Joanne Rock - Don't Look Back

They worked side by side for the first hour or so, with Sean bringing Donata up to speed on the investigation he’d been picking away at for years. His sister’s molester had been locked up long ago, but that hadn’t been justice enough for him and frankly, Donata could understand why. The bastard who’d hurt his sister had found her through the massive network of sex criminals linked by seemingly endless online communities. And Sean wanted to bring down as many of those communities as possible. The ones who trafficked in webcam porn or more innocent webcam footage turned into porn by spurned lovers or boyfriends as an act of revenge were the highest on his list.

Donata’s eyes were starting to cross two hours later when she hit a site that advertised innocent girls showing off on their teen webcams. Most of the footage looked harmless enough—girls having pillow fights at sleepovers with an occasional hint of undies and other video clips that were probably posted by the unsuspecting girls themselves. She was about to leave the site when a name on the index caught her eye.

Donata.

Curious, she moved the mouse over the name. It wasn’t that common, but she’d certainly come across it a few other times. Still, when you had a more unusual name, you felt a little sense of kinship with anyone who shared it. Or maybe that was just her. Her life wasn’t exactly overflowing with friendships and supportive connections so maybe she tended to seek out whatever ties she could in a hostile world.

Sean’s computer was fast, but the graphic images still moved slower than other pages and it took a moment for the photo to load. As soon as the top band filled the width of the screen, however, Donata knew she wasn’t going to find any kinship here. She recognized the backdrop for the picture before the rest of the image came over the screen.

Sean had disappeared into the kitchen to grab them each a beer, but he returned now to settle their drinks on the folded sports section of the Times.

“I don’t know why the bastard thought he could blackmail me into staying off the case when he’d already turned my photos into public property.” She couldn’t look away from the ancient picture of herself, the one she’d let her ex-lover take in a moment of trust. It would have been like looking away from an oncoming train wreck.

What did it matter if Sean saw the photo now that people all across the country had the option to copy and save it to their hard drives? Clearly, she wasn’t going to be able to keep all her dirty little secrets as private as she would have liked. Her few moments of reckless stupidity had been captured in full color to haunt her for the rest of her days.

And the tug of her attraction to Sean—something normal and healthy, even if she never acted on it—would be tainted by the ugliness of her old life.

“Holy hell,” Sean whispered, his voice deep and ragged a few inches from her ear as he leaned closer to the computer screen to get a better view. “That’s you?”

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