Helpless (45 page)

“You read the report.”

“In this town, I know where the questions stop. I get framed for something I didn’t do. Jill finds pictures of herself and Lindsey on Mitchell Boyd’s computer. Lindsey goes missing. Mitchell’s computers get a virus. Marvin is murdered. Connect the dots and it draws a picture of Roland and Mitchell Boyd.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“What does proof have to do with justice?” Tom said, too loudly. “Can you prove that I’m innocent?”

“No. I can’t prove it,” Rainy said. “But I can still believe it.”

Tom shook his head in disgust. “So you can’t prove I’m innocent. Only believe it. And you can’t prove the Boyds are guilty.”

“No, but I can work on getting search warrants and wiretaps to find out the truth. The courts and lawyers are the ones to prove it.”

“You’ve got a lot of faith in the system.”

“I have to. Otherwise, I couldn’t do my job.”

“Marvin had faith, too. Look where that got him.”

“You’ve got to be patient. It’s just not going to happen overnight.” Rainy took a sip of wine and glanced down at her watch. “It’s getting late,” she said. “I better go.”

“I’m glad you came.”

“Me too,” Rainy said.

“I’ll walk you out.”

The clouds had cleared, and the night sky was a canvas of stars. Rainy pulled her car keys out of her purse but didn’t immediately open the car door.

“You really are on my side, aren’t you?” he said.

Rainy smiled from the corner of her mouth, in a way that Tom had never seen before. It made her look even more attractive. He didn’t know what made him reach out and take hold of her hand. He was just glad that she let him.

“So what was this really?” Rainy asked, still holding Tom’s hand.

“Dinner,” Tom said.

“But was it ... a date?”

“I wouldn’t lie to my daughter.”

Rainy laughed. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“But this could be a date.”

“What? Here? Outside your house, by my car?”

Tom nodded. “Not the best of locations, I agree. Not the best circumstances, by any stretch. But it’s all about intention.” Tom took hold of Rainy’s other hand and tingled as their fingers interlocked.

“Is our date over?” Rainy asked.

Tom nodded again. “Yeah, busy day tomorrow.”

“Well, I had a nice time.”

“Do you kiss on the first date?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I haven’t been on a date in so long, it’s hard to remember.”

“So you might be willing to kiss, is that what you’re implying?”

Rainy cocked her head in a coy, playful gesture. “Jury’s out on that one,” she said.

Tom let go of Rainy’s hands. He cupped her cheeks with his hands. Her eyes grew wide and seemed to draw him to her. There was a brief hesitation when their lips first touched. She leaned into him, and they kissed harder. They each pulled away at the same instant. Again, he held Rainy’s hands.

“The jury may be out,” Rainy said, “but the verdict is in.”

She gave Tom a last quick kiss, then climbed into her car. Tom stood at the edge of the driveway and watched her drive away. He waited until her car’s taillights faded from his view.

He had made it halfway back up the driveway when he heard a loud crash. He recognized the sound instantly. It was the noise glass made when it shattered. The next sound he recognized, too, but it was one he’d never heard before.

It was the sound of his daughter screaming.

When Tom got to Jill’s bedroom, his daughter was still screaming. He saw shattered glass and the rock someone had thrown through her bedroom window. He picked up the rock and saw a note attached with rubber bands. The note read:

Your father is a rapist and a kidnapper. He’s probably got Lindsey in your basement. You should kill yourself so you don’t have to live with him. If you don’t, somebody will do it for you.

Chapter 71

W
hen Rainy showed up to work the next morning, she thought everybody was looking at her strangely. Other agents. Receptionists. Security.
Could it be because of Tom?
She decided it was just her imagination running away with her. If Tomlinson knew what she’d done, he wouldn’t be his usual terse, grouchy self. He’d be downright furious.

“You
kissed
a guy you were investigating?” he’d probably scream.

