Helpless (9 page)

“You just have to be patient with her,” Adriana said. “And stay persistent, too.”

Tom smiled.

“What?” she asked, her voice rising with a squeak of interest.

“Nothing,” Tom said, with a slight laugh. “It’s just that my personal mantra is ‘Persistence and patience.’ The two Ps.”

“Well, I think you’ve got a fabulous mantra. Don’t let her go, Tom.”

“I won’t,” Tom said. “I’ll never give up on Jill.”

Adriana surprised Tom by giving him a hug. She put her warm lips close to his ear and whispered, “I know.”

Roland cleared his throat. “
Ahem!
I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Adriana quickly pulled away. She stood and smoothed out the fabric of her pantsuit. Tom stood as well.

“Darling, you surprised me,” Adriana said.

“And by the looks of it, just in the nick of time,” Roland said.

Chapter 11

R
oland crossed the room with a cool smile on his face. Tom understood why. Shortly after Stephen’s death, Tom had overheard gossip about Adriana’s affair with Doug Henderson in the teachers’ lounge. Adriana’s paramour had been the father of a Millis teenager who had died in a car accident. They met at a support group for grieving parents—a group that Roland had refused to attend. She’d been unfaithful to Roland before. Judging by the look Roland flashed Tom, he evidently believed she could be unfaithful again.

Tom had picked up other details about Roland and Adriana’s troubled marriage from teacher lounge gossip. Roland hadn’t thought Stephen’s drug problems were as serious as Adriana believed them to be. Against Adriana’s wishes, Roland insisted Stephen remain in school, not return to rehab, after another of his many relapses. Six months later, Stephen was dead.

Boyd wore a creaseless light blue polo shirt, dark khaki cargo shorts, and wire-rimmed reading glasses. His short military crop was now a healthy head of dark hair with distinguished gray patches at the temples, which he slicked back with a glossy gel. Boyd’s thin face didn’t have a sprig of facial hair on it, and his youthful appearance was strikingly similar to that of his son Mitchell.

“Tom’s moving back to Shilo,” Adriana said, with excitement in her voice. “Isn’t that wonderful news?”

“Yes, it certainly is,” Roland said.

“I’m moving back into the Oak Street house,” Tom said. “So Jill doesn’t have to leave.”

“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Adriana said, “I’ve got a lot of planning work to do for the party.” Adriana’s face lit up in a bright smile, as though she’d been struck by a fantastic idea. “Oh, Roland,” she said. “Have you invited Tom? It think it would be good for him to make some new connections now that he’s moving back into town.”

Roland nodded. “Sure. That’s a great idea.”

“What is?” asked Tom.

“My annual client appreciation party at the club. You really should be there. Adriana’s right. It’s a good way for you to meet some of your new neighbors. Or old neighbors, as the case may be.”

“I’ll make sure you get an invitation before you leave,” Adriana said.

“That would be great,” said Tom as he exchanged air kisses with Adriana.

Roland turned to watch his wife leave the room. “I’m a lucky man,” he said, but only after her footsteps could no longer be heard. “How are you holding up, Tom?”

“Doing okay. Thanks for asking.”

“And Jill?”

“She’s doing all right.”

“I’m trying to rearrange my schedule so I can come to the funeral,” Roland said.

“Thanks,” said Tom.

“Look, Tom, I’m happy if you just want to hang out and chat, play catchup, but on the phone you sounded like you had something pretty important to talk about. No need to beat around the bush with me. Just saying.”

Tom nodded. He always appreciated Roland’s style. “Do you remember a guy named Kip Lange?” Tom asked.

Roland pursed his lips. “No. Is he from Shilo?”

“Not Shilo,” Tom said. “Wiesbaden.”

Tom could see the recollection come to Roland’s face. “Lange ... Isn’t that the guy who shot Stan Greeley?”

Tom nodded. “About sixteen years ago. You, me, and Kelly, we were all stationed there at the time.”

“Right. But if my memory serves, I think I was in Denmark when that went down. Who knows? Feels like a lifetime ago. Why? What’s up with Lange? You don’t think he had something to do with what happened to Kelly, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “But I was wondering if you might have seen him around town.”

“Isn’t he still in prison?”

