Helpless

by Daniel Palmer

  “That’s a drag,” Marvin said.

  “Figures my car was parked where the mall security cameras couldn’t see it, and I was wearing a hat, so it was impossible to make a positive ID from the surveillance inside the store.”

  “Did you save the box?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “The box should have a SKU number on it,” Marvin said. “That SKU number can be matched up with Home Depot’s store records and can confirm you were shopping when you said you were.”

  “I may still have it. I’ll look.”

  “You know, I do handle criminal defense cases, not just estate planning and family law.”

  “Well, let’s plan on my not needing those particular services of yours.”

  Marvin studied Tom and seemed to take notice of his physical conditioning. “Thinking I might waive my usual fee in exchange for some personal training,” Marvin said, patting his ample midsection. Marvin’s rumpled suit suggested that he might have slept in it, an assessment confirmed by the attorney’s bleary eyes.

  “Coaching high school soccer has made me fret off the pounds,” said Tom.

  “State champs three years in a row now. Pretty impressive.”

  “Thanks. The girls put in a huge effort.”

  “Well, Jill’s been a rising star for the Wildcats, from what I’ve read in the Journal. Guess I know where she got the talent from.” Marvin pointed to a photograph on his office wall, which was covered with dozens of framed pictures of great moments in sports history. The specific photograph was one Tom remembered well: Marvin himself had taken the picture of a young Tom Hawkins making a bicycle kick shot against onetime New Hampshire powerhouse Wiltshire.

  “That’s a great shot, Marvin.”

  “Yours or mine?” Marvin said with a slight laugh.

  “We lost that game, if I remember,” Tom said, thinking of the hours he’d spent in the coach’s room, watching game tape and going over every mistake he’d made on the pitch.

  “We did, but as I recall, both teams were pretty evenly matched,” Marvin said. “Did you know that if two teams are equally matched, seventy-two percent of the time it’s randomness that makes one of them lose, not real skill difference? So that loss wasn’t your fault. It was just a random outcome.”

  Tom shrugged. “Doesn’t make me feel any better. Though I admit, that’s one soccer stat I’ve never heard before,” he said.

  Marvin gestured to other sports pictures that adorned his office walls. “Well, I was never a great athlete,” he said, “but I am a freak for sports stats. I can tell you the stat that goes with every picture on my wall.”

  “You weren’t that bad an athlete, Marvin,” Tom said.

  “That’s kind of you to say, but completely untrue,” Marvin corrected him. “I got cut every year I tried out for the soccer team.”

  “But at least you tried.”

  “And you were one of maybe three other guys who didn’t laugh at me whenever I did. Besides, there are approximately seventeen thousand professional athletes in the United States. That gave me a point zero zero five percent chance of becoming one myself. The law seemed a far more surefire way to financial security.”

  “By the looks of it, you’re doing well,” Tom said.

  By all appearances, it was true. The cozy office inside the well-kept Victorian home was smartly furnished with several dark bookcases stocked with legal tomes. A richly colored Oriental rug lay over a pale wide-plank hardwood floor. The meeting area within Marvin’s high-ceilinged office had an unmarked whiteboard, similar to the type Tom used to map out soccer plays; a large black-lacquered conference table; and a set of six plush leather chairs.

  “Business keeps growing,” Marvin said. “I might not be scoring goals, but I am helping people, and that feels good. So, you ready to get started?”

  Tom tapped Jill on the shoulder. She pulled the buds from her ears and followed Tom over to the meeting area. Tom sat first, and Jill sat on his side of the table, but two seats away. Marvin sat across from them.

  Marvin began by addressing Jill. “So, Jill, we’re here today to talk about your future.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I spoke with your dad, and he told me to be very candid during this session,” he said. “As the attorney for your mother’s estate, I’m most familiar with her affairs. I’m afraid the news about your mother’s finances isn’t good.”

  “What’s ‘not good’ mean?” Jill asked Marvin, her sweet voice edged with concern.

