Rainy felt whole-body tired. Lately, she’d been working way too much OT. She’d put a bug in Clarence Stern’s ear about needing help with some imaging work. She didn’t mention the images were from a series Tomlinson told her not to bother Stern about.
“No can help,” Stern had said during one of their passing hallway conversations. “These days I’ve got to schedule time to take a piss.”
Rainy remained convinced that one or more of these images would eventually leave the closed circles of the child porn trade for wider distribution across the Internet. It was only a matter of time before there was another Melanie Smyth, she had warned Tomlinson. But Tomlinson didn’t share her sense of urgency. If the pictures had been of a bomb, no doubt her boss would have made Stern pee in a cup until he tracked down the source.
But this was terrorism of a different kind.
When Rainy’s cell phone rang, she answered it without checking the number or thinking about who might be calling.
“Rainy, it’s Clarence. I’ve got a trade to offer.”
Rainy’s heart skipped a beat.
“Talk,” she said.
“Do you have any plans tonight?”
“No,” Rainy lied. She had a blind date that would need to be canceled.
“Then come up to my office, and let’s make a deal.”
Stern’s office was a spacious, refurbished conference room on the sixth floor of their new building. The agency might have preached fiscal responsibility, but such frugality was not on display in Stern’s world. The Lair looked like an Atari 2600 to Stern’s Xbox 360. Stern sat on his swivel chair with his back to Rainy. His head bobbed to whatever beat thumped in his headphones. The array of computer monitors cast his body’s heavyset outline in a bright blue glow.
In Stern’s case, Rainy figured the Bureau decided to ignore their physical fitness requirement in exchange for his boundless talent. The man’s round physique suggested he would struggle to pull a cumulative score above a six on the physical fitness test. Rainy’s last score of thirty, by contrast, was reported to be among the highest of all female agents.
Rainy tapped Stern on the shoulder. Stern slowly pulled the headphones off his head. Even though he’d invited her up, Stern looked irritated by her intrusion, but he looked irritated by just about everything.
“What’s the trade?” Rainy asked.
“I’ve got four arms’ worth of work here and two arms to do it all.”
“You want my arms?” Rainy asked.
Stern nodded. “Not in a physical sense. Do you know how to log surveillance video?”
“It’s not rocket science,” said Rainy.
“It’s six hours of tape.”
Rainy groaned. “Six hours? That’s torture.”
“You do six hours of logging for me, and I’ll ID as many of the girls in that new series you found.”
“You’re that tired of my bugging you?”
“I’m that tired of logging surveillance video,” Stern replied.
“Deal,” said Rainy.
Rainy returned to Stern’s office twenty minutes later and handed him a thumb drive. The Lair offered a protective environment for safeguarding her evidence. She preferred not to take evidence out of the Lair, but saw no alternative. If she wanted Stern’s help, she had to take the risk.
“Okay, you start logging. I’ll work my magic. Take a seat.”
Rainy pulled up a chair beside Stern and set about the arduous task of logging.
“Note the time each person enters and exits the apartment building. Here are snaps of our delightful suspects. Match them to the people coming and going, and write your findings in the logbook here. Simple enough.”
“Don’t you have somebody to do this for you?” Rainy asked with a sigh of desperation.
“Normally, yes. This week, no.”
Over the next four hours, Stern would groan, pout, shake his head, and grunt, all presumably signals that he had failed to find anything useful. Meanwhile, Rainy kept logging while Stern kept searching. Only once did Rainy see Stern stand up to stretch. On more than one occasion, Stern threw a pencil at his computer monitor, never failing to connect with the eraser end. He kept muttering to himself, “No, not that one,” and then he’d start working with another picture in the batch Rainy had provided.
“What are you looking for?” Rainy asked him after Stern again switched to a new image.
“Something useful,” he said.
Rainy just nodded and resumed her logging duties.
Three hours into his promised six, Stern exclaimed, “I’ve got it!”
Rainy had drifted into a zone of tape logging, and Stern had to repeat himself before she got excited. “You did? Who is she?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I thought you said you got it.”
“I got how we can do it. I’ve run twenty girls through every sophisticated facial reorganization application we have. I even did some aging analysis in case the picture is an old one.”
Rainy felt a sudden disappointment. She hadn’t thought of that. These girls could be in their twenties by now.
“But you got nothing.”
“Nada. Zilch. Then I figured out what I’ve been doing wrong. I spent so much time focusing on the faces, I’ve been ignoring the setting. Their rooms.”
“Carter and I looked. But we didn’t see anything useful.”
“Well, you can’t enhance pixels the way I can. I’m going to work off this picture. She took it standing in front of her mirror, so I’ve got a lot of the room to work with visible in the reflection. Keep logging. This may take another hour.”
What Stern could do in an hour, Rainy knew, would take normal programmers five times as long to complete. When he announced success, Rainy understood that he’d basically churned out two days’ worth of product in less than half a day’s effort. Rainy positioned her chair closer to Stern so she could get a better look at his screen.
Stern manipulated the image on his monitor to show Rainy an enhanced view of the girl’s bedroom.
“First thing I’m going to do is crop out everything but what’s visible in the mirror,” Stern said. “Then I’m going to flip the image around so that it doesn’t look like a reflection.”
He did both in less than two seconds.
Next, he used his computer mouse to highlight a corner of the room, and the picture zoomed in closer. All Rainy could see were the fuzzy, pixelated outlines of a dresser, mirror, and chair. On the chair she could make out a blue Windbreaker, but it, too, was barely recognizable at the current magnification level.
“I’m not seeing anything,” Rainy said.
“Watch. I’m going to run my script.”
Stern hit a button, and the entire image went black, save for the chair with the Windbreaker on it. Then image magnified tenfold, until Rainy saw what she took to be a design of some sort.
“Is that a logo on the Windbreaker?” she asked with growing excitement.
“Watch,” Stern said.
Stern’s program began to twist, wrap, and stretch the image, while adding new pixels to the design. The transformation took what had been a blurry, shapeless form and rendered it anew. It was now clear and easy to interpret.
“This is how we’ll figure out who this girl is,” Stern said. “You see, the jacket was folded over the chair. What my program just did was to take the pixels that were invisible to us and hypothesize what the lettering would be if the jacket were to be unfolded. It’s a lot of vector analysis, but this is the best match I got. The proportions aren’t right, because the Windbreaker was folded, but at least the lettering is legible.”
Rainy read the words Stern’s program had generated.
“Shilo Wildcats Soccer.”
“Now to Google,” Stern said. He did a few Web searches before finding a picture he thought might be useful.
“What’s that?” Rainy asked.
“A team picture of last year’s girls’ varsity soccer team. Assuming, of course, that ‘Shilo’ is Shilo, New Hampshire. But they are the Wildcats, so…”
Rainy studied the team photo. She didn’t need to look at the girl’s picture again. Her face was burned into Rainy’s memory. And there she was. Back row. Second to last on the left. Rainy scanned the names of the girls listed in the photograph.
“Her,” Rainy said, tapping a finger on Stern’s spotless monitor. “That’s her! You’re a miracle worker, Clarence, you know that?”
“Nah. I just can’t stand logging video.” Stern leaned in close to read the name for himself. “Yup, that’s her, all right. Lindsey Wells, of Shilo, New Hampshire.”