indicated the blank photo on the board.
“She had a boyfriend?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“A little, I guess. What do we know about him?”
“Not a lot. Her friends admitted covering for her at various points so she could leave work early to meet him. Suzanne’s parents were adamant there was no boyfriend, but a search of Suzanne’s room turned up a stash of love letters from him hidden in a bookcase.”
“And?”
“And nada. Law enforcement canvassed but failed to turn up a single Tom B. within a fifty-mile radius. They expanded the search to include variations on the name: Tom A., Tom C., Tom D., etc., but it was a dead end.”
“And he never came forward?”
Jenn shook her head. “But a new lead emerged when Suzanne’s laptop was searched. The hard drive had been wiped using Heavy Scrub, a program designed to erase data permanently.”
“Gibson, can you explain how it works?” George asked.
Jenn looked at her boss questioningly. George knew exactly how Heavy Scrub worked. He was the one who’d explained it to her. No doubt he had a reason for asking. Dealing with George was like playing chess with a grandmaster. He made her paranoid about her paranoia.
“Ah, sure,” Vaughn said. “Well, contrary to popular misconceptions, emptying a computer’s ‘trash’ only de-allocates it. It still exists on the hard drive, but the computer now has permission to overwrite the file should space be needed. However, an ‘erased’ file might exist for years depending on the user’s habits. Retrieving so-called erased data from a hard drive is simple. It’s been the downfall of many a would-be master criminal. Hence the need for programs like Heavy Scrub, which systematically overwrites a hard drive multiple times until any existing data becomes unrecoverable. Not the sort of thing your average fourteen-year-old would know to do.”
“And certainly not a teenager described as ‘technologically inept’ by her parents,” Jenn said.
“Which she quite clearly was,” Hendricks interjected. “Because while she installed and ran the program to cover her tracks, she shut the laptop’s cover before it was finished—”
Vaughn’s head turned sharply to Hendricks. “Which caused the computer to hibernate and stop Heavy Scrub midwipe,” he completed Hendricks’s sentence. “Bear botched it?”
“Correct,” Jenn said. “The laptop was taken to Fort Meade, which reconstructed as much of the data as it could—which turned out to be not much. The majority was garden-variety teenager: fragments of homework, essays, e-mails, etc. But an Internet relay chat client was found on her machine that her parents didn’t know anything about. And that none of her friends used.”
“I remember the FBI hunting high and low for WR8TH. Is that how the FBI knew about it?” Vaughn was sitting forward in his seat now.
“Yes. Someone using the username WR8TH befriended Suzanne in a chat room. WR8TH presented himself to her as a sixteen-year-old boy and became her confidant. What emerged was that he encouraged her to run away and helped her cover her tracks.”
“Did they get anywhere with it? The feds, I mean.”
“No, WR8TH was a dead end. The FBI made it public, as you know, but nothing ever came of it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Vaughn said. “Internet relay chat is purposefully anonymous. No chat logs. Someone could choose a new username at each log-in. When I was getting into computers, IRC was what I used to trade tricks and strategies and code. Everyone was paranoid that the FBI had snitches lurking around in chat.”
“They did,” Abe said.
“So I had like twenty different usernames that I cycled through. If WR8TH was careful, it would be almost impossible to track him back to a source.”
“And that’s exactly what happened. Despite thousands of tips,” Jenn said. “Not one of them led to the person or persons behind WR8TH. Ironically, it wasn’t that the FBI couldn’t find
“She had a boyfriend?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“A little, I guess. What do we know about him?”
“Not a lot. Her friends admitted covering for her at various points so she could leave work early to meet him. Suzanne’s parents were adamant there was no boyfriend, but a search of Suzanne’s room turned up a stash of love letters from him hidden in a bookcase.”
“And?”
“And nada. Law enforcement canvassed but failed to turn up a single Tom B. within a fifty-mile radius. They expanded the search to include variations on the name: Tom A., Tom C., Tom D., etc., but it was a dead end.”
“And he never came forward?”
Jenn shook her head. “But a new lead emerged when Suzanne’s laptop was searched. The hard drive had been wiped using Heavy Scrub, a program designed to erase data permanently.”
“Gibson, can you explain how it works?” George asked.
Jenn looked at her boss questioningly. George knew exactly how Heavy Scrub worked. He was the one who’d explained it to her. No doubt he had a reason for asking. Dealing with George was like playing chess with a grandmaster. He made her paranoid about her paranoia.
“Ah, sure,” Vaughn said. “Well, contrary to popular misconceptions, emptying a computer’s ‘trash’ only de-allocates it. It still exists on the hard drive, but the computer now has permission to overwrite the file should space be needed. However, an ‘erased’ file might exist for years depending on the user’s habits. Retrieving so-called erased data from a hard drive is simple. It’s been the downfall of many a would-be master criminal. Hence the need for programs like Heavy Scrub, which systematically overwrites a hard drive multiple times until any existing data becomes unrecoverable. Not the sort of thing your average fourteen-year-old would know to do.”
“And certainly not a teenager described as ‘technologically inept’ by her parents,” Jenn said.
“Which she quite clearly was,” Hendricks interjected. “Because while she installed and ran the program to cover her tracks, she shut the laptop’s cover before it was finished—”
Vaughn’s head turned sharply to Hendricks. “Which caused the computer to hibernate and stop Heavy Scrub midwipe,” he completed Hendricks’s sentence. “Bear botched it?”
“Correct,” Jenn said. “The laptop was taken to Fort Meade, which reconstructed as much of the data as it could—which turned out to be not much. The majority was garden-variety teenager: fragments of homework, essays, e-mails, etc. But an Internet relay chat client was found on her machine that her parents didn’t know anything about. And that none of her friends used.”
“I remember the FBI hunting high and low for WR8TH. Is that how the FBI knew about it?” Vaughn was sitting forward in his seat now.
“Yes. Someone using the username WR8TH befriended Suzanne in a chat room. WR8TH presented himself to her as a sixteen-year-old boy and became her confidant. What emerged was that he encouraged her to run away and helped her cover her tracks.”
“Did they get anywhere with it? The feds, I mean.”
“No, WR8TH was a dead end. The FBI made it public, as you know, but nothing ever came of it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Vaughn said. “Internet relay chat is purposefully anonymous. No chat logs. Someone could choose a new username at each log-in. When I was getting into computers, IRC was what I used to trade tricks and strategies and code. Everyone was paranoid that the FBI had snitches lurking around in chat.”
“They did,” Abe said.
“So I had like twenty different usernames that I cycled through. If WR8TH was careful, it would be almost impossible to track him back to a source.”
“And that’s exactly what happened. Despite thousands of tips,” Jenn said. “Not one of them led to the person or persons behind WR8TH. Ironically, it wasn’t that the FBI couldn’t find
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