The Neighbor

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In the beginning, I worried about two things: how to ask my questions of Ethan Hastings without giving away too much and how to plot against my husband given my extremely limited free time. The solution to both problems turned out to be surprisingly simple.

I met with Ethan every day during my free period. I told him I was creating a sixth grade teaching module for Internet navigation. Under the guise of crafting a class project, Ethan answered all of my questions and more.

I started with online security. We couldn’t have sixth-graders visiting porn sites, right? Ethan demonstrated for me how to manage account and browser permissions to limit where users could go.

That night after Ree went to bed, I booted up the family computer and went to work. I opened the security window in AOL and busily “permissioned” away. Of course, after I went to bed, it occurred to me that Jason might not use AOL to surf the web. Maybe he used Internet Explorer or another browser.

I returned to Ethan the next day.

“Is there any way to see exactly which websites have been visited by each computer? You know, that way I can check and see if each student is going where he or she is supposed to be going and that our network security protocols are working.”

Ethan explained to me that each time a user clicks on a website, a cookie is created by that website and temporary copies of the web pages are saved in the computer’s cache file. The computer also stores a browser history, so that by glancing at the right files, I could tell exactly where that computer had been on the World Wide Web.

I had to wait five more nights, until Ree was asleep and Jason was at work. Ethan had showed me how I could click on the pull-down menu of the Internet search bar, and it would show me the websites most recently visited by the computer. I selected the search bar, got the pull-down menu, and saw three options, www.drudgereport.com, www.usatoday.com, and www.nytimes.com.

Right away, this struck me as not enough options, because when Ethan had done it in the computer lab, we’d easily gotten twelve to fifteen sites. So I booted up Internet Explorer, and tried its browser history, which gave me the exact same results.

I was stumped.

I monitored the browser history for a bit after that. Every few days, random times, when I thought I could quickly call it up without Jason noticing. Always I found the same three sites, which didn’t make any sense to me. Jason spent hours at a time hunched over the computer. No way he was simply reading the news.

Three weeks later, inspiration hit. I constructed a civics question to research for my social studies class regarding the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment. Then I merrily Google-searched away. I found history sites, I found government sites, Wikipedia, all sorts of good stuff. I hit them all, and by the time I was done that evening, the pull-down menu showed a nice robust list of recently visited websites.

I went to school the next day and gave my class an impromptu lecture on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to peacefully assemble, and freedom to petition.

Then I raced home, barely able to contain myself until Ree went to bed and I could check the browser history of Internet Explorer once more.

You know what I found? Three websites: Drudge Report, USA Today, New York Times. Every site I had visited just twenty-four hours before was gone. Wiped out.

Somehow, some way, my husband was covering his online tracks.

The following day, I hit Ethan with my question the second he walked into the computer lab.

“I was talking to another teacher after school yesterday, and she implied that checking the computer’s browser history isn’t enough. That there are ways of tampering with the browser history, or something like that?”

I shrugged helplessly and Ethan immediately sat down at the nearest computer and fired it to life.

“Oh sure, Mrs. Jones. You can purge the cache file after going online. That will make it appear like that web visit never happened. Here, I’ll show you.”

Ethan logged on to the National Geo graphic website, then exited and showed me the options for clearing the cache on the computer. I was crestfallen.

“So I can’t really track what the kids are doing at all, can I? I mean, if any of them figure out how to clear the cache-which is just a click away-then they can visit all sorts of places when I’m not looking and I’ll never figure it out.”

“Well you have the basic security functions,” Ethan tried to assure me.

“But they’re not foolproof either. You demonstrated that the first time we set them up. It seems to me I can’t really control where the students go or what they do. Maybe a teaching module on Internet navigation isn’t such a good idea.”

Ethan was thoughtful for a bit. He is a bright kid. Earnest, but lonely. I had the feeling his parents loved him but had no idea what to do with him. He is too smart, intimidating even for adults. The kind of kid who is meant to suffer for the first twenty years or so, but then would take his software company public at age twenty-one and wind up married to a supermodel and driving a Ferrari.

He wasn’t there yet, however, and I felt bad for his painful shyness, the way he regarded the whole world through this highly analytical lens the rest of us could never see.

“You understand that when you delete something on a computer, it never actually goes away?” he said presently.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t understand that at all.”

He brightened. “Oh, absolutely. See, computers are inherently lazy.”

“They are?”

“Sure. A computer’s primary function is to store data. If you think about it, the hard drive is nothing but a giant library lined with empty shelves. Then you, the user, come along and start inputting documents, or downloading information, or surfing the Internet, whatever. You’re creating ‘books’ of data, which the computer then stashes on the shelves.”

“Okay.”

“Like any library, the computer needs to be able to retrieve the books at a moment’s notice. So it creates a directory, its own version of a card catalogue system, which it can use to find each particular piece of data on the bookshelves. Got it?”

“Got it,” I assured him.

Ethan beamed at me. Apparently, in addition to being a good teacher, I was an excellent student. He continued his lecture: “Now this is where the computer gets lazy: When you delete a document, the computer doesn’t take the time to track down the actual data on the bookshelf and trash it. That would be too much work. Instead, it simply deletes the reference to the document in the directory. The book’s still there; the card catalogue, however, no longer shows its location.”

