to be listening attentively to the anxious chatter that escalated in tone to worry and panic when it became apparent that her daughter, Olivia Brown, was missing. Franco was on the phone with Dispatch confirming who had called in the disturbance. Perry headed toward the woman, deciding it wouldn’t hurt to learn what she might have seen.
As he walked around the teenagers toward her, Perry stared at the woman and those bright blue eyes of hers flashed defiantly. She straightened and then the material of her short dress swayed over her perfectly shaped ass as she jumped into her car.
“Hold on a minute,” he called out.
There wasn’t a car parked in front of her hybrid and the woman started hers and peeled out. As she drove away, Perry repeated her tag number out loud to himself. If she was a witness to anything, he would find out.
Chapter 2
Kylie Donovan would nail the son of a bitch to the wall.
“Look at her,” she hissed, staring at the pictures of Maura Reynolds her parents had provided the FBI. “She barely got a taste of life.”
“Which is why you were called in.” Paul Hernandez sat at the computer, clicking his mouse repeatedly while biting his lower lip. “All right. I’ve sent the files I pulled off her hard drive to this flash drive.” Paul tapped the small drive plugged into the USB port in the tower next to him. Then pushing his glasses up his nose he stared at her over the thick brown rims, looking very much the computer geek that he was. “She chatted with a boy named Peter for three months and last October agreed to meet him at the movie theater.”
Kylie stared at the pictures, barely hearing what Paul said. For a moment she didn’t see the pretty young teenager. A half buried, naked body broken and twisted in an impossible position, Karen Donovan, Kylie’s older sister, appeared in her mind, also dead, her legs and arms bent the wrong way.
She knew why she was called in, for the same reason she was flown from city to city any time the local police ran into a snag with online predators. Especially when their prey were teenage girls. Kylie wouldn’t say why, and she wasn’t convinced she knew the reason herself, but she was good at tracking assholes who fed off of innocent teenagers. For some reason, it came naturally to her. It wasn’t something she was proud of, understanding the minds of twisted bastards who fed off of innocent teenagers. She saw the beauty of young girls, how virgins inexperienced in the art of seduction yet provocative in their willingness to flirt and explore could be more of a turn-on than a fully grown woman who was already jaded from life’s experiences.
That was how Karen was, her older sister, cocky and a flirt, flaunting her perfect body and teasing and torturing every boy in their high school. Karen loved every minute of it. And Kylie, being younger and not yet as developed, envied the hell out of her beautiful, perfect sister, who managed to get every boy at school to stumble over his own feet to do anything for her. Kylie couldn’t get any of them to give her the time of day. Of course all of that ended the day her sister died.
Kylie pinched her nose, blowing out an exasperated breath, and put the horrible memory out of her head. Someday she would quit seeing her sister every time she took on a new case. “You’ve tracked the ISPs?”
“That’s why you’re working solo, kiddo.” Paul probably wasn’t more than five years older than Kylie, possibly in his mid-thirties, yet he spoke like an old man.
He looked like a nerd, but there was an easygoing side to him Kylie immediately liked. She’d spent the day with him, after flying into Kansas City and renting a car to drive to the suburb of Mission Hills. And in that short time she already knew he would be volumes of help in gathering data for this case.
“I’m still working on narrowing it down to a specific computer. Our perp is jumping around. But whoever is chatting with these girls is using city computers. The Mission Hills, Kansas, Law Enforcement Center for one, and other city offices, but I’m narrowing it down, and it’s not looking pretty.”
“You think he’s a cop?” she asked, keeping her emotions at bay.
Someone who’d taken an oath to uphold the law, to protect and serve, to watch over