Bare Girl

by Bella Forrest

  “Did the guard at the entrance gate remember the person in the van?”

  “Vaguely. Only one person in the front, didn’t see in the back. Pretty sure it was a middle-aged Caucasian, a bit out of shape, brown moustache. But he stressed that he wasn’t sure of any of that. You know how witnesses are.”

  Erin nodded. Most people made terrible witnesses. The average citizen floated in a mental la-la land most of the time and couldn’t accurately describe what had happened five minutes before unless it was of crucial importance to them. It was remarkable anyone ever got convicted at all.

  Wilson jabbed the controls again. “Now look at this.”

  He advanced the tape to show the van leaving the parking garage.

  “Notice something?” he asked.

  Erin blinked. “Yeah, the sign is gone.”

  “We figure it was a magnetic sticker, easy enough to purchase. The abductor pulled it off to reduce the chance of being picked out from all the other white vans out there on the road.”

  “Why didn’t the guard notice?”

  “There’s no guard at the exit, because you have to put in your parking card to raise the barrier, and it won’t rise unless you have a valid card. Watch this.”

  He advanced the tape a couple of seconds. A window on the driver’s side came down and an arm extended to place the card in the reader. The angle looked strange, and Erin couldn’t pick out the driver in the shadow of the cab.

  Then she realized why. The driver had slumped down to get out of sight of the camera and hooked an arm over the windowsill to put in the card.

  A moment later the arm withdrew, and the window went up. The barrier raised and the van pulled out of sight.

  “Freeze frame on the arm,” Erin requested.

  Wilson did so. The picture was grainy, but showed a thick arm with a black glove. The arm looked more fat or bulky than muscular, but it was hard to tell. Erin squinted. A small strip of flesh showed between the glove and sleeve. The police investigator zoomed in.

  “Light skin,” Erin commented.

  “White, most likely,” Wilson said. “Or maybe Asian or light-skinned Hispanic. Pretty hard to tell for sure.”

  “Hard to tell anything with this. Any shot at the entrance where we can see the suspect?”

  “No, the camera angle is wrong. Gets the license plate but not the driver’s side window. We’re going to release these images to the press and hope someone comes through with a good lead.”

  “You’re going to get inundated with cranks.”

  Captain Wilson shook his head and got an expression like he was sucking on a lemon. “I know, but it will look like we’re making progress. It will get the press off our backs for a couple of days. This thing has exploded. It’s international news. And who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Erin tensed. When a police inspector said “maybe we’ll get lucky” it meant a long, hard case ahead.

  “Isabel had a court case with a studio musician,” she said.

  “Rhys Hyatt? Already checked him out. He was recording a demo in Los Angeles at the time of the abduction.”

  “Sergio Cruz also mentioned a couple of employees who were let go recently.”

  “We checked that too. Decent alibis for both of them. We’re still looking into them a bit more but I don’t think either of them is responsible for this.”

  “Any stalkers?” Erin remembered a new story she’d heard along those lines.

  “A couple over the years. One’s in Hawaii, the other is in a mental institution a few blocks from here.”

  Erin sighed. Nope, this one wasn’t going to be easy.

  Captain Wilson turned his computer back to its original position and gestured toward the door.

  “I have a press conference in fifteen minutes. We’ll be releasing the images then. I would have liked to have kept your participation secret, but my people have already gotten some calls from reporters asking about you. With your, um, background, that’s going to give them even more to splash across the front pages.”

  So apparently the police inspector had done his homework on her like she had on him. Erin chose her next words carefully.

  “A reporter for the Daily Review contacted me for a follow-up interview on my abduction. Somehow he caught wind of my participation in this case. In fact, he heard about it before I was officially hired.”

  “The Daily Review? Isn’t that a major UK paper?”

  “It’s a tabloid, specializing in big headlines using small words.”

  Captain Wilson sighed and rubbed his graying temples. “Great. That’s just peachy. And when do you have your interview with this muckraker?”

  Erin gave him a wry smile. “Right after your press conference. He’s covering the abduction too.”

  The captain groaned. “Try to keep him off my back, will you?”

  She hoped Captain Wilson took his time at the press conference. Talking with this reporter was going to be her least comfortable moment of the day.

  Chapter 5

  Consciousness returned to Isabel quickly this time, a snapping open of awareness and the gut-wrenching realization that it hadn’t been a nightmare.

  Isabel opened her eyes. She lay on a bare mattress on a concrete floor. Bars encircled her, a tiny cage barely big enough to accommodate the mattress itself. The cage stood six feet tall. Beyond it she could see little. A tiny red bulb, maybe twenty watts, gave her a feeble light.

  She seemed to be in a cellar, judging from the clammy air. She got a dim impression of concrete walls at the edge of the light, and a wooden ceiling about ten feet above her. The place was large for a cellar. Maybe a warehouse? Surrounding her stood several low, rectangular objects only half visible in the shadows. It took her a moment to figure out what they were.

  Televisions.

  Her bonds were gone, not that it mattered. Isabel stood and tested the door to her cage, finding it firmly padlocked. She tried each bar in turn, all of them tough steel welded to one another. The roof of her cage was the same.