But Tomlinson didn’t know. Nobody did. Only Tom and Rainy knew what had happened between them. It might never happen again. It was a downright stupid thing to have done. Inexcusable and indefensible, really. Perhaps, with enough persuasion, what she’d done could be rationalized: the emotions of the funeral, the missing girl, and the failed computer battery proving his innocence to her. But engaging in debatable behavior wasn’t a wise career strategy at the FBI. In a world of black and white, rights and wrongs, the stuff in the middle typically did not sit well with management.

For a brief moment, while they were kissing, Rainy felt happy. She felt truly happy. She’d allowed herself to be lost in that moment. To feel like she was finally thinking of herself.

Rainy had slept only a few restless hours. She kept thinking about him. She had woken up thinking about him. She had showered thinking about him. She had tried not thinking about him, which in itself was thinking about him. Rainy knew only one way she’d be able to kiss Tom Hawkins again. Kiss him and feel truly free to do it again.

She had to get Tom Hawkins out of the middle. She had to convince the D.A. prosecuting his case to drop the charges. And to do that, Rainy needed something more powerful than belief in his innocence.

She needed proof.

The only avenue left for Rainy to explore was those images James Mann had given to her. Mann was right to be perplexed about those disparate hash values. The oddity wasn’t limited to an isolated image or two. Every duplicate image James Mann sourced from what she had officially logged as the Shilo NH Sext Image Collection generated a different hash value. It didn’t make sense.

Why were the pixel colors changed, but the image composition left untouched?
she wondered.

Carter wondered if opening an image in a photo-editing software program, such as Photoshop, could have altered the pixels in some way. They tested Carter’s theory, but without success. This was shaping up to be the sort of outlier Marvin Pressman would have jumped all over. It was the sort of curiosity that demanded an explanation.

Rainy and Carter worked late in the Lair trying to solve what was shaping up to be an unsolvable puzzle.

Tomlinson showed up an hour later. “Agent Miles, I need you to do a PowerPoint presentation for me,” he said.

Rainy groaned. Years ago she had made the tragic mistake of demonstrating to Tomlinson her mastery of PowerPoint. The ability to make effective slides was a skill management coveted.

“When do you need it, sir?” Rainy asked.

“Yesterday.”

“What about this evening? By eight?”

“Why? What do you got going on here?”

“We’re trying to figure out why the images don’t generate identical hash values. And we’re not having much luck.”

“Is it important?”

“Yes, I believe it is, sir.”

“In that case, eight will be fine.”

Tomlinson left. Rainy and Carter returned to their work.

“Can you magnify this one?” she said. She pointed to a copy of Lindsey Wells’s picture, one of the many copies that had begun populating the Web soon after she’d texted it to Tanner.

Carter magnified the image three hundred times. Rainy kept staring at the screen.

“What are you looking for?” asked Carter.

“Something I noticed when Clarence Stern was helping me ID the Lindsey Wells photograph.”

“And that something would be?”

“He saw things at a high magnification level. Just by looking at the color gradation, he was able to add missing pixels to form a complete image. You can see it only when the image is magnified.”

“It just looks like a bunch of colored squares,” Carter said.

“But there’s a smoothness to how those squares are stacked together. That smoothness is the logical next color variant to complete the picture. It’s how Clarence was able to guess which pixels were missing.”

“Are you looking for that same smoothness on this image?” asked Carter. He’d magnified the image so that all Rainy could see were rows and columns of colored blocks no more than an inch tall and wide.

“I’m looking for the out of the ordinary,” said Rainy. “Something that shouldn’t be there. Something we can’t easily see with our eyes. Look. There.” Rainy pointed to a section of the image. “The squares here go from light to dark without any gradation,” she said. “It’s jarring. It happens almost too quickly. Can you show me the same section, same magnification, but for a different image? I want to compare them.”

Carter did, and Rainy saw it right away. “We’ve got the same jarring transition in the same section of both images,” she said.

“The unusual shading pattern looks similar, but they’re not identical,” Carter said. “The pixel colors are different, too.”

“But it’s something,” Rainy said. She was feeling breathless. “Each image looks identical. Only at magnification can we see the actual location of pixel color variation. Why?”

“It’s probably a watermark,” said a voice from behind them.

