Predator

  Megan stared at her. Krista heard his heavy breathing.

  “The police…they’re in there.”

  Krista backed away from the bed, desperate to protect Megan from this news.

  But Megan knew. Her face looked as if she’d just been beaten again. “She was there, wasn’t she?”

  Krista swallowed as that debilitating anger crushed down her own sorrow. The muscles in her face grew tight, rigid.

  “Karen!” Megan cried as she brought her hands to her face.

  Krista pulled the girl into her arms and held her.

  Megan’s parents arrived at the hospital with swollen eyes and red noses from weeping at the horror that had intruded on their daughter’s life. Krista left the hospital, assuring Megan that she would keep her informed about the search for the killer. When she got back to her car in the parking lot, she stared at the windshield. Rage pounded in her ears, and vengeance shivered through her body. Something had to be done.

  She wondered what state her father was in after burying his own daughter, then discovering the murder of another. Already, he was falling apart. She had no comfort to offer him. But she would not crumble. She had to hold herself together long enough to do something that mattered.

  With shaky hands, she called Ryan Adkins. His secretary did her usual avoidance routine. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Ryan’s in a meeting. Is there anything I can tell him for you?”

  “Tell him this is Krista Carmichael,” she bit out through stiff lips. “Tell him a girl was brutally attacked and beaten last night. Tell him they found another murdered girl today. Tell him that makes three attacks connected to your company. That’s what you can tell him for me!”

  The secretary put her on hold, and Krista waited, tasting the bile in her throat. If he didn’t come to the phone, she would go to GrapeVyne herself, find him in his meeting, and drag him out. She would throw a holy fit until everyone in that company listened.

  After several minutes, he picked up. “Krista, this is Ryan.”

  “Another girl was murdered!” she yelled into the phone.

  “Murdered? They called me this morning and told me she survived, that she was in the hospital.”

  “No, it’s not her! Megan Quinn survived. It’s her roommate.”

  “What?”

  “This killer had Megan’s keys and all her information, and he used them to go and finish the job he botched last night when he left Megan alive. He went to her apartment and didn’t find Megan there, so he murdered her roommate.” She wished she could see his face, because the silence on the phone told her nothing.

  He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s horrible.”

  “Is that all you have to say? Two girls are dead, another is beaten half to death, and a killer is still out there, using your community as a weapon. That would make you an accomplice.”

  “Krista, you’re going too far—”

  “You are responsible,” she cried. “You’ve provided a haven for killers and online predators. You’re so smart you came up with a billion-dollar company in your dorm room. Why don’t you use some of those brains to figure out a way to catch this monster?”

  “We’re working on that now, Krista.”

  “Well, you’re not working fast enough. How many other girls are going to die before you figure this out?”

  “We’ve been talking to the police. They’re on the case.”

  “The police didn’t prevent this last murder, even though Megan told them she was worried about her roommate. My father had to go there and find her himself. My father, who’d just buried his own daughter, had to watch them roll another girl out on a gurney.” She took in a wet breath. “Someone who was probably murdered by the same person who got Ella.” Her voice was trembling, and she knew she was on the edge of an eruption that would make her seem hysterical. She tried to breathe.

  Lowering her voice, she said, “Ryan, I’m appealing to you one more time. You seem like a decent person. You’ve got to do something about these Thought Bubbles.” She wiped the tears from under her eyes. “You’ve created a trap for your clients to be stalked and destroyed, and if you can’t find a way to stop these predators, then you need to shut your business down.”

  “I can’t shut my business down, Krista. That wouldn’t solve the problem. There would still be predators out there. They would just go to Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, or two dozen other places.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything about the other ones. I’m only asking you to do something about yours.”

  “I’m doing what I can, Krista. I really am. I’m horrified by what happened to these girls. Just now I was in a meeting with my security team and with my legal counsel.”

  “You’re going to need legal counsel,” she snapped. “I’m going to file a lawsuit that will put your company out of business. I’ll find every person who’s gone missing connected to online communities, and we’ll do a class action suit. I’ll go before congressional committees and make them regulate what you guys do. I’ll educate the public and make sure no sane parent will let their children go on these places ever again!”

  “And how will you educate them, Krista? By using our communities? You used GrapeVyne to post your message to the killer. You used it to rally volunteers to search for Ella. I looked at your page, and you use it in your ministry for Bible studies. There are a lot of good things about GrapeVyne. It’s not all evil.”

  “If you want to save the good, Ryan, then you need to do something about the bad.”

  His voice was maddeningly unruffled. “Well, I’m not shutting it down. Give me something realistic to do right now, and I will.”

  Krista tore a tissue out of a box on her console and wiped her nose. “There’s a girl lying in the hospital right now who wants desperately to identify the killer. The police have given her all sorts of pictures and mug shots, but she hasn’t been able to identify him yet. Maybe you could come to her room and show her pictures of her friends on GrapeVyne, and help her figure out if it could be any of them. Something she tells you might rattle something in that brain of yours. If you bring your own computer, you could probably dig into profiles of suspicious members. She says he was a middle-aged man with brown hair, about 220 pounds. He told her he’d been stalking her on GrapeVyne.”

