9:08.
Into the kitchen for a bagel and coffee. Dining room table. Back to the bed for my mobile. Back to the table.
Out the French doors, the sky was the color of old nickels. The shrubs in the courtyard looked dark and droopy, as though dispirited by the prospect of sleet or snow.
At 9:29 the phone rang. I knocked over my coffee snatching it up. Grabbed a towel from the kitchen as I answered.
Slidell was talking before I could say my name. “Pastori’s getting some of Leal’s browser history.” He took my nonresponse as puzzlement over the name. “Pastori’s the computer geek.”
“I know who he is.”
“Whoa. We got a bug up our ass today?”
“What is Pastori finding?” Diverting a brown tentacle coursing toward the edge of the table.
“I’ll spare you the bullshit about URLs and partial URLs and embedded sites, blah, blah, blah. Bottom line, it don’t seem like much.”
I heard a wet sound as Slidell thumbed his tongue, flipped a page, went on. “No shopping trips to eBay, Amazon, that kind of thing.”
“Not surprising. Shelly Leal was thirteen years old.”
“She visited some game sites let kids play dress-up with cartoon characters. You know. Put Barbie in a tube top and braid her hair.”
I held the phone with my shoulder as I lifted and blotted.
“There was a site lets kids create aviators for moving around virtual worlds.”
Knowing Slidell hadn’t a clue about avatars, I didn’t bother to correct him.
“What the hell’s a virtual world? That some kinda make-believe where everyone’s good?”
“That would be virtuous. What about chat rooms?”
“The kid didn’t hit porn sites, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You know it isn’t.” Wiping off the chair seat.
“She linked to a site called AsktheDoc.com. You put in questions about your prostate, someone claiming to be a doctor answers.”
“Is that what she did?”
“What?”
“Ask about her prostate?” What little patience I had was fast disappearing.
“You could try tweezers.”
“What?”
“To pluck that bug crawled—”
“What questions did Shelly ask?”
“Pastori couldn’t get that.” Paper rustled. “The only other site he managed to pull out was a forum on a disease called dysmenorrhea.” He pronounced it “dies-men-o-ree-ah.”
“It’s not a disease. The term refers to severe pain associated with menstruation.”
“Yeah. I don’t need no details.”
“What did she do there?”
“He couldn’t get that, either.”
“Why not?” Sharper than I intended.
Slidell let a few beats pass, his way of telling me to lose the attitude. “First of all, you’ve got to have an ID, and the forum’s got a shitload of members. Pastori says he skimmed through a couple hundred posts. But he had no idea what to look for. And even if he did figure out who Leal was, she could have been a lurker. That’s someone—”
“I know what a lurker is. Did he attempt to figure out her ID?” I almost said “aviator.”
“With what little I could give him, yeah. Family names, pets, initials, birthdates, phone numbers. Got nowhere.”
I thought about that. “Was he able to determine what cartoon characters she chose on the game sites?”
“Hmm,” Slidell said.
I bunched the towel, walked to the door, and tossed it into the sink. Coffee dribbled on the floor as it arced across the kitchen.
“This whole Internet angle may be a dead end,” Slidell said.
“Or she may have met someone in that chat room.”
“It’s a site for people whining about cramps.”
Seriously? “Gee. You think some of those whiners could be adolescent girls?”
“You’re saying our target visits this chat room hoping to hook up with kids? Maybe pretends to be a doctor or something?”
“A doctor, a teacher, another kid having difficult periods. People lie on the Internet.”