I stared at my red-headed partner for a bit. “You mean to tell me, even if the cache is cleared, those particular Internet files are still on the computer somewhere?”

I got a second smile for that one. “Great job!”

I couldn’t help it. I smiled back. This made Ethan blush, and reminded me I had to be careful. Just because I was using Ethan Hastings didn’t mean I wanted to hurt him.

“So, if the card catalogue has been cleared,” I asked, “how do I find the data?”

“If you really want to know what’s in the computer’s browser history, I recommend Pasco.”

“Pasco?”

“It’s a computer forensic software you can download from online. Here’s the deal When someone ‘clears the cache,’ the computer rarely clears all the cache. At least a few index.dat files get left behind. So you open the history files, run Pasco, and it’ll spit out a CSV-”

“CSV?”

“Comma Separated Values, which opens an Excel spreadsheet that will show every URL that was visited by the computer with a date-time stamp. You can cut and paste one of the URLs straight into the computer’s search engine and it’ll take you to that website for inspection. Voila, you’ll know everyplace the computer has visited.”

“How do you know so much?” I had to ask.

Ethan blushed furiously. “My um… family.”

“Your family?”

“My mother runs Pasco on my computer each week. Not that she doesn’t trust me!” He flushed brighter. “It’s just, um, ‘due diligence,’ she calls it. She knows I’m smarter than her, so she’s gotta have something on her side.”

“Your mother’s right, Ethan. You are a genius, and I can’t thank you enough for assisting me with this teaching module.”

Ethan smiled, but he appeared more thoughtful this time.

At home that night, I got serious. Two stories, one song, and half a Broadway show later, Ree was down, Jason was out, and I was all alone with my newfound computer skills and a whole host of suspicions. First order of business: downloading and installing the Pasco forensic tool from Foundstone.

Next up, I started working the menu system, identifying possible history files and running Pasco on the contents. Shoulders hunched, head down, I pecked away at the computer with eyes glued to microscopic type on the screen and ears perked for the first sound of Jason’s car in the driveway.

I didn’t know what I was doing, and everything took longer than I thought. Next thing I knew, it was after midnight and Jason was due home any minute. I was still running reports and hadn’t figured out yet how to uninstall Pasco, whose mere presence on the desktop would alert Jason that I knew something was going on.

I was hopped up and jumpy when I finally got the dialogue box asking if I wanted to open or save the CSV. I didn’t know what I should do, but I was running out of time, so I hit Open and watched an Excel spreadsheet fill the screen before me.

I figured I would discover dozens of URLs. Porn sites? Chat rooms? More terrible photos of terrified little boys? Evidence that the man I’d chosen to raise my child was a hard-core pedophile, or one of those sick men who trolled MySpace, preying on twelve-year-olds? I wasn’t sure yet what I hoped, or what I feared. My eyes were screwed shut I could barely bring myself to look.

What, oh what, was my husband doing all those long nights?

Three values filled the screen. I already knew what they were before I ever entered the URLs into the web browser: Drudge Report, USA Today, and the New York Times.

My husband held his secrets well.

The next day during free period, Ethan was already waiting for me in the computer lab

“Did it work?” he asked me.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Well?” he said impatiently. “Did you find out what your husband is doing online or not?”

I stared at my star pupil

He remained matter-of-fact. “Sixth-graders aren’t that Internet savvy,” he said. “I mean, I was, but you don’t have a single me in your class, meaning you have nothing to worry about. That leaves your job, but I hack into the school’s computer all the time, and there’s nothing interesting going on here-”

“Ethan!”

He shrugged. “So the last possibility is that you’re worried about something at home. Ree is only four, so it can’t be her That leaves your husband.”

I sat down. It seemed better than standing.

“Is it porn?” Ethan asked with his guileless blue eyes. “Or is he gambling away your life savings?”

“I don’t know,” I said at last.

“You didn’t run Pasco?”

“I did. It returned only three URLs, the same three I’ve seen before.”

Ethan sat upright. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Wow, gotta be a shredder I’ve only ever heard about them. That’s cool!”

“A shredder is a good thing?”

“It is if you’re trying to cover your tracks. A shredder, or scrubber software, is like a rake, clearing all the cache file footprints left behind you.”

“It’s deleting things the lazy computer wouldn’t otherwise delete?”

“Nope. Shredders are lazy, too. They’re automatically clearing the cache file so you don’t have to remember to do it manually. So a user can go all sorts of places, then ‘shred’ the evidence. But since a lack of browser history is also a red flag, your husband is attempting to be clever by rebuilding a fake Internet trail. Fortunately for us, he’s not that good at faking it.”

I didn’t say a word.

“Here’s the cool part, though-shredders aren’t foolproof.”

“Okay,” I managed.

“Every time you click on an Internet page, a computer is creating so many temp files there’s no way the shredder can get them all. Plus, the shredder is still only messing with the directory. So the files are still there, we just have to find them.”

“How?”

“Better tool. Pasco is over-the-counter. Now you want prescription-strength meds.”

“I don’t know any pharmacists,” I said blankly.

Ethan Hastings grinned at me. “I do.”