Lorie O - Strong, Sleek and Sinful

“You stay in that getup, we might be here all night anyway.” Paul reached in and lifted out the box holding her new computer, then wagged his eyebrows at her before heading toward her house. “That or I might have to persuade the wife to put her cheerleading outfit on tonight.”

“I’ll change,” Kylie called out after him, and smiled when he groaned.

Slamming her trunk closed, she looked up and down the street before heading inside. She’d been here a couple days and had stopped at quite a few different businesses where kids tended to hang out, the fast-food chains in walking distance of the high school, the mall, the bowling alley, as well as the library. Only once did anyone pay attention to her, and that was while she watched the kids trying to get into their friend’s car outside the mall. It didn’t take much to learn the man who’d tried approaching her was an off-duty cop, and she hadn’t seen him since. She couldn’t let her guard down for a second, though, especially with their perp possibly being a cop.

Her work was cut out for her, getting to know who’d been friends with Maura Reynolds and Sally Wright, as well as learning enough about the kids in town to find out if any one of them might be chatting with someone named Peter. Kylie would need to go online and try to lure her perp out of hiding. The toughest part of her job would be getting to know the local cops. Anyone comfortable enough to rape and murder while donning a badge daily would be shrewd, incredibly confident, and also capable of obtaining inside knowledge about how close she might be to closing in on him.

Kylie changed into comfortable shorts and a T-shirt, ordered pizza, and worked with Paul until the house was secure and wired thoroughly.

“No one will set foot on your lawn without you knowing.” Paul finished screwing the plate into the wall and stood back adjusting the cameras in the smaller of the two bedrooms that now looked like a high-tech surveillance room. “Any chat conversations will be saved using this program here. Every keystroke is monitored as well. It’s all saved to this flash drive.”

All the equipment now installed in her small two-bedroom rental house was standard-issued equipment. “I’m familiar with the programs,” she assured him, but continued listening since Paul seemed intent on explaining how everything worked.

As it grew dark, she closed blinds and turned on lights. It had been a long two days. She pinched the bridge of her nose, her eyes dry with exhaustion.

“Okay, kiddo.” Paul packed up his tools in a small leather case and looked at the room like a proud father. “My work here is done. Get some sleep. I’ve finished the easy part. You’ve got the hard part of the job, catching this asshole.”

“We’ll catch him.” Kylie patted Paul’s shoulder while walking behind him down the hall to her front door. “But you’re right; I’m ready to crash.”

She would soak in a hot bath and then see how many hours she could get online before she couldn’t stay awake any longer.

“Where are you headed tomorrow?” he asked, pulling his cell out and glancing at the screen before shoving it back in his pocket.

“Tomorrow is Friday. I can hit the bowling alley after school and there are a few house parties I heard about while hanging at the McDonald’s across from the high school today.”

“You’re going to house parties?” Paul reached for the front door but turned and raised an eyebrow.

“No,” she said quickly. “That won’t be necessary. I need to be around the kids in order to learn if any of the girls are chatting with someone online they don’t know. From what I heard today, the group I was following will be at the bowling alley tomorrow and Saturday. Then there’s another group that camps out at the movie theater by the mall both Friday and Saturday.”

Paul stepped around her and scooped up one of the remaining pieces of thin-crust pepperoni pizza slices. She watched him stuff half the slice into his mouth. “I’ll need to log into your local network,” she told him.

Paul nodded and grunted, his mouth full of pizza. Wiping his hand on his jeans, he reached into his back pocket, pulled out a worn wallet, and then freed a card, which he handed to her. She stared at the plain business card, one similar to the kind she had-somewhere.

“Call me tomorrow and we’ll get you set up with a screen name and password. That’s my cell,” he said, pointing with his thumb at the card. “I’m going to head out. The wife’s already called twice.”

Kylie smiled. Everyone in her world had someone to answer to except her. “I’ll call if I need anything.”

Once Paul was gone, she set up her police scanner, turned it up so she could hear it, then headed back for a hot bath. An hour later she sat in front of the computer, ready to create her profile as a teenage girl. Her assignment: nail the son of a bitch who was raping and killing girls in Mission Hills, Kansas. Her focus: the Mission Hills Police Department. No city employee or official in Mission Hills, or anywhere in the Kansas City area, knew she was here; no one other than the handful of people working at the field office here in town.

Kylie clicked on the Internet Explorer icon, typed in “Yahoo!” and then proceeded creating a screen name. She typed in a few variations, working until she found one that wasn’t already in use. Grabbing one of the flash drives out of her purse, she plugged it in and then opened the first file. She’d taken pictures of herself with her digital camera before arriving here. Not professional. Some of them goofy. And looking very much like pictures that she’d seen on the many teenager profiles she’d browsed through over the past few days. It never ceased to amaze her how much information she could always gather about high school kids in whatever city she worked simply by going to Twitter and Facebook.

Sticking to the life she’d created for Kayla, her online persona, she worked with her new profile-Kayla2010. She was sixteen, graduating from high school in 2010, and from Wyoming. She was in Kansas City, not Mission Hills, so kids online wouldn’t question who she was, staying with her grandmother. Using the pictures on her flash drive and searching the Internet for backgrounds and songs to finalize the profile she made, Kylie finally sat back and let her head fall.

“That was work,” she said out loud, and straightened, realizing it was almost midnight. It sucked sometimes not being able to use the same profile as she moved from city to city, chasing down the bastards who made the Internet their lair for sick behavior. If there was one strong consistency about online predators, they were intelligent, usually very Internet savvy, and if her profiles didn’t appear 100 percent legitimate she wouldn’t be able to nail them.

But the basic traps were set. Tomorrow she’d start working the profiles, hitting chat rooms, blogs, and YouTube.

Kylie crawled into bed, leaving the scanner on for background noise, and cuddled under her new blankets. Another town, another bedroom, another case. She was damn good at what she did. One of the best.

As she closed her eyes, images of the many profiles she’d been to that evening swam around in her head. She faded away, hitting a deep, hard sleep quickly. There visions of her older sister, so perfect and popular, until the day she was found naked and beaten, and very dead, tortured Kylie’s dreams.

Kylie stared at the open coffin, watching her older sister for the longest time, willing her to move. She’d been fourteen, her older sister, Karen, seventeen, and that funeral was the day Kylie’s life ended. Their happy family destroyed, changed forever, as dead as her sister.

Her father, who’d never missed a day’s work in his life, suddenly seemed sick all the time. Kylie remembered watching her mother grow old before her eyes, as if time were sped up and in a week she’d aged twenty years. The laughter ended. Their home turned into a shell. Where once there was continual chatter and TVs on in every room and her mother’s radio always buzzing in the kitchen, the moment they returned home from the funeral all that seemed forgotten. The house was quiet, continuous, non-ending silence, like the tomb where Kylie’s sister lay. Kylie didn’t grow up, she passed through time, until she, too, left the shell that once was her family.