LITMIR.BIZ

      *LAINEY*

      The wrong age didn’t faze him. To join MySpace you had to promise you were fourteen or older and enter a birthday accordingly. There were no stats, but he’d be willing to guess that a good chunk of the ‘teens’ on MySpace were closer to eleven or twelve. He’d interviewed kids as young as eight or nine who’d had MySpace pages, with profiles that claimed they were thirty-five. He clicked on Lainey’s profile. It wasn’t set to private, which meant anybody surfing MySpace could see it, member or not. Gwen Stefani’s ‘The Sweet Escape’ started to play. Brilliantly colored butterflies served as wallpaper. Pictures of young teenage girls, who he guessed were friends from Ramblewood, decorated the site – laughing, kissing the camera, making goofy faces, giving the finger, trying to look way too sexy for thirteen-year-olds. Cigarettes dangled from the slight fingers of a couple of girls; others toasted the camera with strange-looking drinks. A girl with long, brown, coffee-colored hair was in a few of the group shots. A girl who looked a lot more grown up than the lanky, awkward fifth grader in the photo Bobby held in his hand. Each picture was captioned with insider-jokes:

      Molly B. & the ferret bandits!

      No one home … LAINBRAIN Bite me, please!!! E and M pre-concert jelly-jollies … Was I just at the bathroom and then at the stairs?

      He looked at his notepad: Molly Brosnan, Erica and Melissa Weber, Theresa – Last Name Unknown. He glanced around the room. Vampire movie posters adorned the walls. Sketches of ferrets decorated the inside of her hutch. He definitely had the right site.

      Tiny picture icons of Lainey’s favorite movies, rock bands and books covered half of the first page. Blogs, angst and general teenage drama filled the next two. Akin to a lot of MySpace pages, her site read like a diary, supplemented with postings and comments from her fellow MySpace friends. Three pages told Bobby more about Elaine Emerson than her mother could manage to communicate to police over the past eight hours.

      ‘Whatcha got?’ Zo asked, standing over his shoulder.

      ‘She’s got a MySpace. Last time she logged in was Thursday, the day before she went to the movies with the unknown friend. Hates school. Can’t stand bro, stepdad’s an asshole, mom’s a bitch and sis is pretty cool. Loves animals and her BFFs. Typical shit. Wishes she could, quote, “just get the hell away from here”. Endquote.’

      ‘Sounds like that’s just what she did,’ Zo muttered. ‘So much for, “my daughter wouldn’t do that.” Damn, you’re quick. Are we out of here, then?’

      ‘Not yet. She’s got twenty-four names on her friend space, but only six in her top,’ Bobby said, hitting the print button. MySpace was a membership-only social networking site, which meant that to communicate with somebody on MySpace you had to have an account yourself. Like a magazine, the more subscribers MySpace could boast having, the more it could charge its advertisers. Members were encouraged to continually boost the number of friends in their ‘personal networks’, and the number of friends someone had was automatically posted on the ‘Friend Space’ part of their webpage – like a sophomoric bragging list of sexual conquests. Some members were known to have hundreds, even thousands, of ‘friends’ – most of whom they’d never even chatted with. A lot of friends in Lainey’s network would potentially mean a lot of legwork tracking everyone down if the kid didn’t resurface. ‘Let’s see who Mom can ID from that. And let me look for a more recent picture of our girl.’ Under ‘start’ he ran a Find Files search to look for jpegs – electronic photos – on the computer’s hard drive.

      ‘Whoa,’ said Zo, as dozens of tiny pictures swarmed the screen.

      ‘Whoa is right,’ Bobby said as he clicked on one of the images. A picture of a girl dressed in tight jeans and a midriff-baring, see-through, white T-shirt, a sexy smile on her bright, red lips filled the screen. Her long brown hair, the color of coffee ice cream, was blown sleek and straight. Her big, brown, made-up eyes flirted coyly with the camera. Long red fingernails beckoned Bobby and Zo to come a little closer.

      ‘She sure don’t look thirteen,’ Zo said with a low whistle.

      ‘That’s the idea,’ Bobby answered. ‘There’s about thirty of these on here.’

      ‘A photo shoot?’

      ‘Yup.’

      ‘For who?’

      ‘That’s the question that needs an answer.’

      ‘The boyfriend Mom insists she doesn’t have?’ Zo asked.

      ‘Bingo.’

      ‘Great,’ Zo said with a chuckle. ‘I’ll let you be the one to tell her that she doesn’t know shit about her daughter. She already doesn’t like you.’

      ‘She’s in good company. Let me look at those MySpace friends again.’ Bobby went back to the first page of Elaine’s MySpace. Most of the names under her top six were recognizable as friends from the neighborhood that her mother had told him about: Molly B., Melly, eRica, Teri, Manda-Panda. Each had a picture of a teenage girl accompanying the name. Only one name on the top six was missing a picture. Only one name stood out from the rest and caught his attention.

      ‘I think we might have found our boyfriend,’ he said slowly, spinning the chair around to face Zo. ‘Looks like little Lainey’s been making nice with The Captain.’