Bare Girl

by Bella Forrest

  As Erin continued to search the database for clues, Eddie chugged the vodka-laced coffee, then ordered another cup.

  “I do love the American invention of the bottomless cup,” he told the waitress once the next coffee arrived. “Do keep them coming once every ten minutes or so, dear.”

  The waitress scowled at him and walked off.

  Eddie turned to Erin. “Whatever happened to the famous American customer service?”

  “So tell me,” Erin said, ignoring his question, “what foreigners did your father take?”

  Eddie went pale and slugged back some more of his drink.

  “Give me a few minutes.”

  A few minutes turned into half an hour and most of the bottle, which he kept tucked under his legs between pours in an ultimately fruitless attempt to keep it hidden from the waitress. Erin laid a five-dollar bill on the table as a tip and she stopped glaring at them until Eddie started hiccupping and spilling his drink.

  Just as Erin was thinking they would be kicked out of the diner, Eddie, now reeling in his seat but still visibly frightened, looked over his shoulder and leaned in toward Erin.

  “There was a little French chap, I remember,” he slurred. “Plus a Middle Eastern lad, Turkish perhaps, but I can’t remember for certain. Um, an Irish girl. And two Hispanics, a girl and a boy. Not related.”

  Erin turned to him. “Hispanic? From where? Were they Mexican?”

  Eddie lay slumped on the table, his face hidden in the crook of his arm while muttering, “Sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For disobeying you,” he slurred, and Erin realized he wasn’t speaking to her, but to a dead man.

  Erin turned back to the database. Isabel had made a point of hiring Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. They made up at least half of Isabel Enterprises’ payroll, from Sergio all the way down to the janitorial staff.

  Erin leaned back, letting out a slow breath as Eddie muttered and sobbed beside her. A Hispanic man or woman of about her age. She went through the database, cleaning out those who were too old or too young or who the police had flagged as having solid alibis. Once she finished she was still left with a few dozen people, but it was a start.

  Sergio and Carlotta were both on the list, as were several employees who had spoken out against the Wall Street protest.

  But how to narrow them down?

  Chapter 14

  Isabel lay curled up in a trembling ball on her mattress after her abductor left. The freak had never spoken, never taken off his mask. He had simply stood there shaking the flayed skin of some poor woman at her before tucking it back in a bag, turning on his heel, and walking away.

  This time he didn’t turn off the lights. Instead she sat there in the full light, knowing he watched her through that damn camera.

  He didn’t return for many hours, and she had a long time to think.

  How could anyone do such a thing? Of course she had heard about serial killers, and she had seen more than her share of rough men in the poverty-stricken region where she grew up, but the level of insanity that these killers reached had always seemed unreal to her. What could warp a mind into such depravity? Why did men get like that?

  She knew many men wanted women under their thumb, to cook and clean and spread their legs. She also knew that some men got angry, even hateful, at women who wanted more than that out of life. That was what she sang against in so much of her music. She had always tried to keep it positive, though. Isabel didn’t want to defy men or treat them as enemies, she wanted to convert them into allies. Through albums, fashion shoots, and movies, she had carefully built up the image of a strong, proud woman assured of her own sexuality and self-worth and ready to be a passionate lover to any worthy man who would accept her as she was.

  Everyone could see it in her songs, with titles such as Love Me As I Am And I’ll Love You Forever, and On Top, and Pride Ain’t No Bitch. With the movie deals she fought hard with male directors to keep her characters from being sex objects that needed saving. If her male lead was fighting terrorists, she got to shoot some too. If her male lead was an international diamond thief, she had the technical know-how to get him into the bank vault. She couldn’t count the number of lucrative parts she had turned down because the director wouldn’t budge and incorporate some of her vision into his. She had pushed hard to get young female directors into prominent positions with good funding, hoping one day she could rely on them and not have to waste time and energy on these fights any more.

  And of course the more superficial among the women’s magazines didn’t talk much about this. Many of her fans weren’t even aware of the struggles she had to go through to get the roles she wanted. At least with the albums she got to make her own decisions. Thank God Isabel Enterprises was hers and hers alone.

  Well, not entirely. Sergio had to help out with a substantial investment in those rough early days after she had bought her freedom from the record label. That gave him a big stake in the company. Isabel had taken care to put a clause in the contract that she would retain full creative control. Isabel Enterprises might not be entirely hers, but her art would never be compromised by anyone.

  And her art had always said that women should be their own people. She had gotten so much hate for that over the years, mostly from men but sometimes, amazingly, even from women.

  Hate. That was all you could call it. Some men in the world simply hated women. It wasn’t that they wanted to keep women down, keep them as servants, they loathed women. They wanted women destroyed.

  But why? That was something she could never understand. There were people out there who wanted to crush women. Social media just seemed to make it worse because those embittered souls could spout their bile in public and find others who thought the same. They even formed communities.

