“Do you know a James Mann? Is that name familiar to you?” Rainy asked.
Again a shake no, but this time with far less conviction. Rainy believed that answer to be true.
“You’re not in trouble for this, Lindsey, if that’s your concern,” Wendy said. “But we need to know some things if you can help us.”
“Like… like what?”
“Like when you took these pictures,” Wendy said. “And where.”
“I was just playing around with my cell phone,” Lindsey said, tears filling her eyes. “It was a bunch of months ago.”
“From here?” Rainy asked.
Lindsey nodded. “Yeah, why?”
“It just helps us,” said Rainy.
Lindsey sucked in her lower lip, pushed it out, and sucked it in again. A nervous habit, Rainy thought.
“Wendy will help you through this, Lindsey. Okay? You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Are these on the Internet? Can my friends see them?” Lindsey asked.
“I can’t answer that at this time,” Rainy replied. “Once your images are out there, there’s nothing we can do to get them back. You have to prepare yourself. They might show up again one day. You have to be ready for that possibility. We don’t know everybody who has downloaded these pictures, and I can’t promise that we’ll ever find out.”
Lindsey nodded slowly, as though she was inching her way into this new reality.
“I’m going to help you through this,” Wendy said, setting a comforting hand on Lindsey’s shoulder. “I promise everything is going to be okay.”
Thank God for Wendy Toman, Rainy thought.
Cathleen’s expression showed pure disgust as she looked through the pictures of Lindsey. “We are going to have a long talk about this, young lady,” she snapped.
A woman from the bridge club made a trepid entrance into the office. Cathleen introduced her as Adriana Boyd. Attractive, Rainy thought. In a Desperate Housewives kind of way.
“Is everything all right?” Adriana asked.
Cathleen flashed Adriana an upset look. “No,” Cathleen said. “I’d say things are not all right. Not in the least. Just be glad you have a son and not a daughter.” Lindsey grimaced as though in pain.
“What’s going on?” Adriana asked.
“These people are with the FBI,” Cathleen said to Adriana. “Apparently, they found pictures of Lindsey… compromising pictures… during some child porn bust.”
Rainy was surprised and a little dismayed by Cathleen’s candor. Cathleen perhaps sensed she’d crossed a line, because she said to Rainy, “Oh, don’t worry. Adriana is one of my closest friends. She’s like family to us. Especially since my divorce.”
“Is Lindsey in any trouble?” Adriana asked in a way that a concerned aunt might speak.
Rainy assured her that she was not, then went on to explain the situation and her role with the FBI.
When Rainy had finished, Adriana appeared as distraught as Cathleen and Lindsey. “Oh my,” she said. “What happens next?”
Rainy’s lips tightened as she tried to temper her officiousness with a softer tone. She wasn’t a mother herself, but she could certainly empathize with a mother’s concern. “Well, I have other images from our investigation, but for reasons of privacy, I’ll show them only to the school superintendent. We’ll try to make other victim identifications. Wendy’s here to help Lindsey through the witness process. If Lindsey wants, she can make a victim impact statement. It’ll be read aloud in court if the accused is found guilty of the crime.”
“Then what?” Cathleen asked.
“Then we’re going to try to figure out how the guy we arrested came to possess pictures of your daughter. We’re going to track down his source, or sources, and try to shut them down.”
“Can you do that?” Cathleen asked.
“Well, it would speed things along if Lindsey would be honest about who she sent these pictures to.”
“Mom, I swear I didn’t send them to anybody! I swear. Somebody either got my cell phone or hacked into my account or something.”
Cathleen frowned at her daughter.
“What happens to the person who did this?” Adriana asked. “The person who sent these around, I mean.”
“He’ll be charged with interstate trafficking of child pornography.”
“What does that mean?” Cathleen asked.
“It means whoever did this will spend a long, long time in jail.”
Chapter 20
Rebecca Bartholomew had been Tom’s favorite neighbor on Oak Street. Rebecca was the first to greet Tom after he moved back into his former home. Tom wasn’t surprised that days later she again stopped by unannounced.
“Want some pie?” she asked, flashing him some berry-rich homemade delight.
“If you don’t mind a mess, I’d love the company,” Tom said.
The pie, he knew, was an excuse for her to check up on them. It was just Rebecca being Rebecca.
The bulk of Tom’s belongings remained packed inside boxes and milk crates. The boxes and crates were strewn about the living room and upper hallway of the split-level home.
“Is this all you own?” Rebecca asked, evidently surprised by Tom’s lack of possessions.
“One day and a rented van was all it took to move me here,” Tom said with a degree of pride. “That’s why I’m a big fan of my milk crate storage system. Just flip ’em over and, voilà, you’re moving.”
Jill had been quite helpful with the move. They talked some on the trip up and back, but not very much. She’d been quiet in the days since her mother’s death.
At Marvin’s suggestion, Tom and Jill began seeing a social worker to help facilitate the transition to her new custodial parent. Tom found it reassuring to know that Jill’s quiet demeanor was normal for this stage of the grieving process, according to Maggie, the social worker.
Rebecca followed Tom into the kitchen. She stepped over an open toolbox, then navigated a field of corroded parts that Tom had removed from the newly disassembled kitchen sink. Rebecca made it safely to the refrigerator without tripping and seemed well aware of the accomplishment.
“We’ve been getting a lot of takeout,” Tom said to Rebecca, who looked inscrutably at the sink and about the kitchen mess.
“I was going to make us a cup of tea,” she said, as if to imply that was no longer an option.
“We have bottled water in the fridge,” Tom said.
Rebecca nodded, got the water out of the refrigerator, and retrieved an electric kettle from one of the kitchen cabinets. She didn’t have to ask Tom where to get it. In another life, Tom, Kelly, and Rebecca had been friends, so it was no surprise that she knew where to find the kettle and Kelly’s substantial collection of teas.
Rebecca had an apple-shaped figure, an unruly nest of dark, wavy hair, and a pretty face, which Tom could not recall ever looking so concerned.
“Does it feel strange to move back into your old home?” Rebecca asked as she filled the kettle with bottled water.
“Everything about this feels strange,” Tom said. “Ten years ago I got divorced and moved out. Jill was just six. Now she’s fifteen, and I’m sleeping in the basement of the house Kelly and I bought together.”
“The basement?”
“Jill’s not ready to touch her mother’s things, and I can’t blame her for that. But I keep on finding things I bought as gifts, or shopped for with Kelly, in just about every room of the house.”
From the living room, Tom heard the familiar whistle of the wall-mounted cuckoo clock announcing the top of the hour with seven quick tweets. Tom had first laid eyes on that wooden cuckoo clock from the Black Forest region of Germany when he opened the crate of knickknacks Kelly had asked him to bring home for her from Wiesbaden.