I closed the browser window. The search program had finished, turning up over a thousand URLs for the ten days I’d bracketed. I started scrolling through them, startled to see the amount of time I spent on the Internet. It took about twenty minutes for me to find where Petra had been, but, once I got there, it was dead easy to follow her in. She’d been updating her MySpace pages. She hadn’t logged in as Petra Warshawski. Instead, her page was called “Campaign Girl.”

I had to create my own MySpace page to look at Petra’s. I signed up under Peppy’s full name, Princess Scheherazade of DuPage, and even created an e-mail address for her. I began to see why people liked using the site. The process of making up Peppy’s biography and interests, the music she listened to—currently, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog”—took me away from my dark, disaster-filled office and my fears for my cousin’s safety. For twenty minutes, I was in a fantasyland of my own creation.

Campaign Girl loved Natalie Walker’s Urban Angel. She had five hundred friends. To read the messages they sent her, I needed Petra’s password. Trying to figure that out would require either better computer tracking skills or more inside knowledge of Petra than I had. I concentrated on the posts she’d made on her profile page.

She started by explaining that she had to post anonymously because she was working on an important Senate campaign and if she said anything under her own name, or her candidate’s name, she could get both of them in trouble.

“So I’m just Campaign Girl for now. And all of you homeys out there, PLEASE don’t screw up and call me by my real name. Not unless you want me to lose my job. And that goes quintuple for you, Hank Albrecht, wanting stuffy old Janowic to win. My boy is going to beat yours with one hand behind his back. And I have a bottle of beer riding on it.”

I looked up Hank Albrecht, one of Petra’s “friends.” He had gone to college with my cousin and was in Chicago working for the incumbent.

A few days later, Petra was writing about the work she was doing for Brian, whom she scrupulously only called “My Candidate.”