  Like the #rapeIsabel hashtag on Twitter. That had been around for a while, but really got going after her eighth album, Girls on Fire, which had a cover showing teenaged girls playing basketball and climbing a mountain and working in a scientific laboratory. Every song was upbeat, optimistic, and aimed squarely at her teen fan base. Within days there were YouTube videos using her songs as soundtracks to clips of girls doing amazing things. One that stuck in her mind was a home movie of a fifteen-year-old girl juggling torches. Another showed some high school girls’ basketball team where one player made a shot from the center line, followed by another girl doing the same, and then another. Sergio had wanted to shut down these videos for copyright infringement but Isabel had only laughed. While he was a good money man, as usual he had missed the point. Isabel saw the purpose of her career as creating a soundtrack to push these girls on to be the awesome women they had the potential to be. The money was only a bonus. She had never been able to get that through Sergio’s thick head.

  At the same time these videos were coming out, the #rapeIsabel hashtag began to pick up steam. Imagine that, wanting to defile someone whose only crime was to encourage girls to be good at what they loved!

  Then came the worst. Sergio had come into her office one morning, pale and visibly shaken. That had taken Isabel aback, because few things truly rattled that man. He opened his laptop and showed her a YouTube video from Afghanistan where a crowd of men was beating a teenage girl over some imagined crime.

  Then came the worst part. After the girl lay bleeding and sobbing on the ground, the men had doused her in gasoline and lit her on fire.

  Playing in the background to the scene, not as a soundtrack spliced onto the video but coming from some radio at the scene, was the title track of her Girls on Fire album.

  Isabel had burst into tears. Once she had recovered, she had watched the video again. Sergio had turned away in disgust.

  This time Isabel didn’t watch the horrible spectacle of the girl writhing in flames, but instead studied the faces of the men perpetrating this atrocity. They were twisted with hatred, animalistic. They didn’t look like human faces at all.

  Perhaps tha
t was why her abductor kept his hidden.

  So much hatred. How could an entire village of men hate this girl so much? They had held her as a baby, gone to school with her, said good morning as she went to fetch water at the well. How could they hate her so?

  If the video had been intended to shut Isabel up, it hadn’t worked. She had taken it as a gauntlet thrown down at her feet. The video made the news, of course, and in the subsequent interviews Isabel declared a new charity campaign sponsored by Isabel Enterprises, one for helping female victims of abuse in the developing world.

  She raised millions, but still she wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to erase those twisted faces, turn those snarls into smiles. She tried everything. She came out with songs emphasizing unity between the sexes, she tried extending an olive branch to men’s rights groups, she even tried television debates. Nothing worked. The foul hashtags and online haters continued their campaign.

  Isabel didn’t know what to do next. Every time she pushed, the patriarchy pushed back harder. If she celebrated women she got called a man-hater. If she celebrated sexuality she got called a slut. If she helped girls in need she got accused of ignoring boys, as if generations of society hadn’t ignored girls.

  At her wits’ end, she’d hit on the idea of the Wall Street protest. She’d take her ideas straight to the source, the strongest bastion of patriarchy in America. All those men in suits working at male-dominated companies. She knew her protest would fall on deaf ears with that crowd and that was fine by her. They weren’t her target audience anyway. Her target audience was all those lost girls out there, and the sympathetic men who really wanted to help.

  What she hadn’t counted on was one of her haters finally snapping.

  A muffled clearing of a throat made her look up.

  He stood just a foot outside her cage, face still covered by a gas mask.

  Isabel gasped. How long had he been standing there?

  He didn’t hold the skinning knife in his hand. Instead he held a spray bottle.

  He gestured for her to stand up.

  Isabel paused, then did as she was instructed, wondering why he didn’t speak except through that speaker system that gave him that robotic voice. Was he trying to hide his voice from her? That must be it. So this really was someone she knew.

  As she got up she discovered to her surprise that he stood slightly shorter than she did. Isabel hadn’t noticed that before. He had looked bigger when holding a knife and towering over her as she cowered in a corner. She racked her mind to think of men she knew who were shorter than her. There were a few at the office.

  He gestured for her to step forward. Timidly, she did, dreading every inch she moved to approach him. Every instinct told her to shrink away. Her mind, however, told her that being stuck in this tiny cage meant there was no escape. Best not to anger him.

  “Look,” she said, holding out her hands in a calming gesture. “I’m sorry for whatever I did. I’ll stop singing. I’ll never appear in public again. Just let me—”

  Her abductor raised the spray bottle and shot a stream of gas right into her face.

  Isabel coughed, eyes blinking. As she wiped them to see, her vision went double. The cage spun. She reached out for the bars to steady herself.

  Too late. Isabel fell unconscious onto the mattress.

  Chapter 15

  Isabel awoke feeling cold and clammy. She shook her clouded head, trying to clear her thoughts. As she raised herself up she felt earth and wet leaves under her hands. Looking around, she was astonished to see that she was alone in the middle of a forest at night. The trees stood like tall, black sentinels all around her, faint rays of moonlight shining through their leaves.

  She rose unsteadily to her feet, looking around in wonder. She was not tied up and there was no sign of her cage. The forest was silent save for a soft wind whispering through the leaves and the crunch of the forest floor under her running-shoes as she walked in a slow circle, looking around her. She was alone.