  “Your mother had no savings. No life insurance. Really, no provisions at all for your care. On top of that, your house has two mortgages, which she was already behind on, and the bank is threatening to take it to foreclosure.”

  “What does that mean?” Jill asked.

  “It means we need to talk about where you’re going to live,” Tom said.

  “I’ll live with Lindsey,” Jill said, refusing even to glance at her father. “They already offered.”

  “Jill, I’m not going to allow that. Not with what happened last night.”

  “But it’s my life!”

  Tom cleared his throat. “I believe I have custody now.”

  Marvin nodded. “That’s correct,” he said. “Until Jill is an adult, you become the custodial parent.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying to come and live with me in Westbrook.”

  “What? No! My life is here in Shilo. I don’t want to just leave it behind. Especially now. I need my friends more than ever.”

  “Jill, you were there. You saw what happened. It’s not safe, and I’m not going to take any chances.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Jill snapped. “You think Mom was looking out for me? She could barely look out for herself.”

  “Look, I’m not going to trust your friends to keep you safe.”

  Marvin cleared his throat, his way of clearing the air. He said, “Well, you’re within your parental rights to have Jill come live with you, Tom. Westbrook is a nice town, Jill. Great schools, from what I hear.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” Jill pleaded. “If you love me, like you say you do, then just let me live with Lindsey. Let me stay here. Please.”

  Tom thought. Then he asked, “Marvin, what if I moved to Shilo? Took over Kelly’s mortgage?”

  “Remember, the bank is coming after the house,” Marvin warned. “But all the bank is interested in is money. If we can get the mortgage caught up and show proof that you can continue making payments, I’m sure they would be satisfied.”

  “I’ve got my job with the Shilo public schools, and I can sell my place in Westbrook,” Tom said. “Whatever it takes to make this work, I’ll do it.” He felt absolutely confident about a plan he’d spent all of ten seconds concocting.

  “You would do that?” Jill stammered. “You’d move here so I could stay?”

  Tom nodded. “I’m your father, Jill,” he said. “I’m going to do what’s best for you.”

  Jill’s downcast face brightened. Tom smiled too.

  The next hour passed in a blur. Papers needed to be signed. Forms to be filled out. Each completed check-box item made Tom feel one step closer to his goal: to be thought of as Jill’s father again.

  But he had other concerns that needed resolution.

  Who was the man in the woods?

  Where was Kip Lange?

  Could Tom realistically keep them both safe?

  When they were finished for the afternoon, Tom escorted Jill back into the waiting room. “Hang here a second, kiddo,” he said. “There’s something I forgot to ask Marvin.”

  Jill’s iPod earbuds went back into place before Tom reopened Marvin’s office door.

  “Forget something?” Marvin asked.

  “Marvin, do you do any investigative work?” Tom asked, keeping the door slightly ajar so that he could keep an eye on Jill. “You seem pretty good at digging up esoteric sports stats. I’m guessing you’re good at finding out a
lot of things.”

  Marvin’s eyes narrowed on Tom. “Is this about Kelly’s killer? Because I don’t do PI work.”

  “If the guy I fought in the woods is who I think it was, then his name is Kip Lange.”

  “Go on.”

  “Almost sixteen years ago Lange was stationed at the same military base in Germany as Kelly and I. He was arrested for the attempted murder of a U.S. Army officer. He’s supposed to still be in prison.”

  “Yeah? What do you need to know?”

  “I don’t trust Murphy to investigate this properly. He’s too focused on me. So if Lange’s not still locked up, I need to know where he is.”

  “Do you think Lange had something to do with what happened to Kelly?”

  “It’s possible,” Tom said. “But unlikely. Like I said, he should still be in prison.”

  “Tom, I’ll do what I can to help you find him, but you have to level with me. What’s the real story here? I don’t like to operate in the dark. You’ve got to give me something.”

  “We have attorney-client privilege working here?”

  Marvin nodded. “We do.”

