Her private thoughts were starting to flow into a small pink diary.

Her bedroom door, which stays shut these days, sports a construction paper sign with some stick figures and a demand in colored pencil: ``Knock to get in.''

Her grandparents and her dad indulged her newfound sense of privacy and secrecy with understanding grins.

Recently, Mark Lunsford crossed the threshold without knocking and walked into the tiny room crowded by his daughter's narrow, girlish bed. With his trademark baseball cap, long hair and indigo tattoos, he was all elbows and big feet in a little girl's world of pastel stuffed dolphins, fragile glass angels, Barbies waiting in their prom dresses for Ken to arrive.

Mark Lunsford doesn't like to go in there.

That's where the scum snatched his beautiful girl, carrying her away to violate her purity in ways he cannot, will not, let himself contemplate. That room is just one of the places he won't go. There are others, mostly in his mind.

------ Jessie was Mark's fourth child, but not the first he had to raise on his own. About 15 years ago, back in North Carolina, his first wife walked out on him, leaving him with a girl and a boy, ages 3 and 5. He learned how to care for them and kept learning as he fathered another boy. He took responsibility. He loved 'em all.

The first three grew up pretty good, he thought.

His parents had taught him not to take any bull from anybody. Don't start a fight, but don't walk away from one, either. He passed that on to his kids, a tough family with a sweet side. Mark got his Jessie hug and kiss every morning and every night.

About two years ago, when things went sour in his relationship with Jessie's mother, Mark moved to his parents' tidy trailer in Homosassa. Archie and Ruth were getting up in years. He and Jessie could help look after them, and they could help look after Jessie. Three generations together.

The neighborhood seemed OK, not far from busy U.S. 19, kind of quiet with a few homes and even more trailers. Lots of trees, some grass if you watched out for the fire ants. A little space between the trailers, too. Nice for a kid who liked to play outside.

He didn't know it then, but at the ramshackle trailer kitty- cornered across the street, a lawn chair had been set up that afforded a perfect view through the brush of Jessie at play in her front yard.

Mark got a girlfriend and a job, putting in long hours moving industrial-sized trash containers from home construction sites, hauling off the debris.

Sometimes, Mark got a beer after work at The Gypsy's Den up on 19, a place where he could smoke his Camels and hear some classic rock 'n' roll. Other nights, he and Jessie drove out to the construction sites, watching the houses grow.

Jessie's presence warmed her grandparents' home. She and Ruth collected porcelain dolls in lacy outfits that perch on the back of the plush sofa in the parlor; flowers adorn any spot that needs a little something. The wallpaper looks like silk.

The brown-haired granddaughter with the almond eyes could charm the heck out of Archie, sweet-talking him into buying her three pounds of her favorite caramels and then teasing him mercilessly when he snitched a piece.

Jessie, whose mother was back in Ohio, called Ruth ``Mama,'' and shared with her a love of shopping. Jessie could spend forever looking through the girls' section at Bealls. She liked sparkly, pink and frilly things. Kind of like that fuzzy pink hat she wears in that photo, the one everyone looked at, first asking ``Where?'' and then ``Why?''

------ That day of the hat is a good memory; Mark lets himself go there. The Sunday before Jessie disappeared, he had taken her to the Florida State Fair. She rode every ride she wanted to ride. He bought her the hat. As they were leaving, a carny started taunting.

Win a big stuffed dolphin for your little girl, Dad. Take home a big one. Pop a balloon with a dart, everybody wins.

He spent about 35 bucks before finally snaring a smaller, cheap purple dolphin, but he didn't care. She was happy. Who could care? She loved that dolphin. When she disappeared from her bedroom three days later, she took it with her. For comfort? As a reminder of Daddy, who would surely come to her rescue soon? No, man. He can't go there.

After the fair, it was getting late, and Waffle House seemed like a good choice. It was one of her favorites, along with Applebee's (for fried cheese) and locally owned Luigi's, where the waitresses knew she liked her noodles hot and buttered, with none of the green stuff.

At Waffle House that night with Daddy, Jessie and her dolphin ordered limp bacon, scrambled eggs, pancakes with extra syrup for her sweet tooth. Jessie was in heaven. Daddy was her hero. It was Feb. 20.

The following Wednesday, Mark headed over to his girlfriend's to spend the night. He never wanted Jessie to wake up and see a woman in the house. That wouldn't be right.

