Kiss Me, Kill Me

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 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 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.