Helpless

Chapter 8

The work never got easier.

Her superiors had assured FBI special agent Loraine “Rainy” Miles that she’d eventually grow numb to it. She had joined the Innocent Images National Initiative, part of the cyber crimes against children investigative squad, five years ago. In all those years, Rainy had yet to feel a tingle of that promised numbness.

Not once.

The computer jocks assigned to the cyber squad were members of the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, or CART for short. Rainy handled procedural duties and was the person most responsible for gathering evidence for the U.S. Attorney’s office (USAO). CART made it possible for Rainy to get that evidence, and thanks to them, Rainy had enough material to put James Mann away for a very, very long time.

From start to finish, Mann’s arrest in his suburban Boston home had taken only a few hours. But the events leading up to it had been several months in the making, and it had all started because of that tip. Tips, Rainy had come to learn, were the lifeblood of the squad. If it weren’t for them, her team would have a hard time finding a child porn ring, let alone breaching one to shut it down. Whoever had jump-started the Mann investigation apparently knew how to stay in the shadows. Mann, a pharmaceutical executive and father of two, fortunately did not.

CART had created the mirror images of Mann’s computers with their typical thoroughness. Procedurally, Rainy couldn’t begin to gather evidence until she had a bit-by-bit re-creation of Mann’s physical hardware to work from. She hadn’t seen much of the sun since Mann’s arrest, as she’d spent almost every working hour cramped inside the windowless confines of the Lair, the pet name given to CART’s forensic lab. In her world of justice, James Mann couldn’t do enough time, but the law had different standards for punishment.

Rainy, and others who thought like her, were appalled that the legal language in cases like Mann’s didn’t imply a crime and a victim. Rainy didn’t think much of the defense attorneys who decried the lengthy sentences handed down for federal child porn cases. Rainy was part of a growing movement pushing to change the term “child pornography” to “child sex abuse images,” “exploitation of children,” or better still, “crime scene images.”

She believed this issue was less a moral failing of the general public than a need for better education and information. To that end, she urged any of the defense attorneys or rights activists who disagreed with her to come to a trial and listen to victim impact statements. Then they’d know a real crime had occurred. They’d know these images would haunt the children long past their youth. They’d agree that predators like James Mann were no different from sex offenders and should pay justly for their crimes.

Ten years, Rainy thought. Mann would do ten years knowing he had no chance for early parole. But Mann’s lawyers would soon be crawling over their casebooks, sniffing for the smallest infraction of the USAO investigative guidelines that they could use to spring their client. Every move the cyber squad made involved careful orchestration, painstaking detail work, and for Rainy specifically, the horrific task of forensic categorization.

Forensic categorization was by far the toughest part of her job, but in many ways the most important. Rainy had to sift through every image personally, watch every video from Mann’s collection, and count them up. Sentencing for convicted child pornographers was based partially on the number of images in their possession. Six hundred images (each video counted as seventy-five images for her tally) was the maximum number considered by the courts at sentencing time. The fewer images they had, the less time they did. Simple as that.

But even if James Mann exceeded the six hundred image count, Rainy looked for other enhancements that could add years to Mann’s sentence. Pictures of sadomasochism, masturbation, and oral and anal sex, or those that featured prepubescent youth, were all justifiable cause for a sentencing enhancement. The USAO left it up to Rainy’s best judgment to decide which images were sexually explicit, child erotica, or simply nude pictures that were not sexually suggestive.

She’d look at each image, examine every frame of video for closeup shots of genitalia, or something that made the depictions lewd and lascivious. Some of the images counted for multiple categories, so Rainy was responsible for keeping track of that as well. She did this work, even though it tore her up inside to see such horror inflicted on innocent children. She did it, even though sometimes she had to drink herself to sleep.

“So where are we at, Carter?” Rainy asked.

CART team member and special agent Carter Dumas, whose first name’s resemblance to the team name was a running joke, was Rainy’s favorite forensic analyst. They’d worked several cases together over the years, forging a sibling-like camaraderie. Rainy stood up from her seat to ask her question. She didn’t have to; the Lair was small enough that Carter could have heard a whisper.

Carter had boyish looks, thanks to his curly blond hair and an almost creaseless face. He was also exceptionally pale because, as he pointed out, computer monitors glowed but did not tan. Rainy threw Carter a Snickers bar, one of several snacks she kept tucked away for times of low blood sugar.

Carter ripped open the wrapper with his teeth and took a hearty bite. “Well, I’ve finished scanning the hard drive, and I’m about to run a timeline report. We’ll need a few binders for this guy, though. Seems like he worked OT to build up his library.”

“Any exculpatory evidence?” Rainy doubted it, but there had been cases of viruses turning a home computer into a porn server.

Carter shook his head. “Nope. We’ve got plenty of emails from Mr. Mann demonstrating his undeterred commitment to secure the goods.” Rainy bent forward to stretch her stiffening leg. “You staying late again?” Carter asked.

“No, I’ve got a hot date tonight.” Carter held her gaze, then grinned. Rainy laughed in return. “Actually, I was thinking about busting out early.”

“You almost had me that time. Rainy on a date would warrant a front-page bulletin on our intranet.”

“What are you implying, Carter? That I’m undesirable?” Rainy leaned over her favorite tech and gave him her best menacing glare. She got enough looks from the men she worked with to know they found her attractive—compact, petite, shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes, and photogenic smile. But it had been years since she’d had a boyfriend. Her work schedule made it a challenge, and the work itself stuck with her long after she left the office.