  “All right,” he said. “Tell me which hospital. I’ll go this afternoon.”

  She dropped her face into her hand. She supposed that would be all right. Megan’s parents would want everything possible done to catch Megan’s attacker.

  “What’s her condition?”

  “Her jaw is broken and wired shut. She has torn ligaments in her knee, broken ribs, bruised kidneys. Both eyes are swollen, her lip is stitched, she has bruises that look like black ink. I don’t think I have to tell you the rest of it.”

  Again, silence.

  “He raped her and tried to bury her, too, Ryan. It’s a miracle she got away. She’s scared to death in there. She thinks he’s going to come after her again.”

  “Then will you go with me? Since you already know her that might make things more comfortable for her.”

  His concern for Megan’s comfort surprised her. She sighed. “I can’t go until later this afternoon. I’m speaking at my sister’s high school today. I plan to give them an earful.”

  “Why don’t you give me a call when you’re finished, and I’ll meet you at the hospital?”

  She hesitated a moment, wondering if she should tell him to go without her. But then she thought of Megan, devastated and upset. He was right. She would be afraid of a strange man in her room. Besides, she’d probably be dealing with police all morning and most of the afternoon. Yes, maybe he should wait for her. “All right,” she said. “After I’m finished at the high school, I’ll give you a call. Tell your secretary not to make me jump through hoops or threaten to bring down the company to get through to you.”

  She clicked off the phone and looked into the mirror, wiped her eyes. This had to be one of the
worst days of her life. It went at the bottom of a list that kept growing. She was amassing quite a collection.

  Seventeen

  Ryan hung up the phone and rubbed his face. Another girl dead. What was he going to do about this? Though he had to defend the company’s image, he couldn’t help feeling there was more that could be done.

  Needing wisdom, he picked up the phone and called Henry Hearne, his mentor and one of the most influential members of his board of directors. “You got a minute to talk in person?” he asked.

  “Sure, Kid. I’ll be right over.” Henry, one of the wealthiest men in the country, was the only one he knew who got away with calling him “Kid.” Ryan took it as a term of endearment, since Henry had become a friend to him in so many ways.

  A few minutes later, Henry knocked on his door, then stepped inside. Ryan motioned him to a chair. “Thanks for coming, Henry. I need some advice.”

  Henry took the chair across from Ryan’s desk. Though he wore his usual suit and tie, he carried himself with comfort and an ease that made him more accessible than the “suits” who intimidated Ryan.

  “You look like you’re having a bad day,” Henry said.

  Ryan folded his hands under his chin. “It could be better.”

  “I worry about you, Kid. I don’t think you’re enjoying your role as CEO as much as you used to. Is the bureaucracy getting to you?”

  Ryan smiled and shifted in his seat. None of the other board members would have asked him a thing like that. He was just expected to get along with them.

  But Henry was different, and Ryan appreciated him. He was a humble man, who’d never paraded himself in front of the cameras like some of the other board members did. You’d never see him on talk shows or news commentaries, even though he had a wealth of knowledge about the economy and building businesses. He could put Donald Trump to shame. Henry owned a huge share of Willow Entertainment and ran its Internet division. He had been among the men who’d negotiated to buy Ryan’s business and allowed him to stay on to run it. If not for Henry, he’d be one hundred million dollars poorer right now. And without the technology Henry had created at Willow Internet Division, GrapeVyne wouldn’t be worth billions in advertising revenue.

  “Sometimes I miss the good ole days, when it was just us computer nerds having fun.”

  Henry rubbed his chin, crossed his legs. “The company’s going through growing pains now. It won’t always be like this.”

  Ryan glanced at his monitor. “These murders are really getting to me. I got a call from the FBI this morning. Two more girls were attacked last night. One of them is dead.”

  Henry’s eyebrows drew together. “Two more? Here in Houston?”

  “Yes.” Ryan leaned back in his chair. “And there are cases like it all across the country. Kids missing after agreeing to meet someone they friended online.”

  “All of them are connected to GrapeVyne?”

  “Some, yes. I never bargained for this when I created the site. I just wanted it to be a fun place for people to hang out and communicate with their friends. I didn’t think of predators scouring the sites for victims.” He scratched his face and lowered his voice. “Henry, Ella Carmichael’s sister keeps calling me and demanding that we make changes to the site. She considers me an accomplice to the killer. She’s talking about a lawsuit.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous. This is not your fault, Kid. And it’s not GrapeVyne’s fault. Blaming us is like blaming Vint Cerf for creating the Internet. We’re no more responsible for these attacks than he is.”

  “She suggested we remove Thought Bubbles from our system, since they encourage people to post too much information.”

  Henry chuckled. “If we took them down, the subscribers would just start Twittering. It wouldn’t make anyone safer.”

  Ryan got up, looked out the window onto the street below. “But maybe some of her suggestions aren’t out of line.” He turned back to Henry. “What if we started reporting these cases on the advertising sidebar, so people could see how dangerous it is to post things that are too specific?”

