“So these charges are all made up?” Wendy asked. “Miciano never got arrested?”
“No,” Fly said, “that one is real. From a legit newspaper on a legit site. But the rest on him, I mean, look at this blog about the drug dealer. And now look at this blog from the prostitute involved with Farley Parks. Both plain pages from Blogger—and the author didn’t write any other blog entries, just the ones condemning these guys.”
“These are just smear jobs,” Wendy said.
Ten-A-Fly shrugged. “I’m not saying that they didn’t do it. They all might be guilty—not you, Phil, we know better. But what I am saying is that someone wanted the world to know about the scandals.”
Which, Wendy knew, played into her scandal-to-ruin conspiracy theory.
Ten-A-Fly looked behind him. “You got anything, Owen?”
Without glancing away from the laptop, he said, “Soon maybe.”
Ten-A-Fly continued to study the printouts. A barista shouted out a complicated order involving ventis and half-cafs and one percent and soy. Another barista jotted notes on a cup. The espresso machine sounded like a train whistle, drowning out the Unsprung sound track.
“What about the pedophile you caught?” Ten-A-Fly asked.
“What about him?”
“Did someone viral-market him?”
“I never thought to check.”
“Owen?” Ten-A-Fly said.
“On it. Dan Mercer, right?” Wendy nodded. Owen clicked a few keys. “Not much, maybe a few posts on Dan Mercer, but no need. The dude was all over the news.”
“Good point,” Ten-A-Fly said. “Wendy, how did you find out about Mercer?”
Wendy was already going there in her own mind—and she wasn’t crazy about the path her mind was taking. “I got an anonymous e-mail.”
Phil shook his head slowly. The rest of the guys just stared for a moment.
“What did it say?” Ten-A-Fly asked.
She took out her BlackBerry. The e-mail was still in the saved file. She found it, brought it up, and handed it to Ten-A-Fly:Hi. I’ve seen your show before. I think you should know about this creepy guy I met online. I’m thirteen and I was in the SocialTeen chat room. He acted like he was my age, but it turned out he was way older. I think he’s like forty. He is the same height as my dad so that’s six feet and has green eyes and curly hair. He seemed so nice so I met him at a movie and he made me go back to his house. It was horrible. I’m scared he’s done this to other kids too because he works with kids. Please help so he doesn’t hurt more kids.
Ashlee (not my real name—sorry!)
PS Here is a link to the SocialTeen chat room. His screen name is DrumLover17.
They all read the e-mail in silence, one at a time. Wendy stood there stunned. When Ten-A-Fly handed her back the phone, he said, “I assume you tried to write her back?”
“No one replied. We tried to trace it down, but it got us nowhere. But I didn’t rely just on this e-mail,” Wendy added, trying not to sound too defensive. “I mean, that was just the start. We acted on it, but that’s what we do. We go into chat rooms and pretend to be young girls and see what pervert comes out of the woodwork. So we went into this SocialTeen chat room like we always do. DrumLover-Seventeen was in there. He pretended to be, well, a seventeen-year-old drummer. We set up a meet. Dan Mercer showed up.”
Ten-A-Fly nodded. “I remember reading about the case. Mercer claimed that he thought he was meeting some other girl, right?”
“Right. He worked for a homeless shelter. He claimed a girl he was helping had called him to the location of our sting house. But keep in mind we had solid evidence: DrumLoverSeventeen’s chat logs and the sexually explicit e-mails to our fake thirteen-year-old girl all came from a laptop found in Dan Mercer’s home.”
No one responded to that. Doug took a swing with his air tennis racket. Phil looked like someone had whacked him with a two-by-four. Ten-A-Fly was keeping his wheels in motion. He looked back at Owen. “Done yet?”
“I’ll need my desktop computer for a fuller analysis of the videos,” Owen said.
Wendy was ready to move to a new subject. “What are you looking for?”
The baby against Owen’s chest was asleep, head tilted in that way that always made her nervous. Wendy had another flash—to John carrying Charlie in a baby sling. She wondered again what John would make of his son now, nearly a man, and wanted to cry for all that he missed. That was what always got to her—at every birthday or back-to-school night or just hanging out watching TV together, whatever. Not just how much Ariana Nasbro had taken from her and Charlie, but how much she had taken from John. All she had made him miss.
“Owen worked as a tech specialist on a daytime TV show,” Phil explained.
“Let me simplify this as much as I can,” Owen said. “You know how your digital camera has a megapixels setting?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so let’s say you take a picture and post it online. Let’s say it’s four by six. The more megapixels, the bigger the file. But for the most part, a, say, five-megapixel picture of the same size will be roughly the same size as another—especially if taken by the same camera.”
“Okay.”
“The same is true for digital videos uploaded like these. When I get home I can look for special effects and other telltale signs. Right here, I can only see file size and then I can divide up the time. Put simply, the same type of video recorder was used to make both of these videos. That in and of itself doesn’t mean much. There are hundreds of thousands of video cameras sold that would fit the bill. But it’s worth noting.”
They were all there now, the Fathers Club—Norm, the Ten-A-Fly Rapper, Doug of the Tennis Whites, Owen of the Baby Sling, and Phil of the Power Suit.
Ten-A-Fly said, “We want to help.”
“How?” Wendy asked.
“We want to prove Phil’s innocent.”
“Norm . . . ,” Phil said.
“You’re our friend, Phil.”
The others mumbled their agreement.
“Let us, okay? We got nothing else to do. We hang here and feel sorry for ourselves. I say enough with wallowing in failure. Let’s do something constructive again—put our expertise to use.”
“I can’t ask you to do that,” Phil said.
“You don’t have to ask,” Norm continued. “You know we want to. Heck, maybe we need this more than you do.”