  As Isabel checked the roof she noticed something else, a camera attached to the basement ceiling a few feet away from her cage.

  Pointed at her.

  She gasped and backed away, banging her back against the bars.

  Then she jerked in terror as a metallic voice came over an unseen sound system.

  “What’s the matter, Isabel? I thought you enjoyed being on camera.”

  Isabel shivered.

  “What do you want?” she screamed up at the camera. “I have money. I can give you millions!”

  “Your millions mean nothing to me, Isabel. It’s you I want,” the metallic voice droned back at her. “You have to pay for your sins. I would not touch your filthy money, earned by shaking your body in front of the world.”

  Isabel’s heart went cold. Was this one of the zealots? She’d had so many screaming at her, calling her a slut and a bad influence on children.

  Isabel was trying to come up with a response when all the televisions turned on simultaneously, showing nothing but static accompanied by white noise.

  She tried to shrink within herself, terrified at the sudden light and the hiss of static coming from all the screens. They ringed her cage, facing in on her.

  One by one they went from static to video.

  Videos of Isabel.

  Isabel twerking at the Grammys. Isabel modeling a bikini for a sport’s magazine. Isabel in a steamy scene from her latest blockbuster.

  All around her, images of her baring flesh assaulted her. The speaker remained silent.

  “What’s wrong with this?” Isabel shouted. “I never did anything exploitative! There’s nothing degrading about a woman expressing her sexuality.”

  The televisions cut off one by one, going dark. As the last television switched off, the cellar was plunged into darkness. The little red light had been turned off while the televisions had been on and Isabel hadn’t noticed.

  Silence.

  Isabe
l strained her ears to hear any sound of movement. Would he come down now and rape her? Kill her? She wanted to shout out again, plead with him, but the darkness and the silence clenched her throat and she didn’t dare make a sound.

  She leapt in the air and banged her head against the top bars of her cage as all the televisions came on at once, flooding the cellar with light.

  All the televisions showed the same thing.

  It was her Wall Street protest.

  The camera moved around in quick jerks as the cameraman walked with her along the sidewalk.

  “Focus on me and then pan around the crowd,” Isabel heard herself say.

  The camera did a close-up as she stopped, still clothed, and struck a pose on the sidewalk. Wide-eyed men in business suits gathered around. The guy right behind her was obviously staring at her ass. The cameraman zoomed in on him. He didn’t notice, but stood there, mouth partially open, eyes fixed and a bit glassy as if hypnotized.

  Isabel strutted and posed, pirouetting as the camera panned out to take in more of the crowd assembling around her.

  “Give me a little room, boys,” she said, laughingly pushing back against the men crowding around her. A couple of guys got in close next to her to take selfies, grinning stupidly at their phones.

  “Wait, fellas, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  She stepped forward, into the street. A taxi honked off camera. A voice called over the murmur of the crowd, “Ma’am, could you get yourself and your camera crew off the street, please? You’re blocking traffic.”

  That had been one of the police officers. A couple of them had shown up as soon as the crowd started gathering.

  Isabel smiled to the officer, then her face showed a flicker of doubt. She took a deep breath, obviously nervous.

  She remembered this part. This was the final hesitation. It had taken her weeks to steel herself to do this protest, and then when she had told a few of her inner circle a few days before the shoot, she’d had to weather their objections and worries, especially Sergio’s. They had been so relentless that she had almost caved in, but the morning of the protest she had decided to go through with it. Their objections had all been male objections, even when they had been voiced by women. Baring herself would make her an object. Baring herself would be bad for business. Baring herself would turn the protestors and haters even more against her.

  She had decided that no matter what the fallout, she had to go through with it. That hesitation in her face as she stood in the middle of Wall Street had been the final struggle between her determination and her fear.

  Now Isabel leaned against her cage, tears flowing down her cheeks. Yes, she had decided to go through with it no matter what the consequences, but she’d never dreamed the consequences would be this.

  The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Isabel looked directly at the lens, smiled, and in a single fluid motion slid off her evening gown.

  She wore nothing underneath.

  The crowd of businessmen backed off in shock. Even stuck in a cage in a madman’s cellar, Isabel felt a flush of pride to see how powerful her body and her confidence made her. There was a pause as Isabel did a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, and then everyone went for their phones. A second later a policeman ran into view with a coat to cover her. The camera got jostled as the second cop detained the cameraman.

  Gripping the bars of her cage, Isabel stared in shock as a new awareness dawned. This was the raw video. This hadn’t been released to the press or put on her webpage. This was what her cameraman had taken before it went to the editor. How had her abductor gotten hold of this? Only two copies existed—the one in the video suite at the office, and a backup at her home.

  The image rewound and froze on her standing nude on Wall Street, her arms flung over her head, radiant, confident.

  For a long minute the image stayed shining at her from the giant rectangular eyes of a dozen television sets.

  “M-Mark? Mark Sanders?” She called out the name of her cameraman.

  Silence.

  “Josh Mitchell?” Isabel called out the name of her video editor.

  Silence.

