“You want to give us a bunch of new sources of child pornography in exchange for our dropping the case against you?” Rainy asked.
“No. I’ll give you that, anyway,” said Mann. “But in the process we found something unusual that I thought you should know about.”
“And that would be?” Rainy inquired.
“My own Lisbeth Salander generated digital fingerprints, those hash values, for all the images he found, just like you guys do. He did it to keep all the images organized. We could tell by looking at the digital fingerprint of each image how many different sources were distributing the identical image.”
“We’re not hiring, if that’s what you’re after,” Carter said.
Mann returned a weak smile. “There are images on this flash drive, dozens of them, that look to be the exact same to me. Same composition. Same background. Same subject. But these here are not like the other duplicates we found,” Mann said.
“And why is that?” asked Rainy.
“Even though these images appear to be exact duplicates of one another, their digital fingerprints, the hash values each image generated, were all different. All the other duplicates my guy sourced generated identical hash values. These didn’t.”
“That’s your proof?” Rainy wondered.
“These pictures appear to be identical in every way. So, logically, they should produce an identical fingerprint.”
“Like I said, that’s your proof of innocence?” said Rainy.
Mann’s expression revealed an infinite sorrow. “My friend told me not to ignore any outliers.”
Rainy felt the flesh on the back of her neck begin to rise.
That sounds like something Tom’s lawyer would have said.
“I don’t know if this will in fact prove my innocence. I needed something to lure you into coming over here and taking a look. But I do know that these images are outliers. They’re the only duplicates that don’t generate the same hash values. I need to understand why. No stone left uncovered. This is my life on the line, Agent Miles.”
“Okay, we’ll do that for you,” said Rainy. “But you and this jock of yours are going to turn over all the evidence you’ve gathered.”
“I’ve got it ready to send to you,” Mann said. “But first you’ll have to promise that there will be no charges against him, or new ones against me.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged,” Rainy said.
“And there’s one other thing,” Mann said. “The images with the hash values that don’t match but should—they look similar to me.”
“Yeah? In what way?” asked Carter.
“They all look like they were taken with a cell phone camera.”
Chapter 58
Prospect Park was once a weed-infested lot of broken bottles, crumpled beer cans, and cigarette butts. It was just down the road from Lindsey’s house, but all the years she could have played there (before it became uncool to play), the park was essentially unusable. Apart from all the litter, the playground itself was in shambles. The swings were broken. The slide could cut your leg if you hugged too close to the right going down. There were relics of a zip line, which the town selectmen had ordered taken down after some kid broke his arm. The only apparatus that wasn’t broken, rusted, or falling apart was the tire bridge, and that was never much fun to play on.
Some years earlier, a group of concerned parents, Lindsey’s mother among them, had rallied the town for funds to clean up Prospect Park. Bake sales were followed by a town appropriations vote, and the park had been reborn.
The park’s renaissance, however, came too late for Lindsey to enjoy the benefits fully. Yet even though she was well beyond the monkey-bar years, she still liked coming here. Her quick jaunts to Prospect Park began around the time of her parents’ divorce.
She sat awhile on the wide hard-plastic swing just to think. Over time, what had been an occasional desire had turned into something of a habit. She’d come to the park whenever she needed an escape, which, sadly, was more and more often. That was why she came here mostly at night—when the little kids were all in bed, and her mother was passed out on the sofa with half a bottle of Chardonnay. At least her mother’s drinking problem made it easy for Lindsey to sneak unnoticed out of the house.
Normal parents would know if their kid had walked out the front door at midnight. But getting her mother’s attention would require Lindsey to scream in the poor woman’s ear. Come morning, Lindsey doubted her mother would even remember the conversation. When Lindsey slipped on her light blue cotton jacket and slipped out the front door minutes before the grandfather clock chimed twelve, she did so without leaving a note as to her whereabouts. She’d be home in an hour.
The moon was just a sliver in the sky, and it was late enough that even the crickets, normally deafening, seemed to have retired for the night. Lindsey rocked herself backward and forward, pumping her legs just enough to keep her momentum, but not so much that the swing hinges creaked out her presence. She wanted only Tanner Farnsworth to know that she was there, and judging by her cell phone’s clock, the boy who had betrayed her trust wouldn’t show for another ten minutes. That is, if he dared to come at all.
Lindsey let her thoughts drift back to the events that preceded this planned rendezvous. It had all begun with a frantic phone call from Jill.
“Slow down, Jill,” Lindsey had to shout into her phone. “I can’t understand you.”
But once Lindsey finally grasped what Jill had been saying, she couldn’t believe what she heard. Their plan had been simply to figure out whether Mitchell was involved in the computer attacks. But in a single sentence, the life that Lindsey believed couldn’t get worse had done just that.
“Mitchell had what on his computer?”
“Your pictures,” Jill said. “The ones you told me you sent to Tanner. And that’s not all. He had pictures of me, too, and a bunch of other girls as well.”
“Oh my God.”
They went back and forth for a few minutes, with Lindsey punctuating each new revelation with another “Oh. My. God.”
“You’ve got to promise, swear to me, Lindsey, that you’re not going to do anything about this. I didn’t even tell my dad.”
“Your dad came and rescued you. Don’t you think you can trust him?”
“Yeah, a lot more now,” Jill agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I want him to know that I passed out at a party, or that somebody took pictures of me with my clothes off. You can’t tell anyone I told you this. Mitchell swore to me that he’d put my pictures everywhere if you did. Yours, too. I mean, we’ll be totally destroyed.”
“We went after one thing and found another.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jill.
“The police found child porn on your dad’s computers. But this isn’t the same thing. Mitchell can’t be the one who framed him.”
“That doesn’t mean I want my dad to know about these pictures!” Jill cried.
Lindsey tried to calm her crying friend, but it wasn’t easy to do over the phone. Eventually, Jill managed to calm herself.
“We can’t just let this go,” Lindsey said. “How many other girls’ pictures did Mitchell have?”
“A bunch,” Jill said. “Like I said, I didn’t look long. I copied them, though. I still have the storage key. When Mitchell found me looking, I swear I thought I was going to die. I can’t tell you how freaked out I was.”