“He got out on appeal, sixteen years into his twenty-five-year sentence,” Tom said, quoting facts that Marvin had uncovered.

“The guy shoots an officer and wins his appeal? Explain that one to me.”

Marvin had unearthed the answer to that question as well. “I guess two of the ballistics experts and the MP who was first on the scene after the shooting gave their testimony via two-way video technology. Lange’s defense argued that their testimony violated his constitutional right of confrontation and should have been inadmissible during trial. It took sixteen years, but the CAAF got some new judges appointed, and well, they agreed with the defense. The evidence was thrown out, as was Lange’s conviction.”

“So when did Lange get out?” asked Roland.

“Apparently, just a few days before somebody broke into Kelly’s house,” Tom said. Tom told Roland about his scuffle in the woods behind Jill’s house—his house now.

“No idea where Lange’s at now?”

Tom shook his head. This was where Marvin’s efforts had come up short. Marvin was able to tell Tom when Lange got out and why, but he was unable to provide that most vital piece of information.

Roland looked dismayed. “I don’t get it. Wasn’t Lange busted for attempted murder? Why did he even get such a short sentence?”

“It wasn’t a slam dunk case, if you remember,” Tom said. The story was fresh in Tom’s mind because he’d been studying up on Lange. “Greeley was shot in the head but didn’t die. The wound left him badly brain damaged. Poor guy could barely speak after and couldn’t even remember what happened to him that night. Lange played innocent the whole way. According to ballistics, Greeley had shot him in the leg and stomach. Lange said that he heard a scuffle in the lieutenant’s home and came in to help Greeley. Greeley shot Lange by mistake, or so he claimed. But Lange couldn’t explain to the MPs what had happened to his gun. That was a big problem for the JAG lawyers. Without it, they weren’t able to match the ballistics. But they still went ahead and tried him for assault with a deadly weapon and got a twenty-five-year conviction. Lange shouldn’t have even been up for parole for another ten years.”

Roland shook his head in disbelief. “But he’s out.”

“He’s out,” Tom said.

Roland gave Tom a puzzled stare. “And you think Lange is the one who broke into Kelly’s house and assaulted her?”

“I’d like to be sure that he didn’t.”

“Have you gone to the police?” Roland asked. “I mean, if you think this guy had something to do with Kelly’s death.”

Tom nodded, but his face showed some frustration. “Yeah. I told them. But Murphy is heading up the investigation, and he thinks I may have had something to do with what happened to Kelly. I told him, but his expression didn’t scream ‘We’ll get right on it, right away,’ if you know what I mean.”

Roland nodded. “So what makes you think Lange would have had anything to do with what happened to Kelly? I mean, why would he go see her after he got out of prison?”

Tom had rehearsed what he was going to say, knowing that Roland was going to ask the question.

“I guess Kelly and Lange were seeing each other romantically on the base,” Tom said.

“Yeah? I didn’t know that,” Roland said. “Then again, there were twelve thousand people on that base, and I was traveling a lot of the time. She could have hung out with him, but I don’t remember ever seeing them together.”

“Kelly broke it off with Lange right after she and I got back together. I guess he became pretty jealous, started sending her threatening letters and such. He even sent her some from prison.”

“Makes sense that you’d be concerned,” Roland agreed. “Look, if you really need to know where this Lange character is, I’d be happy to make some inquiries on your behalf. A lot of my former military contacts are clients with Boyd Capital. High-ranking people, too. I’ve got connections to people who can help track him down.”

“Thanks, Roland. I really appreciate that.”

“You know, Tom—and don’t take this the wrong way, because I know you can handle yourself—but with Jill and all, and that guy prowling in the woods, if you wanted to alarm the house, just to play it safe, one of my clients does all the local installs for APS Security. I’m sure I can get you a deal on a really good system.”

Tom smiled. “You’re not offending me at all,” he said. “In fact I’m glad you mentioned it, because after speaking with you, alarming the house was the next item on my to-do list.”

Roland shook his head in disbelief. “So you think Lange might still be harboring a jealous rage all these years later, huh?”

“It’s a possibility,” Tom said.

Nothing suggested to Tom that Roland had picked up on his lie. If it was Lange who had broken into the house, then he’d come looking for his share of the heroin Kelly had stolen from Stan Greeley. The drugs that Tom had unwittingly smuggled out of Germany.

