Daniel Palmer - Helpless

The phone rang. He answered it and smiled before the caller could finish her greeting.

“Hi, Dad,” Jill said. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m over at Lindsey’s house. We’re studying for a chem test tomorrow.”

“Hey!” Tom said. “I was just about to text you, but it’s a lot nicer hearing your voice.”

The conversation that followed wasn’t anything more extraordinary than a parent and child playing catch-up: “How are you? What’s new at school? What have you been up to?” After about ten minutes of back-and-forth chitchat, Tom got the sense his daughter wanted to end the call. It was just one of the many ways that he’d come to know Jill’s personality better.

“I hope you’ve been eating well,” Jill said to him.

“Hey, who’s the parent here?” Tom replied. “Anyway, I’m eating fine.”

“Dad, you can’t cook.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“Whatever. I should probably get back to studying with Lindsey.”

Tom glanced over at the kitchen table, where he’d been doing some studying of his own. On that table were six large legal tomes, each splayed open, plus a bunch of printed-out documents and spiral-bound notebooks filled with Tom’s research on child pornography and legal defenses. He’d drawn only one conclusion based on the cases he’d studied: Marvin really had his work cut out for him.

“I’m so glad you and Lindsey have reconciled,” said Tom.

“Me too,” Jill said.

“You know you can come home anytime,” Tom said to her. “You don’t have to stay at the Kalinowskis’ if you don’t want to.”

Jill went quiet, and Tom allowed her to process without interruption.

“Maybe I will,” she eventually said.

“Your room is waiting.”

“Okay. Well, I really should keep cramming… unless you happen to know anything about the photoelectric effect.”

“Does it have anything to do with taking pictures?”

“Good night, Dad,” Jill said with a groan.

“Good night.”

Tom set the cordless phone back in its cradle. He hadn’t made it back over to the kitchen table when the phone rang again. Tom answered it on the second ring, assuming it was Jill calling him back.

“Whatcha forget?” he asked.

“Nothing,” a man said in a raspy, monotonous tone. Tom’s pulse kicked up a notch or two.

“Who is this?” asked Tom.

“You don’t know my voice, but I’m pretty sure you’d recognize my face.”

Tom’s muscles tightened like a coil spring poised to unleash. He gripped the edge of the kitchen counter hard enough to make his fingers hurt.

“Lange? Is that you?”

“The one and only. We need to talk.”

“I’d say. Come on over. I’ll make us some tea.”

Lange laughed lightly into the phone. “Can’t do that, compadre,” he said.

“Well then, why don’t you start by telling me why you broke into Kelly’s house?”

“You think you know what’s happening here, Tom, but I’m calling to tell you that you’re wrong. I’m not the enemy. Not even close.”

“Funny, my friends don’t spy on me from the woods.”

“It wasn’t me who broke into Kelly’s house,” Lange said. “And I’m not the one who chased her into the woods and down that ravine, either. But I know who did, why they did it, and why you’re being set up to look like a kiddie porn collector.”

Tom took a sharp breath, then let it out slowly. “Who is setting me up, Lange?” he asked. “What does this have to do with what happened to Kelly?”

“I can’t tell you that over the phone, Tom. When you see what I have to show you, then you’ll understand. And it’s not what you think. You don’t have the slightest clue why they think you’re so dangerous.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Tom shouted into the phone.

“Meet me at Johnny Rockets in one hour,” Lange said. “And come alone, or this time I’ll vanish for good.”

“Why should I trust you?”

Tom thought he heard Lange sigh into the phone. “I know you’ve been looking for me,” Lange said. “You. Roland. That nosy attorney of yours. I stayed hidden because I was afraid of getting caught.”

“Why show yourself now?”

“Because you need to see what I have,” Lange said. “And I need you to protect me from them.”

Rainy and Carter ordered dinner from Monument Market. It was a credit to Monument’s sandwiches, because hours earlier they’d ordered lunch there, too.

Sergeant Brendan Murphy had set them up in the Shilo Police Department’s only interrogation room. From there they were able to conduct a second forensic audit on Hawkins’s laptop computer. Murphy had no objection to granting the FBI access to Tom Hawkins’s confiscated laptop. His only request, which had actually been relayed to the agents from the D.A. herself, was that the state be able to use whatever new evidence the FBI dug up. Rainy assured Murphy that the FBI would disclose anything new that they found. She didn’t reveal that she had a secret agenda in returning to Shilo: she needed to settle her growing doubts about Tom Hawkins’s guilt.

The facts of the Hawkins case more than just puzzled Rainy. She found them downright troubling. First, Lindsey Wells admitted to sending pictures of herself to Tanner Farnsworth, but not to Tom Hawkins. Why not to the man she was allegedly having an affair with? How did Hawkins end up with her pictures? She had a hard time believing Tanner Farnsworth worked for Tom Hawkins, not the way he talked about the coach—dismissively, and with evident disdain.

Lindsey wasn’t the only girl from Shilo who had lied about her sexts, either. So far Rainy had interviewed six of the ten girls from Shilo’s text image collection (the other four were away at college). Rainy got the girls to sign and date the back of the verification images while their parents looked on with disappointment. Though the girls admitted that the images were of them (hard to deny), none confessed to having text messaged them to anybody. Not to Tanner Farnsworth. Not to Coach Hawkins. Same as Lindsey, the girls claimed to have no idea how James Mann ended up with their naked pictures.

Something that Marvin Pressman had said stuck with Rainy as well. It was the convenience of it all. Here she was, hunting for James Mann’s supplier, and Tom Hawkins literally fell into her lap. The chances that that was just a lucky break were about the same as someone breaking Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak.

But how would the jury see it?

Guilty, that’s how. Rainy knew it and Carter did, too.

Carter spent a few hours re-creating a mirror image of Hawkins’s laptop on a machine he’d brought with him, then returned the laptop to Murphy. Mindful of maintaining the integrity of the evidence, he used techniques similar to those CART employed to safeguard the machine. Carter had run through several series of advanced computer forensic tests on the mirror image. He kept searching for that single bit of exculpatory evidence that Rainy had come to believe he’d find. So far, though, they hadn’t found a byte of evidence that suggested Tom Hawkins was an innocent man.

“So we’ve found archival evidence that shows illegal transactions going back several years,” Rainy said.

“Which says to me he’s been running this enterprise primarily from this machine,” Carter replied.

“But why use his work computer?” Rainy said, recalling how Marvin drew her attention to that unusual choice. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know, Rainy,” Carter said. The tone of his voice held a tinge of exasperation.

He thinks I’m chasing shadows, Rainy thought.