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 ass five weeks ago, she’d been on edge. Nearly seven years … six years, eight months, and two weeks … had passed 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 assignment 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 anticipating 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 overanalyzing 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. “Shit,” he finally said.
“I’ve seen it many times, particularly on the amateur sex 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 he
r 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 password 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 sexual predators hunted for their victims. WCF, a victim-rights group that took a proactive role in tracking predators in cyberspace, 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 participated 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 sexual 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.
Lucy put her charts aside and went through the other files. She saw the empty.mov files that Sean had mentioned, and realized they were time stamped to correlate to the chat log files. That was odd, because there shouldn’t be two files created with one exchange. But there was definitely no data in them, and no way to re-create the images.
One file stood out because it was in a completely different directory. She downloaded an undelete program to Kirsten’s computer, then ran it, watching the computer screen as files were re-created. Many were corrupted or unable to be rebuilt-a common problem if they’d been deleted long ago. Some of those could be recoverable by law enforcement-the FBI had a state-of-the-art recovery process that could re-create more than 90 percent of deleted files, unless the person went to extraordinary lengths to permanently delete the data through a multistep process.
While she waited for her program to finish the laborious process, she wrote up a report for Sean with her ideas as to what the data meant. She was about to send it off when she saw a.mov file undelete. She opened it.
The webcam footage was clearly of Kirsten’s room. Kirsten and a male teen were naked on her bed, his mouth on one of her breasts, her hands holding his head.
Lucy stared, stunned. Why was she surprised? Maybe because she had thought that the generic room was for sex chats only-but an amateur sex video was simply one more step down the same dark path.
And while Kirsten and her young companion were definitely amateurs, both teenagers knew the webcam was on, as they moved and adjusted their positions to make sure it caught all the action. It appeared consensual, the two intentionally creating an amateur sex video; Lucy couldn’t pretend that Kirsten didn’t know.
She couldn’t watch anymore. Her hands were shaking when she clicked stop, and she got up and paced, her legs weak; she would have puked if she had anything in her stomach.
“What have you been doing, Kirsten?” she whispered to no one.
She couldn’t stop shaking. Her fears of being watched by unknown people crawled under her skin like microscopic worms, making the hair rise on the back of her neck. But she wasn’t being watched. And this wasn’t rape; this wasn’t a hidden camera. These were two teenagers voluntarily having sex for the world to see.
Lucy became angry, not at herself, but at Kirsten and her boyfriend. What possessed them to do such a thing? Did they even consider the consequences? That once that video was out, it was in cyberspace forever?
They could have recorded it just for themselves.
Lucy sat back down and considered how to approach searching for this video online. She didn’t want to search the known amateur sex sites-she knew what would happen to her if she went too deep into that world. Verbal chats she could manage because they were just words, but images brought back her nightmares, and with everything that had happened in the last five weeks it was all she could do to keep those memories at bay. She knew herself well enough to know that going to the sex sites would be the tipping point.
Yet what kind of FBI agent would she be if she couldn’t conquer that fear? Because she would likely have to conduct just this sort of investigation if she were assigned to cybercrimes, which was her expertise and her dream job. She had to either find a way to defeat the nightmares and make sure they never returned or learn to live with them.
They’d gone away before; they would go away again. She had to believe this.
Taking another gulp of water as if to fuel her courage, Lucy scrolled through Kirsten’s browsing history, which she knew should have a log of all uploads. Though Kirsten’s history was set to erase every time she logged off, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be re-created. Such a log would be the best bet to find out where if anyw
here Kirsten had uploaded the video, rather than randomly scanning known amateur sex sites.
It took Lucy only fifteen minutes to re-create Kristen’s browsing history and find a promising site called Party Girl.
Lucy clicked the link. Party Girl was a social networking site obviously aimed at men interested in online sex. The ads alone promoted live sex cams, sexting, and pornographic videos. Repugnant to Lucy, who knew too much of what went on behind the scenes, but all legal-at least on the surface.
Both men and women-ostensibly all over eighteen-had profile pages where they could post their personal videos and photographs. There were links to group chats, private chats, webcam chats, and more.
Kirsten had a profile on the Party Girl site, but not under her own name. Her browser led to the Web page of Ashleigh, though Ashleigh’s pictures were clearly Kirsten’s. They were revealing, but not pornographic. Ashleigh’s Web profile indicated that she was “into” meeting men online and stated that she was nineteen. Lucy would have to create a membership on the site to access further private information on Ashleigh.
She debated her options. Sean could hack Kirsten’s Party Girl password, but it would take time. If Lucy registered, she could find out now what exactly Kirsten had posted on the Internet. Lucy’s computer had extensive firewalls-not only because of her own personal security concerns, but also because Kate taught cybercrime at Quantico. They probably had the best-protected computers outside of the FBI offices.
Creating a profile cost nothing, though if Lucy wanted to view videos or post anything she’d be required to pay a monthly or annual fee. She opted for the free profile and created a false identity, similar to many she’d created in the past while working for WCF. She didn’t post a picture, and a pop-up told her that to receive the full benefits of social interaction on Party Girl, posting photographs and videos was encouraged. She exited the pop-up and continued with the brief questionnaire.
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