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  He'd met up with Ellie, the name Rachel used on the Internet, in an online roleplaying game. Jimmy played late at night after his family went to bed. To unwind, he said. "I could beat up the virtual bad guys. It let me deal with the real life jerks. Be a hero, I guess." He shrugged. "Some hero."

  I let the remark slide. I wasn't about to buy into Jimmy's pity-party.

  At first Jimmy talked to her through the game's chat window. Innocent flirtation, Jimmy said. They talked to each other in character. It made the game more fun. He started staying up until two or three in the morning, just hoping to catch her online.

  "How long ago was this?" I asked.

  Jimmy looked off to the side, trying to remember. "I got the game about a year ago. I didn't play it much until I met up with some people online, then we'd go on raiding parties together. Ellie was one of the people I met. I don't know. Six months ago? Eight months? Maybe longer."

  The more they talked through the game, the less they stayed in character. They started setting up times to meet in a chat room that had nothing to do with the game.

  "She was fascinating," Jimmy said. "I swear, she didn't sound like a kid. Not like any of the kids I coach, and not like any of the women I meet. She had no idea who I was."

  Jimmy Fisher had done well for himself in commercial real estate, just as Ryan had done well for himself as an attorney. They'd taken the competitiveness that made them play every sport under the sun for the win, not the draw, and turned it into a successful work ethic. The few times Ryan and I were at the same party with Jimmy and his wife, I'd watch women flirt with Jimmy, and I knew most of them were only interested in his bank account. The allure of flirting with someone while totally anonymous apparently had been more than Jimmy could ignore.

  According to Jimmy, Ellie claimed to be a college freshman who lived in an apartment with two other girls. She'd created an entire online persona for herself. She told Jimmy she was an education major, and she worked as a waitress to make ends meet. When she let it slip that she was going to UNR, Jimmy started asking her to meet him in real life.

  "Just for coffee." He gripped his beer hard, his knuckles white. "I swear, at first I just wanted to have coffee with her. That's all. I told myself I only wanted to meet her, put a face to the name so I would quit imagining what she must look like."

  Ellie -- Rachel -- resisted, at first. When he kept asking, she got a web cam.

  "She was beautiful," Jimmy said. "She looked like a college student. She looked like Karen used to when we were all in college. Remember those days?"

  Karen. Jimmy's wife. Karen was brunette and petite and had retained her well-toned, stick-thin college figure. She'd always struck me as a distant beauty -- a look but don't touch type -- and more than just a bit impressed with herself. Jimmy had gone after Karen with a single-minded determination that finally wore her down. Karen had never tagged along with the boys like I did. She got her tan in a tanning booth, and she never, ever burned.

  Jimmy continued to meet up with Ellie on the Internet late at night, only now their chats were loaded with innuendo and outright flirting. One night Ellie took her shirt off and teased Jimmy with a web cam view of her bare breasts.

  "I knew I was lost," he said. "I couldn't help myself. I couldn't stop."

  Their chats turned into online sex sessions. Cybersex with real time pictures, at least from her end. Jimmy spared me the details.

  "I'm guessing she eventually agreed to meet you in person," I said. My ice tea was half-gone. What I'd had to drink sat bitter in my stomach.

  Jimmy nodded. "Yeah. We were supposed to meet two nights ago."

  Monday night. That was the day Rachel didn't meet her mom after school.

  "Where?" I asked.

  He hesitated a split second. "Motel Six on West Fourth."

  "For coffee." Right. "Nobody sets up a meeting at a motel for coffee."

  "I thought she was in college." He picked at the label on his empty beer bottle. His nails were clean and neatly trimmed, his fingers thick and square. I was imagining those fingers doing things I didn't want to think about. "We'd been having sex," he said. "Over the computer. The things she did, I--"

  I held up my hand to stop him. There was a limit to what I could hear, and I'd just reached it. "Which one of you came up with the idea to meet there?"

  "It was the next logical step."

  I glared at him. That wasn't an answer. The nice lady everyone wanted to tell their troubles to wasn't the woman in the booth anymore, and he knew it.

  "Okay, I did," he said. "I wanted it. I thought she did too. She agreed to it."

  "What about Karen? Is she used to you disappearing at night?"

