“Yo. Earth to Hatcher. You there, girl?”
Rogan waved a hand in front of her eyes, as if to check her sight.
“It’s like that parakeet hypnotized you for a sec.”
“Sorry.” The bird sticker made her sad. Sadder than Julia’s water-pruned and lifeless body in the bathtub. With all the emphasis on the Whitmires’ wealth and Julia’s life of privilege and precociousness, Ellie had neglected to remember that she was still only a sixteen-year-old girl. A part of her had still been childlike. It was yet another fact Ellie had overlooked during that initial callout to the townhouse.
Pettinato motioned for them to look over his shoulder. “All right, so here’s what seems relevant based on what you told me yesterday—suspected suicide, slit wrist, found in the tub. You asked me specifically to search for first drafts of the goodbye note, or for any Internet research about depression or suicide. I got zilch on both fronts. The only documents I found on the hard drive all appeared to be school papers—Shakespeare, Civil War, that kind of stuff. I didn’t find any Googling for methods of death, for mental heath issues, for anything like that.”
“So what did she look at online?” Rogan asked.
“Typical teenage fare. Facebook. Twitter—though that was more one-way communication.”
“What does that mean?”
Ellie braced herself for the usual loud sigh that followed questions that struck CIS detectives as stupid, but Pettinato showed no signs of attitude. “It’s how a lot of quote-unquote real people use Twitter. They don’t actually post—or tweet, in the lexicon. But they have accounts so they can follow their favorite celebrities. She followed twits like those big-butt sisters and smack-talking rap stars. That kind of nonsense. So, anyway, Facebook. Twitter. Lots of online shopping. Fashion sites. Yelp for reviews of restaurants and clubs and stuff. Celebrity gossip like TMZ, Us Weekly, and Perez Hilton. Really, not all that much activity as far as surfing goes. But I did find one hit over the weekend to a blog about childhood sex abuse. I thought maybe that could be related, you know?”
If Julia had been abused, it would put her eating disorder and promiscuity into context. It would also make her a prime candidate for suicide.
“And explain to us exactly how you can be sure Julia accessed the blog?” Rogan asked. “And, to be sure, we’re not total Luddites—we get history windows, time stamps, etcetera. It just helps when you break it down.”
Pettinato was waving away the explanations. “I may be CIS, but I’m also a detective. I get it. So, like you said, there’s a history window involved. If we open Safari here . . . that’s the Internet browser”—he smiled at the exaggeratedly elementary level of the tutorial—“and hit Show All History, and then look at this column called Visit Date? Now we have a list of every site she went to, and the date and time when the visit occurred. And here, on Saturday night, you’ll see three entries for this blog.”
He clicked on the link and the website opened. “Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor.”
Pettinato scrolled down the screen slowly so they could get a sense of the subject matter.
“Can you tell if she’d been following the blog for long?” Rogan asked. “Or going to other websites related to sex abuse?”
“No, this is the only one.”
“It could be a complete fluke,” Ellie offered. She herself had wound up at countless unintended online sites thanks to random hyperlinks, pop-up ads, mistaken mouse clicks, and search-engine snafus.
“That’s what I thought at first,” Pettinato said, “but I swear there’s a reason I thought you’d want to see this.”
He pulled up the history page again, and this time Ellie noticed that the “Second Acts” blog was listed three consecutive times. “Wait a second. Why are there three entries in a row if she only went to the website once?”
“Ah. Because the fact of three different entries in the history window doesn’t mean three separate visits to the blog. Otherwise we’d see the names of other websites in between if she was doing other surfing. Those three entries are for navigation within the blog itself. See: if we click on this first entry here”—he moved the cursor and clicked accordingly—“we pull up the home page for the blog. This is the main page, what you get whenever you enter the main website address. Got that?”
He looked to both Rogan and Ellie for confirmation they were following his step-by-step tour.
“Okay. Then we go back to the history to see what happened next. We click on this second entry, and now we see the comments that came in response to the blog post for that day.”
Rogan nodded. “So Julia would have first seen the post of the day on the home page, but then she clicked to see the comments.”
“Correct. Now here’s what’s interesting. If you click on this third entry in her history, it takes you to the ‘Create Journal Entry’ box in the comments section.”
“Meaning that she posted a comment?” Rogan asked.
“Well, I can’t tell you that with a hundred percent certainty just from the laptop. The only way to do that would be if she had a keystroke recorder on her computer. But, yeah, I’m pretty confident that’s what happened.”
“Explain to me how you know that?” Ellie said. Pettinato was a detective—and perhaps a talented one at that—but she didn’t want his inferences. She needed to conclude for herself that two and two added up to four.
“Okay, but if I’m right, am I allowed to claim the hundred-thou reward? Just saw it online.”
“I’m quite sure the three of us aren’t eligible.”
“What I know for certain is that the three listings in her history correlate to these three actions. One, she pulled up the home page Saturday at 10:02 p.m. Two, she pulled up the comments, also at 10:02 p.m. And, three, she pulled up the page for entering comments at 10:03 p.m. Now, if you look here on the blog post that went up on Saturday, there’s only one comment posted within ninety minutes of that time, and it was finalized at 10:04 p.m.”
She understood now why Pettinato had concluded that Julia was the author of the comment posted at 10:04.
“And here’s the kicker.” He pushed back from the laptop to make sure they could get a clear look. “This is the comment that was posted that night.”
“If you thought that night twenty years ago was bad, wait until you see what I have planned. You won’t remember a single time on the clock. Maybe a day on the calendar if you’re lucky. Maybe a week. Or maybe I’ll keep you busy for a month. One thing I know for certain: You will not live to write about it.”
Ellie remembered the physics teacher saying that Julia was more likely to have been bullying someone else than being bullied herself. Julia may have only been sixteen years old, but these were not the words of a normal teenager.
“I assume you have no idea why your victim would say such a thing?” Pettinato asked.
They both muttered their no’s, still taking in the new information.
“Now, here’s where things get really perplexing. Your victim died Sunday night? Well, that’s all and well if we’re right about her posting the one comment on Saturday night. But guess what? There have been five other threats since Monday. Unless Julia Whitmire is surfing the Web from the afterlife, someone else out there is continuing whatever she started.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ramona was not usually an angry girl. She had been told over the years that she had plenty of reason to be an angry person. The word bitter had been used at times, too.
Usually the words came from people who thought their job was to tell Ramona how she should feel.