Lisa Gardner - The Neighbor

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 .”

D.D. was already lost. “Why is that suspicious?”

“Because Sandra herself had visited lots of different websites preparing assignments for her class. All of those sites should have shown up in the browser history, but none of them did. That meant someone was clearing the cache file, then purposefully building a false history by clicking on the same three websites when he was done. That was sheer laziness,” Wayne murmured now, probably more to himself than her. “Like all criminals, even the techies sooner or later do something stupid to give themselves away.”

“Wait a minute, back up: Why would someone create a false browser history?”

They’d reached the waterfront, walking along the docks toward the aquarium. It was still drizzling out, making the docks much less crowded than usual. Wayne made his way toward the railing, then turned to face her. “Exactly. Why would someone create a false browser history? That’s the million-dollar question. Ethan had already recommended a downloadable forensic computer tool, but that hadn’t been powerful enough. He suspected that Sandra’s husband was employing something called a shredder, or scrubber software, to cover his tracks. So Ethan gave me a call, bringing in the big guns, so to speak.”

D.D. blinked at him. “Could you help her?”

“I was trying to. This was December, mind you, so only a few months ago, and given that she suspected her husband, we had to proceed carefully. She and Ethan had already run Pasco on her computer, but Pasco can only find what you tell it to find. It’s not nearly as powerful as, say, EnCase, the software we employ in the lab. EnCase can mine deep into a hard drive, inventorying the slack space, analyzing unallocated clusters, all sorts of good stuff. Better yet, given Sandra’s concerns, EnCase has an image carver tool that will dig out any images on the hard drive, spitting out literally hundreds of thousands of photos. Finally, EnCase also has the ability to pull out Internet browser histories-”

“So you ran EnCase on Sandra’s computer?”

“Don’t I wish.” He rolled his hazel eyes. “First off, you never work on the source. Bad forensic protocol. Secondly, Sandra needed to be discreet, and running EnCase on the family desktop for three to four days was bound to be noticed. Searching and seizing a computer is easy. Ripping one apart on the sly, however…”

“So what did you do?”

“I was working with Sandra to make a forensically sound copy of the family hard drive. I gave her instructions on what kind of blank hard drive to purchase, then how to attach it to the family computer and transfer over the data. Unfortunately, Jason had recently purchased a new five-hundred-gigabyte hard drive, and the copying time alone was over six hours. She’d made several attempts at it, but couldn’t get the job done before he returned from work.”

“Sandra Jones has spent the past three months basically plotting against her husband?” D.D. asked.

Wayne shrugged. “Sandra Jones has spent the past three months trying to outmaneuver her husband. As she has yet to get the hard drive copied, I have yet to run EnCase on it. So I can’t tell you if she has genuine reason to be afraid of him.”

D.D. smiled. “Wouldn’t you know it, as of last night, BPD became proud owners of the Jones family computer.”