Chapters (48)
- also by patricia cornwell
- title page
- copyright
- dedication
- contents
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- two nights later
- credits
What kind of world do we live in? I think.
“A lot of people on these social networking sites don’t research whoever they’re tweeting or direct-messaging or making comments to. They arrange to meet and haven’t a clue. Unbelievable how trusting people are.”
“Desperate is what comes to mind.”
“Stupid,” she says. “Really stupid. And I told him.”
“Marino should know better.” Damn him.
“Nothing in Peggy Stanton’s profile suggests she’s local or from Massachusetts.” Lucy indicates what’s on a computer screen. “I’m not sure Marino was doing much more than cyber-flirting.”
“Cyber-flirting? You could be flirting with a damn serial killer or a terrorist.”
“Obviously, that’s why he’s in this trouble,” she says. “I’m not sure he was serious about actually meeting her or dating her. They never arranged anything that might have worked. It was all talk. He thought it was safe.”
“He told you they never arranged anything, or you can tell from the tweets?”
“Twenty-seven from him,” she repeats. “Eleven from her, from whoever was impersonating her. There’s nothing to suggest they ever got together, although he bragged to her he was going to Tampa and maybe she’d want to, quote, ‘drop by for some fun and sun.’”
“Did he say when he was going?” I think of the timing again. “When he was arriving and departing?”
The video clip was e-mailed to me not even an hour after Marino’s plane landed in Boston this past Sunday after he’d been in Tampa for a week.
“You got it,” Lucy says. “He gave the info in a tweet and she never answered. Like I said, it was all talk. But you can see why it’s a problem for the police, for the FBI.”
“It still is?”
“I don’t know. He never called her, never met her. But he needs to stay in his foxhole right now.”
“He’s still at your house?”
“He needs to stay there. Nobody’s going to bother him without our seeing it coming.”
I’m not sure what she means by that or who might see it coming.
“The problem is, he wants to go home, and I can’t exactly keep him against his will. The account’s gone now.” She means the BLiDedwood e-mail account is. “The bad guy”—that’s what she calls whoever it is—“created it, then deleted it, right before he e-mailed the video clip to you.”
“I’m confused,” I admit. “I thought it was created two months ago, at the end of August. Yet I just got the video clip, the e-mail from BLiDedwood, on Sunday.”