Chat - Archer Mayor [57]
“No connections to my brother’s accident?” he almost murmured.
“Not yet,” Rob admitted, his voice upbeat. “I did take advantage of all this to do a search for your mom’s name, and Leo’s—just to see.”
Once more the cursor was leaping about, and text blocks of chat dialogue cut in and out across the screen, making Joe slightly dizzy.
“Like I said,” Rob continued, “there’s a huge amount of material here, and I doubt what I found’ll be the last of anything illegal. I mean, even the porno stuff is likely to get us something. But I didn’t hit on any of your names—except in the billing and service documents, of course.”
Joe suddenly sat straighter in his seat. “Go back.”
Barrows froze his hand. “Where?”
“Maybe one click. I saw something. One of the handles, or whatever you call them.”
“Screen names?” Rob asked, moving back.
“Yeah,” Joe said, pointing at the screen. “What’s going on here?”
Rob paused to study the document before them. “It’s a general chat room. Bunch of people all talking at once. You do this sometimes, like at a party, when you’re looking for someone special. When you do, you can ask that person to kind of step away for a private chat, like you were going into another room, just the two of you.”
“What’s the topic here? Drugs again?” Joe asked.
“Nope, it’s the other favorite. Sex.”
Joe tapped the screen with his index finger. “What about this one? What’s he after?”
Rob leaned forward and began studying the exchange, scrolling through the short and, to Joe, virtually incomprehensible one-liners where almost every word was reduced to its purely phonetic root, if not merely replaced by initials—for example, “LOL” for “laughing out loud.” The dialogue before him now might just as well have been written in a foreign language.
“Ugh,” Rob finally said, sitting back.
“What?”
“Well, it’s sex, all right, but what that guy’s looking for is young girls. There’s a load of that shit on the Web. You see it everywhere. CarGuy’s not biting, though, doesn’t even address your man—different interests.” He twisted around to face Gunther. “Why?”
“It’s the name,” Joe admitted.
Rob returned to the screen. “Rockwell? Where’d you run into that?”
“I don’t know for sure if I did. I’ve got a John Doe case we’re working on where all we’ve got for ID is the motel registration—N. Rockwell. I laughed when I saw it, because it reminded me of the painter.” He pointed at the computer again. “Probably a big stretch. It’s not that unusual a name.”
Barrows was already typing, moving to another display. “Everybody has to register a profile with the chat room. It’s a legal thing. They all lie, of course, but you’re supposed to be able to check each other out if you connect. Most pedophiles pretend they’re nineteen, or something.” He laughed shortly and added, “Course, we lie, too, when we’re trying to catch ’em. But the format is basically name, age, where you’re from, what your hobbies are, and so on.”
He paused so Joe could see what was before them. “Of course,” he then added, pointing out a warning message, “there’s always the flip side, too. They put a lock on their profile. We’d have to get a subpoena to open it, and, for that, a good reason to request one. Slim chance, given the innocuous language I saw.”
Joe nodded, his enthusiasm undaunted. Despite what he’d just said, he actually didn’t think that the name Rockwell surfacing twice in odd circumstances was too likely. They had to be connected. “Going back to the chat where CarGuy was, too, can you tell if Rockwell does hook up with anyone?”
“Maybe” was the answer, as Barrows went back to work.
“Yeah,” he said a few minutes later. “Looks like Mandi144 and he hit it off. They certainly go off together.”
“And Mandi is . . . ?” Joe asked leadingly.
Rob broke away from the computer to give him a sour look. “Well, let’s put it this way: She says right up front that she’s fourteen in the general chat. I’m guessing your Mr. Rocky wasn’t.”
Joe nodded slightly. “My Mr. Rocky is also dead.”
JMAN: U hav a pic or cam?
Mandi144: cams broke - howz