Page 12 of Fatal Mistake
Cal lowered his voice. “Her as in Tara?”
“Yes,” Kaci said, that smile widening. “I have finally found your missing Tara Parrish.”
Chapter 5
An adrenaline rush urged Cal to take action, but he forced himself to calm down before he said something the people surrounding them had no business hearing. He looked around the area, searching for much-needed privacy for this conversation with Kaci. His gaze landed on County’s command truck.
“Follow me,” he said, and marched to the vehicle. He took both stairs in one leap and heard Kaci follow.
A uniformed deputy sat behind a console running the length of the vehicle about the size of a package delivery truck. He looked up, a question in his gaze.
Cal eyed him and held out his credentials. “Leave us.”
The deputy with a gleaming bald head and stern expression watched him for a moment, but then stood and brushed past them before stomping down the stairs. Cal tried to be nicer to local officers, as the country’s well-being depended on local law enforcement, but right now Cal didn’t have the time or patience for anything but obtaining details on Tara Parrish’s location. And he didn’t even have patience to wait for that. He spun on Kaci.
“Tell me where she is,” he demanded without apology for his pushy behavior.
“Her PO Box is in Dufur, Oregon,” Kaci replied. “It’s a small town outside the Mount Hood National Forest. She’s working at the Fivemile Butte Lookout Tower as a fire lookout.”
Cal blinked a few times, processing the news. “Oregon isn’t on her list of places she’s vacationed and doesn’t fit her pattern.”
“No, but you have to admit a fire tower is a perfect place to go to ground.” Kaci took off her glasses and settled them on top of her head, pushing back gleaming dark hair. “She lives in the tower full-time, not meeting face-to-face with people, and she only comes to town to get supplies and use the post office.”
“You’re sure it’s Tara?”
Kaci bobbed her head. “The postal worker in Dufur ID’d a picture of her.”
“Wait a minute. Back up.” Cal took a step closer. “You have the worker identifying Tara, but how did you find her in the first place?”
A cocky grin slid across Kaci’s lips. An expert in cyber investigations, she knew her skills were second to none. “Remember I told you about Etsy.”
Cal nodded. “The online site where Tara once sold her animal photos. You said her account was inactive.”
“That account is, but she’s selling landscape pictures under a new account. Not in her name, of course.”
“So how’d you track her?” Cal flashed up his hand. “And if this is one of those geek kind of things, dumb it down for me, okay?”
“It isn’t complicated at all, and even you can understand it.” She chuckled and didn’t seem the least bit put-upon to explain yet one more bit of technology. “With the waitress jobs Tara’s been taking, we all figured she’d need extra money to live on, right? So I took that a step further. As an amateur photographer, she successfully sold photos before. What better way to make money anonymously than selling pictures again? I figured she’d have an online storage account for her pictures so she could access and sell from anywhere.”
“And did she?”
Kaci nodded. “I found a link on the desktop computer in her row house. So I cracked her password and found a whole slew of marketable landscape pictures. I had my team regularly upload these pictures into Google’s reverse image search. Finally the search engine hit on one, which led me to her new Etsy account.”
“Explain the Google thing.”
“On Google’s image page, you can click on the camera icon in the search box. It then gives you the option to upload a picture. After you do, Google runs a search and returns links for any web address where the image has been posted online.”
“Really?” he asked, trying to make sense of her statement. “So I could upload a picture of myself and Google would find it if someone’s posted it online?”
“Yes, but one caveat. Google’s Internet bots would have to crawl the Net and index the files from the picture sites. The bots don’t crawl every website, and the ones they do crawl aren’t necessarily done in the same time span. And webmasters can use their robots.txt file to block Google bots, too.”
“Okay, now you’re getting into terms I’m not familiar with. I get the gist of what you’re saying, so please stop before you make my head spin.”
“Aw.” She laughed. “What fun is there in that?”
He grinned and had to admit smiling felt good, until the thought of going to Oregon and surprising Tara—seeing her again—took it away. It would be no hardship to lay eyes on this woman who was so vital to his case, but she was also the woman who hadn’t left his thoughts for three months and not only for professional reasons. Still, that wouldn’t stop him from traveling to Oregon to get the information he needed from her. Not for one second.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were working on this?” he asked.
