The three men hit it off and drank and snorted too much late into the night. Billy Ray, who was more a talker than Carver, told Neal Parks they were trolling for blondes to use in movies they produced for several profitable sites on the dark web. One of the most recent, and most successful, Billy Ray said, featured two young blond lesbians from Pennsylvania. He gave Parks the URL of one of the websites: www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. I dug in my pocket and came up with the Ziploc containing the Toshiba flash drive. “The same URL is featured on the video on this drive. I want to know if the video’s real or not.”
Rawlins became all business at that point. He took the bag and asked where I’d gotten the drive, and I told him about Gretchen Lindel’s father.
“He should have brought this directly to the agents on his daughter’s case,” Rawlins said, moving toward one of his workbenches.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“You’ve watched what’s on the drive?”
“If it’s real, it’s the first actual snuff film I’ve ever seen.”
“You just want to know if it’s fake?”
“He wants to know everything and anything,” Batra said. “So do I.”
Rawlins said, “You make a copy?”
“On my laptop at home,” I said.
“No crashes?”
“Worked fine.”
“I’ll check it anyway,” he said, sitting down at a computer. He donned latex gloves, got out the drive, and inserted it into a USB port.
A few moments later, I watched a scanning icon count down the minute and forty-five seconds it took to do a full inspection of the flash drive. At the end of the scan, a message appeared: No known anomaly detected.
“Well, all righty, then,” Rawlins said.
He disconnected the flash, took it to the larger control board below the eight big screens, and plugged it into a server linked to the internal FBI network.
A digital index of the drive popped up on the large center screen; it showed the icon of the single MPEG movie file. Rawlins clicked on it. There was a brilliant flash, and then the clip played—the grainy video of the hysterical blonde running through the forest with the cameraman in hot pursuit.
“What was that?” Batra asked. “That flash at the beginning there?”
“I don’t know,” Rawlins said, freezing the video.
I said, “You know, come to think of it, when I hit the icon on my laptop, it did the same thing, only my screen’s much smaller and older, so it wasn’t as bright as that.”
Rawlins grunted and gave his computer orders to list all running processes and applications. The directory opened and showed them in a stack sorted by the time each was launched, beginning with the most recent app.
“That’s what just flashed there?” Batra said with an arched eyebrow. “Porngrinder?”
CHAPTER
34
RAWLINS LAUGHED AND said blithely, “Oh, no, Porngrinder is on me. What can I say? It’s a lonely life in the basement at times.”
“My God,” Batra said, disgusted. “The Bureau frowns on that kind of thing.”
“Have them sue me, won’t you?” Rawlins said.
“What was the flash?” Batra said.
“I don’t know. A blip, a screen hiccup. They happen, you know.”
“Or a bug in the plug-in that drives the video player?” Batra said.
Rawlins held up a finger. “A momentous occasion. Special Agent Henna B. and I might agree.”
Batra rolled her eyes. “Tell us about the video.”
I won’t bore anyone with the details of Rawlins’s technological savvy and instincts, but they were shrewd and his results conclusive. At first, he used ordinary software to try to access the video file’s so-called dark data. No luck. The video had been run through an onion system similar to the one used to create the Killingblondechicks4fun website. The dark data had been stripped away.
“Not surprising.” Rawlins sniffed. “But I’ve still got the dust rag.”
The “dust rag” was software Rawlins had designed and coded himself to raise the faintest trace of old dark and metadata. He compared the software to the Hubble Space Telescope looking for cosmic debris a thousand miles behind a comet’s long tail.
Sure enough, his screen was soon filled with fragments of code that played out in sync with the video. By focusing on the moments where the lighting was dimmest and the noise of the alleged killing most pronounced, Rawlins found evidence in the data dust that suggested an audio splice in the sound track roughly six seconds long. Those six seconds included the knife-across-the-throat slitting noise and the pah that sounded like air bursting out of a frightened and dying chest.
“She’s alive,” Rawlins said barely fifteen minutes after starting his examination. “Or at least, those weren’t the sounds of her murder.”
I sighed with relief. I wouldn’t have to give Alden Lindel or his wife more heartbreaking news. “Explain how you know. The parents will ask.”
Rawlins said, “The sound patch itself is fairly sophisticated CGA. Computer-generated audio. So someone’s had advanced training in sound effects. You’re looking for a film-school grad or someone who worked in a special-effects company out in Hollywood, not a coder.”
“Why’s that?” Batra asked.
Rawlins gave his computer a command, and the video on the center screen rewound to the beginning of the six-second splice. A second screen showed the remnants of the dark data. He pointed out a jagged line of data that almost connected top to bottom.
“That’s your digital splice,” Rawlins said. “A more adept coder would have hidden it better, sewn it up as clean as a plastic surgeon. There wouldn’t have been even a hint of a scar.”
“So this is basic sound-editing work?” I said.
Rawlins touched his Mohawk as if it were a high-fashion hairdo and said, “Three steps above butchery. And that’s all I can manage now. I have a lot to do before Goddess opens.”
I was puzzled.
“His favorite dance club,” Batra explained.
“Do you dance, Dr. Cross?” Rawlins said.
Before I could reply, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, saw the number.
“My son’s school,” I said. “I have to take this.”
CHAPTER
35
ALI CROSS BELIEVED he was smarter than the average kid at Washington Latin but not brilliant, not a genius. The kids he considered supersmart were also the shyest and the most awkward. He decided within a month of starting at the charter school that brilliance was overrated. He’d take very bright, very hardworking, and very curious any day of the week.
Ali was the youngest kid in fifth grade at Latin by at least a year. With his attitude and sense of humor, he fit in with most of his older classmates. But, as his father always said, there were jerks in every crowd.
Ali met two of them shortly after the school bell rang to announce the end of classes. He had fifteen minutes before debate practice and decided to go sit outside. It was a nice sunny afternoon, not too cold.
Ali stopped on the front steps and looked toward the plaza, remembering the hooded men who’d grabbed Gretchen Lindel and shot Ms. Petracek. Rather than dwell on those violent events, he sat up on the wall at the top of the stairs and started playing a game on his phone.
He was aware of knots of kids walking past him, and he caught snatches of their conversation. Suddenly, someone grabbed him by the collar, right below his chin, and pushed as if to shove him backward off the wall. Then whoever it was yanked him forward again.
Shocked, surprised, Ali felt his stomach go sick with adrenaline and fear before he’d fully realized what had happened. George Putnam, a burly sixth-grader, still held Ali so tight by the collar, he was having trouble getting his breath. The older boy laughed at his reaction.
“Saved your life,” Putnam said. “You little turd, Cross.”
“Let go!” Ali said. “You’re choking me!”
Putnam’s buddy Coulter Tate was taller and already fighting acne. Tate leaned over, got right in Ali’s face, and gave him a crazed, zitty look.
“How’s it feel to be a killer’s son, Cross?” Tate said. “How’s it feel to have murder in the genes?”
Putnam tightened his hold, making Ali’s eyes feel like they were swelling. There was no thought, no consideration on Ali’s part after that. He just pulled back his head and then slammed it forward. His forehead connected with Tate’s nose, and he heard a distinct crunching noise.
Tate screamed and stumbled back, holding his hand to his nose, which was gushing blood.