Rainy turned, and her eyes went wide with delight. Clarence Stern had just entered the Lair.

“Tomlinson said he’ll need that PowerPoint deck by six,” Stern announced. “Now, move over, Carter. Let me figure this out.”

Chapter 72

“
Y
ou think it’s an invisible watermark?”

“Seems like it to me,” Stern said to Rainy. “Watermarks are nothing more than embedding information into a digital media. Could be audio. Could be a picture.”

“Could be spinning the Beatles’ ‘I’m So Tired’ backward and hearing Paul is dead,” Carter said.

“Well, that’s a watermark of sorts, I guess,” Stern said. “It’s used a lot in copyright protection. It’s also used in source tracing.”

Rainy nodded. “Of course. The movie industry has been using source trace watermarks for ages. They can identify who downloads their intellectual property and then create a map of the distribution network. We’ve been exploring applications for them as well.”

Carter nodded enthusiastically. “If each of the images Mann gave us has a unique watermark, it would explain why they weren’t generating the same hash value. The watermark is what makes each image unique from the other. But it’s hidden, so we can’t easily see the difference with our eyes.”

“The question now is,” Stern said, “how do we reveal the watermark?”

Stern picked one image to work with. He spent a half an hour bumping up the contrast and adjusting the image levels.

“I’ve got the contrast here set to one hundred percent.”

Rainy looked. “See anything?”

“I’ve got to run the contrast filter a bunch of times over before I can say.”

Stern was back to his Stern ways. Grunting. Sighing. Pouting. He picked up a pencil and prepared to throw it at the monitor.

“That’s my monitor, Clarence,” Carter said. “I trust you. But not that much.”

Stern set down the pencil. He looked over at Rainy. “Do you have an original?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“An original source. One that hasn’t been moved from a point A to a point B. One that wouldn’t have a watermark applied.”

Rainy thought a moment. “Lindsey Wells,” she said. “After my seminar she gave me her cell phone. She deleted the sent messages, but not the pictures. She thought they might somehow be helpful.”

“Well, she just might be right,” said Stern. “Let me have it.”

Rainy returned to the workstation with Lindsey’s cell phone. It took only a few minutes for Stern to download the pictures to Carter’s machine.

“What are you going to do?” Rainy asked.

“I’m going to run a difference filter,” Stern said.

“I’m not familiar with that,” Rainy said.

“The difference filter compares the original to a copy. Look, I’ll compare the original to itself.”

Stern did just that, and all Rainy saw afterward was a black square on the screen.

“A black square means the images are identical,” Stern explained. “All pixels turned a pure black color. Now let’s run the difference filter on the original and one of the matching images.”

Rainy examined the completed output. “It still looks like a black square to me,” she said.

“But some of the pixels are not quite pure black,” Stern said. “When I change the color levels to brighten all the very dark colors, I suspect our hidden watermark will become visible.”

Stern adjusted the levels. The dark colors transformed to bright, almost neon shades. Rainy’s hand went to her mouth when she saw what appeared. Most of the image square was still black. But not all of it. At the bottom of the square, Rainy saw a series of numbers. Stern’s level adjustment had turned the color of those numbers a bright yellow.

“I bet those numbers are an IP address,” Stern said. “Whoever embedded this watermark wanted to track the distribution of their copies, that’s for sure. But what the heck is that?”

Stern was pointing to another newly revealed part of the watermark. Rainy knew exactly what it was. Even with the colors being off, she could see it clearly. A yin and yang symbol designed to look like a human skull.

“That right there is more than just a watermark,” Rainy said. “That is a calling card.”

Chapter 73

T
he spray paint was not going to come off. That was Tom’s final conclusion after hours of effort. He’d tried Goop-Off and GoneIt, and two heavy-duty cleaners that the hardware store salesman had recommended. No luck. The paint had set, and he’d have to replace the siding, or paint over it, to get rid of the disgusting words.
HEY RAPIST—BRING LINDSEY HOME.
That was the message somebody had spray painted three times, in three different colors.