Read Time to Run for Free Online Page A

bricks-and-mortar world, you at least had a chance to get a good read on people, to look them in the eye. In cyberspace, men could be women, friends could be predators. As her interest in computers grew, Nicki needed to understand that. He even showed her a few of the pictures of Deni’s gruesome wounds.
    After all of that, how could Nicki possibly run off with some guy from cyberspace? And he was certain it was a guy. Internet sickos were almost always guys.
    Carter moved from the bed to her desk chair, where he pressed the button and waited for the machine to grind through its booting protocol. The monitor popped and crackled, and then he faced the computer wallpaper: yet another pop star, this one shirtless, with his pants unfastened to his pubic hair.
    Carter guided the cursor to the swirly triangular logo for their Internet provider and clicked it. Since he didn’t know her password, he didn’t bother trying to sign on. It wasn’t necessary, anyway; not for what he was looking for.
    He clicked on her cyber file cabinet and searched his way through several menus until he found the one he wanted. Nicki changed her log-on password every other day, it seemed, but it never occurred to her to protect access to her files. Such a simple precaution wouldn’t have prevented Carter from finding what he wanted, but it would certainly have slowed him down.
    When he found the file marked Chat Logs, he clicked that, and there they were: a complete record of every chat his daughter had had since God knew when. After the Deni James case, one of the detectives he worked with had told him how to rig Nicki’s computer software so that every website she visited and every chat and instant message she shared became a part of a permanent digital record, still around even after the user thought that the files had been erased. If the James family had had such a bug in their daughter’s computer, they might have been able to get help before the permanent damage was done. Certainly, it would have left a trail that would have negated Deni’s refusal to testify.
    Carter gaped at the endless list of chats. He knew that she spent a lot of time online, but he had no idea that it was this much time! More surprising, he saw that the vast majority were time-stamped between midnight and three in the morning. No wonder she was always so tired.
    Could it be that he was so hopelessly naïve, that Nicki was living a life he knew nothing about, hiding even more details from him than he’d thought?
    Fifteen minutes later, he had his answer.

Chapter Four
    V innie Campanella glanced nervously at the digital clock over the ticket taker’s station. If everything were truly running on schedule, he had only fifteen minutes left before boarding, with thirty pages left to go in the novel he was reading. In it, a quadriplegic New York City detective was in grave danger, and Vinnie hated like hell to break up the action to board the airplane.
    So engaged was he in the novel that he was surprised he even heard the page over the public address system: “Vincent Campanella, please go to the nearest white courtesy phone for a message.”
    The announcement caused his insides to tighten. He couldn’t imagine that white courtesy phones carried much good news.
    The nearest phone was mounted on a pillar two gates away. The other side was already ringing as he brought the receiver to his ear. “Customer Service,” said a pleasant voice on the other side.
    â€œUm, hello, my name is Vincent Campanella. Did you just page me?”
    He heard papers shuffling in the background. “Oh, yes, Mr. Campanella. Someone turned in a wallet here with your identification in it. Did you lose a wallet?”
    Vinnie’s right hand slapped his left hand suit coat pocket—a move fast enough to make passersby wonder if he might be in pain. Sure enough, his billfold was missing. How could that be?
    â€œSomeone found it on the