Killer Move

“Yeah.”

“But what I don’t get is why your wife is so mad at you. I mean, a salacious photo book, even if you had ordered it . . . not such a big deal, right? I’m not getting the impression she’s notably uptight or a total vanilla wife, so why the spat?”

Red wine on top of beer, I’m not sure what it was . . . but I reached in my pocket and pulled out the thumb drive. “Last night,” I said, “I got home, and she’d been on my laptop looking for pictures I took at a friend’s party. Instead, she found what’s on here.”

I had been intending to describe the images, in very vague terms. Cass grabbed the stick from me, however, and was on her feet and up at the desk, slipping the drive into a port on her laptop, before I’d had time to react.

“Hang on,” I said, struggling to my feet. By the time I got there, however, the first of the images was already on-screen.

“A bad photo of a window, at night,” Cassandra said. “Yeah—I can understand why that would . . . Oooh, oh, I see. Gotcha. La-di-da.”

By the time the fourth picture was up—the first showing Karren White with nothing above the waist—I was standing beside Cass. “I didn’t take these,” I said, about as embarrassed as I had ever been. “But they’re dated to a night when I was kept out all evening.”

“Kept how?”

“Chasing the meeting with Warner, which his assistant now disclaims all knowledge of.”

The next picture came up. “Who’s the pretty lady?”

“Her name’s Karren. She works in my office.”

Then the next picture, frontal, in better focus. I was uncomfortably aware that I was standing close to a young woman while we looked at pictures of another woman, in a state of undress.

“So how did these end up on your machine?”

“I have no idea.”

“And this is why you met up with Kevin?”

“I didn’t tell him about the pictures, only that it seemed like someone had gotten remote access to my machine.”

“What’d he say?”

“That it was possible. Though he liked the idea of physical access better.”

“Is the woman aware of her starring role?”

“No.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“I thought I should wait until I had some clue about how to explain the pictures being on my laptop,” I said, aware of how lame an excuse this was.

“Hmm,” she said, and then ducked her head closer to the screen. “This interests me.”

“What?”

Her hands flashed around the keyboard for a few seconds, causing small, semitranslucent windows to pop up and disappear almost too quickly to see. “You mind?”

“Mind what?”

Then the first picture was back up on-screen. A couple of finger taps, and it jumped in size—first to fill the entire screen, then twice as large again. Cass used a diagonal movement on the track pad to scroll to the bottom right-hand corner of the image, and leaned back, cocked her head, squinted.

“Yep,” she said. “I am as cool as everyone says.”

She closed the window and opened another from the folder, apparently at random. A three-quarter view of Karren was treated in the same way. “Again. See?”

“See what?”

She tapped a key combination and the image popped down a level in resolution. She caused the cursor to circle around the date and time stamp in the corner. “Examine the edges of those numbers.”

I looked more closely. “I don’t get it.”

“They’re not real.”

“Not real?”

“The way date- and time-stamped numbers appear on digital photos is pretty distinctive. These look off. The edges are too sharp, don’t have the halo. Could just be the camera in question, it does vary from brand to brand, but I don’t think so. Let’s check something else.”

Another key combination, and a long thin window popped up next to the image, filled with orderly lines of text. She ran a finger down it, humming to herself.

“Aha.”

“What’s all that?”

“The EXIF data for the image. Let me check another.” She reopened the first image, and the side window filled with similar data. “Bingo. My awesomeness abounds.”

“I don’t understand what you’re showing me.”

“E-X-I-F,” she said, spelling out the letters as if to an illiterate cat. “That’s Exchangeable Image File format to you. A way of storing metadata about a picture, in the file itself. When a digital camera takes an image, it injects pieces of information into the JPEG or TIFF, where it can be accessed by any viewer application. It will typically store the aperture, shutter speed, focal length, and ISO setting—and some will even log geolocation data in there, too.” She placed the slender tip of her finger near the top of the data window. “And of course, basic, it will log the time and date when the picture was taken.”

I looked at the date next to her finger. Then at the numbers in the corner of the image itself.

They were different.

“Hang on,” I said. “The numbers on the picture say it was taken midevening on the twelfth, Tuesday. But the EXIF data says the eleventh. Which was Monday.”

“That would be my point.”

“But wait . . . wait a minute,” I said, as it dawned. “On Monday night I was out with Stephanie. All evening. From before dark. So if these were taken on Monday, then it couldn’t have been me, and she would know that.”

Cassandra tipped her hand like a seesaw. “Don’t get too excited. The EXIF data relies on the camera’s settings as much as the old-school time/date stamp would. If someone set the camera to the wrong date or time, the EXIF stamp will be wrong, too.”

“But I set the date and time correctly.”

“I’ll bet. But you can’t prove it. You could have changed it to take the pictures, then changed it back, for some fell purpose of your own. You can’t use those numbers to actually prove when the picture was taken.”

“But something’s hinky with them—because either way, the two dates should be the same. Right?”

“Yes. Someone faked the date and time onto those images to pin it to a specific day and time. Which—”

She stopped talking abruptly, mouth hanging open. Slapped herself upside the head. “Well, duh.”

“What?”

She appeared pained at her own stupidity. “What’s the word you keep seeing? Modified? ”

“They modified the dates, I can see that, but—”

“No no no. Not only that, my friend. It’s not just one thing being modified, or even a bunch of little things. It’s an actual mod.”

“What the fuck is a mod?”

“Rewind. I play games, okay? Computer games, online. This has been established in prior conversation. Recall?”

“Yes.”

She looked perplexed. “You really don’t know what a mod is?”

“No.”