Dot Com Boom

Anna Martinez

I screeched up to the curb and jumped out of my car. The entire block was a red and blue light show. Police cars everywhere. Unmarked FBI cars. News trucks. I walked past a reporter that was talking to the camera and they were saying a little girl was missing. Vivi. Fuck. I should have been here. I should have known The Fucking Devil would come after people in the FBI. Me. Lead on the case against him. I'm so sorry. I'm so fucking sorry Vivi.
"Let me through," I shouted, as I pushed a police officer out of the way. "My parents live in there." I flashed my FBI credentials. He let me pass.
I ran past three houses to reach my mother and father's house. I barged in and they were sitting in the living room crying. Vivi was nowhere in sight.
"Where is she?" I screamed.
My mother shook her head in regret. My father held her close with one arm. Both of them were crying.
"How could you fucking let this happen?" I screamed. "Why weren't you watching her?"
My father stood and opened his arms to me. "Get the fuck away from me!" I shouted and pushed him. "I have to find her!" He continued to walk toward me and take me in his arms. "Where were you? Where the fuck..." I broke down and cried in my father's arms, like a little fucking baby. Is this all I could do? We failed Vivi. We all failed her. But me most of all. I should have known. I should have been more careful.
The sadness was just about to give way to rage, when an officer knocked at the already-open door to get our attention. Standing next to him was Vivi. In her arms she held her dolls and two stuffed animals.
"I'm sorry," Vivi said. "Did I do something wrong?"
I rushed to her and scooped her up. "No, baby. You didn't do anything," I said. I held her so close and cried on her shoulder. "We thought we lost you." My mother and father joined the group hug. After we all got the crying out, I set Vivi down on the ground. "You scared us so much. Where have you been?"
"I was playing outside at the school. I built a really big castle in the sand box to get married in," she said excited. she swiped her arms up in the air to demonstrate that the castle was really big. In her left hand were the bride and groom dolls, and in her right the cat with long whiskers stuffed animal, and a new one I had never seen before, an actual dragon.
I laughed. "That's really great, but Vivi, you can't run off like that without an adult. It can be dangerous. Do you understand?"
She nodded. "I'm sorry, Anna."
"What is this?" I asked about the dragon stuffed animal.
"A nice man gave it to me. He said I should have a real dragon. Isn't it nice?"
That motherfucker. He was here. And he did talk to Vivi. He could have taken her. He could have... Oh my God, he really could have hurt her. But he didn't. He was taunting me. And how did he know about the dragon game that Vivi plays? Has he been watching her. Has he been watching me? This is how he does it. He watches. He stakes out. He strikes when he sees weakness.
I snatched the dragon from Vivi. "You can't keep this."
"Why?" She said, almost tearing up.
"That man you met was very bad. Me and my friends have been trying to catch him for a long time. We need this to see if it can help find him. This is evidence now. Do you understand Vivi?"
She nodded, but was ready to cry.
"We'll get you another dragon, I promise." Then I took her in my arms and hugged her for a long time. She wasn't going to be staying here. Neither were my mother, father, and abuela. They're all being moved to safe custody until this is all over.



We took the next few days using the dragon stuffed animal to try to find some leads. We found that it was obtained at Barston's Child's Play toy store in Washington D.C. Surveillance footage from the store and area around it showed the same thing as the upload points. A rolling static. We asked the store clerks and they didn't remember anyone buying the stuffed animal. They showed their purchase logs for around the time the static hit, none were sold. He probably shop-lifted it. I asked if the store clerk remembered anyone unusual. Or if they remembered anyone around the time of the static. They couldn't recall.
The stuffed animal underwent forensics to identify any handlers. Skin cells, hair, anything. The obvious people were on the list of subjects: Vivi, me, and some of the task force members that had handled it. There were two others. One was the toy store owner and another was a distributor of merchandise to local businesses. The case was too big to just assume their innocence. We did a fairly extensive investigation into them. They weren't the killer.
I asked Vivi about the man she saw. She told an artist what the man looked like so a sketch could be made. She said he had a beard and was pale white. She said he had very blue eyes. And that he had black hair. Vivi remembered as best as she could. It's the only thing we had to go on. We released the sketch to the public, hoping it was accurate. I didn't want to release it. If it isn't him, it'll just throw us more off of his trail. The task force pressured me into it, Donald did. I didn't have much hope that is what The Fucking Devil actually looked like, he's too smart to be seen without a disguise on by someone that he let live.
While all of this was going on, Jake was nowhere to be seen. As a matter of fact, he wasn't even there that night that we recovered Vivi. He was the one that called me, then never showed up. It was getting fucking old. I was about to tell Donald what had been going on with him, the disappearances, the strange behavior, when the killer beat me to it.