  Wait, running-shoes? She had been barefoot when she had woken up in her cage. Her abductor had removed her belt, her high heels, and her jewelry, leaving her only with her dress and underwear. Isabel had assumed that was so she wouldn’t have anything to use as a weapon.

  And now here she was, free and away, and even provided with comfortable shoes to walk through the woods.

  Had her abductor had a change of heart? Had her pleas and promises of not speaking to the police touched the madman’s heart?

  Her soaring sense of hope was stomped down by a soft, distant sound.

  The unmistakable sound of a blade being drawn across a knife sharpener.

  Her abductor hadn’t freed her as an act of redemption; he had freed her in order to enjoy a nighttime hunt.

  The sound had come from her right, where the ground sloped down a little. She turned and hurried uphill, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  Panic urged her to bolt and run straight away, but being an entertainer had taught her to think on her feet, react to the unexpected, whether it was a trick question from a journalist or equipment failure on stage.

  Or a maniac coming at her with a skinning knife.

  Isabel trotted at a moderate speed, fast enough to eat up some distance but slow enough that she could use the moonlight to check her progress, to keep from slamming into a tree trunk or tripping over an exposed root. She also ran at an angle, veering away to the right, not straight ahead like some startled deer.

  Although it was impossible to run silently in that darkened forest, she tried to move as quietly as possible, avoiding any bushes or the leaves of low-hanging branches. She winced at every crunching footstep, every snap of a twig or rustle of a leaf.

  The rasp of a blade across a sharpener sent a chill up her spine and contracted her muscles, contorting her hands into claws and tightening her scalp, raising her ears and eyebrows.

  Isabel froze. That had come from her left and a bit behind. It sounded closer than the first time, although it was hard to tell. The killer might only have drawn the blade across the sharpener with more force.

  Run or hide? The freak had worn night vision goggles when he had taunted her in the darkened cellar, but was he wearing them now? The fact that he hadn’t made a beeline for her suggested that he wasn’t. Perhaps he wanted to give her a sporting chance, make it more of a challenge in order to add to the thrill. If he wanted an easy kill he wouldn’t have given her running shoes, or warned her that he was coming.

  If he wanted an easy kill he could have killed her in her sleep, or in her cage.

  No, he wanted a hunt. He wanted a challenge.

  And that gave her a chance.

  She crouched behind a broad oak, clutching the rough bark, inhaling the rich forest smells as she tried to control her labored breathing, bring it down to a normal pace and reduce the sound she made. Her eyes widened, trying to pick out any suspicious shapes in the mottled landscape of pale moonlight and shadow around her. The oak’s broad canopy shadowed her from the moon’s rays, mantling her in darkness.

  Once again she heard the rasp of a knife being sharpened. This time it sounded closer, but a bit beyond her. In his search for his quarry, the hunter had overshot the mark.

  Isabel’s heart lifted in hope once again. She stayed where she was, immobile and silent, hoping he’d continue on his way.

  How long should she wait until she moved again? How long until he moved out of earshot? With the adrenaline racing through her system, all senses alert, it was hard to tell time. It felt like just before going on stage for a big show, like that record-breaker in Beijing. The stage hand would give a five-minute warning. Then the two-minute warning would come almost immediately, or seem to take an hour.

  Her ears strained to hear that damn knife again. The sound didn’t come. Instead her eyes widened as one of the shadows shifted.

  She peered through the darkness, pressing herself against the oak and deeper into its shadow.

  All she had seen
was a movement of a dark spot between two other dark spots. Had that been him, or a shift of light thanks to a branch moving? She had no idea.

  Then a faint sound came to her ears—footsteps, getting louder.

  Then another shadow shifted.

  It looked closer this time, and definitely human.

  The shadow disappeared the next moment, absorbed by another shadow, but in that brief space of time she felt certain it was her abductor, and could tell with startling clarity that he was heading in her direction.

  She peered around the oak, looking for the most open space that offered at least some cover from the moonlight. The route she found lay almost opposite from the direction that the murderer was approaching from.

  Isabel bolted out from her cover. Almost immediately she heard the sound of running feet behind her. For a heart-wrenching few seconds she sprinted across an open area bathed in moonlight, then plunged back into darkness, keeping her hands outstretched.

  It was good that she did. Branches lashed against her palms, and she slowed down only a split second before she would have bashed against a tree trunk.

  Stopping herself inches from the tree, she edged around it and continued. She forced herself to slow down, even though a glance over her shoulder showed her pursuer passing through that same stretch of moonlight, looking to the left and right, searching for her.

  She ducked to the left, slowing further as it grew darker, wincing as a twig snapped underfoot.

  Isabel froze. Peering through interlaced branches, she saw that stretch of open, lit forest glade unoccupied. She heard no sound but the hooting of an owl.

  A faint rustling came from behind her. She looked in that direction and saw nothing. Looking down at herself, she could barely see her own body, although she realized her pale red evening dress made her stand out in anything less than full darkness, while her hunter’s dark work overalls made him blend with the shadows.