Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(62)

“What’s on the phone?” Butch asked quietly. “Tell us.”

There was a long pause before Jenny was able to gather herself enough to speak coherently. “She had close to two hundred messages—some texts and some e-mails—on the phone when I picked it up. There are more now, way more. They keep coming in all the time.”

“What kind of messages?” Butch asked.

“A bunch of them show pictures of Beth,” Jenny answered at last. “Naked pictures of her. Some of them show pictures of the men writing to her, and they’re mostly naked, too. The messages are all addressed to ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike,’ and the things they’re saying are so ugly, so gross—” Jenny broke off again. “I’ve heard people talk about sexting, but this is the first time I’ve seen it. I can’t even say how awful it is.”

“But if Beth is missing,” Joanna said, slightly changing the subject, “when did you last see her?”

“This morning,” Jenny answered, seeming to get a grip. “She was still asleep when I left for my final. She had two of them today. When I came home this afternoon, she wasn’t there, but I didn’t think anything about it. I went down to the Lazy 8 to ride for a while. Then I met up with Nick, and we had something to eat. When I came home tonight, Beth still wasn’t in our room, but her purse was. I thought maybe she was doing laundry or hanging out with someone here at the dorm, but the longer I went without hearing from her and without her answering the phone, the more I started to worry. Finally I decided to go looking for her phone.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Right here where I’m standing—in the middle of campus.”

“Have you called the cops?”

“Not yet.”

“You need to,” Joanna said. “You need to notify the campus police right now before you go back to your room. You’ll need to show them exactly where you found the phone because there might be other evidence there besides just that to tell them what happened. Call them first, and then call us back.”

“You’re sure the photos are of Beth?” Butch asked.

“I’m sure.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of the tattoo,” Jenny said. “At Thanksgiving her mother had a cow because Beth was using a cell phone. If she’d seen the tattoo she would have gone bananas.”

“What kind of tattoo?” Joanna asked.

“I ? Ron with red ink in the heart,” Jenny answered. “It’s on her left breast. She showed it to me right after she got it. She was beyond proud.”

“I’ll just bet she was,” Joanna said with a sigh. “Make that call now and then get back to us.”

“Okay,” Jenny said uncertainly.

“And don’t worry,” Butch added, attempting to reassure her. “I’m sure it’s going to be all right.”

“I don’t think so,” Jenny replied, “but I’m hanging up now.”

For several moments after the call ended, Butch and Joanna sat in stunned silence. “I’m guessing it’s the boyfriend,” Butch said. “She shared nude pictures of herself with him. Then, when their romance hit a bump in the road, he shipped them off to a porn site.”

“And not just the photos,” Joanna replied. “He must have sent along her contact information as well.”

“Contemptible!” Butch muttered.

“It’s also against the law,” Joanna said. “This is called sextortion. There was a panel on this at the last sheriff’s conference I attended. Not only is this kind of extortion illegal, it’s also dangerous. Most of the time, the victims are young and female, and many of them end up so ashamed that they commit suicide.”

“So what do we do?” Butch asked.

“I happen to know that the FBI has a task force working on this. I’m calling Robin.”

Robin was FBI Special Agent Robin Watkins. Several years earlier she had gotten crosswise with one or more of the higher-ups in the D.C. office and had found herself banished to the hinterlands. From the hallowed halls of the J. Edgar Hoover building, Tucson might have looked like the back of the beyond and a suitable exile for someone regarded as an uppity female who needed to be brought down a peg. Unfortunately for them, Robin had taken to the Sonoran Desert like a duck to water. She and Joanna had worked together several times in the past, and Joanna had no compunction about calling at what many would have regarded as an inappropriate hour.

“What’s up?” Robin asked cheerfully once she realized who was on the phone.

In as few words as possible, Joanna brought Robin up to speed. “All right, then,” Robin said when Joanna finished laying out the situation. “If the boyfriend is in D.C. and the girl is in Flagstaff, thanks to the Internet this has already crossed state lines. I know some of the people working on these kinds of cases. I’ll put them in touch with the campus cops at NAU. And give me Jenny’s cell number, too. I’m sure they’ll want to talk to her as well.”

As Joanna finished giving Robin the number, Jenny called back, and once again Joanna put her on speaker. This time Jenny seemed to be more in control than she’d been earlier.

“I’m back in the room,” she said. “When the cops showed up, they told me to come back here and wait for a detective to come interview me while they search the scene. But before they got there, I looked at the contacts list in Beth’s phone, and it’s really weird. There’s no listing in her phone for a Ron or Ronald Cameron—none at all. If he’s Beth’s boyfriend, why wouldn’t he be in her contacts?”