Helpless

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.”

Carter did, and Rainy saw it right away. “We’ve got the same jarring transition in the same section of both images,” she said.

“The unusual shading pattern looks similar, but they’re not identical,” Carter said. “The pixel colors are different, too.”

“But it’s something,” Rainy said. She was feeling breathless. “Each image looks identical. Only at magnification can we see the actual location of pixel color variation. Why?”

“It’s probably a watermark,” said a voice from behind them.

Rainy turned, and her eyes went wide with delight. Clarence Stern had just entered the Lair.

“Tomlinson said he’ll need that PowerPoint deck by six,” Stern announced. “Now, move over, Carter. Let me figure this out.”