give him the satisfaction of having her confirm it.
“I figured at least some of it.”
“Then you were right. Here, let’s go back to my computer to make the recordings.”
He strode to his desk without looking back at her. She grabbed the binder of case overviews that Dawson had given her and fell into step behind him. Inside his cubicle, Lazzaro had already turned his straight-back visitor chair so that it was right next to his. Too close for Kelly’s comfort, but the microphone cord wasn’t long enough to reach across the room.
Nothing about the special agent’s cubicle surprised her, from the obsessively straight collection of pencils in his top desk drawer to the line of photographs—some children, some adults—in the bottom corner of his bulletin board. All about a half inch apart. Just like the crisp creases in his slacks and dress shirt and his perfectly knotted tie that weren’t supposed to be parts of a uniform, Tony Lazzaro was all about preciseness and control. Her arrival must have thrown off his perfect balance.
She rested the binder on the corner of his desk, pulled the seat back and sat. A masculine amber scent filled her nostrils. She’d never been a fan of cologne, but this one was almost pleasant. Distracting.
But she didn’t get distracted. By anyone. If she’d never allowed male-female nonsense to disrupt work with her fellow troopers, even the hotties, she should have no trouble ignoring a surly law enforcement officer. Especially one who had a sprinkling of gray in his black-brown hair that made him look at least a decade older than her twenty-seven.
Tony obviously had no trouble tuning her out as he focused on his laptop and clicked through several screens. Then he moved the standing microphone closer to her. She didn’t miss his frown when he noticed the binder, out of place on his orderly desk.
“Now we just need to record the early stuff. The greetings,” he said. “That way you can practice the flirtation.”
Her breath rushed out in a choked sound. “Are you saying that some victims flirt with their eventual offenders?”
The thought of it made her stomach roll. Emily’s attacker had required no enticement. No encouragement at all.
“I guess some potential victims think they’re supposed to talk more like grown-ups would when they’re in online chat rooms,” he explained. “Seventy-six percent of underage victims first encounter their offenders in chats.”
Kelly blinked away images from her past to focus on details of the current case. On offenders they might have a chance to stop.
“But don’t victims in chat rooms believe they’re talking to someone their own age and not some guy in his sixties with a double chin and a second mortgage?”
“Maybe potential offenders aren’t that specific, but most tell their victims they’re older when they initiate contact.”
As he spoke, he scrolled through a website with a series of conversations rolling down the screen.
She leaned forward to get a better look. “That’s where you’ll have me hanging out? In chat rooms like that one?”
He closed the browser, whether to keep her from seeing what he was looking at or to move on, she wasn’t sure.
“Not you, really. Just an online identity to which you’ll be lending your voice. You won’t always be the one at the keyboard, either. It can be any of us. The screen name will be INVISIBLE ME.”
“Because victims are often looking for someone to pay attention to them and actually listen to them?”
“That’s right. Some of them get more than they bargain for.”
“Especially kids like Sienna and Madison.”
She expected him to say something about her referring to the recent murder victims by their first names instead of calling them “Miss Cottingham” and “Miss Blackwell,” but he nodded at his screen.
“What does all this have to do with the Dark Web?” She hated asking so many questions, but he seemed knowledgeable, and she needed to catch up quickly. “I don’t know as much about that as I should. I spend most of my work time investigating traffic accidents and issuing citations.”
He slid a glance her way and then launched another browser, one she didn’t recognize.
“Most people don’t know a lot about it. The Dark Web is just a small part of the Deep Web, that part of the Internet that includes email accounts and bank records. Only the Dark Web is different. You access it using a software that makes you anonymous by disguising your computer’s IP address. Then visitors can participate in illegal activities without being tracked. Drugs, weapons, assassins…”
“Porn?”
This time, he turned to face her. “That and human trafficking. Those two things are almost always linked.”
“Do you think our victims visited sites on the Dark Web?”
“Probably not. It requires too much computer know-how since the sites aren’t indexed. It’s more difficult to do a search there.” He closed the screen and held his hands wide. “But the suspect might hang out on the Dark Web as well as chat rooms in the Surface Web.”
“Then it makes sense to look both places.”
“Particularly now that he’s had a taste of murder. His cooling-off period between the two girls and his next victim might be decreased. If this is even his first time.”
Was he watching her because he was discussing the possibility that they were dealing with a serial killer when he’d criticized her earlier for jumping to that same conclusion? Or did he expect her to race out the door after the details he’d shared with her? He put his headset around his neck, handed her a second one and pointed to the microphone.
“Ready?”
She straightened in the chair. “We’re going to record stuff right here?”
“Why? Can’t turn on your charm with an audience present? Hate to tell you this, Trooper, but we can’t provide you with a private sound booth.”
The patronizing way he said trooper made pinpricks form on the back of her neck. He might as well have said sweetheart, and she was not okay with that.
“Hello,” she said into the microphone.
“Don’t say it like you’re about to try to sell him a houseful of vinyl windows.”
“Give me a minute. I haven’t done this before.”
“No kidding. And you thought you were going to do all of this live.”
Her glare wasn’t as effective as it would have been if he’d looked at her.
“By the time you have a voice conversation with a suspect, you won’t be strangers, at least in that world. You’ll even tell him your real name is Mackenzie. But if you don’t think you can do it, I’ll be happy to approach Special Agent Dawson and tell him his idea is a bust.”
“Not
