Helpless

by Daniel James Palmer

  “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

  Hours 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.

  “It’s my opinion that these images are of the same type, but not from a single source,” Rainy said. “I think they’re different girls—forty of them, by my count—taking pictures of themselves with their cell phone cameras.”

  “And they sent their pictures to James Mann using Leterg?”

  “I don’t believe that’s true.”

  “Do we know how Mann got hold of these images?”

  “No, sir,” Rainy said. “And it will stay that way unless we can crack the Leterg encryption codes.”

  Carter held up his hand to indicate caution. “Remember,” he said. “If Mann had forty suppliers, we’ll need to crack forty codes. That’s a pretty unlikely outcome.”

  Tomlinson thought. “A bit of a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum, it seems.”

  Carter hoisted his hands skyward in a show of defeat. “Hence we come to a dead end. At least we can still get Mann for all the porn he downloaded.”

  Rainy nodded in silent agreement. Thanks to the Adam Walsh act, James Mann met the interstate nexus requirement. The FBI could charge him with federal crimes simply because he had used the Internet to download pornography. As far as the law was concerned, Internet equaled interstate.

  “Sounds good to me. Agent Miles, what’s the issue here?”

  “The issue is these teenage girls who are sexting are stupid and haven’t a clue what they’re getting themselves into,” Rainy wanted to say. But she thought better of it. “Mann possessed a very large quantity of these unknown images—over three hundred. I think it’s important we confirm these images did in fact originate as part of a text message the girls themselves sent,” she said.

  “Good. Then eventually you’ll get to that conclusion if the evidence takes you there.”

  “We could speed things up, maybe even figure out Mann’s supplier if we could ID one of these girls. But there isn’t enough detail in these pictures for me to make one.”

  “In your opinion, are any of these girls in immediate danger?” Tomlinson asked.

  Rainy knew better than to lie. “No, sir,” Rainy said. “The images are consistent with other sexts that we’ve seen. But I’m wondering if somebody is hacking cell phones. If I could get some of Clarence Stern’s time, maybe put together a bigger task force, we could—”

  “Out of the question,” Tomlinson barked. “Stern is fully booked investigating what may be a terrorist sleeper cell in Somerville. I can’t spare him.”

  “But he’s the best at image manipulation.”

  “Which is why he’s working terrorism.”

  Rainy bit her lip. After 9/11, the FBI had rocketed right to the top of Washington’s most important agency list. Budgets ballooned as a result, but most of the money and resources went toward combating terrorism. Meanwhile, drugs, child porn, organized crime, mainstay assignments of the FBI for years, continued to skyrocket. Rainy couldn’t complain. It was well known that terrorism was job one at the FBI.

  “Well, what do you suggest I do, Walt?”

  “What I suggest you do is your job, Agent Miles.”

  “Sir, if one of the girls finds out that her naked pictures are being passed around the Internet, it could end in tragedy. It could be another Melanie Smyth.”

  Melanie Smyth was a fifteen-year-old girl from Newton who’d hung herself in the bedroom closet after her boyfriend posted the naked pictures she texted him to Facebook.

  “Stern is booked. End of conversation. After you alert the major carriers about a potential hack, I suggest you talk with Mr. James Mann and figure out
how we crack those Leterg codes.”

  “He’s not going to know. Suppliers using Leterg do it to keep themselves anonymous.”

  “Then it looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Tomlinson said, and left.

  Rainy picked up the CVIP report and read it again. Tomlinson was wrong about this one. These girls might have taken their pictures willingly, but that didn’t mean they weren’t in any danger.

  Chapter 13

  Tom watched the Wildcats soccer scrimmage from the sidelines. It felt good to be coaching again. He needed the distraction.

  “How are we looking out there, Coach?” Lindsey asked.

  “We’re looking a little sloppy,” Tom said. “But I’m sure we’ll pull it together.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure. Do you think I’ll get more playing time?”

  “I’m not sure, Lindsey,” Tom said. “You know my position. You’ve got to work harder out there. You’ve got the talent. Now you’ve got to show me you have the desire.”

  “I need to play more. I’ll get better. But I’m not going to get any colleges interested in me with the minutes I got last year. Please, Coach.”

  Tom nodded. “I’m not saying no,” he said. “Okay? I’ll sub you in for Ashley in a minute.”

  “Thanks, Coach.”

  Jill was at practice, but not dressed to play. She wasn’t feeling ready yet. Tom understood completely, but he needed to get back to coaching the team and couldn’t let Jill out of his sight. Not with Kip Lange still on the loose.

  The first game of the season was just a week away.

  Tom noticed something in the distance. A police car was again coming down the road abutting the practice field. The cruiser parked where it had before, and Brendan Murphy climbed out with his signature lack of grace.

  “Vern, keep the girls working hard,” Tom said to his assistant coach as he crossed the field. Tom didn’t notice the metal storage clipboard tucked under Murphy’s arm until the two met up on the other sideline.

  “Good afternoon, Tom,” Murphy said, without extending his hand.