“I’ll walk you out.”
The clouds had cleared, and the night sky was a canvas of stars. Rainy pulled her car keys out of her purse but didn’t immediately open the car door.
“You really are on my side, aren’t you?” he said.
Rainy smiled from the corner of her mouth, in a way that Tom had never seen before. It made her look even more attractive. He didn’t know what made him reach out and take hold of her hand. He was just glad that she let him.
“So what was this really?” Rainy asked, still holding Tom’s hand.
“Dinner,” Tom said.
“But was it… a date?”
“I wouldn’t lie to my daughter.”
Rainy laughed. “No, you wouldn’t.”
“But this could be a date.”
“What? Here? Outside your house, by my car?”
Tom nodded. “Not the best of locations, I agree. Not the best circumstances, by any stretch. But it’s all about intention.” Tom took hold of Rainy’s other hand and tingled as their fingers interlocked.
“Is our date over?” Rainy asked.
Tom nodded again. “Yeah, busy day tomorrow.”
“Well, I had a nice time.”
“Do you kiss on the first date?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I haven’t been on a date in so long, it’s hard to remember.”
“So you might be willing to kiss, is that what you’re implying?”
Rainy cocked her head in a coy, playful gesture. “Jury’s out on that one,” she said.
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.”