Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(32)

“Sports teams?”

“Primary geographic indicator used to target boys. You’re a pedophile in Boston, first thing you do is look for kids who describe themselves as Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, or Pats fans. Nine times out of ten, you’ve just identified a victim within driving range. And boys love to talk sports. Another innocuous way of bonding, where the kid is giving up a major piece of personal information, without ever being the wiser.”

D.D. shifted uneasily in her chair. “That’s twisted.”

Detective O shrugged. “Just because they’re predators doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Computers are tools. We use them to help us analyze evidence and process reports. Internet predators use them to reach beyond the walls of their seedy apartments, into your nice, cozy family room, and make contact with your child without you ever knowing the difference. Some of them even create their own sites. Hamsters Who Play Hockey, whatever. On Website A, where they’ve established the relationship, they trace the kid’s user name back to the child’s e-mail addy—a fairly simple technical exercise. Then they send the kid an e-mail, inviting the child to visit hockey-playing hamsters. Nothing scary or alarming about that, especially as the e-mail came from Cute Animal A, who the child’s been ‘playing’ with for weeks. Kid clicks on the hockey-playing hamster link, and bada bing, bada boom, the child is now on a website controlled by a predator, where content will quickly become more and more questionable as the predator ramps up the next phase of the grooming process. Or maybe the predator goes with a direct outreach. From playing virtual games online, to sending an e-mail saying, Hey, buddy, want to meet after school and play catch in the park?”

“Or Want to see my new puppy,” D.D. murmured.

“Second victim,” O filled in. “Stephen Laurent. Yep, come see my puppy would do the trick. And most kids are easily manipulated. They are receiving an e-mail from a perceived friend, so they say yes. They show up at what they think is another kid’s house, to see a puppy, except there’s a grown man there. But there’s also the puppy, and they’ve been trained not to be rude to adults, so even if they’re uncomfortable, even if in the back of their mind they think maybe they shouldn’t…” She shrugged. “They go along. Things we’ve trained our children to do without the help of computers.”

D.D. felt ill. She was accustomed to analytically discussing crime. But now she kept seeing Jack, except five years from now, and she and Alex were taking the time to raise him in the right neighborhood with the right locks on the door and attending the right kind of school, except the minute he went online…Her son would disappear down a virtual rabbit hole, with dark alleys and seedy strangers everywhere, except the dark alleys would be dressed up as brightly colored computer screens and the seedy strangers would be cute little bunnies with names like ILuvSk8boardingInHarvardSquare. Dear Lord.

“Do you have kids?” D.D. asked Ellen O.

The detective’s face was serious. “Are you kidding? I go around spouting facts like 40 percent of girls ages twelve to seventeen have been solicited by a stranger online. Doesn’t really go over well on dates. Or at cocktail parties for that matter. Then, should someone pull out a smartphone while I’m in the room…Let’s just say, at least my cats still hang with me.”

D.D. hadn’t thought of that, but it rang true. O had a head filled with the kind of boogeyman stories no one wanted to hear. D.D. was a homicide detective, and even she wasn’t sure how much of this she could take. It made her feel too powerless, as a mom and a cop.

“So,” D.D. ventured, “you’re saying Antiholde’s computer log proves he was an online predator?”

“Profile fits.”

“And Stephen Laurent?”

“I’d like to glance at his Internet log, but figured I should get your permission first.”

“I’d like you to look at his Internet log, too,” D.D. agreed. “At the moment, we’re searching for any kind of link between the two victims—”

“Pedophiles.”

“Murder victims. If they both frequent these websites you’re talking about…”

“Question becomes,” O said, “how’d their cover get blown? I mean, online, they’re gonna appear like any other user, an excited kid. Except someone figured out who they were and what they were doing.”

“Victim in common?” D.D. guessed. “Someone who knows the victim?”

She was thinking of the forensic handwriting expert she’d talked to last night, Dembowski’s theory that their shooter was an anal-retentive female. D.D. didn’t say anything, however. She didn’t want to contaminate the investigation with an assumption, and apparently graphology itself was riddled with assumptions, not to mention the assumption that the person who left the note was the same person who shot Stephen Laurent. Which brought her to another question. She regarded Detective O.

“You read the crime scene report of the first shooting, Antiholde?”

“Yep, late last night.”

Ah, the good old days, when work didn’t shut off at five.

“Any documentation of a note from the shooter?” D.D. asked.

“What do you mean?”

“When I left the Stephen Laurent scene, I found a note on my car. I’m wondering if it was from the shooter.”