Sean responded to the last email Trey had sent to Kirsten: Trey, I just got home, my mom"s at work, she cut off my cell phone. Can you come over ASAP? I need to talk to you.
He hoped the kid took the bait.
Sean was scanning the computer logs when Patrick called. "I"m leaving the police station now," he said. "Evelyn only filed a police report the first time Kirsten disappeared. That"s not unusual. Parents of habitual runaways tend to be embarra.s.sed by their kids" behavior, worried that people will think they can"t control their kids. However, I got the police interested in this disappearance, enough that they"ll b.u.mp her to a missing person instead of a runaway. They"ll send her photo and vitals to all hospitals and law enforcement in a hundred-mile radius."
"Good."
"I also contacted my friend at NCMEC and he"s going to put Kirsten in the system as soon as Woodbridge PD sends him the data, so that"s another avenue. They can spread the information far better than any local office."
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children worked closely with both law enforcement and private investigators in finding minors under all circ.u.mstances, runaway or criminal. Having their resources on this case was a big plus.
Sean filled Patrick in on Kirsten"s emails as well as on Trey Danielson. "I sent him an email from Kirsten; we"ll see if he bites. He"s a senior at her school, and based on the pictures of them in his profile it looks like he and Kirsten used to go out. It sounds like he"ll be easier to crack than her girlfriends-he"s sent her numerous messages."
"Unless it"s a CYA."
"CYA?" Sean asked.
"He"s covering his a.s.s by sending concerned emails, even if he was the one who had something to do with her disappearance. I"ve seen it before in domestic cases."
"We"ll find out-I asked him to come over ASAP. If he killed her, he might not, but then again if he sent all those worried emails to cover up a crime, he"d come for the same reason, right? Either way, my gut says he"ll show."
"You"re thinking like a cop now."
Pretending to be insulted, Sean said, "That was low."
Patrick laughed. "Whatever reason he comes, we need to get rid of Evelyn. I think she"s too stressed to help right now. I"ll think up an errand for her by the time I get there."
"Good idea. I sent Lucy pictures of Kirsten"s room and asked her for advice."
Patrick didn"t say anything.
"Did I lose you?" Sean prompted.
"Why get Lucy involved?"
Patrick"s tone was odd, almost defensive. Sean said, "She"s on edge waiting to hear back about her FBI interview. She could use something to distract her. This kind of case is right up her alley, and she might see something we missed." Sean hesitated, then asked, "You got a problem asking Lucy to consult?"
"Of course not," Patrick said and hung up.
Right, Sean thought, no problem at all.
Ever since Patrick had found out about Sean"s relationship with his sister, he"d been acting weird. Sean understood the overprotective big-brother att.i.tude, but Lucy was twenty-five; it wasn"t as if she were a naive teenager. And she was good at this type of work. Lucy was one of the few people Sean knew who not only understood how computer systems and the Internet operated, but understood people as well. She could read a chat transcript and deduce whether the people chatting were predators, victims, or bored kids.
Did Patrick not want Lucy involved with the case because of her relationship with Sean? Or because of her tragic past?
It didn"t matter to Sean. As far as he was concerned, Lucy was capable and willing to help, and he"d use all available resources. The added benefit was that they"d be spending more time together. A winwin, as far as Sean was concerned.
THREE.
Lucy stepped out of the shower after her late morning run and wrapped her body in a fluffy white robe, a Christmas present two years ago from her sister-in-law Kate. She brushed through her thick black hair, then loosely braided it down her back to keep it out of her way until she had time to dry it. Lucy sat down at her computer and retrieved her email. Lots of birthday wishes. She responded to those from her family, hesitating when she read a message from her sister Carina, who not only wished her a happy birthday but also expressed hopes for Lucy"s speedy acceptance into the FBI.
"You and me both, Carina," Lucy mumbled and sent off a quick thank-you.
It could take anywhere from three days to three weeks to hear back from the FBI regarding her interview with the hiring panel, but most applicants who got as far as she did made it to the final stage. Ever since Lucy"s internship with the Washington, D.C., Medical Examiner"s office ended last week, she"d felt as if she were in limbo.
She just wanted to start her training at Quantico.
Though she hadn"t confided in anyone, not her family or even Sean, she"d been nervous about the interview. She"d answered the panel"s questions calmly and honestly, even the hard ones. Like the questions about her imprisoned former boss Fran Buckley and Lucy"s ex-boyfriend Cody Lorenzo, and what happened that horrific day last month when a paroled ex-felon nearly killed her and another woman.
And the hardest question of all: What had she been thinking when she shot and killed her rapist, Adam Scott, nearly seven years ago?
She"d told them that she believed he would kill her if he had the chance. When he moved toward her, she"d shot him.
It was mostly true, but it wasn"t the entire truth.
