Her Dark Web Defender

At least she was wanted there.

A report lay open on her desk, but the words and the grisly crime scene photographs swam on the pages in front of her. This was a mistake. She shouldn’t be there, and it went beyond the special agent who clearly agreed with her on at least that.

She’d believed she could do this. That eighteen years was enough time. Enough distance from those bicycles. That creepy smile. She’d been wrong. Shame filled her, heavy and familiar. The uniform that she wasn’t supposed to be wearing seemed to be the only thing preventing her from splintering into thousands of pieces.

But she had to keep it together, for Emily’s sake. She took several deep breaths and focused on a pushpin on her bare bulletin board instead of the file. Finally, her rapid heartbeat slowed.

She’d hoped for an opportunity to make up for the mistakes she’d made following her friend’s abduction, and now she was balking. Yes, it would require her to work with someone who clearly didn’t want her there, but atonement wasn’t supposed to be easy.

What was Special Agent Lazzaro’s problem with her, anyway? He must have thought that those Italian good looks of his—the kind that a sculptor’s knife would have loved and a sonnet or two had already mentioned—gave him an excuse to be a jerk. Not that she’d noticed the olive skin, that strong jaw, the dimple in his chin or those blue-gray eyes, anyway, but none of those things made the way he’d spoken to her okay. What had she ever done to him?

Eric had said the agent was always hard on new team members, but she couldn’t help thinking it might be something more. That she was a woman? Well, tough crap. She’d proven herself to her fellow troopers by working harder than any of them. If he thought rudeness from one curmudgeonly FBI agent would be enough to scare her off, then he was about to find out how wrong he was.

“You about ready?”

She nearly jumped out of her seat as Tony leaned in to speak to her. The cubicle’s walls had prevented her from seeing his approach, but he’d caught her thinking about him. She didn’t have time to worry about him or anyone else when they had a double murder to investigate.

“Uh. Ready?” Could she have sounded any less like she was about to prove something to him? And why did his eyes have to smile like that, before his lips even moved?

“I just wanted to know if you’re finally up to speed on the case so we can get started. You know, on the voice recordings.”

“For the record, I was already well informed about this case. I was first on the scene, remember?” She took a breath so she wouldn’t tell him where he could shove all his assumptions. “Now what did you say about recordings?”

“You didn’t think you were going to do all of this live, did you?”

The corner of his mouth lifted in a way that was beginning to annoy her. As a matter of fact, she had believed she would always be speaking live, but she wouldn’t 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.