“I think any news of you having a date would break a hundred hearts here, that’s what I think,” Carter said.

“Well, let’s just say I have yet to find a man who can restore my faith in men. You being the exception, of course. The married exception, that is.”

“There’s always women.”

“There’s always keep your fantasies to yourself. Especially while we’re doing this.”

“Yeah, right on.” Carter finished the Snickers with two more bites and focused again on his computer monitors.

Rainy watched him work. Her boss, supervisory senior resident agent Walter Tomlinson, had pursued Rainy for the cyber crimes against children investigative squad not because of her technical acumen, but for her dogged procedural and investigative skills.

All the geek speak Rainy had picked up along the way, she attributed to osmosis. Just by observing Carter’s monitors, Rainy could tell he had several searches running in parallel. Keyword parsers in action. Registry key analyzers kicking at full speed. Recovery tools burning up RAM to restore any deleted files. Rainy couldn’t understand how any of these perps she arrested thought that what they did in the privacy of their home was really private. Technology, she had quickly discovered, could turn anybody’s door into a window.

“Did we get any CVIP hits yet?” Carter asked.

“The report was still printing last I checked. I’ll go look.” Rainy walked over to the printer and removed the report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children pertaining specifically to the Mann investigation.

Earlier, Rainy had sent a batch of images from Mann’s computer to the NCMEC for comparison against the CVIP database of known images. The NCMEC maintained a vast catalog of child pornography on its highly secure database. The NCMEC was operationally in charge of the Child Victim Identification Program, or the CVIP for short.

The CVIP was a national clearinghouse for all child pornography. Every image or video file obtained by law enforcement—state, local, or federal—got processed through the CVIP and assigned a hash value, a nonpictorial, alphanumeric identification that was unique to each computer file. Because of this uniqueness, hash values functioned a lot like digital fingerprints, and Rainy used them for matching purposes. When image evidence Rainy submitted to the CVIP matched an image already on file, she called it a “hit.”

Rainy wanted to get as many hits as possible from her CVIP analysis, and for good reason. A “hit” meant the child in question was already known to the system, that presumably the child was no longer in any danger because they’d been identified by authorities. Sadly, Rainy had come to learn that “out of danger” often meant deceased or dead inside.

When the CVIP didn’t return a hit, Rainy’s work became a lot more intense. A no hit image meant that a child might be in immediate danger and must be identified as quickly as possible. Sometimes hash values didn’t match up because the image Rainy fed into the CVIP had been altered from the original file in some way.

“Image A is already logged in the CVIP,” Carter had once explained to help Rainy grasp the concept. “Let’s say it’s a picture of a teenaged girl with a fifty-year-old man. The CVIP assigns Image A a hash value. Done. Later we feed Image B into the CVIP. Image B is the exact same picture as Image A, only someone cropped out the old man. The CVIP will catalog Image B by its own hash value. It doesn’t know the old man has been removed. The CVIP will think Image B is a new image, and we’ll have ourselves a no hit to investigate.”

Rainy’s job was tough to stomach, but a CVIP analyst had it worse. The CVIP team further classified images into series—images of the same person, setting, or type that should be grouped together. They had to visually inspect every image without a hash value match to see if they could match it on their own. CVIP analysts knew, just based on their vast experience, that certain bathtubs or wallpaper patterns, for instance, came from images they’d seen before. These images could be assigned to a known series even though the hash values didn’t match.

“So far we’ve got all matching hash values and known image series here,” Rainy said to Carter, flipping through the pages of the CVIP report she had printed from her e-mail.

Many of the images taken off Mann’s computer had victim impact statements on file, too. Those statements would need to be read aloud by either the victim or a witness coordinator at Mann’s sentencing if he got convicted.

When he gets convicted, Rainy assured herself.

Some of the images in Mann’s collection had been in circulation a long time, even dating as far back as the early 1980s.

“Rainy, I’ve got some more lovelies to send your way if you want to go through them,” Carter said. “Sorry.”

Perhaps Carter had apologized because he saw the look in Rainy’s eye that said she really didn’t want to look anymore.

“That’s okay, Cart. I’ll check them out.”

Carter electronically transferred a batch of encrypted files to the password-protected external hard drive, where Rainy conducted her forensic categorization.

She settled back into her workstation chair and opened one picture after another. She categorized each image for the USAO’s report. She captured the image properties they’d need for trial. She verified the images with the CVIP. So far, every image sent to the CVIP came back with a hit.

Very good news indeed.

“A little over three hundred left to go,” Rainy said to Carter.

Rainy opened the next image in the batch. During her five years on the squad, she thought she’d seen it all. Every vile and disgusting act she could imagine. Compared to those images, the one she opened next wasn’t graphic at all. It wasn’t very sexually explicit, either. It was just a picture of a girl, a teenager perhaps, lying partially undressed on a bed. She didn’t think much of it as she opened the next bunch of images in the batch that Carter had sent.

She kept looking. What seemed only a curious departure from Mann’s more explicit image collection suddenly became a lot more interesting.

“Carter,” Rainy said, her voice breathy from a pulse of adrenaline. “Stay close by. I may need you. Just want to check these out with the CVIP first.”

Rainy sent the images over to the CVIP for processing. It would take some time for the CVIP results to return, but Rainy had seen enough images to have a gut feeling about the report she’d receive back.

Of the 325 images Rainy sent to the CVIP, there wouldn’t be a single hit in the batch.

Not a one.