Her stomach tightened uncomfortably. Ever since her past had come back to bite her in the a.s.s five weeks ago, she"d been on edge. Nearly seven years ... six years, eight months, and two weeks ... had pa.s.sed and she couldn"t escape the memories. She"d managed them just fine for years, but now they were stuck in her head like a hated song that repeatedly played in her mind, with no way to make it stop.
A new email popped into her window containing a large file from Sean. She boxed up her anxiety about her past and the FBI interview, and clicked on the message.
Lucy- I"m sending you a video I took of Kirsten"s room. Something doesn"t look right, but I can"t figure out exactly what"s bothering me. Thoughts?
I know you miss me. Happy Birthday, don"t eat cake without me.
Yours,
Sean
Lucy smiled, barely suppressing a laugh. Sean always did that for her-lightened her mood. I know you miss me. She didn"t need to inflate his ego any more by acknowledging the fact. But she was thrilled to have something to occupy her mind.
Sean was unlike most of the guys-rare though they were-she"d dated. It had been unplanned, and she had been entirely unprepared for her strong feelings toward him. She appreciated that he didn"t push her. She wanted to spend all her free time with him, but found herself spending less, as if he were an addictive drug that she needed to get out of her system.
Especially after she told Patrick two weeks ago about her and Sean. She"d tried to avoid it as long as she could, though not because Patrick didn"t like Sean-they were partners, and had developed a close friendship in the three years they"d worked together for RCK. She really didn"t know why she didn"t want to tell Patrick. With Dillon and Kate it was different; they"d been around when she and Sean sort of just happened, so it wasn"t as though she"d been hiding it. But when Patrick returned from his a.s.signment in California, at first it had seemed too awkward to sit him down and announce the relationship. So she"d finally told him when they were walking back from church in a casual, oh, you know, I like Sean and I think he likes me too kind of way.
"I know," he"d growled.
When he hadn"t said anything else, she pushed, friendly; she wanted his blessing. Sean was his partner, she was his sister, and she wanted-needed-Patrick"s approval.
He just shrugged and said she was a big girl. But he"d wanted to say something else. What were Patrick"s concerns? She knew she shouldn"t feel this way, that Sean would tell her Patrick would come around, but Sean didn"t understand her close relationship with her brother. Patrick was the one person in her family she was loath to disappoint. She knew it had less to do with the fact that he was her brother, and everything to do with her guilt over the near-fatal injuries he"d sustained on the orders of her attacker, Adam Scott.
Or, maybe, she"d been antic.i.p.ating Patrick"s disapproval.
She kept telling herself that she didn"t want an excuse to leave Sean, but she didn"t want to fall in love or care about anyone, not now. She hadn"t been looking for him, but there he was. Or maybe it was more about how he felt about her. It wasn"t anything he said, it was how he looked at her. How he touched her. He made her feel like she was the only person in the room, special, valuable, his. Without verbally staking claim to her, Sean made it clear that he was the man in her life. It was intoxicating and terrifying.
Sean made her forget, at least for a while, that she wasn"t normal.
"Stop overa.n.a.lyzing everything," she mumbled to herself. Right-that was like telling her body to stop breathing.
She clicked on the one-minute video that Sean had sent. It started at the doorway of Kirsten Benton"s room and panned around 360 degrees. Bare walls above the plain bed. No personal effects. The dresser, the window-all generic. Only the desk and small bookshelf were cluttered with books and papers, and the only photographs were on a wall where they couldn"t be seen by anyone except at a specific angle.
The computer faced the bed.
Heart pounding, she knew what she was looking at, even as she watched the video again in slow motion. She paused the recording when the computer came back into view.
There was a small, round ball on top. A webcam. It faced the bed.
Her face flushed and bile rose in her throat. It took all her willpower not to run to the bathroom and puke. With tight hands, she untwisted the cap on her water bottle and sipped, ridding her mouth of the horrid taste.
She didn"t want to respond to Sean. She wanted to pretend that she hadn"t seen the video, that she wasn"t involved. If she articulated her fears, it would make the truth sound simple, and it was anything but simple.
Maybe she was wrong. There could be another explanation. She always thought the worst; the worst wasn"t always the case.
She emailed Sean.
Are there any video files on the computer? They"d be .wmv or .mov or another standard format. Can you access them?
She wasn"t surprised when her phone rang less than a minute later.
"Sean," she answered when she saw the caller ID.
"There are dozens of video files," he said. "But they"re all shortcuts or temp files-they"re empty, nothing attached. I"m running an undelete program. How did you know?"
"I might be wrong." She didn"t believe she was. "I hope I"m wrong. But there"s a webcam facing her bed."
Sean didn"t say anything, but the weight of the truth hung between them on the phone. "s.h.i.t," he finally said.
"I"ve seen it many times, particularly on the amateur s.e.x sites. Often, the women don"t know they"re being recorded. But-"
"But Kirsten did."