  "I told her I had a bachelor party to go to for a client, I wouldn't be home until late. I waited in that motel room until three in the morning. When I figured Ellie stood me up, then I left and went home. Karen never even woke up."

  I didn't know if that last bit was another ploy for sympathy or a simple observation. Given the circumstances, I was more inclined to believe he wanted sympathy. Too bad.

  "Have you heard from her?" I asked.

  "No. She didn't log in yesterday on the game or in the room where we meet. I figured she decided to blow me off, or she got cold feet and didn't want to face me. Or maybe she was laughing it up with her girlfriends about this old guy she got to fall for her." He rubbed his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut. "I didn't catch the news yesterday at all. The first I heard about her was on the news this morning."

  "And you're sure the cops are going to come after you," I said.

  He raked a hand through his hair. Even sitting across a booth from him in a dimly-lit bar, I could see his hand was shaking.

  "I used my home computer," he said. "I have a DSL line. I figure the cops will be able to trace my IP if they get records from her service provider. They'll want to know who she's been talking to, and that's going to lead them straight to me. Hell, she might even have logged our conversations for all I know. If she did, they'll know we planned to meet." He took an unsteady breath, and his voice was so low now I almost couldn't hear him over the noise in the bar. "They'll know what we've been doing, and if I was them, I'd damn sure come after me."

  The Internet was a fine research tool for someone in my profession, but I had no clue about the kind of footprints a person left online or how the police traced those footprints. Even so, I didn't doubt the cops would be able to find Jimmy. If he had nothing to do with Rachel's disappearance -- and I hoped to hell he didn't -- he'd still become a "person of interest" in their investigation. His name would be spread all over the news. He was a solid citizen, and well off to boot. The press would eat it up. Jimmy Fisher, closet pedophile. Jimmy's life as he knew it, not to mention the lives of his entire family, would be over.

  "I've been waiting for the cops to come for me all day," he said. "I'm scared for her, I'm scared for me. You've got to help me." He looked down at the pile of shredded label from his first beer. "I don't know who else to ask."

  "Help you do what, hide evidence of what you did from the cops?"

  "No." His eyes were big and round now, looking at me in shocked surprise that I'd even suggest such a thing. "God, no."

  Of course. There was only one other reason.

  "I don't do that kind of work anymore," I said. I did judgment debtor work, but that involved tracking assets, not missing persons. I'd made a conscious decision two years ago not to do this anymore, not for anyone. When finding someone meant the most, I'd screwed the job up.

  I'd learned things about myself back then I didn't want to know, not the least of which were my limits. I got along just fine these days with the leg work for attorneys and collection companies. I didn't go looking for missing teenagers.

  "I need you, Abby," Jimmy said.

  "No. Not for this."

  "Please!" He glanced around our booth, a quick, nervous flicker of his eyes. "I can't tell this to a stranger. I could barely tell you, and we've know
n each other for years."

  I couldn't look at him. He was making this all about him, but it wasn't. It was about a missing teenage girl.

  How out of my mind would I be if my own daughter disappeared? If it was Samantha's face on the news instead of Rachel's? Rachel, who'd called herself Ellie online and seduced a married man. Had she known what she was doing, or had she just been playing a role in another kind of online game?

  What had happened to her? Could I live with myself if I did nothing?

  (PRETTY LITTLE HORSES is available for purchase on Smashwords)

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  About the Author:

  Annie Reed is a prolific writer with more than fifty stories in print. Annie began her career writing Star Trek and Battletech short fiction, and has since been published in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery venues. Annie's work has been recognized both in the literary arena, where she was awarded a Literary Fellowship Grant in 2004 by the Nevada Arts Council for her speculative fiction story "One Sun, No Waiting," and genre competition when her novel "Pretty Little Horses" was chosen as a finalist in the 2007 Best First Private Eye Novel contest sponsored by St. Martin's Press and the The Private Eye Writers of America.

  Annie lives in Northern Nevada with her husband, her daughter, and a varying number of high-maintenance cats. Annie can be found on the web at www.annie-reed.com. And if you've read this far, Annie would like to reward you by mentioning that a feature of her blog is Free Fiction Thursdays, where she posts a short story every Thursday that's available for free for one week. Just visit Annie's blog Scribblings for a link to the free story.

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