Suddenly, oddly, Randle said to Catherine, "Are you a parent?"
She stiffened. "Yes."
"I'm telling you, on my daughter's life, I didn't do this."
Catherine said nothing.
O'Riley, cuffs in one hand, with the other made a little turning motion with his finger, and Randle nodded and showed his back to the detective, thrusting out his clenched fists, offering his wrists rather melodramatically, Nick thought. O'Riley clicked on the cuffs.
Then O'Riley took the man by an elbow and ushered him toward the Taurus.
"Big mistake," Randle was muttering. "Big mistake."
"Yeah, it was," O'Riley said flatly.
Randle looked over his shoulder at Nick, still seeking a sympathetic audience: "I swear to you I had nothing to do with this."
As if in absurd response, Catherine's cell phone rang.
As she was responding, Nick's rang, too; and a beat after, so did O'Riley's. Then the three of them moved apart from one another, to find minimal privacy for their individual if simultaneous calls.
As Nick punched the cell button, he heard Catherine saying, "You gotta be kidding!"
Into the cell, the confused CSI said, "Nick Stokes."
"Grissom."
To one side of him, Nick heard O'Riley saying, "Yes, sir," and go back to listening; the words "Yes sir" seemed to be about O'Riley's entire end of the conversation, as Randle stood beside the detective looking as flummoxed as Nick felt.
In Nick's ear, his supervisor was saying, "I just talked to Tomas Nunez, Nick. I hope you haven't made that arrest."
"Well. We sort of just did."
"Sort of Nick? Do we 'sort of' arrest people, now?"
"O'Riley arrested him."
"Really. We may have a problem with that."
Nick glanced over at Catherine, whose eyes were wide with unpleasant surprise as she continued her own cell phone conversation.
"What problem could there be, Gris? Evidence says he's the guy."
"Does it? Get back here. We need to talk."
"Oh-kay."
Nick replaced the cell on his belt just as O'Riley was undoing the handcuffs, freeing the suspect.
"What's this?" the ad man asked. "Cuffs not enough? Bringing out the shackles?"
O'Riley said, "Mr. Randle, we'd like to request you to accompany us back to headquarters."
Randle looked understandably confused. "Request? I'm not under arrest?"
"Not at this time," O'Riley admitted. "We would appreciate your cooperation in helping us straighten this matter out."
"And accompanying you will help do that?"
"We hope so, sir. Yes."
Nick felt anger rising within him. Grissom had been unspecific and yet Nick felt he'd been accused of something, unfairly accused, at that.
"Then I'm not required to go with you," Randle said, making a show of rubbing his wrists.
Catherine stepped forward. Her tone was almost friendly. "No, sir, you don't-but if you would cooperate with us maybe we can help get you out of this situation."
"It seems to me you're the ones who put me in this situation!"
She shook her head. "The evidence put you in this position, Mr. Randle-and we do have a substantial body of evidence pointing in your direction."
His eyes tightened and his voice had a mild waver in it. "I'm not in the clear yet."
"No. But if you're innocent…"
"I'm innocent!"
"…your cooperation can help explain this evidence, even possibly make it…go away."
Randle drew in a deep breath; this time life seemed to come to him. "I'll go with you. I'll show you I mean to be cooperative."
"Good," Catherine said, with a smile so strained it made Nick's face hurt.
"Over here," O'Riley said, pointing toward the Taurus, not taking the man's elbow this time.
The ad man glanced at the looming glass building behind them. "Can't I tell them inside? That I'm going to be late?"
"I thought you worked your own hours," Nick said. O'Riley gave Nick a look and said to Randle, "You can use my cell to call them on the way."
Nick and Catherine stood, shellshocked, watching the Taurus pull out of the lot and disappear. "Who called you, Cath?"
"Tomas-he says there may be a problem with the disk."
"Yeah, I gathered."
"Who called you? Grissom?"
Nick nodded. "And he had that very quiet measured calm thing going."
"In other words, royally pissed."
"Who do you suppose called O'Riley?"
She shrugged. "Mobley maybe? Brass?"
