“I’ve cracked part of it. I’ll know for sure in an hour or so.”
“What is it?”
“We’re talking on radios and I’m told it’s child’s play for somebody to listen in, if you’ve got the right child,” Lucas said. “I’ll want to see you in, say, two hours. But not with your Minnesota sidekick. Just you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I do have a certain level of trust in my sidekick,” Henderson said, referring to Porter Smalls.
“Then you can tell him—or call him and I’ll tell him, but I want to talk to you first.”
“You’re at the Watergate, right? What room?”
Lucas told him and Henderson said, “Two hours. See you then.”
—
THE TRIP SOUTH, across the Potomac, was mostly on interstate highways, and traffic wasn’t terrible; Lucas made it to the Winston house in exactly one hour. He was met at the door by anangry Mary Ellen Winston, who said, “I find this whole thing... despicable, including Blake’s part in it. I’ve told him so.”
“You’ve heard that the FBI arrested a sniper outside the school of a senator’s child?” Lucas asked. “Depending on how this breaks out, your kid could be saving the lives of other children.”
“Blake is betraying a friend—”
“To save lives,” Lucas snapped. “Tell the truth, Mrs. Winston, I don’t want to hear some bullshit about how this is an ethical complication. You ever look at somebody who’s taken a bullet in the head? I have, and just this morning. That was bad enough: if it’d been a kid, I’d be having nightmares.”
She froze up at the tone, then said, “Blake’s in the tennis room.”
—
LUCAS WALKED THROUGH THE HOUSE, with Mary Ellen Winston trailing him, and the place smelled improbably like fresh-baked bread and cinnamon; he thought it might be a spray of some kind, because he didn’t see anybody baking and Winston didn’t seem to be in the mood for anything so mellow.
Blake was looking as frozen as his mother, sitting on a couch looking out over the tennis court, an Apple laptop on the table in front of him, the bright Apple logo glowing from the back of the machine. When Lucas walked into the room, he looked up and Mary Ellen said, “Blake, I’ve told you...”
“Get the fuck off my back,” Blake Winston snapped.
“What!”
“Get the fuck off my back. We’ll talk about this later when Dad gets here. Right now, I don’t want to hear about it. Go read aNew Yorkeror something.”
His mother turned and steamed out of the room. Lucas walked down the three steps into the tennis room and said, “I’m causing you trouble.”
“You’re not causing me anything—I’m causing it,” Winston said. He seemed five years older than he had the last time they talked. “Mom makes complications where there aren’t any. Or shouldn’t be. That’s what she does. Come look at this.”
He took a thumb drive out of his shirt pocket, plugged it into a USB port on the side of the computer and said, “I won’t bother you with the details. The 1919 site is down now, but I’d downloaded the whole site. I searched Audrey’s computer hard drive and found the 1919 articles in her deleted files.”
“Which weren’t totally deleted?”
“No. They’re still there on the hard drive until they’re overwritten and they hadn’t all been overwritten. I also found four of the photographs... the rest were gone.”
“How do you know she didn’t take the files off the 1919 site because she was interested in learning something about them?” Lucas asked. “I mean, you did.” Winston waved him off. “Remember how the photos on the website didn’t have any metadata? The metadata had been stripped off? Well, the metadata is still there on her photo files, which means she didn’t get them off the site. The photos were all shot with a Sony RX100 Mark III, which is a nice little camera. I happen to know she has that exact model. The metadata has all the dates and stuff that the photos were shot.”
Lucas sat silently for a moment, then said, “Let’s see the photos.”
Winston brought them up one at a time, showed Lucas themetadata, which included the time, date, and camera setting used to make them. They’d been done the past spring, before summer vacation.
When he’d looked at them all, Lucas said, “Okay. Give me the thumb drive.”
