the FBI reports, so this should be short. Did you ever have any hint of this 1919 website before you found it with your friend?”
Then something happened.
Audrey said, “No! I was amazed!”
At the moment he asked the question, Lucas saw something lizard-like flicker in her eyes. She hadn’t expected precisely that question and she’d come up with an answer that was at least partially false.
Lucas thought, Uh-oh. That’s what he thought. But he didn’t know what was behind the flicker.
“You’re sure? I mean, young people go through dozens of websites and I imagine with your business, you go through more than the average . . . person.” He bit off “girl,” “woman,” and “teenager” and opted for the most neutral noise he could make.
Audrey shook her head: “I’d remember it. These people are Nazis and they have nothing to do with fashion. That’s my crew: fashionistas. I’m strictly focused on girls. Nazis? No. I don’t even do boys.”
“I understand the photo was taken by a friend of yours . . . Blake, uh . . . ?”
She nodded. “Blake Winston. He does photos and video for my blog. You’ll talk to him, right?”
“Soon as I leave here,” Lucas said.
“Okay. Well, Blake knows everything about photography. He took my picture for a blog entry, we picked that up, right away. We couldn’t figure out what it was doing on that crazy website, Nazis and all that. Then, the other pictures, he says they were all taken with a telephoto lens. He can tell, something to do with what’s in focus, and what isn’t. He can explain it. But, they’re taken from a long way away. He also thinks that even then, they have to blow them up quite a bit. That’s why they look so crappy.”
“I’ll talk to him about all that,” Lucas said. “You don’t think there’s any possibility that Blake—”
“Oh, no.” She was shaking her head. “No, no, no. For one thing, he hates Nazis and all that white nationalist stuff. He’s really a nice guy, for being as rich as he is.”
“He’s rich?”
“His father is, anyway,” Audrey said. “He runs a fund. His father does. A hedge fund.”
Lucas smiled at her: young as she was, she sounded like she knew what she was talking about, that she knew about funds. He turned to Roberta Coil: “Nobody’s contacted you about this?”
“No. I know what you’re thinking, that came up with the FBI agents. Nobody’s tried to blackmail me into changing a vote,” she said. “If you looked at all my votes since this website was created, you’d see they were all party line and my vote wasn’t critical in changing anything.”
“All right.”
“And that worries me,” Roberta Coil added. “They should have contacted me. If they don’t contact me, and if they haven’t contacted the other parents, what does that mean? Does that mean it’s not an extortion racket? Does that mean the kids are simply up there as targets?”
“Jeez, Mom, thanks a lot,” Audrey said. “That totally makes me feel better.”
Lucas looked back at Audrey. “Since you found the photo, you haven’t felt like somebody was watching you?”
“No. Nothing.”
“There was another girl in the photo with you,” Lucas said, going with “girl” since Audrey used the word. “Is there any possibility that she was the targeted one?”
The senator shook her head: “That was Molly McWilliams. Her father owns a liquor distributorship here in northern Virginia. They’re quite well-off, but not political. All the kids on 1919 are children of politicians, so it seems unlikely that Molly would be the target.”
Lucas asked how a predator might locate Audrey and be able to pick her out from all the other students at her school.
Audrey brushed back a hank of auburn hair: “It’s easy. You go to mom’s website and it lists my dad’s name and mine—I’m the only child. Then you look me up on the internet and you find my blog and there I am. All kinds of pictures. I write about school, and parties, and I get kids to give me iPhone snapshots of who’s looking hot, and so on.”
Lucas asked, “Does all this . . . scare you?”
“Scares the heck out of me,” the senator said.
“It’s a little scary,” Audrey said, glancing over at her mother, who nodded. “I now get dropped off by a Secret Service man and go in the back way at school. I only go three days a week—I do assignments at home the other two, which really helps with the blog, you know.