Free Predator by Terri Blackstock Page B

roommate. My father had to go there and find her himself. My father, who’d just buried his own daughter, had to watch them rollanother girl out on a gurney.” She took in a wet breath. “Someone who was probably murdered by the same person who got Ella.” Her voice was trembling, and she knew she was on the edge of an eruption that would make her seem hysterical. She tried to breathe.
    Lowering her voice, she said, “Ryan, I’m appealing to you one more time. You seem like a decent person. You’ve got to do something about these Thought Bubbles.” She wiped the tears from under her eyes. “You’ve created a trap for your clients to be stalked and destroyed, and if you can’t find a way to stop these predators, then you need to shut your business down.”
    “I can’t shut my business down, Krista. That wouldn’t solve the problem. There would still be predators out there. They would just go to Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, or two dozen other places.”
    “I’m not asking you to do anything about the other ones. I’m only asking you to do something about yours.”
    “I’m doing what I can, Krista. I really am. I’m horrified by what happened to these girls. Just now I was in a meeting with my security team and with my legal counsel.”
    “You’re going to need legal counsel,” she snapped. “I’m going to file a lawsuit that will put your company out of business. I’ll find every person who’s gone missing connected to online communities, and we’ll do a class action suit. I’ll go before congressional committees and make them regulate what you guys do. I’ll educate the public and make sure no sane parent will let their children go on these places ever again!”
    “And how will you educate them, Krista? By using our communities? You used GrapeVyne to post your message to the killer. You used it to rally volunteers to search for Ella. I looked at your page, and you use it in your ministry for Biblestudies. There are a lot of good things about GrapeVyne. It’s not all evil.”
    “If you want to save the good, Ryan, then you need to do something about the bad.”
    His voice was maddeningly unruffled. “Well, I’m not shutting it down. Give me something realistic to do right now, and I will.”
    Krista tore a tissue out of a box on her console and wiped her nose. “There’s a girl lying in the hospital right now who wants desperately to identify the killer. The police have given her all sorts of pictures and mug shots, but she hasn’t been able to identify him yet. Maybe you could come to her room and show her pictures of her friends on GrapeVyne, and help her figure out if it could be any of them. Something she tells you might rattle something in that brain of yours. If you bring your own computer, you could probably dig into profiles of suspicious members. She says he was a middle-aged man with brown hair, about 220 pounds. He told her he’d been stalking her on GrapeVyne.”
    “All right,” he said. “Tell me which hospital. I’ll go this afternoon.”
    She dropped her face into her hand. She supposed that would be all right. Megan’s parents would want everything possible done to catch Megan’s attacker.
    “What’s her condition?”
    “Her jaw is broken and wired shut. She has torn ligaments in her knee, broken ribs, bruised kidneys. Both eyes are swollen, her lip is stitched, she has bruises that look like black ink. I don’t think I have to tell you the rest of it.”
    Again, silence.
    “He raped her and tried to bury her, too, Ryan. It’s a miracle she got away. She’s scared to death in there. She thinks he’s going to come after her again.”
    “Then will you go with me? Since you already know her that might make things more comfortable for her.”
    His concern for Megan’s comfort surprised her. She sighed. “I can’t go until later this afternoon. I’m speaking at my sister’s high school today. I plan to give them an earful.”
    “Why don’t you give me a