Either that, thought Tom, or he’d come looking for his cut of the profits.

Chapter 12

H
ours after Rainy sent her e-mail, supervisory senior resident agent (SSRA) Walt Tomlinson entered the Lair with an air of urgency. Tomlinson had three grown daughters, so Rainy figured he’d give her a fair chance to make her case for Stern.

Tomlinson’s eyes looked troubled. Rainy read the deep creases defining Tomlinson’s sagging face like a palmist predicting a bleak outcome.

“Show me what you got, Agent Miles.”

Rainy showed Tomlinson several dozen of what she determined to be sexts culled from Mann’s computer.

“What do you make of these, Carter?” Tomlinson asked.

“No idea where they came from. We don’t think we’re going to get any CVIP hits on these.”

“What about our own database?” Tomlinson asked.

The FBI maintained a collection of their own hash values, nonofficial, of course, which came out of the Bureau’s national center.

Even a partial match would have generated a KFF, or Known File Filter alert. The KFF alert flags files identifiable from the FBI’s less extensive library of known images—most of which are depictions of child pornography.

“I checked and we got zilch,” Rainy said. “Whoever supplied Mann with these pictures is probably a new source to us.”

“So what’s next?” Tomlinson asked.

Rainy started to answer, but Tomlinson pointed a finger to forestall her.

“We’re going to continue with our forensic analysis here,” Carter said. “The log file data is useless to us until we can get valid IP and MAC address information.”

“And you can’t?” said Tomlinson.

“Mann’s basically encrypted all the header data on the file transfers. He used a new computer program that makes it easy to stay anonymous on the Internet.”

“What program is that?” Tomlinson asked.

“It’s called Leterg. We’ve busted a few kiddie porn collectors trying it out.”

Rainy made a face. The software name sounded nonsensical.

“It’s ‘Gretel’ spelled backward,” Carter explained. “Basically, if you think of Hansel and Gretel’s bread-crumb trick as an unencrypted data header that would allow us to follow a trail, Leterg makes it impossible for anybody to navigate a single path back to a source.”

“I’m not sure I’m following,” Tomlinson said.

Rainy followed perfectly well, but Tomlinson had several other squads under his command, including terrorism. He was a busy man with little time to absorb the nuanced details from the constant influx of new technologies.

Carter was more than happy to explain; he enjoyed talking technology. “If you laid down bread crumbs on your way home from work,” he began, “I could easily tell what route you took home.”

“Assuming the birds didn’t eat the bread crumbs, yes.” Tomlinson was always on the lookout for a hole in an explanation.

“Well, if every ten feet that single bread-crumb path split, went off in different directions, and stopped at different houses, could I ever tell where you started, or where you went?”

“No,” Tomlinson answered.

“Well, that’s exactly what Leterg does. Mann was communicating with somebody who was also running Leterg. Everything they sent went through that program, so we have no way of tracing it to a specific Internet hosting provider, let alone to a specific IP address.”

“That sounds pretty sophisticated,” Tomlinson said, rubbing at his temples as though the concept physically hurt.

“Actually, it’s pretty damn easy for somebody who knows what they’re doing,” Carter said. “And it’s a great way to cover your tracks. No evidence left to connect the criminal to the crime.”

“How did we catch on to Mann?” Tomlinson asked Rainy.

“We got a tip. Fed him some of our stock images and he bit. Got a warrant. Made the bust.”

“So how do we figure out Mann’s suppliers?”

Carter sighed. “Leterg requires that both the sender and receiver use the software to block our traffic analysis. Multiple people can use the same software, but every supplier has a unique key. If we had the computer of one of Mann’s suppliers, we could crack the encryption code, and you’d have the kind of evidence that makes the USAO tapdance.”

“Did Mann use a single source or multiples?”

“We think multiples. But everyone who supplied him was running Leterg. He probably installed the software and then went looking for suppliers who used the same CYA technology.”

“CYA?” Tomlinson asked.

“Cover your ass,” Carter explained.

Tomlinson nodded slowly and did not appear amused. “So do we know who these victims are?”

Rainy’s face brightened. Tomlinson had touched upon an important point.