“Well, it’s been a hell of a year and a half. Doesn’t that count as a major factor?” Rodney asked, as he walked in with a fresh cup of coffee.
She lifted her nose, smelled the air, grabbed her oversize mug, and headed to the coffeemaker. It would be a long night. For her team too. At least she’d eaten something and had fueled up enough that she could be here for a while. The trouble was, only so much she could do, even with help. Online chat stuff was full-on BS because they had a department that could run some of it but couldn’t access some of these places. She had a log-in. If she found a way to join some of these groups, she could go in with suicide potential herself.
Kate frowned at that, as she turned to Lilliana. “How stupid would this idea be?” And she ran it past her.
“I was wondering about it myself,” Lilliana said. “We need somebody inside these chats.”
“I’ll do it,” Reese said. “Is it okay if I use this spare computer, Kate?”
“Sure, have at it.”
“I can take a look at some of the sites too,” Andy said.
Kate asked, “Why you?” He grinned and said, “I’m often on these chats anyway.” She gasped. He shook his head. “Not suicide chats, beautiful.”
“Gross, what then? Hump-and-dump chats?” she teased.
He flushed slightly and said, “Hey, you know that it was good for a while.”
“Oh, does that mean you remember the girl you slept with last night?”
“Yeah, she’s the same one for the last couple weeks,” he said, with a big fat smile.
Kate chuckled. “Good for you. I’m glad you got through that nasty stage.”
“It did its job,” he said.
She watched him as he logged on to his computer. “Should you be doing that from the work computer?”
“Not only am I doing it from the work computer,” he said, “but I’ll also track it.”
She looked at him with added respect. “Didn’t know you had the skills. I’m working on it myself,” she said, “but it’s one thing to get into the dark web, yet it’s another thing entirely to hide your tracks on something like this.”
“Yeah, but, in this case, not only do we have to hide the tracks,” Reese piped up from the side, “but we have to keep track of our tracks as well.”
Kate shook her head at that. “It’s a spiderweb out there.”
“It is. But look here,” Reese pointed out. “I’ve got twelve different chats.”
“Twelve?” Kate said, leaning forward, and, sure enough, Reese had found twelve different suicide support groups. “Good God,” Kate said. “Wait. I have the names that match a couple of the addresses.” She walked over to her board, pulled off the copy and the little black book that she had and brought both back to Reese.
The analyst looked at it and said, “Three of those are here. Let me go in and take a look.”
“Can you though?” Kate asked.
“No, probably not tonight,” Reese said. “I can request to join them at least.”
“What happens if they let you in?”
“Then I’ll probably get a list of rules, and then they’ll wait and see what I do.”
“Interesting,” Kate murmured. “So administrators are on these?”
“There usually is one,” Reese said, “if not a couple. Depending on how many people are on the chats. In the loops themselves, there could be anywhere up to five or six administrators. If you’ve got hundreds or even thousands of people on one particular loop, you could have a lot more, and it could be segregated into subloops.”
“Right,” Kate agreed. “I’ve seen that many times.”
Reese nodded. “Exactly. This is just the dark web.”