When he got back early the next morning, he heard Jessie's alarm clock beeping. He went to rouse his apparently sleepy daughter for school, but she wasn't in her bed. She wasn't anywhere in the trailer. That's when Mark's good- enough world slid into hell.

Authorities say sometime that night convicted sex offender John Evander Couey entered the trailer through an unlocked back door while Ruth and Archie slept and took Jessie.

After he was arrested, investigators say Couey told them he sexually assaulted her, kept her captive in his closet, bound her wrists with speaker wire and made her climb into garbage bags. Then, he said, he buried her alive behind his trailer, just a few yards from her home. Two of her fingers poked through the bag.

She died in the dark with her beloved purple dolphin, the little prize, not the big one, clutched in her arms.

------ Mark wouldn't know this for weeks. For weeks, crazy with fear, he had no idea where she was. He appeared on television, gaunt and scruffy in his T-shirts and reflective shades, telling Jessie to hold on, he was coming for her.

He did what he thought best, calling on bikers and truckers to lead the search. They see a lot of asphalt, he figured. Sometimes they see stuff nobody should see. Tattooed guys with beer bellies hit the road in droves. Other people combed the Homosassa bushes.

The first couple of days were horrible as Citrus County sheriff's deputies did what deputies always do: They looked for a killer in Jessie's family.

Granddad Archie seemed suspicious. Evasive about a brush with the law 50 years ago, he had a tic, a twitchy eyelid. Cops grilled family members about one another, questioning Mark for hour after hour when he was frantic to get out and find his girl.

Finally, Archie had had enough. Weary of questioning in his parlor, he says he stood to head outside for some fresh air. The officers quickly handcuffed him behind his back.

Mark was in torment; the same people charged with saving his daughter were tearing up his family. Anger burned at the edges of his fear and grief. Sometimes, to this day, he rips on the cops. Sometimes he praises them. His mind can't puzzle this one out, can't figure out whom to thank and whom to curse.

Except for Couey. If given a chance, Mark would kill him. He says it with dispassion; it's not a boast, it's a fact. He's got nothing now, he says, so he's got nothing to lose.

Controversy surrounds the statement of Couey, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, sexual battery on a child under 12, kidnapping and burglary with battery.

At one point, Couey asked for an attorney, but he didn't get one until much later. The statement could be tossed.

Early on, Mark asked deputies to tell him when they knew what had happened, but not in dribs and drabs. He wanted the whole story.

On March 18, he stood outside and watched deputies line Couey's trailer with yellow crime-scene tape. That's when he knew she had been found. His first thought was for his parents, and he went back inside to break the news. It had to be bad, and it sailed right past bad into hideous.

Nobody can know how they'll react to something like that. Curl up and will the world away? Drink to the death or use a gun?

But almost immediately, Mark Lunsford the dump- truck jockey became a guy with a hand outstretched to governors, to senators, to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, to anybody who could help him make this sorry world safer for somebody else's little girl.

------ From Tallahassee to Washington to New York to New Jersey, Mark Lunsford has been the sad-eyed everyman carrying pictures of his daughter, a grim reminder in the faces of lawmakers.

When Mark came calling, he was stunned that it wasn't the aides who greeted him, but the big dudes themselves. They even called him. Anything they could do, they would, they promised.

When O'Reilly let loose, criticizing the local prosecutor in the case, Mark was stunned. O'Reilly is now his hero.

Florida legislators speedily passed the Jessica Lunsford Act, signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush on May 22. The law, which goes into effect Sept. 1, increases the penalty for lewd and lascivious molestation of a child 11 or younger to life in prison, with a mandatory minimum 25-year prison term and lifetime supervision with electronic monitoring. Among other things, it also provides $12 million for technology, electronic monitoring and new prison beds.

Bush joked with bare-headed Mark that day, asking where his famous baseball cap was. Mark took a liking to the governor. He says he's the kind of guy who would watch your back. Sometimes, Mark thinks about taking up golf; he knows Jeb likes to play. Maybe they could hang sometime, wouldn't that be funny? A white collar hanging out with a guy who isn't even a blue collar. Hell, I'm a no collar, he says, tugging on his T-shirt.

