Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(77)

“How old?” she asked Detective O, who stood behind her, shivering in her short dress and boots.

“Victim gave his name as Barry. Said he was sixteen.”

“And he targeted another kid?”

“Seven-year-old boy. Apparently ‘met’ him on a gaming website. Arranged to meet him at the Boston Public Library. Then lured him outside.”

D.D. shook her head. Even after O’s lecture on sex predators becoming younger and younger, sixteen was hard to take. “Has the body been identified?”

“Uniformed officers are canvassing the area now. He was on foot, so maybe someone local will recognize him.”

“There’s a doorstop conversation,” D.D. muttered. “First off, we regret to inform you that your son is dead. Secondly, he was most likely killed while sexually assaulting another child. Shit.”

Detective O didn’t say anything; maybe she shared the sentiment.

“So the older boy got the younger boy outside, then led him here.” D.D. looked around. They were tucked in a back Dumpster area, servicing local establishments. It was secluded, rank-smelling. But not totally private. One end was open to the side street, not to mention they stood before a heavy metal service door used by personnel as they hauled out trash.

“Wonder if he scoped the area out before,” D.D. thought out loud. “Learned the traffic patterns of this alleyway, felt comfortable. Or maybe, as you explained before, it was a case of impulse meeting opportunity. The seven-year-old had followed, so the sixteen-year-old decided to see what he could do.”

Detective O shrugged; given that the perpetrator was now dead, there wasn’t any way of answering such questions.

“The sixteen-year-old had just exposed himself,” O said, “when the woman appeared. The victim didn’t recognize her and has no memory of her following them. But she seemed to know the sixteen-year-old, implied that she’d been watching him. She identified herself as a gamer from the same website.”

D.D. stood up, frowning. “Really? So while one user is targeting kids, another user is targeting the predator. And both were able to find their victims in real life? But how? Isn’t that supposed to be the hard part?”

“Sixteen-year-old probably targeted the younger based on his stated interest in the Red Sox. Once sixteen-year-old established that the boy lived in Boston, he sent an e-mail inviting him to the library, which, as a public place, seemed harmless enough.”

“Lured him in.”

“Exactly. As for our Femme Nikita,” O shrugged, “there are several tools available to her. Personally, I’d start by running my target’s user name through Spokeo, to find other sites he visited. Given ‘Barry’ was sixteen, one of the first sites that would probably come up is his Facebook page. So I’d visit there, study his photo, identify friends, hobbies, interests. Better yet, Facebook has a feature, called Facebook Places or Check In. Meaning that when ‘Barry’ posts while at the Boston library, that site automatically shows up as part of the post. Now, La Femme Nikita can follow all of Barry’s comings and goings, including that he was at the Boston Public Library tonight. Assuming she has a smartphone, she doesn’t even need to lug around a laptop. She simply carries her smartphone in one hand, her gun in the other, and lets Barry tell her exactly where he’s going and what he’s doing. Takes all the fun out of stalking if you ask me.”

D.D. shook her head, gazing down at the snowy shadow of a dead kid. “But you said the sixteen-year-old targeted his victim at a gaming website, not the chat room you and Phil discussed earlier?”

“Not the chat room. AthleteAnimalz.com, however, is a major corporate kiddie site. Chances are, our first two pedophiles roamed there as well.”

“Meaning that’s the connection, not the chat room.”

“Or all of the above. The pedophile community isn’t that large. It’s not unreasonable that their paths crossed in several different sites on the Web.”

D.D. could buy that. She straightened, working on getting the choreography established in her head. “Sixteen-year-old boy targets seven-year-old-boy. Lures him to dark alley. Then…this woman appears. What happened next?”

“According to our seven-year-old witness, she was already holding the twenty-two. Pretty much ignored the younger boy, homed straight in on Barry. Of course, at this point, Barry had his pants unzipped and was holding his penis, making himself the obvious target.”

“What’d she say?”

“Not much. Confirmed the older boy’s Internet identity as Pink Poodle—”

“A sixteen-year-old boy is Pink Poodle?”

“Welcome to the Internet. And for the record, that strategy helped him. The seven-year-old agreed to meet tonight in part because he assumed he’d be meeting a girl, and who’s afraid of a girl?”

“Shit,” D.D. said.

“The shooter then identified herself as Helmet Hippo, another user from the website. Teenager tried to defend himself. Argued his age, said he’d change.”

D.D. looked down at the snow angel. “Obviously, that didn’t work.” But it bothered her again. Sixteen years old. Shot down in cold blood. What if he could’ve changed? The courts probably wouldn’t have tried him as an adult, but another citizen had. Tried him and executed him in a matter of minutes.