  “Then I can tell you that it has something to do with a gun and millions of dollars’ worth of smuggled heroin.”

  Chapter 8

  The work never got easier.

  Her superiors had assured FBI special agent Loraine “Rainy” Miles that she’d eventually grow numb to it. She had joined the Innocent Images National Initiative, part of the cyber crimes against children investigative squad, five years ago. In all those years, Rainy had yet to feel a tingle of that promised numbness.

  Not once.

  The computer jocks assigned to the cyber squad were members of the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, or CART for short. Rainy handled procedural duties and was the person most responsible for gathering evidence for the U.S. Attorney’s office (USAO). CART made it possible for Rainy to get that evidence, and thanks to them, Rainy had enough material to put James Mann away for a very, very long time.

  From start to finish, Mann’s arrest in his suburban Boston home had taken only a few hours. But the events leading up to it had been several months in the making, and it had all started because of that tip. Tips, Rainy had come to learn, were the lifeblood of the squad. If it weren’t for them, her team would have a hard time finding a child porn ring, let alone breaching one to shut it down. Whoever had jump-started the Mann investigation apparently knew how to stay in the shadows. Mann, a pharmaceutical executive and father of two, fortunately did not.

  CART had created the mirror images of Mann’s computers with their typical thoroughness. Procedurally, Rainy couldn’t begin to gather evidence until she had a bit-by-bit re-creation of Mann’s physical hardware to work from. She hadn’t seen much of the sun since Mann’s arrest, as she’d spent almost every working hour cramped inside the windowless confines of the Lair, the pet name given to CART’s forensic lab. In her world of justice, James Mann couldn’t do enough time, but the law had different standards for punishment.

  Rainy, and others who thought like her, were appalled that the legal language in cases like Mann’s didn’t imply a crime and a victim. Rainy didn’t think much of the defense attorneys who decried the lengthy sentences handed down for federal child porn cases. Rainy was part of a growing movement pushing to change the term “child pornography” to “child sex abuse images,” “exploitation of children,” or better still, “crime scene images.”

  She believed this issue was less a moral failing of the general public than a need for better education and information. To that end, she urged any of the defense attorneys or rights activists who disagreed with her to come to a trial and listen to victim impact statements. Then they’d know a real crime had occurred. They’d know these images would haunt the children long past their youth. They’d agree that predators like James Mann were no different from sex offenders and should pay justly for their crimes.

  Ten years, Rainy thought. Mann would do ten years knowing he had no chance for early parole. But Mann’s lawyers would soon be crawling over their casebooks, sniffing for the smallest infraction of the USAO investigative guidelines that they could use to spring their client. Every move the cyber squad made involved careful orchestration, painstaking detail work, and for Rainy specifically, the horrific task of forensic categorization.

  Forensic categorization was by far the toughest part of her job, but in many ways the most important. Rainy had to sift through every image personally, watch every video from Mann’s collection, and count them up. Sentencing for convicted child pornographers was based partially on the number of images in their possession. Six hundred images (each video counted as seventy-five images for her tally) was the maximum number considered by the courts at sentencing time. The fewer images they had, the less time they did. Simple as that.

  But even if James Mann exceeded the six hundred image count, Rainy looked for other enhancements that could add years to Mann’s sentence. Pictures of sadomasochism, masturbation, and oral and anal sex, or those that featured prepubescent youth, were all justifiable cause for a sentencing enhancement. The USAO left it up to Rainy’s best judgment to decide which images were sexually explicit, child erotica, or simply nude pictures that were not sexually suggestive.

  She’d look at each image, examine every frame of video for closeup shots of genitalia, or something that made the depictions lewd and lascivious. Some of the images counted for multiple categories, so Rainy was responsible for keeping track of that as well. She did this work, even though it tore her up inside to see such horror inflicted on innocent children. She did it, even though sometimes she had to drink herself to sleep.

  “So where are we at, Carter?” Rainy asked.

