Chapter 18
Brandon was waiting on a bench by Strawberry Fields near 72nd Street. Two guys competed for attention (and handouts) by strumming guitars and singing Beatles songs. One went with the obvious, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but he wasn’t doing nearly as brisk a business as the guy in the Eggman T-shirt singing “I Am the Walrus.”
“Let me explain that text,” Brandon said. “The one Detective Schwartz said my mom sent.”
Kat waited. Stacy was there too. Kat was already feeling too close to this. She wanted someone with a little distance to give her perspective.
“Wait, I’ll show you.” He hunched over and started fiddling with his phone. “Here, read it for yourself.”
Kat took his phone and read the message:
Hi. Arrived safely. So excited. Miss you!
Kat handed it to Stacy. She read it and handed it back to Brandon.
“It came from your mother’s phone,” Kat said.
“Right, but she didn’t send it.”
“What makes you think that?”
Brandon almost looked insulted by the question. “Mom never says ‘miss you.’ I mean never. She always finishes with ‘love you.’”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m dead serious.”
“Brandon, how often has your mother gone away on her own like this?”
“This is the first time.”
“Right, so naturally she might use ‘miss you’ at the end, no?”
“You don’t get it. Mom always signed her texts with x’s and o’s and with the word Mom. It was like a running joke. She always announced herself. Like if she called me and even though I had caller ID and knew her voice better than my own, she would always say, ‘Brandon, it’s Mom.’”
Kat looked at Stacy. Stacy gave a small shrug. The kid always had an answer.
“I also saw the surveillance video,” Kat said.
“What surveillance video?”
“Of the ATM.”
His eyes widened. “Whoa, you saw it? How?”
“Detective Schwartz was more thorough than I would have been. He got the tape.”
“So what did it show?”
“What do you think it showed, Brandon?”
“I don’t know. Was my mother on it?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“What was she wearing?”
“A yellow sundress.”
She saw his face fall. The guy in the Eggman T-shirt finished singing “I Am the Walrus.” There was a smattering of applause. The guy bowed deeply and then started singing “I Am the Walrus” again.
“She looked fine too,” Kat said. “Your mother is a very beautiful woman.”
Brandon waved away the compliment about his mother. “Are you sure she was alone?”
“Definitely. The camera has views from down low and overhead. She was by herself.”
Brandon fell back in his seat. “I don’t understand.” Then: “I don’t believe you. You just want me to stop. You could have known about the yellow dress some other way.”
Stacy frowned and finally spoke up. “Come on, kid.”
He kept shaking his head. “It can’t be.”
Stacy slapped him on the back. “Be happy, kid. She’s alive and well.”
He shook his head some more. He stood and began to pace, cutting across the tiles that made up the Imagine mosaic. A tourist yelled, “Hey!” because he had ruined their picture. Kat hurried after him.
“Brandon?”
He stopped pacing.
“You said you found something about Jeff.”
“His name isn’t Jeff,” Brandon said.
“Right. You said he called himself Jack online?”
“That’s not his name either.”
Kat sneaked a glance at Stacy. “I’m not following.”
He took his laptop out of his backpack. He flipped it open. The screen came to life. “It was like I said before. I Googled him and found nothing. But, well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It should have come to me right away.”
“What should have?”
“Do you know what an image search is?” Brandon asked.
She had just done one on his mother, but there was no reason to tell him that. “It’s when you search for someone’s picture.”
“No, not that one,” he said, a hint of impatience in his voice. “That’s pretty common. You want to find, say, a picture of yourself online, so you click IMAGE and you type in your name. What I’m talking about is a bit more sophisticated.”
“Then no, I don’t know,” Kat said.
“Instead of searching for text, you search for a particular image,” Brandon said. “So, for example, you upload a picture onto the website, and it searches for anyplace else where that picture might exist. More sophisticated software can even find a person’s face in other photographs. Stuff like that.”
“So you uploaded, what, a picture of Jeff?”
“Exactly. I saved the images from his profile page on YouAreJust MyType.com and then I put them in the Google image search.”
“So,” Kat said, “if any of those pictures were somewhere else on the web . . .”
“The image search would find them.”
“And that’s what happened?”
“Not at first. At first it came back with no hits. But here’s the thing. Most search engines only look through what is currently on the web. You know how parents are always trying to scare us kids by telling us that anything on the web is on it forever?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s true. It becomes a cached file. This is getting more technical, but when you delete something, it isn’t really gone. It’s like you’re painting your house. You’re just painting over the old color. The old color is still there if you take the time to scrape off the new paint.” He thought about that. “That’s not really a perfect analogy, but you get the point.”
“So you scraped off the new paint?”
“Something like that. I found a way to search through deleted pages. A buddy of mine who runs the computer lab at UConn wrote the program. It’s still beta.”
“What did you find?”
Brandon spun the computer toward her. “This.”
It was a Facebook page. The profile picture was the same photograph Jeff had used for YouAreJustMyType.
But the name listed on the top was Ron Kochman.
There was nothing much on the page. The exact same photographs had been posted. There were no posts, no activity, since the day the page was created four years ago. So the pics were four years old. Well, maybe that explained why Jeff aka Jack aka Ron looked so damned young and handsome. The last four years, Kat thought, had probably aged him a ton.
Yeah, right.
But of course, the greater question remained: Who the hell was Ron Kochman?
“May I take a hopeful shot in the dark?” Stacy said to her.
“Sure.”
“Are you certain that’s your old fiancé and not some guy who looks like him?”
Kat nodded. “It’s a possibility.”
“No, it’s not,” Brandon said. “You instant messaged him, remember? He knew you. He told you that he needed a fresh start.”
“Yeah,” Kat said, “I know. Plus, Stacy knows better too, don’t you, Stacy?”
“I do,” she said.
“How?” Brandon asked.
Kat ignored him for now, trying to put it together with Stacy. “So eighteen years ago, Jeff moves to Cincinnati. He gets in a bar fight. He changes his name to Ron Kochman—”
“No,” Stacy said.
“Why no?”