And anyone capable of doing this to a young girl was a hell of a lot more than mental—he was insane, not worth saving or wasting tax dollars on to rehabilitate. As far as Kylie was concerned, he should be made to suffer a horrendous death worse than what he put his victims through.
“What I think doesn’t matter,” Paul said, as if he followed her line of thinking and came up with the inevitable conclusion. He was still clicking his mouse repeatedly and staring unblinking at his computer screen. “It’s our job to find proof. Just the facts, ma’am.”
Kylie turned to study Paul. Although still light outside, heavy shadows stretched across the small office. Light from his monitor cast different shades of color over his hard, dark face as he continued jumping from screen to screen. There were streaks of silver in his black hair and crow’s-feet stretched to his temples, more visible through the lenses of his glasses that he stared over as he focused on the computer. He was a gaunt man, but not grossly unattractive.
The thick gold band on his ring finger and the heavy gold chain around his neck stood out against his brown skin, making them look more like intentional bling-bling than jewelry he’d probably worn for so many years he forgot they were there. Something told her, in the week or so she’d spent communicating with him prior to arriving here in Mission Hills, that her opinion of him summed up his nature: the computer geek taken for granted and often forgotten by agents in the field until they needed his talents. Special agents like him were overlooked in the heat of the action, yet Kylie wouldn’t be as ready to jump into this case if it weren’t for the profile he’d already created on her perp.
Paul pulled the flash drive out of the USB port and held it in his hand, palm up. Kylie walked over to his desk and took it.
“What you think does matter. I want your opinion, Paul,” she said quietly, and moved so she could see the screen he stared at through the lenses in his glasses. She pressed her lips together, hiding her smile when she realized he was playing a computer game. “Any gut reaction or thoughts that come to mind, whether you can prove them at the moment or not, matter to me and I need to hear them,” she added, walking around his desk and staring at his monitor.
“Okay, sweetheart,” he said, clicking his mouse repeatedly while moving a starship into orbit around a glowing red planet. “Peter is a city employee, paid by the hardworking citizens of Mission Hills and sitting at a computer right now somewhere here in town, trying to beat my high score.”
An instant message box popped up in front of Paul’s starship, and he moved the cursor to minimize it so quickly Kylie barely managed to read what it said.
“You’re battling against our perp right now?” she asked, shocked.
“Don’t know,” he said, and sent a stream of laser fire toward an approaching ship until it exploded on the screen.
The next evening Kylie pulled into the narrow driveway of the rental house provided by the FBI and hung up her cell phone. Everything was in place. The tag on her car was registered to Kylie Dover, her undercover name. She’d signed a month-to-month lease and picked up all of her new identification for her undercover work. Her aunt in Topeka owned the house, as the cover story went, and anyone who did a background check would learn that much. The FBI was very good at protecting their own.
She’d answered to many names over the past five years. Although a lot of her cases were handled in her home office in Dallas, once she showed an ability to narrow in on this particular type of perp, her supervisor, Susie Parker, started sending her around the country, helping out local law enforcement agencies to nail online sexual predators.
At least this time she would use her real first name, except when she was online. She might not be attacking starships in distant galaxies, but her battle would definitely go down on the Internet. The online predator stalking and killing teenagers in Mission Hills would die from worse than laser file, at least if she had anything to say about it.
Paul Hernandez turned the corner in his Ford F-150 and pulled in behind her rental car. This wasn’t her favorite part of a case, all the prep work, and she was grateful he’d agreed to stop by and help her get organized. Kylie pushed the button to release the trunk and then hopped out of her car.
“Holy crap,” Paul said, and then let out a low whistle between his teeth. “How much for the goods?” he drawled, strolling up her driveway and eyeballing the skimpy outfit she’d worn while scoping out several of the teenage hangouts in town.
“You couldn’t afford me,” she told him smugly, and walked around to her opened trunk. “There’s more stuff inside. We’ve got this computer, and then a camera system that needs to be installed. Without your help, this would take me all night.”
“You stay in that getup, we might be here all night anyway.” Paul reached in and lifted out the box holding her new computer, then wagged his eyebrows at her before heading toward her house. “That or I might have to persuade the wife to put her cheerleading outfit on tonight.”
“I’ll change,” Kylie called out after him, and smiled when he groaned.
Slamming her trunk closed, she looked up and down the street before heading inside. She’d been here a couple days and had stopped at quite a few different businesses where kids tended to hang out, the fast-food chains in walking distance of the high school, the mall, the bowling alley, as well as the library. Only once did anyone pay attention to her, and that was while she watched the kids trying to get into their friend’s car outside the mall. It didn’t take much to learn the man who’d tried approaching her was an off-duty cop, and she hadn’t seen him since. She couldn’t let her guard down for a second, though, especially with their perp possibly being a cop.
Her work was cut out for her, getting to know who’d been friends with Maura Reynolds and Sally Wright, as well as learning enough about the kids in town to find out if any one of them might be chatting with someone named Peter. Kylie would need to go online and try to lure her perp out of hiding. The toughest part of her job would be getting to know the local cops. Anyone comfortable enough to rape and murder while donning a badge daily would be shrewd, incredibly confident, and also capable of obtaining inside knowledge about how close she might be to closing in on him.
