Thief (4 page)

"Just for coffee." He gripped his beer hard,
his knuckles white. "I swear, at first I just wanted to have coffee
with her. That's all. I told myself I only wanted to meet her, put
a face to the name so I would quit imagining what she must look
like."

Ellie -- Rachel -- resisted, at first. When
he kept asking, she got a web cam.

"She was beautiful," Jimmy said. "She looked
like a college student. She looked like Karen used to when we were
all in college. Remember those days?"

Karen. Jimmy's wife. Karen was brunette and
petite and had retained her well-toned, stick-thin college figure.
She'd always struck me as a distant beauty -- a look but don't
touch type -- and more than just a bit impressed with herself.
Jimmy had gone after Karen with a single-minded determination that
finally wore her down. Karen had never tagged along with the boys
like I did. She got her tan in a tanning booth, and she never, ever
burned.

Jimmy continued to meet up with Ellie on the
Internet late at night, only now their chats were loaded with
innuendo and outright flirting. One night Ellie took her shirt off
and teased Jimmy with a web cam view of her bare breasts.

"I knew I was lost," he said. "I couldn't
help myself. I couldn't stop."

Their chats turned into online sex sessions.
Cybersex with real time pictures, at least from her end. Jimmy
spared me the details.

"I'm guessing she eventually agreed to meet
you in person," I said. My ice tea was half-gone. What I'd had to
drink sat bitter in my stomach.

Jimmy nodded. "Yeah. We were supposed to
meet two nights ago."

Monday night. That was the day Rachel didn't
meet her mom after school.

"Where?" I asked.

He hesitated a split second. "Motel Six on
West Fourth."

"For coffee." Right. "Nobody sets up a
meeting at a motel for coffee."

"I thought she was in college." He picked at
the label on his empty beer bottle. His nails were clean and neatly
trimmed, his fingers thick and square. I was imagining those
fingers doing things I didn't want to think about. "We'd been
having sex," he said. "Over the computer. The things she did,
I--"

I held up my hand to stop him. There was a
limit to what I could hear, and I'd just reached it. "Which one of
you came up with the idea to meet there?"

"It was the next logical step."

I glared at him. That wasn't an answer. The
nice lady everyone wanted to tell their troubles to wasn't the
woman in the booth anymore, and he knew it.

"Okay, I did," he said. "I wanted it. I
thought she did too. She agreed to it."

"What about Karen? Is she used to you
disappearing at night?"

"I told her I had a bachelor party to go to
for a client, I wouldn't be home until late. I waited in that motel
room until three in the morning. When I figured Ellie stood me up,
then I left and went home. Karen never even woke up."

I didn't know if that last bit was another
ploy for sympathy or a simple observation. Given the circumstances,
I was more inclined to believe he wanted sympathy. Too bad.

"Have you heard from her?" I asked.

"No. She didn't log in yesterday on the game
or in the room where we meet. I figured she decided to blow me off,
or she got cold feet and didn't want to face me. Or maybe she was
laughing it up with her girlfriends about this old guy she got to
fall for her." He rubbed his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut.
"I didn't catch the news yesterday at all. The first I heard about
her was on the news this morning."

"And you're sure the cops are going to come
after you," I said.

He raked a hand through his hair. Even
sitting across a booth from him in a dimly-lit bar, I could see his
hand was shaking.

"I used my home computer," he said. "I have
a DSL line. I figure the cops will be able to trace my IP if they
get records from her service provider. They'll want to know who
she's been talking to, and that's going to lead them straight to
me. Hell, she might even have logged our conversations for all I
know. If she did, they'll know we planned to meet." He took an
unsteady breath, and his voice was so low now I almost couldn't
hear him over the noise in the bar. "They'll know what we've been
doing, and if I was them, I'd damn sure come after me."

The Internet was a fine research tool for
someone in my profession, but I had no clue about the kind of
footprints a person left online or how the police traced those
footprints. Even so, I didn't doubt the cops would be able to find
Jimmy. If he had nothing to do with Rachel's disappearance -- and I
hoped to hell he didn't -- he'd still become a "person of interest"
in their investigation. His name would be spread all over the news.
He was a solid citizen, and well off to boot. The press would eat
it up. Jimmy Fisher, closet pedophile. Jimmy's life as he knew it,
not to mention the lives of his entire family, would be over.

"I've been waiting for the cops to come for
me all day," he said. "I'm scared for her, I'm scared for me.
You've got to help me." He looked down at the pile of shredded
label from his first beer. "I don't know who else to ask."

"Help you do what, hide evidence of what you
did from the cops?"

"No." His eyes were big and round now,
looking at me in shocked surprise that I'd even suggest such a
thing. "God, no."

Of course. There was only one other
reason.

"I don't do that kind of work anymore," I
said. I did judgment debtor work, but that involved tracking
assets, not missing persons. I'd made a conscious decision two
years ago
not
to do this anymore, not for
anyone. When finding someone meant the most, I'd screwed the job
up.

I'd learned things about myself back then I
didn't want to know, not the least of which were my limits. I got
along just fine these days with the leg work for attorneys and
collection companies. I didn't go looking for missing
teenagers.

"I need you, Abby," Jimmy said.

"No. Not for this."

"Please!" He glanced around our booth, a
quick, nervous flicker of his eyes. "I can't tell this to a
stranger. I could barely tell you, and we've known each other for
years."

I couldn't look at him. He was making this
all about him, but it wasn't. It was about a missing teenage
girl.

How out of my mind would I be if my own
daughter disappeared? If it was Samantha's face on the news instead
of Rachel's? Rachel, who'd called herself Ellie online and seduced
a married man. Had she known what she was doing, or had she just
been playing a role in another kind of online game?

What had happened to her? Could I live with
myself if I did nothing?

(PRETTY LITTLE HORSES is available for
purchase on
Smashwords
)

# # #

About the Author:

Annie Reed is a prolific writer with more
than fifty stories in print. Annie began her career writing
Star Trek
and
Battletech
short fiction, and has since
been published in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery venues.
Annie's work has been recognized both in the literary arena, where
she was awarded a Literary Fellowship Grant in 2004 by the Nevada
Arts Council for her speculative fiction story "One Sun, No
Waiting," and genre competition when her novel "Pretty Little
Horses" was chosen as a finalist in the 2007 Best First Private Eye
Novel contest sponsored by St. Martin's Press and the The Private
Eye Writers of America.

Annie lives in Northern Nevada with her
husband, her daughter, and a varying number of high-maintenance
cats. Annie can be found on the web at www.annie-reed.com. And if
you've read this far, Annie would like to reward you by mentioning
that a feature of her blog is Free Fiction Thursdays, where she
posts a short story every Thursday that's available for free for
one week. Just visit Annie's blog
Scribblings
for a link to the free story.

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