Body of Evidence

'Hey, treat us right,' Nick said, 'and I'll make a run.'

'You found something?' Catherine asked.

'You could say that…. Have a seat. Have two.'

They drew up chairs, on the same side of him, with a good view of the monitor.

'The laptop you brought in? Found a bunch more pictures…'

The CSIs sat forward.

'…the twelve you've seen and maybe a hundred sad little brothers and sisters.'

'So,' Catherine said, with an eyebrow lift, 'Gary Randle's back on the radar.'

'But we still don't have his prints anywhere on that laptop,' Nick reminded her. 'The whole thing's been wiped clean.'

'Nick, it was in his possession!'

Nunez cut back in. 'Chill, you two…let me give you a few more facts to chew on, before you jump to your next conclusion.'

'Ouch,' Nick said.

'I ran a search for angel12.jpg and found reference to that file in unallocated space. Guess where the reference indicated it'd been downloaded from?'

'A kiddie porn website,' Catherine said hopefully, 'that you traced to Gary Randle?'

'How about a website…in Russia.'

'Russia?' Catherine blurted.

'Si. Since the Cold War ended, all kinds of crime has flourished in the former Soviet Union, as capitalism flowers in various interesting and often vile ways.'

'Less commentary,' Nick said. 'More data.'

'Fair enough. I was able to resolve the Internet address to an IP address using a Domain Name Server Resolver; then I traced the IP address using a Trace Route site on the net, which sends a PING message to the IP, and waits for a response. It'll then trace the route the PING takes to the destination server and show where the destination-or host server-is, for the IP address.'

'Soooooo,' Nick said, 'if we want the actual peddlers of this smut…'

'…you'll be flying Aeroflot to Moscow, then hopping a train to East Armpit, Siberia.'

Catherine asked, 'How does this help us?'

'It helps you. Not directly, but it gives us something to hand over to the Feds.'

Processing the info aloud, Catherine said, 'This means that Randle, or someone else at Newcombe-Gold, is not a child pornographer, rather a consumer of the product.'

Nick said, 'I have to admit, I never really thought Randle had a camera and was taking photos…'

'A guy in an ad agency,' Catherine said, flaring, 'with his skills and smarts? With his sexually deviant tastes? With a teenager daughter in the house? I thought he might be.'

'Till now.'

'Till now,' she admitted. 'So he's a user, not a dealer. Either way, it's still 'drugs.' '

'If it's Randle.'

'If it's Randle,' she granted.

Nunez said, 'Hey, kids-if you're through, I got a little something from that laptop to make you smile.'

Catherine said, 'Don't tease me, Tomas.'

'No tease: I ran E-Script, which carved out the Internet history to an Excel spreadsheet, showing websites visited, along with the dates and time of each visit…and logged on user for each site.'

And, as the computer wizard had predicted, Catherine and Nick traded smiles.

'That Russian website,' Nunez was saying, 'was last visited Friday at four o'clock P.M., local time. The logged-on user was Randyman.'

After glancing over at Nick, who seemed suitably impressed, she asked, 'You got all that from the laptop?'

Nunez nodded. 'Like they say on the infomercials…but that's not all: the laptop had AOL software. I got O'Riley to get a search warrant for the subjects of the AOL logs-account history, billing history and website history, along with saved e-mails. The AOL logs matched the laptop's Internet history log, so that'll stand up. Anyway, I tried to access the website, but like a lot of these child porn sites, it's password protected.'

'Does this mean Gary Randle really is guilty?' Catherine asked, trying not to give in to the spinning-head feeling she always seemed to get during Nunez's explanations.

'Not necessarily,' Nunez said. 'All it means is those twelve pictures that you confiscated from Newcombe- Gold were downloaded from the Internet using this laptop.'

'Smoking gun,' Nick said.

'But who was holding it?' Catherine asked. To Nunez, she said, 'Next step?'

'You need a search warrant for Randle's local telephone records, to see if the AOL access number was dialed during the times this machine was online, and the Russian website was accessed. If they match, he's your guy.'

Nick took a sideways look at the laptop. 'Could this machine be the one that was plugged into work station eighteen, and used to mimic Ben Jackson's computer?'

'No. The MAC address of the NIC card doesn't match the server log.'

Catherine sat with arms folded, eyes narrowed. 'So-there's still a computer somewhere that sent that print order…and we haven't found it.'

'You haven't found it. But there's one more puzzle piece I can give you.'

'Which is?'

He withdrew a sheet from his printer tray and held it up for Nick and Catherine to read. There was only one paragraph:

Given this opportunity, we will help turn Doug Clennon's All-American Jukebox into the biggest attraction in Las Vegas. By launching a major media blitz, including using our contacts at the above-mentioned publications, we can guarantee you market awareness rivalling the All-American Jukebox TV show itself.

'Some kinda letter,' Nunez said.

'Pitch letter,' Catherine said, slowly, eyes half-shut. 'But where's the rest of it?'

Nunez shook his head. 'One of the Angel jpegs got overwritten on the other sector this file was in.'

'Que?' Nick asked.

Nunez smiled a little. 'The memory is broken into sectors. Some files take up one, some take two, some take a lot more-it just depends on the size. But if a file is four and a half sectors, it will claim five. That half sector of unused space is called file slack. That's where I found this piece of this file.'

'And this was on the same zip disk as the pictures?' Catherine asked.

'Yeah.'

'What about Randle's zip disk that he was working on last Saturday?'

'Log numbers all match. He seems to have been doing what he said he was doing, when he said he was doing it…but that doesn't mean he wasn't in earlier.'

'Oh-kaay,' Catherine sighed. She turned to Nick. 'Time to split up and search different parts of this haunted house…. You get the phone records and see if we have a match. I'll go talk to the folks over at Newcombe-Gold, and try to widen this investigation beyond just our one favorite suspect.'

'Sounds good.' Nick frowned. 'Cath, bring O'Riley in. We don't want to overstep.'

'Not on this one,' she agreed. She took the piece of paper, with the partial paragraph, from Nunez. 'Thanks, Tomas.'

Forty-five minutes later, Catherine walked into Newcombe-Gold, Detective O'Riley at her side. They started to display their credentials to the receptionist, but she just waved them back down the big hall-their presence, however intrusive, was starting to be perceived as routine around the agency. In fact, the receptionist even smiled a little.

As they walked down the corridor toward the conference room, Catherine pondered whether to talk to Janice Denard, first, or Gary Randle; she had questions for both.