actually intended for his wife. One was from the preschool Ree attended reminding parents to save the date for an upcoming fundraiser. Another was from the school principal, reminding teachers of an upcoming workshop. The final four were replies from an original mass e-mail from one teacher asking other teachers if they’d be interested in forming a group to walk together after school.
Jason frowned at this. Last time he’d checked, several months ago, she’d had at least twenty-five personal e- mails, ranging from notes from students to information from various mom e-mail loops.
He checked his wife’s old e-mail folder. All he found was the spam he’d just deleted. He tried the sent e-mail folder. Also empty. And then, with a growing feeling of dread, he began to search in earnest. Her address book: cleared. Favorite places: cleared. AOL buddies: cleared. Browser history of most recent Internet searches: cleared.
Holy crap, he thought, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. He was the deer caught in the headlights, feeling the panic in him grow and grow until it threatened to spiral out of control.
Date and time, he thought frantically. Nail down date and time. It all boiled down to date and time.
He clicked back on her old e-mail folder, scrolling to the oldest dated spam with a hand that was starting to tremble again. Sixty-four clicks and there it was: Oldest e-mail sent had been delivered Tuesday at 4:42 in the afternoon, over twenty-four hours before Sandra had disappeared.
Jason sat back, hands clutched against his knotted stomach while he sought to make sense of this.
Someone had systematically purged Sandra’s AOL account. If it had happened Wednesday night, the same night as her disappearance, one logical conclusion would be that whoever had taken Sandra had also cleared the account, possibly as a way of covering his tracks.
But the purging had come first, by nearly twenty-four hours. What did that imply?
Occam’s razor, right? The simplest explanation is generally the correct explanation. Meaning Sandra herself had probably purged her account. Most likely because she had been doing something online she now felt a need to hide. An Internet flirtation? A genuine physical relationship? Something she didn’t want him or anyone else to find.
That explanation was less ominous than the image of a shadowy man, first attacking Sandra, then sitting smugly at the kitchen table and covering his computer tracks while Ree presumably slept overhead.
And yet that explanation hurt him more. It implied premeditation. It implied that Sandra knew she was leaving, and had wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t be able to find her.
Jason lifted a weary hand. He shielded his eyes, and for a moment, the flood of emotion that choked his throat surprised him.
He had not married Sandra for love. He was not a man who had that kind of expectation out of life. And yet, for a while… For a while, it had been very nice to feel like part of a family. It had been nice to feel normal.
He had screwed up in February. The hotel room, the dinner, the champagne… He never should’ve done what he’d done in February.
Jason cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes. He pushed his own exhaustion away, and gazing down at his sleeping child, forced himself back to the matters at hand.
Sandra was not as technologically gifted as he was. He assumed that if she had been the one to purge the account, she’d done it through purging the cache file, meaning the information was all still on the hard drive, just the directory identifying the location of each data point had been removed. And, by utilizing any number of simple forensic programs, he could restore most of the deleted information.
Time was the issue. It would take at least an hour to run such a program, and then hours more to comb through the re-created data until he found what he was looking for. He didn’t have hours. Jason glanced at his watch. He had thirty minutes.
He rubbed his face again with tired hands, and took a deep breath.
All right, time for plan B.
His memory stick had reached capacity. He disengaged it, returned to the system menu, and perused the contents menu. He had removed both too much and too little. He selected half a dozen more files to delete, glancing at his watch again and feeling the urgency.
Originally, he had hoped to capture what he could, then run an official purge program. Now, however, he couldn’t bring himself to trash the hard drive, not when it might contain clues regarding Sandra’s final hours. Which created an interesting dilemma. The computer potentially held the power both to find his wife and to put him in jail forever.
He thought about it. Then he knew what to do.
He would return the old family computer from the basement to the kitchen table, uploading it with all the current software programs from the new computer. He could transfer over basic files from his memory stick, enough garbage to give the old computer the appearance of an active one.
A good evidence tech would figure it out, eventually. That there were date gaps in the computer’s memory. Perhaps even Sergeant D.D. and Detective Miller would catch the switch. He didn’t think so, however. Most people noticed a person’s monitor, and maybe a person’s keyboard, but they didn’t notice the computer itself, the functional tower that was generally propped under a desk or kitchen table. If anything, perhaps they’d noted that he owned a Dell, in which case his brand loyalty was about to be rewarded.
So the old computer would become his current computer, buying him some precious time.
Which left him with the issue of what to do with his current computer. Couldn’t put it in his house, which was probably destined to be searched a few more times. Equally risky to stash it in his vehicle, for the same reason. Which left him one option. To leave the computer right here, set up just as it was, a computer on a desk, in a room full of computers on desks. He would even connect it to the network, making it a fully functional, completely indistinguishable
Even if the police thought to search the
At least he hoped not.
Jason pushed away from the desk. He crumpled up the duffel bag and stuffed it in the back of a metal filing cabinet. Then he picked up his sleeping daughter and, very gently carried her back out to the car.
Five forty-five A.M. Sun would be coming up soon, he thought. He wondered if Sandra could see it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I’m working on a letter. In order to graduate from my treatment program, I need to write a letter to the victim, in which I take responsibility for my actions and express my remorse. This letter is never sent; wouldn’t be fair to the victim, we’re told. Dredging up bad business and all that. But we have to write it.
So far, I have two words:
Rachel is an alias, of course-no confidentiality in group therapy, remember? So basically, after six weeks of work, I have two words, one of which is a lie.
Tonight, however, I think I can make some progress on my Dear Rachel letter. Tonight, I’m learning what it feels like to be a victim.
I wanted to run. Thought about it. Tried it out in my head. Couldn’t see how it could be done. Running away involves some serious logistics in this post-9/11 world where Big Brother is always watching. Can’t catch a plane or train without a license, and I don’t have a car. What am I supposed to do, walk my way across Massachusetts state lines?
Truth is, I don’t have the cash or the wheels for a hard-core disappearing act. I’ve been paying for polygraphs and support group, not to mention the hundred a week I send straight to Jerry. He calls it restitution. I call it insurance that he doesn’t track me to South Boston and break every goddamn bone in my miserable body.
So the bank account is a little low on exit funds.
What can I do? After support group, I headed home.
