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
When 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
“You 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 differen
ce 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
The 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.
Jill didn’t want to go to school the next day, and Tom wouldn’t have let her go. It wasn’t safe for her in Shilo anymore. She kept to her room for most of the day. She didn’t even come out to eat.
Tom was on the ladder, trying one more application of GoneIt, when Jill shuffled into the backyard through the basement door.
“Hey, honey,” he said, climbing down. “You hungry yet?”
“No.”
Tom checked his watch. “It’s quarter to seven. You haven’t eaten anything all day.”
Jill looked up at the house and recoiled at the sight. “Who would do this?” she asked. “Why won’t they just leave us alone?”
“I’m so sorry about all of this,” Tom said. “But it’ll be all right. You’ll see. Everything is going to turn out just fine.”
“Did you go to the police?” Jill asked.
Tom made a conciliatory expression. “You know I can’t do that,” he said. “Pretty much the whole town is against me at this point. The police most of all.”
“Rainy’s on our side,” said Jill. “Can’t she fix this?” Tom’s face formed a grimace, which Jill noticed right away. “What is it?” she asked.
“Rainy,” Tom said with a sigh. “I should have called her hours ago, but I got so caught up in this vandalism that I forgot.” Tom put his arm around Jill. “I’ll give her a call in a few. Maybe she’ll have some good news to share.”
Tom’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and showed Jill that it was Rainy calling him.
“I guess she beat you to it,” Jill said.
“Hey there,” Tom said into the phone. “I was just about to call you. I’m planning to see Marvin’s parents tonight. They’re sitting shivah at his sister’s house. I was hoping you’d come with me.”
“Tom! Tom! I think we’ve got it.”
“Got what?” he asked.
“Evidence that’ll prove Mitchell Boyd is the distribution source of the images on your laptop. I’m not saying you’re in the clear. But when we put the pressure on him, I bet he’s going to start talking.”
“Rainy, that’s great news. Just great. Where are you now?”
“I’m with Carter. We’re on our way to Shilo to have a little chat with Mitchell Boyd.”
Tom’s phone buzzed again. He was getting another call. He glanced at the number but didn’t recognize the caller. “Rainy, let me call you right back,” he said.
Tom clicked over to the incoming call. “Hello. This is Tom.”
“Tom Hawkins,” said a much-younger sounding voice. “It’s Tanner Farnsworth.”
Tom’s jaw muscles tightened, and he squeezed his phone harder. “What do you want, Tanner?” said Tom.
“Look, I know I’ve done some pretty bad things. But I also know you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Lindsey.”
“And how do you know that?” asked Tom.
“Because I know who did it,” Tanner said. “It was Mitchell Boyd.”
“What?”
“I was just over at Mitchell’s house. We were eavesdropping on his dad. He was talking with Brendan Murphy from the police department. Mr. Boyd gets all the inside scoop. I overheard him say that they found Lindsey’s body.”
Tom’s heart sank. Jill looked over at her father. Her expression revealed a growing alarm.
Tom turned his back so that Jill couldn’t see him. He took a few steps away so that she couldn’t hear him, either. “Where?” Tom whispered.
“In the woods near the Pine Hill Pond. They found your knife nearby, too.”
“My knife?”
“Small knife, about the size of my palm,” Tanner said. “It’s yours. Don’t ask me how Mitchell got it, but he took it from your house. The police pulled your prints off the knife. They’re coming to arrest you. Not just the Shilo PD, either. State police, too. And soon.”
“Hang on.” Tom raced back into the house. He looked for his knife. It was gone. “Tanner, listen to me. You’ve got to call the police yourself. Right now. Tell them what you just told me.”
“I can’t do that,” Tanner said. “I can’t turn myself in. Can’t turn on my best friend, either. I won’t do it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do something right.”
“Do something right? What right thing are you doing here?” Tom shouted into the phone.
“I’m telling you to run.”
Chapter 74
Tom turned to Jill. “Get inside the house,” he said. “Stay out of your ro
om. Stay in the basement. Don’t move until I come for you.”
“Dad, what is it? What’s going on?”
Tom kept his voice calm and controlled. “Just do as I say,” he ordered.
Jill fled into the house.
Tom didn’t know what he should tell Jill. Was Tanner lying? Could Lindsey really be dead? Were the police coming to arrest him? Tom didn’t have time to think through the possibilities. He only had time to ready an escape. He’d been arrested for a crime that he hadn’t committed once before. He wasn’t about to let it happen again.
Distract and evade.
If it came to it, that was what he would do.
Distract and evade.
Tom needed to survey his best exit points. He crouched low and kept to the side of the house. Where possible, he used trees and shrubs to keep himself hidden. Oak Street was clear. But if Tanner was telling the truth, the street would soon be active with police. He picked this as the place where he’d set the distraction.
Next, Tom crossed to the back of the house. The ravine where Kelly fell and died had an 8 percent grade. He’d have to descend into the ravine and climb back up the other side to get to Pine Street. Beyond Pine Street lay hundreds of acres of conservation land. Tom knew the Shilo topography better than most. He knew he could get away.
Tom returned to the house, where he slipped inside through the basement back door. He saw Jill standing there, waiting for him. She was pale and looked frightened.
“First thing I need you to do is relax,” Tom said. He put his hands on his daughter’s shoulders. “Take some deep breaths. I need you with me.”
Jill nodded.
“Some people are coming for me,” Tom said. He remained calm, which helped Jill. “I’m pretty sure they’re coming to arrest me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She’ll never forgive you for lying to her, he thought.
Jill nodded again, but more slowly. “You’re not leaving without me?” she cried. “You can’t leave me alone.”
“No. Never. But listen to me. We need to separate for a short while. Do as I say and we’ll be together again soon.”
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