Kiss Me, Kill Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

witnessed firsthand in her life.
    “If you have time, I’d appreciate your help. I’ll share out her computer and send you a password to access the hard drive.”
    “I have all the time in the world right now, and I want to help. I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t.”
    “It’s already done. Check your email.”
    As he spoke, her email beeped. “You’re good,” she said.
    “I know. Happy birthday, Princess.” Sean hung up and Lucy was smiling again.
    She logged onto Kirsten’s computer and started working her way through the directories one by one.
    If her initial instincts were correct, she’d find specific coded headers in the temporary files that were created whenever any program was open on the computer. Most of the data were unreadable, and she wouldn’t be able to re-create data that hadn’t been specifically saved on Kirsten’s computer. However, she could strip the symbols and be able to identify the chat rooms, if any, that Kirsten had entered, including tracking information like the ISP address, time stamps, and similar identifiers.
    When she’d volunteered for Women and Children First! before it was shut down, she’d learned the ins and outs of how and where sexual predators hunted for their victims. WCF, a victim-rights group that took a proactive role in tracking predators in cyberspace, taught her more about cybercrime than five years of college and postgraduate school. She could discern whether someone was trolling for victims or identify potential victims by how they communicated. It had bemused her that her linguistics skills and fluency in four languages had helped her decipher chat room shorthand, which was a language unto itself.
    She created a spreadsheet with the identifiers in Kirsten’s temp files. It quickly became clear that Kirsten had frequented a website where she participated in multiple video chats. Similar to the increasingly popular Skype, the primary difference was that the external chat didn’t require any additional software over and beyond the webcam attached to the computer. The events weren’t recorded on the hard drive, though because of the live streaming, a temp file had been created with start and stop times that helped Lucy catalogue them.
    Savvy predators could erase and delete the data within the temp file, but Kirsten wasn’t a predator. Yet, based on the extent of the log Lucy was creating, Kirsten didn’t appear to be a victim, either. The videos could be innocuous, friends chatting face-to-face over the computer screen. Lucy wanted to believe that, but her mind kept going back to the generic room that Kirsten’s webcam would show behind her.
    It took her an hour to log all the temp files, and then she created a graphical representation of the data. It was clear that the video chats all originated from the same host. Most of the chats were between ten and twenty minutes, with a few longer than half an hour. Most of them had taken place between four and six in the afternoon, with about 20 percent at night. The afterschool hours were when sexual predators did most of their work—when kids were home without parents and could freely chat on the computer.
    Lucy frowned. Kirsten was seventeen, a high school senior. There was no way of knowing whether she was chatting with the same person or different people, because the temp file logged only Kirsten’s computer and the server that hosted the chats.
    Kirsten might very well have a boyfriend, and maybe they talked nearly every day over webcam. If that were the case, then she most likely ran off to meet him.
    Had she been meeting with the same person the past weekends she had disappeared? Had she gone off with someone voluntarily, or was she being held against her will?
    Was Kirsten already dead?
    Because no matter how careful you thought you were being, whenever you met an online friend in person, you put yourself at risk. Especially in the world in which Kirsten was playing around.
    Lucy consciously focused on