  CART team member and special agent Carter Dumas, whose first name’s resemblance to the team name was a running joke, was Rainy’s favorite forensic analyst. They’d worked several cases together over the years, forging a sibling-like camaraderie. Rainy stood up from her seat to ask her question. She didn’t have to; the Lair was small enough that Carter could have heard a whisper.

  Carter had boyish looks, thanks to his curly blond hair and an almost creaseless face. He was also exceptionally pale because, as he pointed out, computer monitors glowed but did not tan. Rainy threw Carter a Snickers bar, one of several snacks she kept tucked away for times of low blood sugar.

  Carter ripped open the wrapper with his teeth and took a hearty bite. “Well, I’ve finished scanning the hard drive, and I’m about to run a timeline report. We’ll need a few binders for this guy, though. Seems like he worked OT to build up his library.”

  “Any exculpatory evidence?” Rainy doubted it, but there had been cases of viruses turning a home computer into a porn server.

  Carter shook his head. “Nope. We’ve got plenty of emails from Mr. Mann demonstrating his undeterred commitment to secure the goods.” Rainy bent forward to stretch her stiffening leg. “You staying late again?” Carter asked.

  “No, I’ve got a hot date tonight.” Carter held her gaze, then grinned. Rainy laughed in return. “Actually, I was thinking about busting out early.”

  “You almost had me that time. Rainy on a date would warrant a front-page bulletin on our intranet.”

  “What are you implying, Carter? That I’m undesirable?” Rainy leaned over her favorite tech and gave him her best menacing glare. She got enough looks from the men she worked with to know they found her attractive—compact, petite, shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes, and photogenic smile. But it had been years since she’d had a boyfriend. Her work schedule made it a challenge, and the work itself stuck with her long after she left the office.

  “I think any news of you having a date would break a hundred hearts here, that’s what I think,” Carter said.

  “Well, let’s just say I have yet to find a man who can restore my faith in men. You being the exception, of course. The married exception, that is.”

  “There’s always wom
en.”

  “There’s always keep your fantasies to yourself. Especially while we’re doing this.”

  “Yeah, right on.” Carter finished the Snickers with two more bites and focused again on his computer monitors.

  Rainy watched him work. Her boss, supervisory senior resident agent Walter Tomlinson, had pursued Rainy for the cyber crimes against children investigative squad not because of her technical acumen, but for her dogged procedural and investigative skills.

  All the geek speak Rainy had picked up along the way, she attributed to osmosis. Just by observing Carter’s monitors, Rainy could tell he had several searches running in parallel. Keyword parsers in action. Registry key analyzers kicking at full speed. Recovery tools burning up RAM to restore any deleted files. Rainy couldn’t understand how any of these perps she arrested thought that what they did in the privacy of their home was really private. Technology, she had quickly discovered, could turn anybody’s door into a window.

  “Did we get any CVIP hits yet?” Carter asked.

  “The report was still printing last I checked. I’ll go look.” Rainy walked over to the printer and removed the report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children pertaining specifically to the Mann investigation.

  Earlier, Rainy had sent a batch of images from Mann’s computer to the NCMEC for comparison against the CVIP database of known images. The NCMEC maintained a vast catalog of child pornography on its highly secure database. The NCMEC was operationally in charge of the Child Victim Identification Program, or the CVIP for short.

  The CVIP was a national clearinghouse for all child pornography. Every image or video file obtained by law enforcement—state, local, or federal—got processed through the CVIP and assigned a hash value, a nonpictorial, alphanumeric identification that was unique to each computer file. Because of this uniqueness, hash values functioned a lot like digital fingerprints, and Rainy used them for matching purposes. When image evidence Rainy submitted to the CVIP matched an image already on file, she called it a “hit.”

  Rainy wanted to get as many hits as possible from her CVIP analysis, and for good reason. A “hit” meant the child in question was already known to the system, that presumably the child was no longer in any danger because they’d been identified by authorities. Sadly, Rainy had come to learn that “out of danger” often meant deceased or dead inside.