  “Do I need to remind you that without the ads on those sidebars we can’t stay in business? We need all of that space.”

  “Then we need to figure out another place on the pages where we can put warnings, someplace where people will read them. Maybe we could send out a notice to everybody once a week with the latest missing persons. Kind of update them on what’s going on. Sort of an online Amber Alert that would help locate missing persons, but also constantly remind them what could happen.”

  “So every time they log on, you want to hit them in the face with some dead kid who met his killer online?”

  “No, not every time. Just once a week.”

  “Kids wouldn’t read it.”

  “Then we send it to their parents.”

  “We don’t ask them to provide their parents’ information if they’re fourteen or above.”

  “Well, maybe we should, Henry. Maybe that’s something we can change.”

  Henry laughed. “And that will help our business, how?”

  “Well, it might not help our business, but it could save lives.”

  Henry got up and came around the desk, set his hands on Ryan’s shoulders. “We’ve got to let the police handle this, Ryan. The more entangled you get in this situation, the guiltier we’ll look. You won’t be able to stop and say this has gone too far. If you take any responsibility at all for what happened to these girls, you might as well take all of it.”

  Ryan sank back down. “If these attacks just hadn’t happened right here in Houston.”

  Henry slid his hands into his pockets, jangled his change. “You said two girls were dead. What happened to the third?”

  “She’s in the hospital.”

  “Is she conscious?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And what’s the prognosis?”

  “Well, I guess she’s going to survive, but she was beaten pretty badly.”

  He paced across the office, staring at the carpet. “Has she been able to identify the killer?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Henry rubbed his face, then fixed his eyes back on Ryan. “Maybe when they find the guy it’ll be clear that this had nothing to do with us. Girls who are irresponsible with information on the Internet might be irresponsible in other ways. She could have gotten involved with the wrong guy. It could be anything. We don’t necessarily know that it had anything to do with GrapeVyne.”

  “She said that the killer told her he’d been following her on GrapeVyne.”

  “Ryan, I’m warning you, you need to stay out of this. If the press calls, avoid them.”

  “What if they corner me? What if I have to talk?”

  “Then take as little responsibility as possible. Tell them that your security team is doing all it can to provide protection for our clients, but that ultimately it’s the responsibility of the members. Then wash your hands of it.”

  “I’m not sure I can.” Ryan didn’t want to tell him that he’d agreed to go to the hospital that afternoon or that Krista was going with him. He knew what Henry would say. “Thank you for your advice, Henry. I appreciate it. I always value your wisdom.”

  Henry went to the door. “Think of the company, Kid. Hundreds of jobs depend on you doing the right thing.”

  He closed the door, and Ryan dropped back into his chair. Hundreds of jobs might depend on him, but hundreds of lives might also. There must be some way to provide a little more safety for their clients.

  He had a team that had helped build this community and was able to capture the imaginations of millions of people. Surely they were creative enough to put security measures into place to ensure that this kind of thing didn’t happen anymore. All it would require was educating the public. But how could they do that, when people rarely read their Terms of Service anymore and skipped right past any notices that GrapeVyne sent out? Nobody was interested in what they had to say.

&nb
sp; He didn’t like the idea that Krista, as an individual, was doing more than his entire company to make online communities safer—speaking at a school this afternoon, after learning of Megan Quinn and her roommate. As upset as she’d been when she called, he couldn’t imagine how she’d hold together to give a speech.

  Then again, he’d seen her strength.

  Where had she said she was speaking? Maybe he needed to attend. Her small voice had the power to do great damage to his company. But somehow, he couldn’t think of her as the enemy.

  He got online and went to Ella’s GrapeVyne site, found the name of her school.

  Then he packed his laptop in his briefcase. He’d show up at the school, wearing sunglasses and a ski cap, blending into the crowd so that he could listen to Krista. If he was careful, no one would notice him. He could still look like a high school kid if he tried. He’d had virtually the same wardrobe since his high school days, after all.

  He got his jacket, shrugged it on, and told his secretary he’d be out for the afternoon.

  Eighteen

  Ryan looked like anything but a student as he pulled his Jaguar into the high school’s parking lot, behind the bus he’d followed from the Vo-tech a few blocks away. The car had caught the attention of the students at the back of the bus. But if he could distance himself from his car, he might be able to blend in. He pulled his gray ski cap over his ears, and shoved on his sunglasses. Then he ambled up the sidewalk as students stepped off the bus in front of him.

  He followed the last of the students into the building, blending in like one of them. A teacher stood in the school corridor, directing traffic.

  “Into the auditorium, people. Quiet as you go in.”

  The students ignored the teacher’s admonishment to be quiet as they followed the others pouring in. Ryan went in and took a seat in the back row.

  As the auditorium filled up with chattering kids, he saw Krista sitting on the front row next to the principal. She looked pale and small, and as she turned to talk to the principal, he saw dark circles under her red eyes. But her chin was high and determined.