Kylie changed into comfortable shorts and a T-shirt, ordered pizza, and worked with Paul until the house was secure and wired thoroughly.
“No one will set foot on your lawn without you knowing.” Paul finished screwing the plate into the wall and stood back adjusting the cameras in the smaller of the two bedrooms that now looked like a high-tech surveillance room. “Any chat conversations will be saved using this program here. Every keystroke is monitored as well. It’s all saved to this flash drive.”
All the equipment now installed in her small two-bedroom rental house was standard-issued equipment. “I’m familiar with the programs,” she assured him, but continued listening since Paul seemed intent on explaining how everything worked.
As it grew dark, she closed blinds and turned on lights. It had been a long two days. She pinched the bridge of her nose, her eyes dry with exhaustion.
“Okay, kiddo.” Paul packed up his tools in a small leather case and looked at the room like a proud father. “My work here is done. Get some sleep. I’ve finished the easy part. You’ve got the hard part of the job, catching this asshole.”
“We’ll catch him.” Kylie patted Paul’s shoulder while walking behind him down the hall to her front door. “But you’re right; I’m ready to crash.”
She would soak in a hot bath and then see how many hours she could get online before she couldn’t stay awake any longer.
“Where are you headed tomorrow?” he asked, pulling his cell out and glancing at the screen before shoving it back in his pocket.
“Tomorrow is Friday. I can hit the bowling alley after school and there are a few house parties I heard about while hanging at the McDonald’s across from the high school today.”
“You’re going to house parties?” Paul reached for t
he front door but turned and raised an eyebrow.
“No,” she said quickly. “That won’t be necessary. I need to be around the kids in order to learn if any of the girls are chatting with someone online they don’t know. From what I heard today, the group I was following will be at the bowling alley tomorrow and Saturday. Then there’s another group that camps out at the movie theater by the mall both Friday and Saturday.”
Paul stepped around her and scooped up one of the remaining pieces of thin-crust pepperoni pizza slices. She watched him stuff half the slice into his mouth. “I’ll need to log into your local network,” she told him.
Paul nodded and grunted, his mouth full of pizza. Wiping his hand on his jeans, he reached into his back pocket, pulled out a worn wallet, and then freed a card, which he handed to her. She stared at the plain business card, one similar to the kind she had—somewhere.
“Call me tomorrow and we’ll get you set up with a screen name and password. That’s my cell,” he said, pointing with his thumb at the card. “I’m going to head out. The wife’s already called twice.”
Kylie smiled. Everyone in her world had someone to answer to except her. “I’ll call if I need anything.”
Once Paul was gone, she set up her police scanner, turned it up so she could hear it, then headed back for a hot bath. An hour later she sat in front of the computer, ready to create her profile as a teenage girl. Her assignment: nail the son of a bitch who was raping and killing girls in Mission Hills, Kansas. Her focus: the Mission Hills Police Department. No city employee or official in Mission Hills, or anywhere in the Kansas City area, knew she was here; no one other than the handful of people working at the field office here in town.
Kylie clicked on the Internet Explorer icon, typed in “Yahoo!” and then proceeded creating a screen name. She typed in a few variations, working until she found one that wasn’t already in use. Grabbing one of the flash drives out of her purse, she plugged it in and then opened the first file. She’d taken pictures of herself with her digital camera before arriving here. Not professional. Some of them goofy. And looking very much like pictures that she’d seen on the many teenager profiles she’d browsed through over the past few days. It never ceased to amaze her how much information she could always gather about high school kids in whatever city she worked simply by going to Twitter and Facebook.
Sticking to the life she’d created for Kayla, her online persona, she worked with her new profile—Kayla2010. She was sixteen, graduating from high school in 2010, and from Wyoming. She was in Kansas City, not Mission Hills, so kids online wouldn’t question who she was, staying with her grandmother. Using the pictures on her flash drive and searching the Internet for backgrounds and songs to finalize the profile she made, Kylie finally sat back and let her head fall.
“That was work,” she said out loud, and straightened, realizing it was almost midnight. It sucked sometimes not being able to use the same profile as she moved from city to city, chasing down the bastards who made the Internet their lair for sick behavior. If there was one strong consistency about online predators, they were intelligent, usually very Internet savvy, and if her profiles didn’t appear 100 percent legitimate she wouldn’t be able to nail them.
But the basic traps were set. Tomorrow she’d start working the profiles, hitting chat rooms, blogs, and YouTube.
Kylie crawled into bed, leaving the scanner on for background noise, and cuddled under her new blankets. Another town, another bedroom, another case. She was damn good at what she did. One of the best.
As she closed her eyes, images of the many profiles she’d been to that evening swam around in her head. She faded away, hitting a deep, hard sleep quickly. There visions of her older sister, so perfect and popular, until the day she was found naked and beaten, and very dead, tortured Kylie’s dreams.
