Pretty Little Things. Jilliane Hoffman

lay very, very still. Could the person see her? Where was she? She tried to open her eyes. They were so heavy.

       … She smells good. She sure looks good. She doesn’t seem evil. What man would not be tempted? Like many of us in our everyday lives, Moses must make a difficult decision. A terrible decision …

      She tried again. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

      Her eyes would not open.

      Was she dreaming? Was she blind? She reached to touch them and couldn’t. Her arms would not move. She struggled, but they would only tug. She felt the burning in her wrist and realized her arms were bound.

      She was tied up.

       … He tells them, ‘Slay, therefore, every male child and every woman who has had intercourse with a man. But you may spare and keep for yourselves all girls who had no intercourse with a man …’

      She could sense the flashes of bright light and she heard the familiar click of a shutter lens. Over and over and over. Someone was taking pictures of her.

      ‘Help me,’ she tried, but only a croaked whisper escaped, her words were as heavy as her eyelids and her throat burned. The footsteps slowed, circling her. Closer, closer. Like a cat might approach a wounded bird, studying it, watching it.

      Playing with it.

      The shaking started first in her knees, then like a fast-moving electrical current, the fear traveled up her spine, to her arms, her neck, her head, her teeth, until her whole body was trembling uncontrollably. She thought of the time in fifth grade when she had caught the flu and couldn’t stop shivering even under a dozen blankets. Her mom had let her watch Scooby-Doo cartoons all day in her bed, and gotten her wonton soup from the Chinese restaurant.

       Mommy, Mommy, I’ll be good, I swear. I won’t do anything bad ever again. Ever. I’ll take care of Bradley. I’ll never complain. I’ll get straight A’s again. I’ll listen. Just let this stop. Make it all go away, Mommy, please, please, please …

       … please let me wake up!

      She felt him standing there, maybe inches away, maybe a foot or two at the most, watching. Then he sat down next to her, and the mattress or cushion she was on sunk just a little under his weight. The smell of his cologne was nauseating. Paco Rabanne again. Was it Zach? Her mind raced. Was it the same person from the car? Could there be more than one? Could there be more than one person in the room right now, watching with him? Who had taken the pictures? She could hear him breathing hard but trying not to, the feel of his warm breath as it fell on her face. His breath smelled like … SpaghettiOs? She wanted to turn off her senses, just hear and smell and feel nothing. She wished everything were black again. She wished she could cry.

      The TV began to scream. Remember that! We are watching you! Are you pure in both thought and deed?

      Then his hand reached out and gently stroked the hair off her forehead. His trembling fingers were moist and warm.

      ‘Ssshh now, pretty girl,’ said the devil in a sing-song voice. ‘You’re home now. Right where you belong.’

       16

      It was his gut that told Bobby something was wrong. More wrong than just a troubled teen from a dysfunctional family not wanting to come home any more.

      No one knew the stats better than him. Every forty seconds in the US a child gets reported missing. That’s 800,000 kids a year; 2,185 each and every day. Most of them – as high as 92 per cent – were runaways. Alarming numbers, no doubt, until you realized that those were just the kids lucky enough to be reported missing. The National Runaway Switchboard put the actual number of runaways – often called ‘throw-aways’ because nobody cared if they didn’t come home – closer to somewhere between 1.6 and 2.8 million a year.

      Faced with overwhelming statistics like that, it wasn’t too far a leap to the conclusion that Elaine Emerson had run away from home. She fit the classic profile: a dysfunctional family, a history of running away and truancy by an older sibling, a family history of alcohol and drug use, a recent drop in grades and cutting classes, a recent relocation away from friends, and a tumultuous relationship with her parents, one of whom was a step. Her disappearance had taken Mom almost two days to finally get herself worried enough about to call in, which – translated into cop language – meant this was probably not the first time little Lainey had decided not to come home. Add in the sexy photos and a web space where the kid rants about her ‘asshole’ stepdad, ‘bitch’ mom and how she wants to ‘get the hell away from here’, and the missing juvi classification in NCIC was certainly justifiable. Statistically speaking, little Elaine should be walking back through that front door in the next twelve to twenty-four hours.

      But then there was the other 8 per cent. And that was what was troubling him.

      Bobby rubbed his temples. The skateboard contest down the block had moved and was now in the street right outside Elaine’s bedroom window. Given the neighborhood, he figured one or more of the kids had recognized the Crown Vic, Taurus and Grand Am as undercovers and had edged the game closer to see what was happening. Maybe they knew about the troubles with Liza Emerson. Maybe they knew of some troubles with Lainey. He made a mental note to talk to them as soon as he finished up with the computer.

      Of the 800,000 children reported missing each year, almost 69,000 of them – or 8 per cent – were classified as ‘abductions’. Familial abductions, such as when a parent takes off with a child in violation of a custody agreement, accounted for 82 per cent of those cases. But the remaining 12,000 were identified as victims of non-familial abductions. Non-familial, as in when the child is taken by an acquaintance, a family friend, or, sometimes – in the more remote and more terrifying cases for the public-at-large – a complete stranger. Plucked off of school buses or snatched from busy malls. Those were the cases that instantly made headlines and triggered AMBER Alerts. And for good reason. While the stereotypical kidnapping was statistically rare, it was almost always deadly.

      With the explosive growth of the internet and social-networking websites, non-familial abductions had risen dramatically within the last ten years. Bad guys didn’t need to lurk around corners any more, or peek in windows in the middle of the night. Now they walked straight through a kid’s front door in broad daylight. Right past Overprotective Mom and Drug Czar Dad and into junior’s bedroom via the computer. There they could exchange pictures, chat, play video games and discover all sorts of neat things about the ‘distant’ teen whose parents didn’t understand him. The World Wide Web had spawned a new hunting ground for predators. Trolling kiddie chat rooms and adolescent networking sites at their leisure, they picked off their prey from the millions of profiles offered on MySpace and Facebook, where smiling victims provided as much scrumptious detail about themselves as dinner entrées on a restaurant menu. Sitting behind a keyboard and monitor, this new breed of predator could pretend to be anyone: An eighteen-year-old boy; a twelve-year-old girl; a talent agent; Jay-Z’s best friend. They took advantage of the naiveté of kids and the ignorance of their parents – gaining the former’s trust, and then slowly, carefully exploiting the relationship, subtly grooming their victims for the ultimate, devastating high: a face-to-face meeting. And then, with just the simple click of a button, disappeared forever back into the black abyss of cyberspace once lives were destroyed and the police were finally called in.

      Bobby looked around the pink bedroom with its typical teenage décor. Lainey hadn’t lived here long, and she’d moved under protest, but she had hung up her posters and wall art, which meant she considered this room home. She was definitely a slob, but although her clothes spilled haphazardly out of drawers and boxes, they hadn’t been packed up into a suitcase. It would be hard to figure out what was missing, but, perhaps more importantly, if anything was missing. And then there was the faceless photo in her friend space. Bobby was willing to bet the bank ElCapitan just might be the intended recipient of all those sexy pictures. And of course, perhaps the most