“Pretty soon folks will have their cell phones implanted. Nope. Not here. Her absence is voluntary, then. You know how to navigate this Web world? Good thing we all have to use computers on the job these days. Keeps our kids from shutting us out as much as they’d like.”
“What’ve you found?”
“Sometimes it’s a good thing the Internet is as intrusive as it is. Kids think they know it all but they’re no match for Internet crooks and don’t know beans about how to erase an Ethernet trail. I’m in the history segment on recent URLs, and your daughter has visited some veeery interesssting sites.”
She stared at him.
“Sorry. I’m old enough to have seen that Laugh-In catchphrase on TV as a kid. I think if Mariah’s gone, it’s on her own recognizance, Carmen. That’s good. Not great, but good.”
“What do you mean?” She dropped on her knees beside his chair, eyeballing the computer screen.
“Britney. Miley. She’s bookmarked every pop tart teen singer site there is. And American Idol, and the site for the Teen Queen reality TV show she competed on. They have mini-movies you can play. Shows her along with all the other contestants. The finals. Her singing that Broadway song. She’s good. Better than the winner. She’s a mini-star on this thing.”
Molina grabbed the keyboard. “I monitor this devil’s workshop. I have the V-chip, for God’s sake.”
“You’ve been sick, remember?” Morrie said. “Give yourself a break. The sites she went to are just pop culture, entertainment news. The kid’s a wanna-be, a groupie. She’s probably skipped out to attend some idol’s concert.”
Molina frowned at the screen. “It’s his fault.”
“Whose?
“My ex’s. Rafi Nadir. He encouraged me in a singing career, but I was an adult. She’s just a kid.”
“Wait. You had a singing career?”
She shook her head. Her usually subdued hair whipped her cheeks. Annoying.
“Amateur night only. I, ah, still sit in at a local club from time to time. Nobody knows my day job. It’s a hobby. And it wasn’t meant to be a role model thing for my ditsy teen daughter.”
Morrie frowned at her. At her hoop earrings and dark forties lipstick, borrowed from her torch singer persona, Carmen. “Is that what the way you look tonight is about?
She echoed his words, “the way you look tonight” in a velvet croon. “Yeah. I moonlight as a chanteuse, but not looking exactly like this. This is a disguise I used to meet with a . . . source.”
“A snitch?”
Calling Matt Devine a snitch was hilarious.
“No, Morrie, something more, uh, personal. My life is way more complicated than you think.”
“I always thought you were complicated.”
“That bad?”
“Bad in a good way. So you think this Nadir guy was going behind your back, encouraging Mariah in her American Idol fantasy?”
“He was ‘coincidentally’ on site at the Teen Queen reality TV show. Yeah, he ran into her. Call it karma. He saw me there with Dirty Larry. That would warn off any guy.”
Morrie made a face. “I saw you there with Dirty Larry too. What’s that all about?”
“Can’t a woman have a social life?”
“Dirty Larry isn’t a social life; he’s a lowlife. You don’t need someone like him.”
“Maybe not. Maybe he’s a suspect too.”
Morrie looked at her hard.
“He initiated the contact,” she said, “and I needed someone to do some undercover, off-the-meter work for me.”
“Chasing poor Miss Temple Barr’s magician boyfriend?”
“Kinsella was a prime suspect for the Goliath Hotel murder a couple of years ago.”
“Not for the department.”
She shrugged. “Larry’s canvassing the neighbors, so he might be back any minute.”
“Right.” Morrie turned back to the screen. “Mariah’s got herself posted online too.”
“MySpace?”
“Naw, nothing notable. Just this one site you and I never heard of, teenqueendreamscream.com.”
It came up, featuring primped and posed young girls, made up like movie stars.
“That’s Mariah?”
Molina stared at the image of a baby-faced young girl in glitter eye shadow and lip gloss.
“The kids post their photos and bios themselves. The site owner is a local DJ. Visitors vote on who’s most likely to make it big time.”
“Oh, my God. You see what that bastard Nadir encouraged my kid to do.”
“His kid too.”
“My kid all along. He was there at the Teen Queen show as security. He didn’t know who the hell she was, but he seduced her anyway with the idea of using her voice, like a talent was something the world would welcome. It doesn’t. And the path there is ugly. You know that, Morrie.”
“I don’t think whatever way they connected at the Teen Queen house was enough to send Mariah over the fence. I really don’t. Carmen, you don’t need villains here. You need to understand that Mariah sees a world where kids her age can live a dream. She has a dream. And talent.”
“I know that, Morrie. I fear that. I just hope her dream isn’t a nightmare.’
Morrie looked around to see if Dirty Larry had come back yet.
“One more thing, Carmen. Here’s the most popular outtake on that Teen Queen Reality TV show site. Six hundred and sixty thousand-some visitors. It’s not your daughter who’s the pop tart hit of the site. It’s this little number.”
He’d brought up a small podcast screen and hit the play button.
An animated figure with punk blond hair and a wild outfit was dancing and rapping in the TV show’s final competition. She hadn’t even placed in the finals, but Molina could place that particular piece of tiny trouble in a Las Vegas minute.
It was Zoe Chloe Ozone, the phony teen persona Temple Barr had created when a certain homicide lieutenant had pressured her to go undercover to protect her contestant daughter, Mariah, from a possible stalker.
The thirty-year-old PR woman, current Matt Devine fiancée, and ex–Max Kinsella squeeze was an Internet pop tart sensation and didn’t even know it.
Duty Call
Thanks to modern conveniences, a ringing cell phone had interrupted opera audiences, churchgoers, classrooms, and bedroom intimacies.
“Damn, I should have turned that thing off,” Temple complained. At least she had never programmed some dopey ringtone, like the “William Tell Overture,” theme song of the Lone Ranger.
“It’s the turnoff,” Matt pointed out as he watched his half-dressed fiancée scramble barefoot across her wooden parquet bedroom floor to the dresser. Coming home to Temple after being in the noisy restaurant with Molina was a nice contrast. He’d promised to keep Molina’s problem quiet, even though the restored condition of Max’s house was troubling.
Still, Matt could lie back virtuously, knowing he’d thought to turn off his cell phone. Of course, almost nobody called him. Temple’s PR job required her being eternally reachable, like a doctor, in case things went wrong. Matt checked his watch: 10:30 P.M. He had to leave for work in an hour, tops.
“Yes?” Temple was saying, looking puzzled. “Gone? Surely you can’t think Crawford—Doing? Uh—” She rolled her eyes at Matt. “Nothing. Now. Yeah. Right away. I hope it turns out to be a false alarm.”
She snapped the tiny slave driver shut. “Molina’s kid is missing.”
Matt sat up, collecting clothes. “Mariah? No! How long?”
“This evening sometime. Wasn’t at the other kid’s house where she was supposed to be.”
“What have you got to do with this? You and Molina get along like cobra and mongoose.”
“Molina wants to talk to Crawford Buchanan ASAP and needs someone who can find the vermin.”