going through, who she was seeing, whether she was having problems. But here, kids are even shutting down their Facebook pages. Is it possible Julia was being bullied?” She wouldn’t be the first teenager to kill herself after a relentless campaign of torment that kids were capable of launching these days, typical schoolyard teasing now amplified by a thousand with a turbo boost from technology.
“I hate to say this, but Julia would have been more likely to be the bullier than the bullied in that kind of scenario. They’re pulling down their profiles because the school put the fear of God in them-no, worse, the fear of tackiness. Some kids might trade a lung for the infamy of some lame song on YouTube, but Casden’s all about propriety. The headmistress made it very clear: even if they set their pages to ‘private,’ all it takes is for one friend to cooperate with the media.”
“Next thing the kid knows,” Rogan said, “his party pictures are on the front page of a tabloid, the poster child for prep school dysfunction.”
“Exactly. So to make sure nothing is taken out of context, no Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, all that nonsense. One of the administrators told me that the school even hired a public relations firm to search the Internet for stories about the school and have the negative ones scrubbed. It’s like 1984.”
“But we saw parents lobbying the headmistress. They were angry, and they wanted information. Won’t a private school need to listen to that kind of pressure?”
Wallace was back to his sandwich, pausing to swallow before responding. “It’ll be interesting to watch the fallout. The kind of people who send their children to this school are used to having their way. But it’s ultimately about supply and demand. You wouldn’t believe some of the family names we’ve turned down. Even the head of the Fed needed a friend to pull strings to get his kid in. Parents can complain, but at the end of the day, what are they going to do? Yank their kids? There are a hundred other families lined up who are willing to tell themselves that two dead teenagers is just a coincidence.”
“Is it?” Rogan asked. “Just a coincidence?”
Wallace crushed the empty wrapper of his sandwich into a tight ball. “I think even I have said enough at this point, Detectives.”
As they were heading back to the car, Rogan’s cell phone buzzed. “Rogan… Yeah… Can’t you just tell me?… All right. We’ll be right down.”
“Now what?”
“That was the CIS detective. He found something on Julia’s laptop.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Most law enforcement jobs came with cool-sounding titles, as with the forensic scientists who worked as criminalists, or the dispatchers, who were communications technicians. Even the clerical staff at least got nifty acronyms- PAAs, short for police administrative aides.
And so, unsurprisingly, the cops who did the increasingly important work of analyzing computers for the NYPD weren’t merely detectives: they were CIS detectives.
Typically, a victim’s computer would have been inspected at the precinct by one of the department’s “computer associates”-civilians who tended toward the long-haired, lanky, Dungeons amp; Dragons techno-nerd variety, more comic-con than Columbo. But when the daughter of Bill Whitmire was involved, Rogan had sent the laptop directly to headquarters to be examined by a CIS detective.
Because Julia was dead, they did not need a court’s permission to search every byte of the computer’s data. They could read her documents, follow her Internet surfing trail, and pore over her e-mail history. With her death, Julia had lost any right to privacy.
Today’s CIS detective introduced himself as Peter Pettinato. From the first glance, Ellie could see he was not the usual only-left-the-basement-to-answer-the-door-for-carry-out type. He was an actual grown-up with short black hair and an equally tidy mustache. There were, however, signs of a creative personality. His cubicle was decorated with photographs of his pets and a few appearances he’d made in local theater productions. In place of a typical office chair, he sat on a bright blue yoga ball.
As Pettinato reached for the closed laptop on his desk, Ellie noticed a sticker of a yellow bird with a white belly on the back of the computer, right above a sticker that read: “Mean People Suck.”
The bird image was familiar. Where had she seen it before? The Brady Bunch? Something about it reminded her of the oldies repeat-channel she used to watch when she was little. That was it. The Partridge Family! It wasn’t an identical cartoon, but the bird reminded her of The Partridge Family.
“Yo. Earth to Hatcher. You there, girl?”
Rogan waved a hand in front of her eyes, as if to check her sight.
“It’s like that parakeet hypnotized you for a sec.”
“Sorry.” The bird sticker made her sad. Sadder than Julia’s water-pruned and lifeless body in the bathtub. With all the emphasis on the Whitmires’ wealth and Julia’s life of privilege and precociousness, Ellie had neglected to remember that she was still only a sixteen-year-old girl. A part of her had still been childlike. It was yet another fact Ellie had overlooked during that initial callout to the townhouse.
Pettinato motioned for them to look over his shoulder. “All right, so here’s what seems relevant based on what you told me yesterday-suspected suicide, slit wrist, found in the tub. You asked me specifically to search for first drafts of the goodbye note, or for any Internet research about depression or suicide. I got zilch on both fronts. The only documents I found on the hard drive all appeared to be school papers-Shakespeare, Civil War, that kind of stuff. I didn’t find any Googling for methods of death, for mental heath issues, for anything like that.”
“So what did she look at online?” Rogan asked.
“Typical teenage fare. Facebook. Twitter-though that was more one-way communication.”
“What does that mean?”
Ellie braced herself for the usual loud sigh that followed questions that struck CIS detectives as stupid, but Pettinato showed no signs of attitude. “It’s how a lot of quote-unquote real people use Twitter. They don’t actually post-or tweet, in the lexicon. But they have accounts so they can follow their favorite celebrities. She followed twits like those big-butt sisters and smack-talking rap stars. That kind of nonsense. So, anyway, Facebook. Twitter. Lots of online shopping. Fashion sites. Yelp for reviews of restaurants and clubs and stuff. Celebrity gossip like TMZ, Us Weekly, and Perez Hilton. Really, not all that much activity as far as surfing goes. But I did find one hit over the weekend to a blog about childhood sex abuse. I thought maybe that could be related, you know?”
If Julia had been abused, it would put her eating disorder and promiscuity into context. It would also make her a prime candidate for suicide.
“And explain to us exactly how you can be sure Julia accessed the blog?” Rogan asked. “And, to be sure, we’re not total Luddites-we get history windows, time stamps, etcetera. It just helps when you break it down.”
Pettinato was waving away the explanations. “I may be CIS, but I’m also a detective. I get it. So, like you said, there’s a history window involved. If we open Safari here… that’s the Internet browser”-he smiled at the exaggeratedly elementary level of the tutorial-“and hit Show All History, and then look at this column called Visit Date? Now we have a list of every site she went to, and the date and time when the visit occurred. And here, on Saturday night, you’ll see three entries for this blog.”
He clicked on the link and the website opened. “Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor.”
Pettinato scrolled down the screen slowly so they could get a sense of the subject matter.
“Can you tell if she’d been following the blog for long?” Rogan asked. “Or going to other websites related to sex abuse?”
“No, this is the only one.”
“It could be a complete fluke,” Ellie offered. She herself had wound up at countless unintended online sites thanks to random hyperlinks, pop-up ads, mistaken mouse clicks, and search-engine snafus.
“That’s what I thought at first,” Pettinato said, “but I swear there’s a reason I thought you’d want to see this.”
He pulled up the history page again, and this time Ellie noticed that the “Second Acts” blog was listed three
