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."

Phil said nothing.

"We can start by looking into this viral marketing, see if we can figure out where it came from. We can help you find that last roommate, Kelvin. We all have kids, Phil. If my daughter was out there, missing, I'd want any help I could get."

Phil nodded. "Okay." Then: "Thank you."

We all have talents. That was what Ten-A-Fly said. Put our expertise to use. Something about those phrases stuck with Wendy. Expertise. We have a tendency to gravitate to what we are good at, don't we? Wendy saw the scandals through the eyes of a reporter. Ten-A-Fly saw them through the eyes of a marketing guru, Owen through a camera lens…

A few minutes later, Ten-A-Fly walked Wendy to the door. "We'll stay in touch," he said.

"I wouldn't be so hard on yourself," she said.

"How's that?"

"That failure talk." Wendy nodded toward the laptop. "A failure doesn't get someone to bid six hundred dollars on a used bandana."

Ten-A-Fly smiled. "That impressed you, eh?"

"Yes."

He leaned closer and whispered, "Do you want to know a little secret?"

"Sure."

"The bidder is my wife. In fact, she has two online personas and bids against herself to make it look good. She thinks I don't know."

Wendy nodded. "Proves my point," she said.

"How's that?"

"A man whose wife loves him that much," Wendy said. "How can you call that guy a failure?"

CHAPTER 24

THE CLOUDS HAD DARKENED over Ringwood State Park. Marcia McWaid trudged through the thick woods, her husband, Ted, a few steps in the lead. Marcia hoped rain was not on the way, but the cloud cover was an improvement over the morning's pounding sun.

Neither Ted nor Marcia was much for hiking or camping or pretty much anything that one might categorize as "outdoors." Before-there was always a "before" now, a shattered world of wonderful naivete from a dead age-the McWaids enjoyed museums and bookstores and dinners out at trendy restaurants.

When Ted looked to his right, Marcia could see his profile-and what she saw surprised her. There was, despite the fact that they were performing the grimmest task imaginable, a small smile on his handsome face.

"What are you thinking about?" Marcia asked her husband.

He kept walking. The small, wistful smile stayed in place. His eyes brimmed with tears, but that was pretty much how they had been for the past three months. "Do you remember Haley's dance recital?"

There had been only one. Haley had been six years old. Marcia said, "I think it's the last time I saw her in pink."

"Do you remember that getup?"

"Sure," Marcia said. "They were supposed to be cotton candy. Strange memory. I mean, it was so not her."

"Very true."

"So?"

Ted stopped in front of an incline. "Do you remember the actual recital?"

"It was in the middle school auditorium."

"Right. We parents sit there and the show is like three hours long and it's so damn boring and you're just waiting for the two minutes your own kid is onstage. And I remember Haley's cotton-candy dance was maybe the eighth or ninth act out of, what, twenty-five, maybe thirty, and she comes on and we start nudging each other. I remember smiling then, you know, and I'm looking at my daughter and for a few moments you feel such a pure joy. It's like there's this light in my chest and I'm looking at Haley and her little face is all scrunched up because you know her-even then Haley was Haley. She didn't want to get anything wrong. Every step is exact and precise. I mean, there is no rhythm or expression, but Haley makes no mistakes. And I'm looking at this little wonder and I'm almost bursting."