The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [113]
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