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 breasts. 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.
Kylie stared into her gray-green eyes. Black eyeliner accentuated her clear, attentive eyes, and dark lipstick gave her full lips a pouty look. The teenager would be pretty without all the paint on her face.
“No. Are you?” Kylie answered without hesitating.
The teenager snorted. “You were at the mall yesterday. Then in the parking lot when the cops showed up at Olivia’s car. And here you are now. Mighty coincidental, don’t you think?” There was a challenge in her tone.
Kylie wouldn’t insult the girl’s intelligence. In fact, Kylie commended her for being alert to her surroundings. “I’m not a spy. My name is Kylie.” She held her hand out to shake the teenager’s hand.
