Helpless

Jill went silent.

Tom smiled, undeterred. “I think trust is our number one challenge.” He wrote the word trust in the center of the square. “On the field you’ve got to trust your teammates. You’ve got to believe that they’ll be in position to receive your pass. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a team. What’s it going to take to get you to trust me, Jill?”

Jill thought awhile before answering. “Time,” she said.

Tom nodded and wrote the word time on the whiteboard. He drew an arrow from the word to the stick figure representing himself. “That’s on me, Jill,” he said. “Over time I’ve got to earn your trust. I accept that. But you also have to earn mine. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were hurt. Or worse. I had no idea who you were with. To make this work, we need to trust each other. So I’m just asking, what could you have done that would have helped me?”

“Call, I guess,” Jill said. “I should have told you where I was. But I was upset.”

Tom wrote call under Jill’s stick figure.

With his hand, he erased a small corner of the square with the word trust in it. “Even if you’re upset, we’re still on the same team. Shutting me out won’t change that fact. We’ve got a long way to go to get past this obstacle.” Tom dotted the square with the point of his dry-erase marker to emphasize his point. “But I think this is a start.”

“Tell me again you had nothing to do with what happened to Mom.”

“Honey, I had nothing to do with it,” Tom said. “And I need you to trust me on that.” He tapped the marker against the written word trust on the whiteboard and forced a hug out of her. It was a brief, strained embrace, but it lasted long enough to give him hope. 

Chapter 16

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.”