“Life happens. You can’t sit here all night waiting for him. You have a life, too. Don’t you have dinner plans with your brother tonight?”
“Yes, but—”
“Lucy, Prenter will be here tomorrow.”
She said, “I have some time—twenty minutes and I’ll make it to Clyde’s by seven.”
“If you sprint to the Metro.”
“I’m a fast runner.” She smiled at Fran, mentally crossing her fingers.
The older woman shook her head but returned the smile. “I’ll pull the plug if you’re still here at six-fifteen.”
That wasn’t an idle threat—Fran had literally cut the power before. Lucy crossed her heart with her right index finger and blew Fran a kiss before she turned back to the fast-moving chat rooms.
WCF had a secure bank of computers, as secure and untraceable as any in the FBI, where they investigated the illegal sexual exploitation of women and children. When they collected enough evidence to identify a victim or perpetrator, they turned over the files to the FBI or local police for further investigation.
Aside from their primary charter, WCF tracked paroled sex offenders. By law, felony sex offenders had to register with local law enforcement after release from prison and with every subsequent change of residency.
Yet, depending on the state, on average half of all sex offenders required to register either never did or moved and didn’t re-register. These parolees were the most likely to commit another sex-related crime, and therefore were the target of WCF’s tracking project. Creatures of habit, these guys often made small changes to their online profiles but still targeted the same types of children or women; they thought because they’d moved to another town or state, they wouldn’t be discovered. And if it were solely up to law enforcement, the predators would be right: they’d get away with it. There wasn’t enough time or manpower to track down every sex offender who skipped registration.
For her master’s thesis, Lucy had deduced that while most sexual predators may modify their behavior after serving time in prison, usually these changes were superficial. They could still be identified by vigilant trackers by scientifically breaking down the creeps’ past activities: how they were caught, coupled with their victim preference—which rarely changed after incarceration. Lucy’s research told her that predators could still be spotted even if they changed their location or online identities. Since graduating, she had continued to develop her database to incorporate all known data as well as a psychological scale that factored in minor behavioral changes. The more information she added, the more powerful—and effective—the system became.
Groups like WCF could use their private resources and volunteers to identify predators online and, if a parolee, it was much easier to put a predator back in prison if he violated parole. Lucy’s database, though still technically in beta testing, had been instrumental in finding and tracking parolees most likely to reoffend, resulting in more than a dozen arrests to date.
For the past two weeks, Lucy had been working on one specific parolee, Brad Prenter, a convicted rapist who’d been paroled after serving only half his time. Normally, WCF targeted predators who hunted children and skipped town after parole, but Prenter was a special case. He used homemade GHB—Liquid X—on his dates. Mixed with alcohol, GHB was especially dangerous. The victim who’d sent him to jail—a Virginia college freshman he’d met because he was the teaching assistant in her chemistry class—had had the wherewithal to text her roommate when she started feeling strange. Otherwise Prenter would most likely have gotten away with his crime.
During the investigation leading up to his trial, authorities learned that Prenter had been suspected of raping another girl in his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, but there had not been enough evidence to go to trial. He’d given that victim such a high dose of GHB that it had left her in a coma. Due to a delayed investigation—the police weren’t immediately called, because the hospital didn’t find signs of forced sex and didn’t initially test for date-rape drugs—Prenter had time to dispose of his home chemistry lab.
There had been circumstantial evidence that Prenter targeted other victims online. He’d hook up, drug and rape them, then drop them at their house. Waking up, the women remembered very little. The only reason Prenter’s name came up in another investigation was because a friend of the victim had seen him with her the night she was raped.
But even in that case, there had been no physical evidence, and the victim didn’t remember anything. Prenter’s house and car were searched, but the investigators found no GHB.
Two weeks ago, the research arm of WCF identified Prenter’s new online persona, and based on his profile he was living in northern Virginia. He had registered as a sex offender and received permission to attend college at American University. He trolled a particular dating website to hook up in the flesh, so Lucy created a fictional character that met Prenter’s personal criteria: a petite, blond college girl who liked running, rock music, and live bands. It didn’t matter that Lucy was tall with black hair, her job was to draw him to a public location where he’d have the opportunity to violate his parole in full view of law enforcement. It had worked many times during her three years volunteering for WCF, and Prenter was already hooked. Lucy just had to reel him in.
And when she did? One of WCF’s volunteer off-duty cops would be there to cuff him and haul him back to prison.
Justice would be fully served. All three to five years.
For too long she’d felt helpless. Even with all the self-defense training, her education, and her dreams, Lucy had felt she needed to be doing more. Interning with Senator Jonathon Paxton on the Judiciary Committee had been interesting, but when he introduced her to Fran at WCF, it had changed Lucy’s life. She was a far stronger, better person today because of the work she did for WCF. She could almost believe she was a normal, average woman.
Even her brother Patrick had admitted the last time they’d talked that Lucy was back to her old self.
Perhaps not her old self. She was no longer the naïve teenager she’d been six years ago when she trusted too easily and thought she was invincible. But she’d finally let go of most of the pain and anger. Some righteous anger, the outrage for injustices in the world, kept her focused on what was important. Saving the innocent. Stopping criminals. Her inner drive was so strong that if she didn’t get into the FBI, she’d find something else in criminal justice. She could go to law school and become a prosecutor. Or join a local police force. Or even go to medical school and become a psychiatrist specializing in crime victims.
But instead she wanted to be on the cutting edge of federal law enforcement in cybercrime.
Talking to predators like Prenter, even in the anonymity of a secure chat room, made her physically ill, but it was for a greater good and taught her more about cybercrime than years in the classroom.
Lucy had done her part to entice Prenter—playing coy and sexy, never suggesting they meet but always giving him the opportunity. He’d asked once, early on in their online chatting, about “hooking up” somewhere, but she’d declined. If she made it too easy for him, he’d smell a cop. And if the case ever came to trial—highly unlikely because he was a registered sex offender on parole—WCF would need to testify that Prenter had plenty of opportunities to walk away, that he actively pursued his intended victim.
The second time he asked, she again declined, but hinted that she was interested, just busy. She’d never suggest a meeting, because WCF played by the same rules as law enforcement—don’t give them a chance to cry entrapment. Be as passive as possible while still giving the pervert the hints he needed to convince himself that he could have sex with the person behind the computer.