The Neighbor

“So,” she began tersely, “you work for the state?”

“Computer Forensic Unit in New Braintree. We handle the majority of the electronic analysis, as you can guess by the title.”

“How long you been there?”

He shrugged, sipped his coffee black, eyes widening briefly at the dark roast. “Five or six years. I was a detective before that, but being a geek at heart, had a tendency to focus on the technology aspects of the cases. Given that everyone from a drug dealer to a crime lord is using computers, cell phones, or PDAs these days, demand for my technical skills grew. So I completed the eighty-hour course to become a CFCE-Certified Forensic Computer Examiner-and switched over to the Computer Lab.”

“You like it?”

“I do. Hard drives are like pinatas. Every treasure you ever wanted is stored in there somewhere. You just gotta know how to break it open.”

The food had arrived. Scrambled eggs with a side of grilled pancetta for both of them. The smells were rich and savory. D.D. dug in.

“How do you investigate hardware?” she asked, her mouth full.

Wayne had forked up a pile of eggs; he regarded her thoughtfully, as if trying to gauge the seriousness of her interest. He had deep hazel eyes with specks of green, so she made sure she looked interested.

“Take the rule of five-twelve. That’s the magic number in forensic computer analysis. See, inside a hard drive are round platters that spin around to read and write data. These platters contain chunks of five hundred and twelve bytes of data, and they’re constantly whirling under the seeker head. The seeker head, then, must divide all information into five hundred and twelve byte chunks in order to store the data onto the platters.”

“Okay.” D.D. went to work slicing up her pancetta.

“Now, say you’re saving a file to your hard drive that doesn’t divide neatly into five hundred and twelve byte chunks. It’s not one thousand and twenty-four bytes of data, it’s eight hundred bytes. The computer will fill one whole data chunk, then half of another available chunk. Then what? The computer doesn’t pick up where it left off, mid-data chunk. Instead, a new file will start with a fresh five-twelve byte space, meaning the previous file has excess storage capacity, or what we call ‘slack space,’ in the existing data chunk. Often, old data gets left in that slack space. Say you called up that file, made some changes, then resaved it. The overwrite might not go exactly on top of the old data the way most people assume. Instead it might be tucked somewhere else inside the same data chunk. Then a guy like me can search that five-twelve chunk. In the slack space I might find the old document where you wrote the original letter asking your lover to murder your spouse, as well as the revised doc, where you deleted that particular paragraph. And voila, one guilty conviction is born.”

“I don’t have a spouse,” D.D. volunteered, having another bite of eggs, “though I’m now deeply suspicious of my computer.”

Wayne Reynolds grinned at her. “You probably should be. People have no idea how much information is retained unknowingly on their hard drives. I like to say a computer is like a guilty conscience. It remembers everything and you never know when it might start to speak.”

“You been teaching your skills to Ethan?” D.D. asked.

“Haven’t had to. Kid absorbs it on his own. If I can corral his skills for good versus evil, he’ll be a hell of an investigator one day.”

“What constitutes the dark side for computer technology?”

Wayne shrugged. “Hacking, code breaking, illicit data-mining. Ethan is a good kid, but he’s also thirteen, so following in his uncle’s footsteps doesn’t sound as exciting as it once did. Join the state police or join the Internet underground. You be the judge.”

“He seems to have valued Sandy Jones’s opinions.” D.D. had finished her food; she pushed back the white ceramic plate.

Wayne was thoughtful for a moment. “Ethan believes he is in love with his teacher,” he conceded at last.

“Did he have sex with her?”

“I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t view him that way.”

“And how would you know?”

“Because I was seeing Sandra myself, every Thursday night. At the basketball games.”

“Ethan contacted me regarding Sandra,” Wayne explained a few moments later. They had paid the bill, left the coffee shop. Walking and talking seemed a better idea, given the subject matter. They headed aimlessly toward the waterfront, following the red line mapping the route once ridden by Paul Revere.

“My understanding,” Wayne continued now, “was that Sandra had approached Ethan about developing a teaching module for the Internet. It didn’t take Ethan long, however, to determine that her interest in online security ran deeper than mere classroom application. He believed her husband was up to something, perhaps involving child porn, and that Sandra was desperate to get to the bottom of it.”

“You didn’t open a case file?”

Wayne shook his head. “Couldn’t. First time I met with Sandra, she made it clear that she would only accept my involvement as a personal favor. Until she learned exactly what was going on, she didn’t want the police involved. She had to think of her daughter; Ree would be traumatized if her father was jailed unnecessarily.”

D.D. arched a brow. “If Sandra suspected child porn, she should’ve been worried about her daughter being traumatized by a lot more than dear old Dad’s arrest.”

Wayne shrugged. “You know how families work. You can confront a mom with her seven-year-old daughter’s semen-stained underwear, and she’ll still insist there’s a logical explanation.”

D.D. sighed heavily. He was right and they both knew it. De Nile wasn’t just a river when it came to child sexual assaults.

“Okay, so Ethan gives you a call. Then what?”

“As a favor to Ethan, who seemed very worried about his teacher, I agreed to attend one of the Thursday night basketball games and talk to Sandra myself. I confess, I figured I’d have a brief chat, give her a detective’s contact information for follow up, that kind of thing. But…” His voice faded away.

“But?” D.D. prodded.

Wayne shrugged, looking almost chagrined. “Then I saw Sandra Jones.”

“Not your typical social studies teacher,” D.D. observed.

“No. Not at all. I figured out immediately why Ethan had taken a shine to her. I mean, she was younger than I expected. Prettier than I expected. And sitting there on those wooden bleachers, this cute little girl tucked up against her knees… I don’t know. I took one look and I wanted to help her. It felt like I had to help her. That she needed me.”

“Oh yeah. Mary Kay Letourneau, Debra Lafave, Sandra Beth Geisel. All beautiful women. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that only the pretty ones want to sleep with twelve-year-old boys? What’s up with that?”

“I’m telling you, she didn’t have that kind of relationship with Ethan.”

“Did she have that kind of relationship with you?”

Wayne gazed at her flatly. “Look, do you want to hear what I have to say or not?”

D.D. gestured with her hands. “Speak away. This is your party.”

“That first night, Ethan sat with Ree while Sandra and I took a short walk around the school to chat. She told me she had found a disturbing photo in the recycle bin of the family computer. Only that one image and only that one time; she hadn’t discovered anything since. However, she’d been learning about Internet browser histories and data storage since then, and it was clear to her that her husband was tampering with the computer, which made her wonder what else he had to hide.”

“Tampering with it in what way?”

“Ethan had taught Sandra how to track which websites are visited by a computer. That information is stored in the history file of the computer’s hard drive, and should be retrievable. She had made a number of attempts at pulling up the family computer’s Internet browser, using various online tools Ethan had told her about. Every time she did it, however, she could only retrieve the URLs for three websites-the Drudge Report, USA Today, and New York Times.”