Bitter Waters by Wen Spencer

can’t touch until she’s thirty, but started drawing a yearly allowance of a hundred thousand dollars when she turned eighteen. Until Harris got hold of her, she always donated a large portion of her allowance to charities, most of them dealing with terminally ill children and battered women.”
    â€œIs she dead?” Ukiah asked.
    Hutchinson looked pained. “We don’t know.” He tapped out another cigarette, the want to do violence plain in his body language. “Along with donating money, Christa did fund-raising, public awareness, and support work via Web sites, newsgroups, and chat rooms. She met members of Harris’s cult over the Internet; it started as a seduction of words, then, somehow, it went deeper than that. She had been using the screen handle of Crowsong, because her initials were CAW; after interacting with the cult, she changed it to Socket. Finally she met with them. I—I’ve been told that she used safeguards: a public place that she knew well, people she trusted to escort her to and from her car. An hour into the meeting, though, she got up and left with them.”
    Why the fumble with words? Ukiah glanced to Max, whoindicated with a tick of his mouth that he’d heard it but didn’t know what to make of it.
    â€œShe’s been missing since then?” Max guessed.
    â€œNo, she came home the next day with Ping.” Hutchinson paused to light his cigarette with the gold lighter. “She apologized for worrying her parents, wrote out good-bye notes to everyone who might miss her, and packed her things.” He tapped the photographs. “She and Ping met Ice and Core at her bank and cashed out her allowance for the year. They moved on to nearby computer stores and charged her credit cards to the limit. Witnesses say she seemed happy, relaxed, and at ease. Last stop was at a pawnshop, where she pawned her jewelry. All in all, it was nearly three hundred thousand dollars in cash and electronics that Christa handed over to Harris at the end of the day.”
    â€œOkay, something definitely went hinky there,” Max said. “We don’t do it, but there are private investigators who will kidnap kids back off of cults and noncustodial parents. Her parents didn’t try something like that?”
    â€œThey did.” A fifth picture joined the others, a gorilla of a man. “They hired John Rizzo, a private investigator out of Boston. Not the wisest choice of men, but they were essentially paying him to break the law. They had a staff of expert deprogrammers on hand to break whatever hold the cult had on Christina.” Hutchinson leaned back, taking out his cigarettes, as Max and Ukiah studied the photos. “Rizzo is, by all reports, a greedy son of a bitch. He would have earned a hundred thousand dollars; instead, he joined the cult. We believe he now goes by the name of Hash.”
    â€œCore, Ping, Socket, Hash,” Max murmured. “They’re all computer terms.”
    â€œChristina placed a lot of emphasis on the fact that they became her friends without knowing how much money she had.”
    Max snorted. “It wouldn’t have been hard to hack her identity.”
    Hutchinson regarded Max for a moment of silence. “Do you know a lot about hacking computers?”
    â€œRegardless of what I know about computer security, itdoesn’t explain how all this relates to us. A Massachusetts high-society girl runs off to join a cult in New England. What the hell does it have to do with us?”
    â€œI said you were a long shot. Bear with me. This is going to take some explaining.” Hutchinson leaned back and organized his thoughts for a minute before starting to talk. “The cult maintained a commune on a farm in New Hampshire. In January, they sold the farm and moved with great secrecy.”
    â€œTo Pittsburgh?” Max asked.
    â€œNo. Buffalo, New York.” Hutchinson held up his hand.