Kylie stared at the open coffin, watching her older sister for the longest time, willing her to move. She’d been fourteen, her older sister, Karen, seventeen, and that funeral was the day Kylie’s life ended. Their happy family destroyed, changed forever, as dead as her sister.
Her father, who’d never missed a day’s work in his life, suddenly seemed sick all the time. Kylie remembered watching her mother grow old before her eyes, as if time were sped up and in a week she’d aged twenty years. The laughter ended. Their home turned into a shell. Where once there was continual chatter and TVs on in every room and her mother’s radio always buzzing in the kitchen, the moment they returned home from the funeral all that seemed forgotten. The house was quiet, continuous, non-ending silence, like the tomb where Kylie’s sister lay. Kylie didn’t grow up, she passed through time, until she, too, left the shell that once was her family.
Now Kylie kept it on autopilot, determined to make up for her sister dying so unnecessarily. It was more than a full-time job. It was Kylie’s life’s work.
Today she didn’t allow social life, or family, to get in her way. Her family was destroyed with the death of her sister. But if Kylie worked her ass off, other families wouldn’t be destroyed like hers was.
She twisted the sheet around her body, waking up from the painful dreams and staring at the ceiling. Her mom had called before Kylie had left Dallas. She still had the voice-mail message on her phone and needed to return the call soon. Suddenly Mom wanted to be friends, as if so many painful years hadn’t passed between them. She told Kylie living like this wasn’t healthy, pointing out she had never dealt with the sorrow of losing her sister. Kylie could handle her mom believing that about her. It was better than her mom thinking Kylie worked her ass off to prevent loving anyone. Never again would she know the pain and deal with the sorrow and healing process of losing someone she loved.
The noise in the bowling alley was comparable to a dull roar. Kylie managed to ignore it as she sat at a table, nursing a Coke and focusing on her laptop. She glanced up when a group of kids, four boys and three girls, entered the building and headed toward the arcade connected to the bowling alley. They were the same group of kids she’d followed around the mall yesterday.
One of the girls looked Kylie’s way and smirked. Maybe it was a smile. The girl’s long brown straight hair covered part of her face, which looked intentional. She wore a tube top, hip-hugging jeans that showed off her concave tummy, and an oversized plaid shirt that was unbuttoned and flowed behind her like a cape.
The girl next to her grabbed the long-haired girl’s arm, and she looked away from Kylie focusing across the lanes as her friend whispered in her ear. Kylie watched the two girls follow their friends through the opened doors into the arcade.
Another group entered from the doors behind Kylie. A bunch of guys, feeling a good buzz, it appeared from their loud and obnoxious behavior, traipsed past her toward the counter.
“This isn’t the library, shorty,” one of them sneered at her.
“I got something you can study,” his buddy offered, stopping in front of her and letting his gaze travel down her and then back to her face with an open invitation.
Kylie smelled alcohol on them and knew from experience that any comment would be enough to egg them on. She glanced toward the arcade room, no longer seeing the teenagers.
“Don’t tell me you like little boys,” the first one sneered, following her focus toward the other room.
“I don’t,” she said, standing. “Which is why I’m not talking to you.”
She couldn’t help herself. Although barely five feet, five inches, and 135 pounds of lean muscle and little body fat, Kylie lived with being thought younger than she looked. Her physical appearance aided in her line of work, though. She was the perfect bait for any online predator. Unfortunately, there were too many lowlifes who weren’t criminals but would pick up any woman, including her. Kylie didn’t mind using her physical appearance to help lure scum of the earth out from under their rocks. Occasionally she yearned for a real man, someone who was intelligent, gorgeous, and could carry on a conversation while looking at her face instead of her br
easts. In her line of work though, those weren’t the type of men she spent time with.
Closing her laptop and getting up from the table, Kylie ignored the laughter of the men and the rude comment the guy she’d just insulted threw at her. It was getting into late Friday afternoon, and she only had an hour or so of the teenagers being here before they would head out for the next hangout spot.
She shoved her laptop into her leather case and zipped it up while working her way around the growing group of people lingering behind the lanes. The noise level dropped drastically when she entered the arcade. So did the lighting. The group of teenagers sat on a long cafeteria-length table in the corner of the room. Legs draped over bodies and they all managed to touch one another somehow as they twisted and crawled over each other, laughing and sharing cans of Coke.
Kylie walked up to a game that looked similar to the one Paul was playing on his computer the other day. Dropping her laptop case in front of her, she dug into her pocket for coins. It was important to become part of the environment in order to learn more about the prey of the predator she stalked. No matter how many times she tried playing these games, she sucked at them. But she stood close enough to hear the kids talking and hoped if they mentioned chatting online she’d learn if any of them were talking to a Peter, or anyone whom they possibly hadn’t met in person yet. Fortunately, she was an expert at understanding teenage lingo, which was a language in and of itself.
“Are you a spy?” The girl with the long brown hair leaned against the side of the arcade game, sizing Kylie up.
Strong, Sleek and Sinful Page 3