  “Who are you? Why are you doing this?” she shrieked, rattling the bars of her cage.

  No answer came from the sound system. The metallic voice remained silent. Isabel collapsed on the floor, weeping, as the image of her naked body bathed her cage in light.

  Chapter 6

  Benjamin Bridges was your typical British tabloid journalist—early forties, disheveled, beer belly, and a red nose and cheeks. He was ten years younger but looked ten years older than Captain Wilson.

  He sat with Erin in the corner of a Starbucks a couple of blocks away from the police headquarters. The nearby cafes were crammed with other journalists and various loiterers who hovered around the NYPD building hoping to catch news of Isabel. A small crowd of true fans was holding a vigil outside, lighting candles and holding pictures of Isabel and signs saying “We Demand The NYPD Do More” and “Save Isabel.”

  Bridges had suggested they get away from the crowd and Erin quickly agreed. With her name floating around the press already, it wouldn’t be long before her photo was all over the Internet and people started hounding her about her progress in the investigation. Time was of the essence in an abduction case and she didn’t want to waste it reassuring anxious members of the public. She didn’t want to waste it talking to Bridges either, but she had already committed to it.

  Bridges gave her a flat smile. “It’s good to meet you. You’re one of my personal heroes.”

  “And why is that?” Erin asked, not hiding the hostility in her voice. She hated tabloid journalists, but they paid and she needed the money. She had her father's medical bills to pay.

  The smile stayed on Bridges’ face but did not get any more genuine.

  “You’re a survivor. It’s a tough world, but you’ve proven yourself tougher.”

  Erin resisted the urge to smack him. A throwaway line for a throwaway emotion. This guy didn’t give a damn about her or her story, only what it could do for his career.

  “So how did you know I was on the Isabel Morales case before I did?” Erin asked.

  Bridges feigned surprise. “You didn’t know? I must have misunderstood. I managed to speak briefly to Sergio Cruz, he told me he was hiring you.”

  “I see.”

  More likely Bridges had suggested her to Sergio in order to get a juicier story. It didn’t matter—she was good at what she did and Sergio had made the right choice whether he had made it himself or had been guided into it.

  Bridges opened his briefcase and handed her a piece of paper.

  “Our contract for the interview.”

  Erin started to read.

  “It’s boilerplate, same as last time,” Bridges said.

  Erin kept reading.

  “I’m terribly sorry but I am in a bit of a rush here,” Bridges said.

  Erin ignored him. Whenever someone tried to hurry you into signing something it was a sure sign that you’d better slow down and read more carefully.

  The contract was not, in fact, the same as last time. While the money was the same as before—five thousand pounds for an exclusive interview—she noted a couple of nasty little paragraphs that she didn’t recall from her last interview.

  One was that the paper would not be held liable in case the interviewer “accidentally” misquoted her. The other was that the reporter could call her for an unlimited number of follow-up interviews at any time at his own discretion.

  Erin took out a pen, crossed those paragraphs out, and initialed and dated them.

  She slid the contract back to Bridges.

  “This is our standard contract,” Bridges objected. “It can’t be changed.”

  “It can if you want this interview.”

  The reporter sighed, pulled out a pen, and initialed the crossed-out paragraphs. He then signed the bottom and handed the contract back to Erin, who signed it too.

&
nbsp; “Now may I ask a few questions?”

  “Certainly.”

  Bridges brought out a small digital recorder and set it on the table. Erin did the same. It always paid to be safe with these people, and she didn’t want this guy to have the only copy of the interview.

  “I see that your father, Professor Alan Bond, has taken early retirement.”

  “He’s had a long and successful career, and a pretty tough life, as you know. He decided to make the rest of his life as easy as possible.”

  “There are rumors around Brown University that he was having difficulty focusing. Is there some sort of trouble?”

  “Mr. Bridges, I thought we were here to talk about my detective agency and the Isabel Morales case,” Erin snapped.

  “Very well, didn’t mean to pry. Any advances in the Morales case?”

  “You were just at the press conference.”

  “Yes, but you’re part of the investigation now.”

  “We will release any pertinent information when we think it will help the investigation.”

  Bridges shrugged and didn’t press the issue. He obviously knew when someone was stonewalling him. Erin supposed it happened a lot.

  “All right, what do you think of Captain Wilson?”

  “I’ve never worked with him before and only met him for the first time today. His reputation is excellent and I am sure he will do everything in his power to find the abductor and bring Ms. Morales home safe.”

  “Any theories on the kidnapper?”

  “We’re pursuing several leads.”

  Bridges cocked his head and studied her for a moment.

  “This is a pretty big case for you, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a pretty big case for everyone. I can’t think of anyone else this famous who has been kidnapped in many, many years.”

  “It’s certainly the biggest case since Cindy Birdsong,” Bridges said.

  “Who?”

  “She was a member of The Supremes. I’m a Motown fan. Like it better than the junk filling the airwaves these days, Isabel’s rot included. Back in 1969, Birdsong was kidnapped by a maintenance man in her apartment but managed to escape unscathed. One can only hope that Isabel will do the same.”