Kiss Me, Kill Me Read Online Free PDF

intoxicating and terrifying.
    Sean made her forget, at least for a while, that she wasn’t normal.
    “Stop overanalyzing everything,” she mumbled to herself. Right—that was like telling her body to stop breathing.
    She clicked on the one-minute video that Sean had sent. It started at the doorway of Kirsten Benton’s room and panned around 360 degrees. Bare walls above the plain bed. No personal effects. The dresser, the window—all generic. Only the desk and small bookshelf were cluttered with books and papers, and the only photographs were on a wall where they couldn’t be seen by anyone except at a specific angle.
    The computer faced the bed.
    Heart pounding, she knew what she was looking at, even as she watched the video again in slow motion. She paused the recording when the computer came back into view.
    There was a small, round ball on top. A webcam. It faced the bed.
    Her face flushed and bile rose in her throat. It took all her willpower not to run to the bathroom and puke. With tight hands, she untwisted the cap on her water bottle and sipped, ridding her mouth of the horrid taste.
    She didn’t want to respond to Sean. She wanted to pretend that she hadn’t seen the video, that she wasn’t involved. If she articulated her fears, it would make the truth sound simple, and it was anything but simple.
    Maybe she was wrong. There could be another explanation. She always thought the worst; the worst wasn’t always the case.
    She emailed Sean.
Are there any video files on the computer? They’d be .wmv or .mov or another standard format. Can you access them?
    She wasn’t surprised when her phone rang less than a minute later.
    “Sean,” she answered when she saw the caller ID.
    “There are dozens of video files,” he said. “But they’re all shortcuts or temp files—they’re empty, nothing attached. I’m running an undelete program. How did you know?”
    “I might be wrong.” She didn’t believe she was. “I hope I’m wrong. But there’s a webcam facing her bed.”
    Sean didn’t say anything, but the weight of the truth hung between them on the phone. “Shit,” he finally said.
    “I’ve seen it many times, particularly on the amateur sex sites. Often, the women don’t know they’re being recorded. But—”
    “But Kirsten did.”
    “It’s her bedroom and her computer,” Lucy said.
    “I haven’t found anything on her computer yet,” Sean said. Then he added, “Why would a young, beautiful girl with a bright future take naked pictures of herself and send or post them on the Internet?”
    It was more than naked pictures, Lucy suspected, from just what little she already knew about Kirsten’s setup and the deleted video files. “Twenty-two percent of teenage girls have posted naked photos of themselves on the Internet,” she said, keeping her voice even. The stats had infuriated her when she first learned of them, followed by a deep, numbing sadness. Once those pictures were out on the Web, there was no getting them back. One nude photograph in twenty-four hours would be downloaded on thousands of computers around the world.
    “I don’t have answers,” she said, though she suspected Sean’s question had been rhetorical.
    “I’ll let you know if I find anything.” Sean didn’t sound like his typical upbeat self. His enthusiasm for everything life had to offer drew Lucy to him, and she hated hearing him so down.
    “You can send everything to me,” she offered, though the last thing she wanted to do was go through the teenager’s computer files, knowing what she’d most likely discover. “I know what to look for.”
    He didn’t say anything for a moment.
    “Sean, I can handle seeing whatever is on her computer.”
    “I know you can. It’s—”
    “Don’t coddle me. Please.” She didn’t want to be protected from the evils in the world. It would be her job soon enough, and nothing she saw on Kirsten Benton’s computer could compare with what she’d already