He turned and looked at her, hard. "Did we screw up?"
Unhesitatingly, she said, "No. Absolutely not. We have the right guy. This computer evidence is just so highly technical, it's easy to run into snags."
"That's it," he said, nodding, "that's gotta be it."
At HQ, O'Riley led Randle into an interview room and Nick and Catherine marched back to the garage where Nunez had set up shop. Nick opened the door and saw Nunez poring over his monitor, Grissom-in black polo and slacks-standing just behind him.
"What's up, Gris?" Nick asked, trying to keep it light.
Their supervisor turned and smiled at them in an angelic fashion that chilled Nick's blood. "Gee, Nick-that's just what I was going to ask you…"
"Hey," Catherine said, quietly defensive. "We were in the midst of a righteous arrest when somebody on this end got nervous. Why?"
Nunez appeared to be so hard at work he was neither hearing nor noticing what was happening nearby; Nick didn't buy it for a second.
Grissom folded his arms; his head bobbed to one side and his eyes were unnervingly placid. "Tell me about the evidence you've developed for this case, Catherine…Nick."
Nick and Catherine traded an uneasy look.
She had to be wondering, like he was wondering, just what the hell Grissom was so worked up about-though to anyone who didn't know him, Grissom's manner appeared calm, his two colleagues could feel the displeasure radiating off the seeming tranquillity.
"You," Nick said to Catherine, who nodded, and laid out what they knew so far. Nick studied Grissom's implacable face, looking for evidence of what was going on behind the unblinking eyes, with no success.
"You found the laptop in Randle's house," Grissom said, nodding once, then cocking his head again, lifting an eyebrow, "but no fingerprints."
"Yes." Catherine shrugged. "But that's not uncommon in cases like this."
"True, but a predictable lack of evidence is not in fact evidence."
She shrugged again, a little embarrassed. "True," she echoed.
Now both Grissom's eyebrows lifted. "Did you wait for Tomas to finish his analysis before you ran off to arrest Mr. Randle?"
Gesturing toward the seemingly oblivious computer expert, Catherine said, "Tomas hadn't even started on it-but he told us the scan showed that the pictures had been on the zip disk we found in Randle's office."
Grissom turned toward Nunez. "Tomas, would you care stop pretending you're working, and tell my CSIs what you did find?"
Looking at least as exhausted as O'Riley had-and as if he wished he were anywhere else-Nunez wheeled in his chair to face the trio, but his eyes went to Catherine. "Catherine, remember I told you that the print order came from work station eighteen?"
"Yes."
"Well, after we popped that bank hacker, I went back to it. There's no evidence that the photos originated from that computer."
"Well, it did come from the zip disk, right?" she said, sounding a little less sure of herself.
Nunez nodded. "That's true; but that's not the problem. I checked the MAC address of the NIC card."
Shaking his head as if trying to dislodge an insect, Nick said, "Whoa! I have no idea what you just said."
Nunez took it slowly. "The NIC or Network Interface Card is a piece of hardware inside each computer in Newcombe-Gold's office. It's what connects to the network cable and thus connects
each computer to the network. Each NIC has a MAC or Media Access Control address that is unique to each machine. These MACs cannot be easily changed."
"Oh-kay," Nick said, glancing at Catherine, "we're with you that far."
"All right. Although information is routed by the IP address, that's the identifier I told Catherine about before…"
They both nodded.
"…even though information's routed with this IP, it's sent and delivered by the MAC address."
"I think I need a couple aspirin," Nick said.
Catherine added, "I could use three."
Grissom said, "Layman's terms, Mr. Nunez."
Nunez said, "Think of the IP as the Post Office and the MAC as the mailman. Although the Post Office sorts the mail and makes sure it's all headed for the right box, the mailman delivers it. I found that the server log for the network showed the MAC address of the sending client computer to be this…"
He presented them with a sheet of notepad paper on which was written: "08:00:69:02:01:FC."
Nick shrugged at Catherine; Catherine shrugged at Nick. Grissom closed his eyes.
