Tears rolled down Sandy’s cheeks as she re-read the posts again her slim, ring adorned, fingers swiping up and down on the phones touch screen, as if re-reading it would change anything. That perhaps she could find some additional words, in amongst the torrent of abuse, that would undo the hurt she felt.
She caught the attention of a few guys standing outside a Lexus dealership, the attractive girl drawing their gazes away from the latest models on display in the showroom, as she walked up West 57th street toward 8th Avenue. As she passed they looked on appreciatively at the teenagers slim frame, in her skinny jeans. Her home stencilled denim jacket that shouted "student", when she really wanted it to say "sophisticated and cool rock chick". But she didn’t notice their looks caught up as she was in the devastation of her social life.
A breeze caught a stray strand of her long blond hair and she absentmindedly tucked it back behind her left ear exposing as she did the three identical cubic zirconia studs that adorned three asymmetrical points of her lobe. She’d wanted diamond but her allowance wouldn’t afford that, and the guy she’d thought would buy them for her hadn’t, even though she’d gone all the way with him, and now he’d dumped her.
Worse still he’d done it online, publicly, and everyone at school was chiming in with their own comments. He’d dumped her and eighty six people had liked it ?? What the Fuck was that about? she thought. There were now fifty two comments and she hadn’t replied, had she left it too late? Should she reply or maintain some dignity? Though according to a lot of the comments she’d given up her dignity in the back seat of a ford Taurus near battery park last Wednesday.
Lost in this dilemma she almost didn’t see the black Lincoln town car until it was too late. The blast of its horn brought her back to the physical world just as she was about to step of the side walk, against the do not cross light.
Sitting in the back of the Lincoln Miller’s attention was also momentarily brought back to the real world by the muted sound of the cars horn and the driver’s sudden braking.
“Sorry about that sir”, the driver said over his shoulder as he started to smoothly accelerate away.
Miller looked out of the window at the girl they had almost hit, standing on her toes as if the near death experience had frozen her. Her hands held out as if willing her body back, pushing against some invisible wall, one hand holding a smart phone. Her arms, raised as they were, lifting her T-shirt exposing an inch or so of her taut young belly and a diamond naval stud.
The sparkling gem caught Millers attention, drawing his head around as the car moved on. “Probably a fake he thought to himself”. That was the problem, it was all fake, none of it was real, and as the young girl passed from view Miller’s attention came back to his own Smartphone.
He was using the SecurePortal app on his phone. The consultant that he had used to produce the security report on the internet grooming of Sophie had recommended it to him. The service was allegedly hosted in one of the ex-USSR countries, or that was his consultant’s best guess. It was accessed via two levels of randomised proxy servers usually located in countries that didn’t acknowledge many international treaties or arrest warrants. There was an exorbitant one off cost to set it up and that was paid for in Bit Coins, again untraceable. Miller had hidden the cost in amongst his fees to the client that had been paying him to fight Claudia’s court battle. Something that the New York state bar may have had issues with but Miller was confident that they were unlikely to ever find out.
The cost of hiring Hank Taylor had also been added to the client’s bill. The private investigator was ex-military police and also came at a significant cost. But Miller had used him before and knew he could be discreet, his brief had been simple, or at least Miller thought it had. He was to identify the true identity of Miller’s client, the client that was so generously paying all of Claudia’s considerable legal costs.
Using his police contacts Taylor had tried unsuccessfully to trace the murdered girl Chloe. That he couldn’t find any record of the abduction and murder of the child was strange but in a way expected. Miller had suspected from the start that the story was a ruse to cover ulterior motives for financing the case. What was strange was that there were no murders of girls named Chloe at all after 1970, Hank’s contacts had dug up several murdered girls prior to 1970 but they had had to go back to the old paper records.
Miller didn’t think for a second that there had been some sort of global conspiracy to keep girls named Chloe safe. What he did suspect was that his client had searched on the internet to ensure that the name they used would not lead to another case, one that may pick up unwanted coverage.
So Taylor and Miller had agreed that the story was almost certainly a front and therefore Taylor should use the only other two leads open to them, to follow the money trail and to trace Claudia’s online contact with MemoryOfChloe.
It was usually looking into financial records that caused the most problems, banks have a lot of money to protect, and therefore a lot of money to spend on security systems to protect that money. It was far too easy to trigger a flag when checking into someone’s accounts. So Miller and Taylor agreed that it was far safer to first check into the online contact. Unfortunately for them this was where things started to get strange.
