He disconnected the flash, took it to the larger control board below the eight big screens, and plugged it into a server linked to the internal FBI network.
A digital index of the drive popped up on the large center screen; it showed the icon of the single MPEG movie file. Rawlins clicked on it. There was a brilliant flash, and then the clip played—the grainy video of the hysterical blonde running through the forest with the cameraman in hot pursuit.
“What was that?” Batra asked. “That flash at the beginning there?”
“I don’t know,” Rawlins said, freezing the video.
I said, “You know, come to think of it, when I hit the icon on my laptop, it did the same thing, only my screen’s much smaller and older, so it wasn’t as bright as that.”
Rawlins grunted and gave his computer orders to list all running processes and applications. The directory opened and showed them in a stack sorted by the time each was launched, beginning with the most recent app.
“That’s what just flashed there?” Batra said with an arched eyebrow. “Porngrinder?”
CHAPTER
34
RAWLINS LAUGHED AND said blithely, “Oh, no, Porngrinder is on me. What can I say? It’s a lonely life in the basement at times.”
“My God,” Batra said, disgusted. “The Bureau frowns on that kind of thing.”
“Have them sue me, won’t you?” Rawlins said.
“What was the flash?
” Batra said.
“I don’t know. A blip, a screen hiccup. They happen, you know.”
“Or a bug in the plug-in that drives the video player?” Batra said.
Rawlins held up a finger. “A momentous occasion. Special Agent Henna B. and I might agree.”
Batra rolled her eyes. “Tell us about the video.”
I won’t bore anyone with the details of Rawlins’s technological savvy and instincts, but they were shrewd and his results conclusive. At first, he used ordinary software to try to access the video file’s so-called dark data. No luck. The video had been run through an onion system similar to the one used to create the Killingblondechicks4fun website. The dark data had been stripped away.
“Not surprising.” Rawlins sniffed. “But I’ve still got the dust rag.”
The “dust rag” was software Rawlins had designed and coded himself to raise the faintest trace of old dark and metadata. He compared the software to the Hubble Space Telescope looking for cosmic debris a thousand miles behind a comet’s long tail.
Sure enough, his screen was soon filled with fragments of code that played out in sync with the video. By focusing on the moments where the lighting was dimmest and the noise of the alleged killing most pronounced, Rawlins found evidence in the data dust that suggested an audio splice in the sound track roughly six seconds long. Those six seconds included the knife-across-the-throat slitting noise and the pah that sounded like air bursting out of a frightened and dying chest.
“She’s alive,” Rawlins said barely fifteen minutes after starting his examination. “Or at least, those weren’t the sounds of her murder.”
I sighed with relief. I wouldn’t have to give Alden Lindel or his wife more heartbreaking news. “Explain how you know. The parents will ask.”
Rawlins said, “The sound patch itself is fairly sophisticated CGA. Computer-generated audio. So someone’s had advanced training in sound effects. You’re looking for a film-school grad or someone who worked in a special-effects company out in Hollywood, not a coder.”
“Why’s that?” Batra asked.
Rawlins gave his computer a command, and the video on the center screen rewound to the beginning of the six-second splice. A second screen showed the remnants of the dark data. He pointed out a jagged line of data that almost connected top to bottom.
“That’s your digital splice,” Rawlins said. “A more adept coder would have hidden it better, sewn it up as clean as a plastic surgeon. There wouldn’t have been even a hint of a scar.”
“So this is basic sound-editing work?” I said.
Rawlins touched his Mohawk as if it were a high-fashion hairdo and said, “Three steps above butchery. And that’s all I can manage now. I have a lot to do before Goddess opens.”