Read Kiss Me, Kill Me for Free Online

the task at hand. She wanted to shake sense into Kirsten, but more, she wanted to find and protect her, to shield her from the depravity she’d probably already seen and experienced.
    “You can’t save the world,” Lucy said aloud. Her brother Dillon constantly reminded her that she took things too personally, that she wanted to help everyone, and some people didn’t want help.
    Lucy put her charts aside and went through the other files. She saw the empty .mov files that Sean had mentioned, and realized they were time stamped to correlate to the chat log files. That was odd, because there shouldn’t be two files created with one exchange. But there was definitely no data in them, and no way to re-create the images.
    One file stood out because it was in a completely different directory. She downloaded an undelete program to Kirsten’s computer, then ran it, watching the computer screen as files were re-created. Many were corrupted or unable to be rebuilt—a common problem if they’d been deleted long ago. Some of those could be recoverable by law enforcement—the FBI had a state-of-the-art recovery process that could re-create more than 90 percent of deleted files, unless the person went to extraordinary lengths to permanently delete the data through a multistep process.
    While she waited for her program to finish the laborious process, she wrote up a report for Sean with her ideas as to what the data meant. She was about to send it off when she saw a .mov file undelete. She opened it.
    The webcam footage was clearly of Kirsten’s room. Kirsten and a male teen were naked on her bed, his mouth on one of her breasts, her hands holding his head.
    Lucy stared, stunned. Why was she surprised? Maybe because she had thought that the generic room was for sex chats only—but an amateur sex video was simply one more step down the same dark path.
    And while Kirsten and her young companion were definitely amateurs, both teenagers knew the webcam was on, as they moved and adjusted their positions to make sure it caught all the action. It appeared consensual, the two intentionally creating an amateur sex video; Lucy couldn’t pretend that Kirsten didn’t know.
    She couldn’t watch anymore. Her hands were shaking when she clicked stop , and she got up and paced, her legs weak; she would have puked if she had anything in her stomach.
    “What have you been doing, Kirsten?” she whispered to no one.
    She couldn’t stop shaking. Her fears of being watched by unknown people crawled under her skin like microscopic worms, making the hair rise on the back of her neck. But she wasn’t being watched. And this wasn’t rape; this wasn’t a hidden camera. These were two teenagers voluntarily having sex for the world to see.
    Lucy became angry, not at herself, but at Kirsten and her boyfriend. What possessed them to do such a thing? Did they even consider the consequences? That once that video was out, it was in cyberspace forever?
    They could have recorded it just for themselves.
    Lucy sat back down and considered how to approach searching for this video online. She didn’t want to search the known amateur sex sites—she knew what would happen to her if she went too deep into that world. Verbal chats she could manage because they were just words, but images brought back her nightmares, and with everything that had happened in the last five weeks it was all she could do to keep those memories at bay. She knew herself well enough to know that going to the sex sites would be the tipping point.
    Yet what kind of FBI agent would she be if she couldn’t conquer that fear? Because she would likely have to conduct just this sort of investigation if she were assigned to cybercrimes, which was her expertise and her dream job. She had to either find a way to defeat the nightmares and make sure they never returned or learn to live with them.
    They’d gone away before; they would go away again. She had to believe this.
    Taking another gulp of