delete any offending files from the computer system as well as from the phones. I had a good deal of faith in Todd Hatcher’s ability to recover any missing data, but still the idea of avoiding an obvious police presence at Janie’s House seemed like a good one. And certainly my Mercedes, parked on the street in front of the office, gave no hint of being a cop car.
Finally, at my suggestion and citing a bogus plumbing emergency, Meribeth went from building to building, dismissing the houseparents who were on duty and shooing out any kids who had settled in for the day. Once they were gone, she posted a notice on each of the front and back doors saying that Janie’s House would reopen at 7:00 A.M. on Thursday.
When Todd Hatcher arrived, properly drawn search warrant in hand, he came to the party in a mud-spattered pickup truck that didn’t look any more like a copmobile than my S-550. Nothing about our vehicles gave any kind of hint that Janie’s House, currently off-limits to its teenage clients, was dealing with anything other than a plumbing problem, or that the place was currently being scrutinized by members of Ross Connors’s Special Homicide Investigation Team.
One whole wall of the director’s office was lined with four-drawer file cabinets. It turned out that Meribeth knew a lot more about the clients Janie’s House served than she had let on initially. She may not have kept official “attendance records,” but each client had a file, a paper file, with both first and last names attached, kept under lock and key in that collection of file cabinets.
During three separate visits to Janie’s House, Rachel Camber had operated under the alias of Amber Wilson. Meribeth plucked the file with Amber’s name on it out of a drawer, opened it, and perused the papers she saw there for the better part of a minute. Then she closed the file and handed it to me.
“When clients come here, they fill out that first page. If they want to give us an alias, we respect that. This is our needs assessment page. It’s designed to tell us something about where the kids are, especially if there’s any area of study that’s giving them trouble. We also want to find out what it is they’re hoping to accomplish. One of our jobs is to do what we can to help them meet their goals, no matter how mundane or how lofty. If you look at Amber’s goals statement, you’ll see she wanted to attend a cheerleading camp.”
“I know,” I said, studying the information on the page. “Her stepfather told us about that. He said they couldn’t afford it.”
“Right,” Meribeth agreed. “Those can be prohibitively expensive. One of my people was working on locating scholarship money that would have enabled her to attend a cheerleading camp later this summer. We expected to hear back on that any day now. That, of course, she would have attended under her real name.”
“So you have both.”
Meribeth nodded. “Usually,” she said.
I took another look at Meribeth Duncan. With her orange-and-purple hair and her iconoclastic manner of dress-army fatigues and scuzzy boots-I doubted she had ever had any yearnings to be a cheerleader. A lot of folks in her position might have tried to steer her charges into things more to their own liking. The fact that she had supported Amber/Rachel’s ambition rather than denigrated it made me revise some of my initial thinking about Meribeth.
“So did she come here this week?” I asked.
Meribeth shook her head. “Not that I know of, but it’s possible she was here without my seeing her. We can check with the houseparents who have been on duty this week.”
I made a note to do just that while Meribeth turned to another file cabinet. “I’ll give you a list of names and phone numbers,” she said. “These four drawers contain information on all of our volunteers. Some of them do nothing but fund-raising. Some specialize in finding sources of appropriate scholarships. You’ll find files on all our houseparents, past and present, in here, as well as all our tutors. Some of those are retired teachers and businesspeople, although most of our tutors come from nearby high schools and colleges.”
“Kids teaching kids?” I asked. “How does that work?”
“You’d be surprised,” Meribeth said. “With kids who have a natural aversion to authority figures, peer-to-peer tutoring works surprisingly well.”
By then Todd, working in a carrel-lined study, had located the offending computer-the one that had been used to upload the film clip to one of the shelter’s cell phones.
In a matter of minutes he hit pay dirt. “Hey,” Todd said. “Come take a look at this.”
I have a bad reaction to standing beside someone’s chair and trying to look at a computer screen. I guess it reminds me too much of standing next to a teacher’s desk to have a paper corrected.
“Just tell us,” I said.
Todd looked at Meribeth. “Let me guess. This whole computer system was donated, right?”
She nodded.
“Whoever did that was interested in helping you, but they must also have had some concerns that their donated system might be put to some kind of nefarious use,” Todd explained. “There’s a hidden file in this computer that functions as a virtual logbook-an invisible virtual logbook. The same program is probably on the other computers as well. Before new users can access the system, they have to create profiles that include their names- or at least whatever aliases they employ here-as well as their user names. After that, the logbook maintains a record of each time that user logs in or out as well as which computer was used.”
This all sounded good as far as Mel and I were concerned. Meribeth Duncan was outraged. “You mean we’ve been spying on the kids’ computer usage all this time?”
Todd laughed. “You could have been, if you had known the file was there. But here’s our guy. We know the film clip was sent to Josh’s phone at one twenty-three Monday morning. And it was sent to the Janie’s House cell phone from this computer at nine thirty-five on Sunday night.”
“But how could that happen?” Meribeth asked. “The cell phone, I mean. We’re not even open at one twenty- three in the morning.”
“Janie’s House may not have been open,” Todd said, “but the Janie’s House cell phones were alive and well somewhere.”
“Can you find out where it was and who was using it?”
“Eventually,” Todd said. “Right now the logbook tells us that a guy named Hammer was online on this computer at the time the file was sent to the cell phone.”
“Who’s Hammer?” Meribeth asked.
Todd did a cross-check with the user profiles. “Hammer,” he said, “aka Greg Alexander.”
“No!” Meribeth exclaimed, shaking her head in dismay the moment she heard the name. “That can’t be. It’s not possible for him to be mixed up in something like this.”
“Why not?” Mel asked.
“Because Greg is one of our best kids-the last person I would have expected to go off the rails like this.”
That reminded me of something my mother used to say, about finding things in the very last place she looked. No doubt the answers we needed were also lurking somewhere in that wall of file cabinets, although we had no clue about the first place to look, to say nothing of the last.
“Sorry,” Todd said. “According to this, Greg is the one who was online on this computer at the time the film clip file was uploaded.”
Resigned, Meribeth nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go pull his file.”
Once she left the room, I turned back to Todd. “Is the original file there, too?” I asked.
“No, they probably used a thumb drive to load it onto this computer and then deleted it as soon as it was uploaded to the phone. But these are kids. They think that once they punch the delete button, everything goes away completely, but they’re wrong. The data may be de-indexed, but the deleted file sits there on the hard drive for a period of time, waiting to be overwritten. The file was sent out Sunday night. There hasn’t been that much activity on this computer since then.”
“You think it’s still in there?” Mel asked.
“Yes,” Todd said, “and you can bet money I’ll be able to find it.”
Meribeth returned carrying another file. Unlike Amber’s, this one had more than one sheet of paper in it. I was mildly interested in the fact that, despite all the computer power sitting around, Meribeth Duncan put her faith in paper files stacked in metal cabinets.
“Greg works part-time in the produce department at the Safeway store in Tumwater. He’s due to graduate from high school next spring. Greg’s family is a mess. Both his parents and his older brother have been in trouble