Nunez kept trying: "That MAC doesn't match up with the MAC address of the computer in work station eighteen, even though the IP matched."
A sinking feeling came over Nick-he not only followed this, he had a terrible feeling he was not going to like what Nunez had to say next….
"The computer we thought sent the print order…didn't."
Nick winced, then suggested, "Maybe you put the wrong computer back in the work station."
Nunez shook his head. "No way-didn't happen. Besides, I had all the serial numbers from the original seizure of equipment."
Head tilted, eyes narrowed, arms folded, Catherine asked, "Just how were we fooled? Actually, Tomas…how were you fooled?"
Grinning ruefully, Nunez said, "Helluva question, Catherine. And I don't have the whole answer, but I know where the answer starts: somebody wanted to fool us."
Again Catherine and Nick traded glances, wide-eyed ones. Grissom's eyes, however, were still closed. Catherine asked, "Who?"
"That," Nunez said, "I don't know…yet."
Grissom's eyes opened and he said, "He does know how…. Tell them, Mr. Nunez."
Nunez presented them with a larger piece of paper, this time-with a rough drawing he'd made. "This box represents the computer in eighteen."
"Okay," Nick said.
"This box," he pointed to another square he'd sketched, "is a computer hooked to the network that was supposed to spoof eighteen."
"Spoof?" Catherine asked.
"Imitate. Simulate…And, from our being lost for so long, I'd say it worked. Anyway, the print order originated there."
Feeling sick, Nick asked, "Which leaves us where?"
Nunez sighed, sat back in his wheeled chair. "I already checked the MAC addresses we had from Newcombe-Gold-it doesn't match any of their computers."
Catherine's head lowered and she covered her face with a hand.
"Please tell me we're not back to square one," Nick moaned.
"Not all the way back," Nunez said, trying to minimize their woe. "But when I couldn't find any trace of the photos on the network server hard drives, I ran an E-Script to carve out all the jpegs-since that's the most popular format of most kiddie pornographers. In unallocated space, I found the pictures angel1angel12.jpg. The reference file indicated that they had been accessed from the D drive-a zip disk. I ran the MD5 hash algorithm and noted the hash values of the pictures."
Nick, who'd just been thinking he was actually following this, held up a "stop" hand. "Hash value?"
Nunez nodded. "It's like a digital fingerprint. The value for Angel12 is…" He checked his notes: "E283120A0B462DB00CEAFA353741F5E9. When we find another file with that hash value, we'll have our source material."
"Near mathematical certainty," Grissom said.
Nodding emphatically, Nunez said, "It's like I told Catherine-the odds against two files having the same hash value and not being identical are astronomical."
Catherine asked, "Have you done the laptop we found at Randle's house yet?"
"No-I'll get to that next. I'm not on anything but this right now. But that was why I called Grissom. I didn't want you thinking you had an airtight case when we're really not even close."
"Go ahead and get back to work, Mr. Nunez," Grissom said, and motioned his CSIs to the other side of the room. They stood on either side of him as he held court, arms folded, eyes serene…terribly so.
"What other suspects," he asked, "have you looked at?"
"Randle is still the guy," Catherine said.
"You know this to be a fact."
"The evidence says so."
Gary Randle and his wife were swingers, living a group-sex lifestyle, with the hardcore pornography collection to prove it: videotapes, photo albums, magazines. Perhaps out of some hypocritical consideration for his daughter, he doesn't want to print his kiddie porn pictures out on his computer. So he takes them into the office, and when his computer doesn't work, he chooses to use Ben Jackson's, since the new kid trusts everyone at Newcombe-Gold and his password is easily accessible.
But instead of printing the stuff off on Ben's computer, the print order is sent to Ruben Gold's printer-since that's where Ben Jackson had sent the last thing he'd worked on Friday to the boss. Figuring he was having trouble with that computer as well-and that his photos hadn't printed anywhere-a pissed-off Randle went home for the weekend, not realizing that his filth was lying in the printer tray in his boss's office.
"And this erotica collection of his," Grissom said. "Any pictures of children? Possible underage teens?"