"It"s her bedroom and her computer," Lucy said.
"I haven"t found anything on her computer yet," Sean said. Then he added, "Why would a young, beautiful girl with a bright future take naked pictures of herself and send or post them on the Internet?"
It was more than naked pictures, Lucy suspected, from just what little she already knew about Kirsten"s setup and the deleted video files. "Twenty-two percent of teenage girls have posted naked photos of themselves on the Internet," she said, keeping her voice even. The stats had infuriated her when she first learned of them, followed by a deep, numbing sadness. Once those pictures were out on the Web, there was no getting them back. One nude photograph in twenty-four hours would be downloaded on thousands of computers around the world.
"I don"t have answers," she said, though she suspected Sean"s question had been rhetorical.
"I"ll let you know if I find anything." Sean didn"t sound like his typical upbeat self. His enthusiasm for everything life had to offer drew Lucy to him, and she hated hearing him so down.
"You can send everything to me," she offered, though the last thing she wanted to do was go through the teenager"s computer files, knowing what she"d most likely discover. "I know what to look for."
He didn"t say anything for a moment.
"Sean, I can handle seeing whatever is on her computer."
"I know you can. It"s-"
"Don"t coddle me. Please." She didn"t want to be protected from the evils in the world. It would be her job soon enough, and nothing she saw on Kirsten Benton"s computer could compare with what she"d already witnessed firsthand in her life.
"If you have time, I"d appreciate your help. I"ll share out her computer and send you a pa.s.sword to access the hard drive."
"I have all the time in the world right now, and I want to help. I wouldn"t offer if I didn"t."
"It"s already done. Check your email."
As he spoke, her email beeped. "You"re good," she said.
"I know. Happy birthday, Princess." Sean hung up and Lucy was smiling again.
She logged onto Kirsten"s computer and started working her way through the directories one by one.
If her initial instincts were correct, she"d find specific coded headers in the temporary files that were created whenever any program was open on the computer. Most of the data were unreadable, and she wouldn"t be able to re-create data that hadn"t been specifically saved on Kirsten"s computer. However, she could strip the symbols and be able to identify the chat rooms, if any, that Kirsten had entered, including tracking information like the ISP address, time stamps, and similar identifiers.
When she"d volunteered for Women and Children First! before it was shut down, she"d learned the ins and outs of how and where s.e.xual predators hunted for their victims. WCF, a victim-rights group that took a proactive role in tracking predators in cybers.p.a.ce, taught her more about cybercrime than five years of college and postgraduate school. She could discern whether someone was trolling for victims or identify potential victims by how they communicated. It had bemused her that her linguistics skills and fluency in four languages had helped her decipher chat room shorthand, which was a language unto itself.
She created a spreadsheet with the identifiers in Kirsten"s temp files. It quickly became clear that Kirsten had frequented a website where she partic.i.p.ated in multiple video chats. Similar to the increasingly popular Skype, the primary difference was that the external chat didn"t require any additional software over and beyond the webcam attached to the computer. The events weren"t recorded on the hard drive, though because of the live streaming, a temp file had been created with start and stop times that helped Lucy catalogue them.
Savvy predators could erase and delete the data within the temp file, but Kirsten wasn"t a predator. Yet, based on the extent of the log Lucy was creating, Kirsten didn"t appear to be a victim, either. The videos could be innocuous, friends chatting face-to-face over the computer screen. Lucy wanted to believe that, but her mind kept going back to the generic room that Kirsten"s webcam would show behind her.
It took her an hour to log all the temp files, and then she created a graphical representation of the data. It was clear that the video chats all originated from the same host. Most of the chats were between ten and twenty minutes, with a few longer than half an hour. Most of them had taken place between four and six in the afternoon, with about 20 percent at night. The afterschool hours were when s.e.xual predators did most of their work-when kids were home without parents and could freely chat on the computer.
Lucy frowned. Kirsten was seventeen, a high school senior. There was no way of knowing whether she was chatting with the same person or different people, because the temp file logged only Kirsten"s computer and the server that hosted the chats.
Kirsten might very well have a boyfriend, and maybe they talked nearly every day over webcam. If that were the case, then she most likely ran off to meet him.
Had she been meeting with the same person the past weekends she had disappeared? Had she gone off with someone voluntarily, or was she being held against her will?
Was Kirsten already dead?
Because no matter how careful you thought you were being, whenever you met an online friend in person, you put yourself at risk. Especially in the world in which Kirsten was playing around.
Lucy consciously focused on the task at hand. She wanted to shake sense into Kirsten, but more, she wanted to find and protect her, to shield her from the depravity she"d probably already seen and experienced.
"You can"t save the world," Lucy said aloud. Her brother Dillon constantly reminded her that she took things too personally, that she wanted to help everyone, and some people didn"t want help.