On a trip to New York to lobby the legislature there for tougher laws against sexual predators, Mark decided to buy his mom some perfume. In he went to Barneys, and they knew who he was, gave him the royal treatment. He even bought a bottle of ritzy cologne for himself. It keeps working even after he's been sweating in the sun all day, so it was a good choice.

------ These days, he thinks about finding a way off the dump truck, and that way may be politics. Yeah, he's only got a ninth-grade education, but he's smart, with a sly wit and self-deprecating humor. Important people are listening to him.

But Mark also has picked up some anonymous detractors. On an unsigned sound-off board on the local paper's Web site, some have criticized Mark for not being home the night Jessie disappeared. Others think he sucks up to the media. Others gave him some smack because he ended up in The Gypsy's Den one night when Jessie was missing.

Jane and Mark Davis, owners of the bar, spring to Mark's defense. He's an honest, decent guy, they say. Who could blame a man for spending time with friends during this? For needing a beer?

Every week, Jane snaps photos of customers in her bar and posts scores of them online. The night Mark was there, she snapped him flashing a peace sign.

The online scribes buzzed. There he sat ``dreamy-eyed,'' someone wrote, when his daughter was missing.

Jane Davis remembers Mark arriving that night, weary from searching, almost crawling into a corner to sit by himself. It disgusts her that people are casting stones.

Tiffany Chenneville, a psychologist at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, says it's not uncommon for people to try to distance themselves from the random nature of tragedy. If we can blame the victim, explain it away as something that would never happen to us because we make better choices, we can lessen our own anxieties.

Not knowing what else to do, friends and sympathetic strangers gave Mark money to help him in his crusade against predators. His travels have drained the coffers, but still, a couple of weeks ago, he was back in New York and Washington, where he stayed with a friend to save money. He's awaiting nonprofit status for the Jessica Marie Lunsford Foundation, which he hopes will help other children in his daughter's memory.

------ Mark admits part of his drive to stay busy is to stem unbidden thoughts. He keeps them at bay most of the time, although he's had some rough moments in hotel rooms, alone in the dark.

He says he hasn't grieved yet, not really. In his conversation, Jessie often ``is,'' not ``was.'' He knows it sounds crazy, but he keeps expecting her to come bopping in the front door for her hug and kiss.

Sometimes, when nobody is around, he talks to her out loud. When he gets angry, which he does a lot now, he hears her tell him to stop it, to calm down. It helps.

He planted a white rose bush on the spot where she died, but he isn't able to tend it. New tenants moved into the trailer Couey shared with his half sister and three other people, and they've called the cops on the family for trying to come over. Some friends have said they are willing to buy the land and haul away the trailer so the Lunsfords don't have to see it every day. The owner won't sell.

Recently, Mark had Jessie's face, that picture of her in the pink hat, tattooed on his belly. He has some sea gulls and a mermaid on his chest, the names of his kids on his arm. The only places left were on his shoulder blade, where he wouldn't see it, or on his stomach, which, he figures, might help replace that daily hug. No fear of a needle poking such a sensitive place, God knows he's already got a much worse pain in his gut.

Ruth and Archie are worried sick about their son. Archie doesn't like the rage he sees in Mark, something that wasn't there before. He fears that when Mark stops having places to go and important people who want to see him, he's going to break down.

He and Ruth dread that day. Mark admits he's afraid of it, too.

Archie can talk about Jessie, tell affectionate tales in the way people do when they're discussing a departed loved one. Ruth has turned Jessie's bedroom into a shrine filled with the glass angels, along with paintings people have sent of Jessie in the pink hat. Some people sent stuffed dolphins, which she keeps on a table top. She dusts her granddaughter's Barbie dolls and colored rocks. She goes in there when she needs to feel her near.

But Mark still doesn't go there if he can help it.

On that one day he drifted in, he glanced at the paintings, at some artwork Jessie had done that her teachers matted and framed, and noted how his mother keeps the room nice.

He picked up Jessie's pink diary for the first time and started reading, trying to decipher the pencil scribblings detailing a 9-year-old's world.

``Look a' here,'' he says, as he reads aloud. ``I guess she had started to like somebody, a boy.''

But suddenly that stings way too much, gets way too close to a place he still can't go, and he puts the diary away.

Mark Lunsford heads outside for a Camel, then takes off on his Harley for a burger up the road at McDonald's. They all know him there.