Strong, Sleek and Sinful - By Lorie O'Clare Page 0,58
had enough involvement raising those girls for them to know better than to meet some stranger off the computer.”
Perry nodded and pulled up in front of the house. They weren’t quite up the walk to the front door when it opened and Eileen, a woman not much older than Perry, and fairly pretty, nodded to the two of them. She looked as though she hadn’t slept and leaned heavily on the doorknob when she stood to the side so the men could enter.
“How are you doing today?” Carl asked, always the concerned cop.
“Not very well,” she answered honestly, offering both of them a small smile and then taking the copy of the subpoena Carl handed her. “This way. Her computer is in her room.”
They followed Eileen up the stairs and down a wide hall to a bedroom, whose door was closed. She pushed it open and walked in ahead of them. There were clothes on the floor and the bed wasn’t made, giving all indications that someone had slept here the night before and headed out that morning in a hurry. Perry guessed Eileen hadn’t touched it since her daughter disappeared by the somewhat musky smell in the room.
“Do you know what chat programs she used?” he asked, pulling out the wooden chair from the desk and sitting in front of the home computer.
“We all use AOL,” Eileen said. “But I think Kathleen used Yahoo! Messenger sometimes, too. I’m sorry I don’t know her passwords or anything. I guess I should have made her give those to me.” She sounded defeated.
“From what you’ve told us, it sounded as if Kathleen was a good girl,” Carl offered.
“She was the best.” Eileen choked and covered her hand with her mouth. “When she approached us and talked to us about meeting a boy who went to another high school but whom she’d been chatting with online we had a long discussion about it. Mitch and I thought Kathleen understood the danger involved in meeting someone from the Internet, even when the situation appeared harmless. We even offered to invite him over to the house so they could meet that way.” Her voice cracked and she covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m sorry. Do you need me in here? I’ll let you two do whatever you need to do.”
Carl walked out of the bedroom, offering words of support and asking if Eileen and her husband had considered counseling for dealing with the loss of their daughter. Perry let Carl console Eileen and studied the contents of the desk while the computer booted up. His instructions were to remove the hard drive and return to the station, but he wanted to search the computer for what he could find before doing that.
He stood, walking over to the briefcase Carl had placed on Kathleen’s bed, and pulled out a ziplock bag and gloves. Then returning to the computer, Perry gently removed the pictures that had been taped around the monitor, pictures of Kathleen and her friends, different poses, different friends. A few of them were class pictures. Either way, they created a profile on her, helping him know who her group of friends were.
He went through the programs on her computer, took a look at the list of songs that were on it, and opened a few files that seemed to be nothing more than homework assignments.
“Find anything?” Carl entered the room. “Mrs. Long is downstairs if we need her.”
“Nothing yet,” Perry said, closing the ziplock bag and handing it to Carl as he slid back into the chair in front of the computer.
“She gave me a list of pet names, birth dates, anything she could think of to help us with passwords.” Carl didn’t bother handing the list to Perry but pulled out another bag and slipped the paper inside.
When they took the hard drive down to the station, passwords wouldn’t be an issue. They could crack into any password-protected program once they hooked the hard drive up to the computers there.
Perry clicked on Yahoo! Messenger, knowing it was his nieces’ preferred chat program. The long, slender box appeared on the screen, Kathleen’s screen name and her password already saved into it.
“We’re in luck,” he said, and Carl moved to his side. “We find a screen name with Pete, or Peter, and we might have to add pornography charges to kidnapping, rape, and murder.”
“Do you think Kathleen is connected to the other girls who’ve disappeared?”
“I’d bet my life on it,” Perry muttered, and watched