage. She suffered frequent headaches and a seemingly endless upset stomach—the physical expression of distress. Now it was guilt’s turn to eat his poor daughter alive. He knew she felt guilty about playing soccer again. She felt guilty that she’d returned to school. She felt guilty trying to live her life. But nothing compared to the guilt she felt about letting her teammates down.

“I’ll dedicate the season to Mom’s memory,” Jill had said to Tom. “But I’m not going to quit the team.”

“You can come back to the squad anytime,” he had tried to reassure her. “There’s no reason to rush.”

Jill shook her head. “Shilo hasn’t been beaten in three seasons,” she said. “That’s tied for the state record.”

“I don’t care about records,” Tom had said. “I care about you.”

“Well, the team cares,” answered Jill. “And I don’t need that kind of guilt on me as well. We barely beat Dover last week. We’ve got Riverside coming up this week. I’m going to be on the field for that game. And we’re gonna win.”

My daughter’s a fighter,
Tom thought, and he had never felt more proud. But hers was proving a hard battle to fight. Throughout the scrimmage, Jill ambled down the field without much urgency. Even at half effectiveness, however, she was still one of the best players on the field. Tom knew she was right about Riverside. Without Jill on the pitch, the much-hyped Shilo unbeaten streak was destined to end.

The girls were just starting to play with real intensity again. This was the best scrimmage Tom had seen since Powers and Murphy tag teamed Tom and nearly destroyed his team’s morale over some misguided prank.

It was Angie who had stepped in and pulled the team out of a tailspin. During a closed-door meeting, Angie gave both the varsity and JV squads a lengthy lecture about cyber bullying. A long period of silence followed the lecture. Afterward, Angie changed her tune and told Tom’s players to go out and win another state championship for Shilo. The cheers had lasted a good two minutes.

You can’t keep a good team down,
Tom had thought.

This practice was proving his assessment to be true.

Lindsey Wells put one hand on her knee and raised the other high in the air—a signal to the coaches that she needed a rest. Vern Kalinowski blew his whistle and subbed in Jenny Fielder for Lindsey. Lindsey passed through a gauntlet of high fives before trotting over to where her head coach stood on the sidelines. She was all smiles, and her brown skin glistened with sweat from the warm September sun. Lindsey put her hands on her hips, still breathing hard from the workout.

She lay down on the ground and began to stretch. She formed a bridge with her body, feet flat on the grass, chest pressing skyward. Tom had seen Lindsey do this stretch a thousand times. But for Tom, it was no longer an innocuous way for a player to keep loose. The stretch, Tom realized, was strikingly similar to a pose made by a naked teenage girl in a picture somebody had sent him.

He had called the sender’s number, only to get a messaging service provider called
TxtyChat.com
. According to the TxtyChat Web site, the service was used to send text and images to mobile phones from a dedicated bank of phone numbers. Untraceable—that was one of TxtyChat’s featured selling points, as documented on the Web site.

Untraceable.

Tom had spent some of the previous day researching the legal and ethical issues around his thorny situation. He knew that what he’d received was a sext—digitally transmitted, sexually suggestive, nude or nearly nude photos. What he didn’t know was whether he could be charged with any crime for simply receiving an unsolicited image.

The blog posts had already cast suspicion on him. Complicating matters, the legal landscape of digital laws was in a near molten stage, changing and reforming as new precedents and cases cropped up. He concluded only that his receipt was unsolicited and therefore didn’t violate any sexual harassment or child pornography laws.

But the question still remained: what should he do about it?

The first thing Tom did was to delete the pictures from his phone. A girls’ soccer coach’s possessing naked pictures of a female minor was like walking around with a stick of dynamite in his pocket. Bringing it to the attention of any of the school staff would launch a formal inquiry. Lots of questions would get asked. The blog posts might not seem like a prank anymore. The additional attention wouldn’t do his already struggling daughter any good, either.

Tom decided to leave it alone.

He hadn’t received any more pictures. Perhaps the pictures and the blog post were unrelated coincidences. Maybe this mystery teenage girl had intended those pictures to be seen by somebody else. Maybe that person’s phone number was close to his own. If so, with luck she had realized her mistake and wouldn’t make it again.

Tom contemplated calling Marvin for legal advice.

Not yet,
he decided.

Marvin might insist Tom make his concerns public. Document them in an official statement. There’d be a formal inquiry for sure if he went that route. And Jill would be caught in the middle.

No, for now, the best thing for Tom to do was wait and see.

Coincidence or attack?

Prank or something else?

He’d find out for certain before deciding his next move.

Another question still bothered Tom. Was Jill doing the same thing as the girl who texted him?

Tom couldn’t get his thoughts around that one. He’d gone from being the occasional father of a distant and disinterested daughter, to a full-time parent of a beautiful teenage girl with a stew of cooking hormones. How could he keep an eye on what she was doing without her feeling that he was intruding on her privacy?