Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗
Gitmo: you ever had sex?
Amber: I had a bf last year
“Bf?” asked Laura.
“Boyfriend.”
Gitmo: Did bf getta bj?
Amber: You sonud mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gitmo: can’t handle a joke LOL
More chimes, the board lighting up with suitors. Jay opened another instant message box.
Smooth Talk: Amber u a little girl?
Amber: im thrteen how old r u???????????????
Smooth Talk: let me see a pic
Amber: I have 1 at shchol school – not here
Smooth Talk: where d you live
Amber: I live in az
Smooth Talk dropped out. Back to Gitmo:
Gitmo: I want a pic
Amber: not fair if u don send me pic toO
Gitmo: you playing games little girl
Amber: fairs fair my pic for yours
Gitmo: if you don’t want to fuck your wasting m time
Gitmo’s name went from red to black.
Jay sat up straighter, twisted, adjusted himself against the back of the chair. “That’s what you’re dealing with. These creeps are on these boards all day, trolling for kids.”
Laura was about to say that she didn’t think any child would fall for that, and then shut her mouth.
Children would fall for it. Teenagers would fall for it. Because they had not yet developed that distrust life ground into you over the years, like grime into clothing.
“We did a survey,” Jay said. “Among parents. They think of computers as just another appliance, like a TV set. They don’t realize it’s like leaving the back door to your house open. Anybody can come in, and some of these guys are really smart. They know how to push the buttons.”
“How do you find someone like this? Can you find his ISP?”
“Doubtful. Guy like that, he’d use one of the big servers, like earthlink, hotmail—it’s easy to be anonymous. There are search engines that you can look on, but I’m pretty sure this guy wouldn’t have a local ISP.”
“Oh.”
“But there’s an easier way. That’s what’s so interesting about technology. Sometimes the best things are simple. You know the photo you have of him? We can probably trace him through that." He hit a couple of keys and a beach scene came up on the screen.
“This is why you need me.” Sounding cocky. “Not many people can get their hands on this kind of software.”
He explained that there was something called image recognition software, which could break up every photograph into its elements, then run each element against all kinds of databases, looking for a match. He zoomed in on a man on the beach. “See this guy’s T-shirt? With the software I’m going to use, I can run a search for exact matches. It’s like a search engine, instead of searching for like words, it searches for images. I’m going to need the original photo, though.”
“From what Endicott said, it was a digital photo, and the only thing we have is an inkjet picture.” She nodded to the black-and-white photocopy. “It’s not all that much better than that.”
Jay looked troubled. “It might be harder, but we can still do it. Where is the original?”
“Endicott’s FedExing it—I should get it today.”
“What we’ll do,” Jay said, “is re-scan the picture using high resolution. Then I’ll compare it to the databases. It might take a few days, though.”
“You sure you can’t find him with the ISP?”
“I’ll try that, too. I’m warning you, though, this guy isn’t your average Internet user. I think you know that.”
“But this image recognition software, it’ll take a few days? That’s a long time.”
“How many days has it been so far?”
Too many, she thought.
27
“This is what CloneImage came up with,” Jay Ramsey said, rolling his chair to the computer monitor.
It turned out that Jay Ramsey’s image recognition program had been quicker than expected; Laura had gotten the call this morning, not twenty-four hours after she last saw him. Jay had already found two matches to the man in the picture.
Ramsey pulled up a site called TalentFish.com. “For a small fee, actors and models can put their pictures online. Kind of like a rogues’ gallery. Lucky for us that young Petey is up on the latest technology.”
“Petey?”
“Peter Dorrance. Actor, model, pretty boy around town. This was a virtual cakewalk.” He laughed at his own joke—virtual.
The TalentFish home page opened up. There were several headings at the top of the page: Actors, Portraits, Head Shots, Actor and Model Composites. Jay pulled up Peter Dorrance’s page under “Actor and Model Composites”.
“CloneImage got this hit pretty quick, since one of these is the same picture he sent that little girl.”
And there it was. The photo of the young man, the house behind him. This was a three-quarters shot, showing his excellent physique, but there were others, including two headshots.
Laura looked at the other photographs, the ones she’d never seen before. Dorrance had three photos taken in front of the house. Two in black and white and one in color. In the color photo, he leaned against a blue sportscar, arms folded over his chest. He wore a cable-knit sweater and looked like a print ad from Land’s End. The house behind him was yellow with white trim.
“Nice wheels,” Laura said.
“Hard to get into,” Jay said, “Unless you’re his age. I also found the house, if you’re interested.”
“In a minute.”
She looked at his resume. Age twenty-two. Six foot three and a half. 40-Regular. Several acting roles in plays Laura did not recognize (she wasn’t a big patron of the theater). Print ads: Hair and Now; Leslie’s Department Store; Eat at Joes. Television ads: Ralph’s Car Sales and Gulf Chiropractic. Not a lot there, but he had gotten a crack at the big time, a cameo as a corpse on CSI: Miami.
“Eat at Joes is in Panama City,” Freddy said.
“Take a bow, Freddy,” Jay said. “The Florida panhandle—just like you said it would be. Prince Charming here lives on the Forgotten Coast, the Redneck Riviera, or—if you’re thinking red and blue states—Bush country.”
Freddy pointed to the bottom of the page. “There’s the address of the Talent Agency.” The Strand Talent Agency, Panama City Beach, Florida.
“So there’s good reason to believe he lives in Panama City,” Laura said.
“Thereabouts. I got another match, though.” Jay clicked through to another site, the Franklin County Home Buyers Guide.
Laura found herself staring at the house. “St. George Island?”
“Down the coast, east of Panama City,” Freddy explained.
“An old listing,” Jay said. “This site hasn’t been updated since 2002.” He zoomed in on a pale plaque near the top of the steps. It was blurry and hard to read, but Laura was able to make an educated guess: “Gull Cottage?”
“Shouldn’t be hard to find. St. George Island isn’t all that big.” He clicked on MapQuest. The barrier island looked like a narrow boomerang, bisected by one main road paralleled by a few ancillary streets. “Twenty-nine miles in length and no more than a mile across at any one place.”
He clicked onto some photographs of St. George Island.
“It doesn’t look like a place Peter Dorrance could afford,” Laura said. “Unless he’s independently wealthy.” Considering the sports car he leaned so casually against, that was a possibility.
“I did a few searches on him. The only times he comes up is in regards to acting jobs—and not very many of them. But at least you’ve got a place to start.”
Laura stared at Dorrance’s headshot. Was this her killer? If she went strictly by the FBI profile, he skewed young for this kind of crime. Usually, it took time to build up to precise ritual-like dressing up of the girl and posing her that way. It took time to develop that kind of self-confidence, time to become a full-fledged sexual predator.
