I was stunned into silence for the rest of the meeting, thoughts spinning out of control as all of the pieces connected together. As soon as everyone left, I bolted to my room, snatching up my laptop to make sure I wasn't going crazy. I opened the folder where I'd saved all the information about Chloe Peterson. First, I pulled up the yearbook photo.
And then I compared it to a photo on my phone I'd taken of Clo in Seattle, which now that I thought about it, she hadn't been too keen on me taking her picture in the first place.
She looked so different from the high school yearbook photo, but one thing's for sure, she wasn't as young as Winters had claimed Pattie Cake was, even though I could see how Clo could've fooled him because she certainly didn't look (or act) 26.
Then I went back to the FetLife profile I'd found the night Gabe had asked if I wanted to do the case. I'd taken a plethora of screen shots and recordings, but decided to check out if the profile was still public. It wasn't, which made my heart race faster — had she deleted it after realizing I was investigating her? Going back to the folder of screenshots, I clicked through them, reminded that none of them showed enough of her face to quite place whether or not she was Clo.
Too bad I never took any pics of her well-spanked bottom to compare with these...
I also tried to compare the sound of the videos to my memory of Clo's voice, but that was harder to figure out. I hadn't taken any videos in Seattle, and it's not like she said much in her FetLife videos anyway.
Now I skimmed through the other evidence I'd found about this mysterious woman. There were articles and videos I had found about Melvin Harris of Detroit, a connection I'd made to Chloe Peterson after finding her birth certificate and school records. Her mom, Nancy Peterson, yielded no results, except as a survivor in obituaries from the early 90s when her parents, Chloe's maternal grandparents, died. Marriage records showed that Melvin and Nancy married in 1990, right after they graduated high school. There was no newspaper announcement of their engagement or anything, which was kinda weird for that time period, especially since when I searched Melvin's family, they seemed generationally wealthy. He had 6 siblings and all of them had children with social media pages, but no photos of Melvin, insinuating that he was the black sheep of the family. I could only find one photo of Melvin's mother, Esther Harris (maiden name Sinclair, which has a wealthy ring to it), surrounded by children in the late 1990s, one of them standing out amongst the others because of her bright blonde hair and stunning blue eyes. The photo was posted by one of Chloe's cousins last year with a caption about wishing she could have known her grandma better.
The first record of an arrest with Melvin Harris was in 2002, which Chloe would have been 10 years old. There was a list of things he was accused of, but only convicted of a misdemeanor theft, and subsequently placed in jail for violating his probation. In 2004 he was arrested for felony theft, but he had a hella expensive lawyer who somehow got him out of all charges. I imagined that was Esther's doing, since Melvin didn't seem like such a great criminal. It wasn't until 2009 that Melvin was finally caught and convicted of a felony that earned him a 20 year jail sentence.
Winters and Pattie Cake allegedly met in 2013, which would have made Sage 15 and Chloe's real age as 21. Pattie had claimed to be 16 or 17 and wanting a "father figure" to punish her as she needed. Was she just trying to set a trap for pedophiles? The blackmail video that Winters had shown me had been delivered only 6 months after they'd met, that's when Pattie had drained his bank accounts, using her "age" as a reason for him not to press charges. And it had worked. She could've gotten away with it. Why did she have to try to destroy his company later? Why did she feel the need to forge documents and go to the media about it? What happened earlier this year that made Pattie turn against Winters?
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