her, focusing on her pouty lips when her tongue darted out and moistened them. She never once looked his way, but if Perry didn’t know better he’d swear she knew she had an audience and posed, offering one hell of a view of her hot, perfectly shaped body.
If one of his nieces dressed like that, he’d march her right back to her bedroom to change into something more decent. In spite of the lady leaning against her car giving all appearances of being a teenager from her attire down to the way she leaned against her car, her body language screaming attitude and a saucy nature that would probably be hell to take on, Perry guessed her to be probably in her early twenties. He wondered if she dressed to appear younger than she actually was on purpose.
As he took his time getting out of the car, his attention was torn between the conversation now playing out between Franco and the group of teenagers and the young woman leaning against her hybrid. Her short blond hair was tousled, possibly gelled, like some of the teenagers wore their hair. If it weren’t for the curves, the way she filled out her sleeveless minidress, and how her slender legs were crossed and very much on display, he might have guessed her a bored teenager trying to stay out of the scene yet very much a part of it. Perry walked toward the group of kids. Franco spotted him and straightened, intentionally looking away from him and deepening his voice as he addressed the kids.
“Whose car is this?” he demanded.
“She’s not here.” A freckle-faced boy stepped forward. “Olivia gave us rides here, but we can’t find her. We thought she ditched us, but here’s her car and it’s locked. Our stuff is in there.”
Perry glanced again at the young woman leaning against her hybrid while Franco called in the tag and continued questioning the teenagers. It was obvious she was attentively watching the teenagers who loitered around the car Franco was calling in. As Perry watched her, she shifted her attention to him. She had blue eyes, bright blue eyes that were sharp and focused and widened when she realized she did in fact have an audience.
It hit him that a sexual predator might watch a teenage girl the way he was staring at this woman right now. If Perry were determined enough, he could approach the woman, engage in a conversation, and leave with her. Even if she went with him against her will, there weren’t enough people around for anyone to notice, especially if he were to gag her, or even drug her. No one would give them a second glance if Perry were a predator, and if he were confident in his moves.
The thought made him sick, hardening his insides and pissing him off. A quick survey showed there weren’t any other people loitering around them. Perry stood in front of his car, staying put, and squinted at the parked cars nearby. No one sat inside any of them.
The teenagers moved, leaving their huddle, when another car pulled up and a woman got out, hurrying over to Franco and not bothering to turn off her engine.
“That’s my daughter’s car,” she announced. “Where is she?”
Perry glanced again at the woman leaning against the hybrid as the teenagers, who apparently knew the lady who’d just arrived, all started talking, quickly informing her when they’d last seen her daughter.
The woman with the hybrid appeared to be listening attentively to the anxious chatter that escalated in tone to worry and panic when it became apparent that her daughter, Olivia Brown, was missing. Franco was on the phone with Dispatch confirming who had called in the disturbance. Perry headed toward the woman, deciding it wouldn’t hurt to learn what she might have seen.
As he walked around the teenagers toward her, Perry stared at the woman and those bright blue eyes of hers flashed defiantly. She straightened and then the material of her short dress swayed over her perfectly shaped ass as she jumped into her car.
“Hold on a minute,” he called out.
There wasn’t a car parked in front of her hybrid and the woman started hers and peeled out. As she drove away, Perry repeated her tag number out loud to himself. If she was a witness to anything, he would find out.
Chapter 2
Kylie Donovan would nail the son of a bitch to the wall.
“Look at her,” she hissed, staring at the pictures of Maura Reynolds her parents had provided the FBI. “She barely got a taste of life.”
“Which is why you were called in.” Paul Hernandez sat at the computer, clicking his mouse repeatedly while biting his lower lip. “All right. I’ve sent the files I pulled off her hard drive to this flash drive.” Paul tapped the small drive plugged into the USB port in the tower next to him. Then pushing his glasses up his nose he stared at her over the thick brown rims, looking very much the computer geek that he was. “She chatted with a boy named Peter for three months and last October agreed to meet him at the movie theater.”
Kylie stared at the pictures, barely hearing what Paul said. For a moment she didn’t see the pretty young teenager. A half buried, naked body broken and twisted in an impossible position, Karen Donovan, Kylie’s older sister, appeared in her mind, also dead, her legs and arms bent the wrong way.
She knew why she was called in, for the same reason she was flown from city to city any time the local police ran into a snag with online predators. Especially when their prey were teenage girls. Kylie wouldn’t say why, and she wasn’t convinced she knew the reason herself, but she was good at tracking assholes who fed off of innocent teenagers. For some reason, it came naturally to her. It wasn’t something she was proud of, understanding the minds of twisted bastards who fed off of innocent teenagers. She saw the beauty of young girls, how virgins inexperienced in the art of seduction yet provocative in their willingness to flirt and explore could be more of a turn-on than a fully grown woman who was already jaded from life’s experiences.
That was how Karen was, her older sister, cocky and a flirt, flaunting her perfect body and teasing and torturing every boy in their high school. Karen loved every minute of it. And Kylie, being younger and not yet as developed, envied the hell out of her beautiful, perfect sister, who managed to get every boy at school to stumble over his own feet to do anything for her. Kylie couldn’t get any of them to give her the time of day. Of course all of that ended the day her sister died.
Kylie pinched her nose, blowing out an exasperated breath, and put the horrible memory out of her head. Someday she would quit seeing her sister every time she took on a new case. “You’ve tracked the ISPs?”
“That’s why you’re working solo, kiddo.” Paul probably wasn’t more than five years older than Kylie, possibly in his mid-thirties, yet he spoke like an old man.
He looked like a nerd, but there was an easygoing side to him Kylie immediately liked. She’d spent the day with him, after flying into Kansas City and renting a car to drive to the suburb of Mission Hills. And in that short time she already knew he would be volumes of help in gathering data for this case.
“I’m still working on narrowing it down to a specific computer. Our perp is jumping around. But whoever is chatting with these girls is using city computers. The Mission Hills, Kansas, Law Enforcement Center for one, and other city offices, but I’m narrowing it down, and it’s not looking pretty.”
“You think he’s a cop?” she asked, keeping her emotions at bay.
Someone who’d taken an oath to uphold the law, to protect and serve, to watch over the youth of their city and make sure they were safe, was tested and put through rigorous courses in order to earn his, or her, badge. Any signs of being fucked up should have been detected long before he donned that uniform. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d arrested someone in uniform, though. A bad seed could pop up anywhere. Unfortunately, working in law enforcement could make a man, or a woman, believe he, or she, was invincible, above the laws he enforced on everyone else. It didn’t happen a lot. But it did happen. Kylie wouldn’t hesitate in making her arrest, no matter if her perp wore a uniform or not. It wouldn’t take her long to gather intel, scope out the town, and find her guy.
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
