“Is this a joke?” Chief Murphy Radisson wasn’t laughing.
“Hardly.” Lt. Perry Flynn couldn’t sit facing the Chief any longer.
“Tell me where you found these again.” Rad hated anyone pacing in front of his desk. Perry didn’t care. He walked over to the window and returned to loom over the Chief’s desk.
“I sure as hell wasn’t looking for a date.” Perry focused on the printed Internet pictures that Rad held in his hand.
“I’d like to think not,” Rad bellowed, his expression hardening fiercely. His immediate outrage was proof enough that he was taking this seriously. “Do you want to tell me what your sudden fascination with kiddy porn is doing on my desk?”
Flynn blew out a breath. It had been a long day, and it was far from over. He nodded to the pictures scattered across the Chief’s desk.
“I did some searching earlier. And only printed the ones that I would swear are legitimate.”
Rad glanced once again at the pictures before dropping them on his desk and then leaning back in his chair, lacing his fingers together and clasping them behind his head. He relaxed although still managed to look ready to pounce, and stared at Perry for a long moment. “There’s no such thing as a goddamn legitimate pornography Web site. Why the hell did you print these? Start making some fucking sense or get the hell out of my office.”
Flynn ignored the crass tone. “You know damn good and well what I mean. These come from Web sites—in fact, four of them from the same site—where you can buy these children off an auction block if you want.”
“And you’ve got proof?”
“No, I don’t have proof other than what is printed on the site. You need to subscribe to these sites, and register with a fair amount of personal information.”
“And you did that?”
“I’ve saved the links if you’d like to take a look. I used the same credit card I got over a year ago when I worked that casino case. Someone would have to do a fair amount of digging to link the card to me as a cop.” He couldn’t look at any of those pictures without seeing his nieces, all of whom were about the same ages as the girls in those pictures. It made him sick, pissed him off. He would kill any bastard with his bare hands who tried doing anything demented or perverted to any of his sister’s girls. “In the past year two high school girls have disappeared.” He stalked over to the window again and tugged at the collar of his uniform, more than ready to get out of it and chill in front of the TV for the night. Like that would happen at this rate. “Yesterday we bring in a sixteen-year-old, Sally Wright, who was convinced she was talking to a boy her age over in Topeka. If she didn’t have overly protective parents, as she called them, who watched out for her and followed her to the rendezvous point, we might have had three missing girls.” Perry rested his fist on the edge of Rad’s desk and stabbed at the pictures with his index finger. “And the worst part is the ISP for those goddamn sites is right here in Mission Hills.”
That grabbed Rad’s attention. “You’ve verified that?”
“I looked into it myself. But just to make you happy,” he added, offering a wry grin, although he was anything but amused by this conversation. “I’ve contacted a Web site expert and am verifying it.”
“There is nothing to pin Sally Wright’s interrupted rendezvous to anything as serious as child pornography.”
Perry dragged his fingers through his short dark hair and took his time choosing his words. Rad was a damn good Chief of Police, but he was a hard-ass, too. Present his argument right and he’d get a chance at this. Fuck it up and he’d get his wish at watching TV all evening. He wasn’t going to win either way on this one.
“The MO is wrong for runaways. You’ve agreed with me on that on more than one occasion. When Sally Wright was in here yesterday with her parents, we saw a mother and father frantic over the fact that they almost lost their daughter. If Charlie Wright hadn’t followed his daughter to the mall and spied on her, some prick would have snagged her up. Mr. Wright brought your proof to you.”
Rad didn’t move but continued resting his head against his hands while eyeballing Perry carefully. “So what’s this all