Death of an Escort by Nathan Pennington Read Free Book Online Page B

was like they were headshots that were cut from other
photos.
    In other words, none of the women had posed
for the photo headshot. That did lend credence to the idea that it
was a true voyeur site.
    I pulled up Kelly's website to confirm that
it was really her by checking the photo on her site against what I
was seeing on the porn site. After checking, I was sure. No doubt
about it. It was her.
    I clicked her link, and a catalog of
thumb-sized images came up. It was a directory listing of videos.
There were eleven available.
    I clicked one in the middle. It took a minute
to load. It started grainy and black, and then it showed a naked
woman. It wasn't Kelly. Moments later Kelly crawled onto the bed
with her.
    They started kissing. You could actually hear
the kissing more clearly than you could see it. The video's only
caption was 4-11-09. It was a date, and it was only several months
ago.
    I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't turned
on by what was playing on my screen, but it felt wrong. And the
wrong feeling was stronger than the desire to watch.
    I clicked the back button. It was only then
that I noticed that the dates were listed to the right of each
video thumb.
    The date listed for the most recent video was
06-13-09. That was only days ago. In fact, that was Saturday. That
was the day Kelly Brandt died.
    I clicked on the thumb. The video didn't
load. After a moment, an error message popped up saying that the
video was unable to be loaded. I right clicked with the mouse and
selected the "View Source" option on the popup menu. The PHP code
that the website was written in came up.
    I quickly searched the code for references to
an MP4 or an FLV file, as those are the two most commonly used
video file formats on the internet.
    About a third into the page, I found the
file. It was called wefisd33992sx.mp4.
    I tried to download the file directly, but I
got an error that the file didn't exist.
    This was frustrating. It seemed that Kelly
had been filmed the day she died. Perhaps this was even footage of
her in the motel room that I'd examined. If only I could see it,
then I'd know.
    Why was the video down?
    Could it be that the murderer and the one
murdered were caught on camera? Then I had a really wild idea. Was
there some connection between the last to see her alive, the
uncooperative Carlie Smith, and Kelly's fiancé Mickey
Richardson?
    I decided to print some of the headshots of
the other women. None of the women were identified by real names.
Kelly wasn't called Kelly on the site, but with the pictures,
someone might recognize one of other women.
    My brain felt foggy. It was very late, and I
needed sleep.
    I checked the WHOIS records. That was
supposed to show me who owned the website. However, WHOIS records
can be made private by paying more when registering the domain
name.
    This one was that way. It was marked private.
I was unable to see who the real owner was.
    I navigated to Google Alerts, and created a
new alert. Any time Google found a new reference to the keyword
phrase "Kelly Brandt", this Google service would automatically
email me.
    This feature of Google was mostly used by
businesses to keep track of what was being said on the internet
about them, but it served us private investigators too. We used it
exactly how I was doing it now.
    If anyone posted anything on the internet
about Kelly Brandt, and if Google found and indexed it, then I'd
receive an email from Google about it.
    Time to go home now. It was really late.
Before setting my computer to do its cleansing routine, I saved a
copy of the webpage that showed the non-existent video of Kelly
Brandt the day of her death.
    I dropped the saved webpage into a secure
encrypted folder in my computer. Then I started the Scrambler
program to clear any traces of what I'd been doing.
    I locked up and headed home. The next day I
was back there.
    What was it about criminals always returning
to the scene of the crime?
    I was back at Brass Works Wholesale but not
in the