Catherine and Nick traded a long look before they both shook their heads.
"So," Grissom said, with a tiny smile that Nick considered mocking, "you've isolated a male suspect who likes to look at pictures of naked women."
"Gris," Nick said, "it goes way beyond that-the lifestyle, the snapshots!"
"So you have a suspect who likes sex. That would create a substantial suspect base, even just at this ad agency."
Neither Nick nor Catherine said anything.
"What we have in this case," their boss said, "is a lot of circumstantial evidence. Nothing concrete."
Nick didn't like it, but he knew Grissom was right. "Yes."
Catherine said nothing.
Grissom gave them his innocent look. "How do you two feel about child pornography?"
Neither replied.
"Is it possible that in your zest to nail this suspect, you made the crime fit the evidence instead of letting the evidence speak for itself?"
Nick considered that but Catherine immediately said, "No, this guy's been avoiding dealing with us, withholding information…"
Nick heard himself blurting, "The guy's a prick!"
"If that was a crime," Grissom said, "we'd all have cause for concern."
Catherine actually smiled at that.
Grissom's voice remained as calm and cool as a Mount Charleston stream. "Could the suspect have been trying to protect himself? Because he thinks he's being railroaded?"
Catherine seemed to be staring into nothing.
Nick had a sick feeling.
Grissom's tone lost its lecturing quality. "How hard have you looked at your other suspects?"
"There really weren't any," Nick said with a shrug, and knew it came out too fast.
Grissom didn't hesitate. "There's at least one other."
Nick said, "Who?"
Catherine was covering her face, but she said, "The first person on the scene."
Nick instantly recalled the axiom Grissom had pounded into all of them, from the very beginning: first on the scene-first suspect.
"Her name's Janice Denard," Catherine said. "She's the personal assistant of Ruben Gold."
"It was his printer the images were found in, right?"
"Right."
"And you checked her out?"
Embarrassed, Catherin
e shook her head.
Grissom's eyebrows flicked up. " 'What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more.' "
"What's that mean?" Nick asked.
Catherine gave him a grim little smile. "It means, Nick…back to square one."
A hint of a smile tightened around Grissom's eyes.
"And this time," Catherine said, "we're going to look at everybody at Newcombe-Gold."
Suddenly Grissom didn't seem to be listening; his eyes were distant, his expression strangely grave.
Nick said, "Gris-you okay?"
Catherine asked, "What's the matter, Gil?"
Their boss grunted a near-silent laugh. "I was just thinking…maybe I should be taking my own advice." His attention snapped back to them; looking from one to the other, he asked, "You two going to be all right?"
"I think my head's screwed on straight," Nick said.
"Now."
"Good."
And Grissom left them in the garage with Tomas Nunez and his big pile of computer data yet to be gone through.
Strolling back over to the computer expert, Catherine asked, "How long do you need to get through Randle's laptop?"
Nunez looked at his watch, then at his monitor. "Four, maybe five hours…depending on what's on it."
"Can you track the address of the computer that actually sent the print order through Ben Jackson's machine?"
"If it's here, I'll find it," he promised. Then he hedged: "Otherwise, could be hard."
"And this case has been so easy this far," she said dryly. "We'll be back later."
In the corridor, Nick smiled over at Catherine. "This is starting to feel like another double shift."
"That's because it is one. Let's go help O'Riley interview Randle and see where that takes us."
They found Randle and O'Riley seated across from each other in an interview room, the ad man's hands beating a gentle rhythm on the metal table. Both looked up when the CSIs came in, and O'Riley glanced at his watch.
"Mr. Randle's attorney should be here any minute," the detective said. "We'll not start the interview until Mr. Austin is present."
The detective's demeanor had done a one-eighty since this morning and Nick could only wonder what Mobley (or Brass) had said to him on the phone.
Soon a soft tap on the door announced the arrival of Jonathan Austin. The gray-haired, rather elegant lawyer-tan suit, white shirt and dark brown tie-carried a large leather briefcase, which he deposited on the floor as he took a seat next to his client.
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