Marcia Talley - Through the Darkness

Once again I felt cold fingers of doubt creep along my spine. What if Dante had known the woman in the ice cream shop? What if he were in cohoots with her? I shivered and checked the clock. It was almost ten o’clock, time for Cross Current to begin. “Should I call now or wait until morning? I don’t want to wake anybody up.”

Paul scowled. “The FBI is working Timmy’s case 24/7. Why would you consider waiting even for a single minute?”

Paul was right, of course, and I was an idiot. While he and Ruth migrated to the living room, I used the telephone in the kitchen to contact Amanda Crisp on her cell phone and report directly to her what my granddaughter had told me. I detected a reassuring note of optimism in Crisp’s voice when she said that, indeed, the FBI had a child abuse unit specially trained to work with children, and she would encourage Dante and Emily to arrange for an appointment for them to talk with Chloe.

When I got back to the living room, Paul was aiming the remote at the cable box, scrolling down to Channel 4.

Aside from Erika’s interest in the program, we still hadn’t the slightest clue what the show was about. We’d kept the television turned off until the kids went to bed, so if NBC had been running any trailers about Cross Current that night, we’d missed them. Earlier, I’d checked the TV listing in the newspaper, but it provided no hints whatsoever to what person or institution Mitch Harmon would be skewering that evening.

Our wineglasses had miraculously refilled themselves, however, so we were prepared for anything.

Paul patted the spot next to him on the sofa. I sat there, curled my feet up under me, and endured the final five minutes of some ridiculous reality show before the Cross Current theme music began.

“Good Evening. This is Cross Current, and I’m Mitch Harmon. Several months ago we reported to you that the Internet has opened doors for pedophiles and child predators to enter, uninvited, into the privacy of our homes. Not only are children being lured into traveling to meet a person in the physical world whom they’ve met online, but pedophiles are traveling to our children! And it’s happening worldwide.”

Ruth groaned. “Pedophiles! Erika thinks this is the kind of thing we need to watch right now?”

“She’s a children’s rights advocate, Ruth. She implied that she has some sort of connection with the show.” I turned to Paul. “Maybe she’s on it!”

“Shhhh,” Paul ordered. “Just watch!”

I returned my attention to Mitch Harmon, as ordered. The reporter had a square face, handsome in a rugged sort of way, and a shock of wavy brown hair. At that moment his normally smooth thirty-something brow was deeply creased. Mitch and his brow disappeared, to be replaced by a slide show of men, all fairly normal-looking. The guy who changes the oil in your car. The teen who cuts your grass. The manager at the bank. Your next door neighbor.

In voice-over, Mitch continued, “ So many children are at risk, that we decided to go undercover, filling an upscale home in a Maryland suburb with hidden cameras. Soon, a long line of visitors came knocking, expecting to find a youngster they’d been chatting with on the Internet home alone. Instead, they found Cross Current.

“To demonstrate the disturbing reality of what goes on in some chat rooms, we enlisted the help of volunteers from a vigilante organization called Predator-Beware. Volunteers of this controversial group are experts at pretending to be children online in order to catch and expose potential predators. One of these vigilantes is Debra Darden.”

A new face filled the screen. Debra Darden looked to be about forty, with close-set brown eyes and a cap of blunt-cut gray hair.

“Debra, how do you, as a PredatorBeware operative, go about catching sexual predators?”

“Well, Mitch,” Debra explained to the viewing audience, “it’s ridiculously simple. First we go into chat rooms, usually through AOL or Yahoo, and set up a profile of a twelve-, thirteen-, or fourteen-year-old… a profile that often includes a photo of a child who is quite obviously underage. Then we just sit and wait to be contacted by an adult.”

Somewhere off-camera another voice spoke low, as if reporting on a golf putt. “Tony thinks he’s coming to the house of a twelve-year-old boy whose parents have left him alone for the weekend. Tony has brought along a six pack of beer.”

We watched transfixed as a man who must have been Tony entered the kitchen wearing nothing but his smile and the six pack. Electronic fuzzing covered his naughty bits.

Ruth, who had been leaning toward the television screen, flopped back in her chair, covered her mouth with both hands. “Excuse me while I barf.”

When confronted by the Cross Current team-who thoughtfully tossed him a dish towel-Tony claimed he simply felt sorry for the boy and he brought the beer along to go with the pizza he planned to order. He’d also brought along some DVDs.

On the hidden tape, Mitch looked visibly pained. “And just where are you keeping those DVDs, sir?”

Suddenly, Mitch was back in real time, still looking pained. “Law enforcement officials estimate that fifty thousand predators are online at any given moment, and the number of reports of children being solicited for sex is growing.”

“Hello? Knock knock?”

I squinted at the screen, trying to make out the face of another man looking around, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot at the back door of the decoy house. He wore a track suit and a ball cap, its bill slightly askew.

“Roger thinks he’s coming to a house to meet a thirteen-year-old girl named Cyndi, apparently for sex.”

Roger? Not many men named Roger these days. The only Roger I knew was Roger Haberman.

I watched in morbid fascination as the man in the ball cap entered the kitchen.

A youngish voice off camera, presumably the decoy, chirped, “I’ve spilled Coke on my jeans. I’ll be down in a minute. There’s some chips if you want them.”

The man called Roger wandered around the kitchen for a minute or two, picked up the bag of chips and read the label, but didn’t eat anything. Perhaps the percentages on the nutritional panel had alarmed him. Roger put the bag down, then looked straight up into one of the hidden cameras.

I grabbed Paul’s arm. “Oh my God, it is Roger Haberman!”

Paul, who had charge of the remote, punched the volume up just as the real-time Mitch launched into: “ Roger thinks the girl in this house is a thirteen-year-old virgin home alone and willing to perform oral sex. But like many of the men you’ll meet tonight, he’s in for a big surprise when I walk out. Some think I’m the child’s father, others believe I’m with the police. One thing’s certain: none of them knows our hidden cameras are recording their every move and they’ll be appearing on Cross Current.”

Back in the kitchen, Roger was stammering to Mitch and the hidden camera, “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“And yet,” real-time Mitch said, “we learned that while Roger Haberman was living in California, he was twice convicted of a second degree sexual offense and served a year in jail.”

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Roger? Eva’s Roger was a convicted sex offender? No wonder Erika had been so secretive about the television program. Erika served on the vestry at St. Cat’s. But none of that explained how she knew about the program and what her connection with it was.

Mitch shook his head into the camera. “You’ll hear more from Roger a little bit later. First, there are more men headed to our house. Meet VAguy 23458. In his online chat with Debra he said, ‘There’s nothing in the world quite like a teenage body.’He’s twenty-eight, and thinks he’s talking to a fourteen-year-old.”