7

So we have a pretty good idea how the woman’s picture showed up on Higgins’s phone,” Windermere told SAC Harris. “But we still don’t know who took the picture or where he or she disappeared to.”

“The pictures should have location tags,” Harris said. “When I take pictures on my iPhone, it automatically knows when and where the shot was taken.”

“Sure,” Stevens said. “True. According to the tag on Mark Higgins’s phone, the picture was taken last Sunday—four days after Sheriff Truman and his deputies moved the body.”

“And if the location tag’s to be believed,” Windermere said, “the picture was taken at a roadside diner in Barstow, California. See, the trouble with geotagging is it only works if the phone is connected to a network.”

“So the picture could have been taken when the phone was offline and uploaded to the cloud when it came online at that diner,” Harris said. “This guy would have had to travel all the way from Idaho to California without turning on his phone.”

“We put a call in to Barstow PD, have them canvassing the diner and the rest of the city for anybody who might have seen anything,” Stevens told him. “The diner doesn’t have any security footage, but at least we have a location.”

“We know the photographer hangs around the Southwest,” Windermere said. “And we can be certain that whoever’s taking those pictures can lead us to the victim’s identity. We just have to track him down.”

“Perfect,” Harris said. “So how are you going to do it?”

Stevens and Windermere looked at each other. Let the question hang there. Then Stevens had a thought, something he’d been playing with all morning.

“I don’t know much about this cloud thing,” he said, “as we’ve already established.”

“Definitively,” Windermere said. “But go on.”

Stevens sat forward. “I was just thinking: Higgins deleted the pictures he didn’t like from his phone. But if he was hooked up to the cloud and he had, say, a laptop, would the pictures have automatically been deleted there, too?”

“Most likely,” Harris said. “But not one hundred percent for certain. It’s worth a check.”

“Damn right,” Windermere said, reaching for Harris’s phone. “And even if they were deleted, maybe our friendly tech guru can get them all back. Let’s try it.”

—

By midafternoon, they had Mark Higgins’s laptop, couriered through the snow from Willmar. Windermere scared up the office’s resident computer whiz, a young tech named Nenad with a Superman tattoo on the inside of his wrist, set him loose on the laptop. Nenad looked almost bored when he found out the assignment.

“Pictures,” he said. “Old pictures, that’s it? You’re sure you don’t need me to hack anything?”

“Not right now,” Windermere told him. “They’re deleted pictures, if that makes you feel any better.”

Nenad cracked his knuckles. “Nothing’s ever really deleted,” he said. “Give me ten minutes.”

It took him five. Windermere was still waiting for the coffee machine when the tech poked his head into the break room. “It’s done.”

She followed him back to her office, where Stevens was already browsing through a cache of files on Higgins’s laptop.

“I did all I could,” Nenad told them. “The longer a file stays deleted, the better the odds the computer will write over the data. Anything too old is already gone, but I salvaged everything recent.”

Windermere thanked him. Promised the next time she called, she would have a mainframe for him to break into. Then she sat down beside Stevens and clicked open the oldest of the pictures. Scrolled through a couple blurry shots of Mark Higgins until she found what she was looking for.

It was a group shot, four kids around a campfire in gray daylight. They were teenagers, or just barely past, twenty-two or twenty-three at the oldest. A girl and three boys, piercings and tattoos, punk rock hairstyles. They had the worn-out, grimy look of the panhandlers and squeegee kids who patrolled parts of downtown Minneapolis, but they were smiling at the camera, all of them, and one of the boys was holding up a handle of Old Crow. As far as Windermere could tell, the girl in the picture wasn’t the murdered woman. She clicked through.

The next picture was pretty enough that Windermere wondered why Mark Higgins hadn’t kept it. It was taken inside an empty boxcar, two kids sitting in the open doorway, a row of trees visible in the daylight beyond. The kids had their backs turned; impossible to identify them.

There were more pictures in a similar vein. Groups of people in ragged clothing clustered around campfires and makeshift shelters, their hair often unkempt, their faces usually dirty. A girl hugging her knees to her chest on an empty container train, the tracks blurred but visible through the steel latticework on which she sat. Then Stevens clicked to the next, and they both sat forward and stared at the screen.

This was the dead woman. Like the others in the pictures, she was young, twenty or so. She was striking, high cheekbones and vivid eyes, a wide, laughing smile. Her black hair was mostly hidden beneath a woolen watch cap; she was walking away from the camera, her head and shoulders half-turned to look back at the photographer. She was pointing to the background, like whoever’d taken the picture had caught her midexplanation, midjoke. She looked young and happy and full of life, completely unaware of the fate that awaited her.

“That’s her, right?” Stevens said. “That’s our victim.”

Windermere nodded. “Yeah.” She couldn’t look away from the screen.

“Did you notice the background?” Stevens asked.

Windermere hadn’t. She blinked, refocused. The pretty woman was pointing at a train, a massive diesel locomotive maybe sixty feet behind her. She was walking toward the locomotive. Windermere frowned. She didn’t get it.

Then she did.

“They’re train hoppers, these kids,” she said, feeling a little jolt of accomplishment as the piece fell into place. “Our girl was surfing those trains.”