Daniel Palmer - Helpless

“Wait here,” Jill said.

Tom watched her storm down the hallway and disappear into her bedroom. She emerged holding something white in her hand. Only when she got closer could Tom see that it was a business card.

Jill handed the card to Tom, then took a step back to wait for a reaction.

“The FBI?” Tom said. “I know this lady. How do you know her?”

“She gave a talk at our school about sexting and stuff.”

“Why’d she give you a card?”

“Lindsey and I went to see her after. We wanted to find out how somebody could have made it look like Lindsey was the one who wrote those blog posts.”

“And?”

Jill gave a quick, nearly imperceptible shrug. “She’s just really smart about this stuff. If there’s anybody who’d know how to recover evidence that Mitchell destroyed, it’s Special Agent Loraine Miles.”

The room smelled of wet earth.

Lindsey cowered in the corner of a square, windowless space, twelve by twelve, if her measurements were right, with walls made of concrete bricks. She could stand if she wanted; only her wrists were bound. But she preferred to keep huddled in her makeshift nest. The smooth concrete floor slanted toward a drain in her corner of the room. Lindsey sat on top of that drain, imagining it could suck her through its tiny holes and spit her back outside. She could hear the trickle of a fast-moving stream beyond her prison walls, but only from that corner of the room. The darkness around her, enveloping and impenetrable, clung to her body and weighed her down with fear. The only door in, she knew, stayed locked from the outside.

She’d tried opening it with her feet but ended up scraping her back.

The cold earth seeped through the thin fabric of her clothes and chilled her skin. To keep warm, Lindsey sat on a nappy gray wool blanket that strangely reeked of fried grease.

She felt better now than before. She no longer believed her heart would keep beating faster and faster until it burst. She could breathe without hyperventilating. But she couldn’t speak or scream, not with the thick cloth gag in her mouth. Her throat still ached where she’d been choked. Her hips and knees were sore now, too, probably because she’d slept with her body all folded up. Her headache, throbbing and persistent before, had finally subsided some. But she could feel it starting to return. Her stomach rumbled, and the first pang of real hunger forced her onto her side.

Sounds came from outside the room, or was that her ears playing tricks?

Lindsey worked herself into a kneeling position, using her lateral muscles to lift herself off the floor. She listened, wondering now if the sound had just been her racing heart. She became disoriented, no longer sure of the location of the door. In the dark, the room became a seamless black void.

She heard the distinct sound of a padlock’s shackle being released. She shivered and turned her head in that direction, flinching when the latch was lifted.

A crack of sunlight soon appeared, painting the outline of a door. She stood, though worried her shaky legs would give out beneath her, and took a few steps toward the open door. In her mind this was a rescue. Her father would be standing in the doorway, arms outstretched, feeling about the darkness for his missing daughter. A lump formed in her throat. But the door opened slowly, without any urgency, allowing the rusted hinges to creak and groan. A fresh grip of fear kept Lindsey frozen to her spot on the floor.

The door opened some more.

Please be Daddy… please….

Bright light flooded the room and shone on Lindsey’s face, blinding her completely. She heard the door slam shut and the fast shuffle of footsteps come toward her. Rough hands (a man’s, Lindsey thought) grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back to the floor. She felt a cloth being wrapped around her head, covering her eyes, secured in place by a tight knot tied by capable hands.

Something sharp, pointed, pressed against her neck.

A knife .

Instinctively, she knew the blindfold was a good sign. It meant her captor didn’t want to be seen. Maybe because he planned to let her live.

“If you scream, I’ll cut your throat,” said a man. He spoke in a deep voice that would have been threatening even without the knife. She didn’t recognize his voice. The man undid her gag.

Lindsey sucked down her fear, working it into her stomach like something unpleasant she’d been forced to swallow. She managed to speak despite her quivering lips and fast-fluttering heart. “Please… please just let me go…. I won’t say anything about the pictures…. Please…”

“Are you hungry?”

Lindsey’s empty stomach grumbled and churned, as though answering for her. “How long have I been here? Why are you doing this to me?”

“I brought you some food.”

“Please, I just want to go home.”

“Do you have to use the bathroom?”

“What?”

“Do you have to use the bathroom?” the man repeated.

Lindsey realized that she did, the intense pressure building up. It would only get worse, until eventually she’d soil herself. “Yes,” Lindsey said in a shaky voice.

She heard the man set something down beside her. He grabbed her bound wrists and pulled her down, forcing her fingers to feel around the edges of the object he placed by her feet. Lindsey could tell by touch alone that it was a plastic bucket, the kind she once used to make sand castles at the beach.

“You can pee in this bucket. I’ll help you.”

Lindsey’s mind started to race. In a panic, she tried to back away, but the man grabbed hold and pressed the knife harder to her throat.

“Please. My parents will pay you money. They’ll pay to have me back. Please, mister, I just want to go home.”

Lindsey sensed something pulling on the front of her denim jeans, a single hand working to free the button from its hole. She shook with fear, hearing every single tooth of her zipper as they pulled apart. She felt the man’s hand exploring the contours of her slender waist. He maneuvered himself behind her. That same hand pulled the fabric down, moving from one side of her waist to the other, until he shimmied her jeans down around her ankles.

“Don’t worry,” said the man. “I won’t look.”

For the past few hours Rainy and Carter had tried without success to make sense of the disparate hash values of the images Mann had given them. They were examining four of Mann’s pictures. The girl Rainy had officially ID’d was Gretchen Stiller.

“Same composition,” Rainy said to Carter.

“Exact same.”

“So why don’t these images generate the same hash value?”

“The pixels aren’t the exact same, that’s why.”

“How so?” Rainy asked.

“Take a look at the color composition of the images when compared side to side. I’ve arranged them on my monitor screen to run from lightest to darkest.”

Rainy could see that each image was progressively darker than the previous one.

“So the colors aren’t the same. What do you know about color depth in computer graphics?” asked Carter.

“About as much as I know about caring for houseplants,” Rainy said. Her spider plants were almost ready for their last rites.

“Maybe if you used your home for something more than a glorified storage locker, they might be thriving,” Carter said.

“Back to the color depth,” Rainy said.

“The job is never going to end, Rainy. There’s always going to be bad guys out there. We can’t get them all.”

“As you were saying—”

“These images are moments in time that’ll last forever. You can’t say the same thing about your life.”