Afraid of the Dark

Afraid of the Dark

Chapter one

KUTGW.

Sergeant Vince Paulo stared at the text message on his smart phone and didn’t have a clue.

In many respects, Vince was at the top of his game. Good looking and full of confidence, he’d come to the city of Miami police force straight out of the marines after a tour of duty in the Gulf War. He was born to be a cop, and a college degree in psychology combined with his battle-tested coolness under pressure made him a natural for crisis management. Five years as lead negotiator had earned him the reputation of a risk taker who didn’t always follow the conventional wisdom of other trained negotiators. His critics said that his unorthodox style would eventually catch up with him. The prediction only made Vince bolder.

But this texting bullshit made him feel impotent. New acronyms popped up every hour. The coffeehouse had free Wi-Fi, so Vince put down his latte and Googled the definition of “KUTGW.”

Keep up the good work.

Benign enough, especially from a sixteen-year-old girl.

Intercepting text messages between teenagers wasn’t Vince’s regular duty, but there was little he wouldn’t do for his best friend, Chuck Mays. For years now, Chuck had partnered with Vince on a number of high-tech law enforcement projects. He was currently in Asia looking to outsource the collection of personal in formation on millions of consumers and globalize his company’s data mining services. His wife Shada and their daughter McKenna had stayed behind in Miami. It was an important trip, but Chuck had almost canceled it. Shada was that concerned about their daughter’s ex-boyfriend. It was while Vince was giving his friend a lift to the airport that Chuck had flashed a deadly serious expression and uttered the ominous words that Vince would never forget:

“I don’t know the whole story, but I’m telling you, Vince: Shada is convinced that the son of a bitch is going to hurt McKenna if she doesn’t stay away from him.”

As a cop, Vince had seen plenty of restraining orders ignored, so he didn’t even suggest that the Mays family seek one. McKenna wasn’t exactly cooperative anyway. She refused to let her parents monitor her cell or computer, and to Chuck’s dismay, her mother had sided with McKenna. Chuck was standing on the curb outside the international terminal, two hours away from boarding the Miami-London leg of his flight to Mumbai, when he persuaded Vince that this was a potential safety issue that transcended teen privacy concerns. But he didn’t want “just anybody” looking over McKenna’s shoulder. Chuck provided the spy software—rudimentary stuff for a self-taught computer genius who was pioneering the personal information business. Vince agreed to review McKenna’s text messages from three p.m. to nine p.m. Eastern time, hours that Chuck spent sleeping on the other side of the world. Chuck would cover the rest of the day.

AFRAID OF THE DARK. Copyright © 2011 by JAMES GRIPPANDO. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.