The Final Veil: Who had kidnapped America's favorite belly dancer?

by Pat Powers

  Tears coursed down Kathleen's cheeks as she spoke, and I understood them. She had given herself completely to her man, and he had turned out not to want her. It was rejection on a scale that was generally experienced only by geeky men at the hands of attractive women, in the movies at least.

  "Do you fear an attempt by your master to reclaim you?" I asked.

  "No," responded Kathleen. "He had me. If he wanted me, he could have used me."

  "Do masters ever go after slavegirls who have run away, to make them come back whether or not they want to?" I asked.

  "I have never heard of it," said Kathleen.

  "There have been a couple," said Bettina.

  "What happened in those instances?" I asked.

  "They were discouraged by other Gorean masters,” said Bettina.

  "How were they discouraged?" I asked.

  "You have heard of the battle circle?" Bettina asked.

  "Yes, that's how Jeff first won April," I said.

  "They were visited by a group of Goreans and informed that if they pursued the slavegirl farther, they'd consider this nonconsensual assault on a slavegirl in the Gorean community, and that therefore they'd be subject to some nonconsensual time in a battle circle with several Gorean masters."

  "Did this stop them?" I asked.

  "All but one of them," said Bettina.

  "What happened to him?" I asked.

  "He survived," said Bettina. "After he got out of the hospital, he did not pursue the slavegirl any more, or attend any meets."

  "What if Jeff were pursuing April, using me to do so," I asked. "How would I know if this were so?"

  "I would tell you," Bettina said calmly.

  "Is it so?" I asked.

  "No," Bettina said. "No one knows where April is."

  I left Bettina's house a little while later with an instinctive feeling that April wasn't squirreled away in a secret room somewhere there. I thought Bettina would hide April if she felt April were in danger, but from what I'd read of her body language, there had been nothing that indicated evasiveness in any way. When I had asked her point blank if April were with her, she'd said "no" and meant it.

  Of course, April might realize that the first place Jeff would go if he were searching for her would be Bettina's place, so she might have hidden with another mentor.

  Chapter 4

  Precious and Precarious

  But the place I wanted to go next was not to a mentor but the Mothers of Propriety, who had their headquarters in one of Atlanta's many under-utilized office buildings not too far from Bettina's home. A short distance physically, but divided by a huge cultural gulf.

  The building was small but nice, all smoked glass and polished brass with thick carpeting everywhere and a hushed atmosphere.

  The receptionists' desk was one of those high, shield-like affairs which had everything short of turrets for archers. Might even have been a pot of boiling oil on the other side. The receptionist was an efficient-looking young blonde who took my information, called around and said, "Mrs. Brown, who's the one you need to talk to, is in conference and will see you soon. Would you care for something to drink? We have coffee and soft drinks."

  I said I was fine and I was. I spent about 45 minutes reading old magazines. I even found an article about April in one of them, though it was only a few paragraphs long, seemed to be mainly an excuse to show a large color photo of April dancing with most of her torso and all of her legs exposed, and was written in the uninformative, vaguely alarmed, mildly arrogant style that was typical of newsmagazines covering something they didn't understand. "Dancing Slave: Role Model?" the headline read.

  "Mrs. Brown will see you now," the receptionist said, and none too soon as I had progressed to the point of looking at a spread of fashion gaffes committed at an awards show, which meant I would shortly be reading obituaries and old sports scores.

  Mrs. Brown popped out of a hallway a moment later, a serious-looking middle-aged woman dressed in a plain black dress that covered her knees and a white blouse with ruffles at the front so you'd know she wasn't a man. Her body had that loose, still vaguely dishy shape of a beauty who'd let things go to seed after marriage.

  "Mr. Bowman? So nice to meet you. Please come this way," said Brown, offering her hand. I took it and shook it and she said, "I'm Cynthia Brown, legal counsel for the Mothers of Propriety."

  I introduced myself and we walked to a small conference room.

  "How may I help you, Mr. Bowman?" Brown asked. She had a deceptively mild tone, but there was a hooded aggressiveness to her manner that made me cautions. Lawyers were at heart attack dogs, going after the enemy with documents and words rather than fists and bullets, but often with more gusto than physical fighters ever did, and doing much more damage with less concern.

  I was definitely a potential enemy at the moment. Time to clear that up.

  "I'm a private investigator," I said. "I'm looking into the disappearance of April Dancer. Ever heard of her?"

  "She's a belly dancer," said Brown, and there was definitely something dismissive in the way she said it.

  "Yes, she is a belly dancer," I admitted, "a well-known belly dancer who has received a number of very angry emails from members of your organization. None threaten immediate physical harm, but some do contain predictions that she'll burn in hell soon, and enough heat elsewhere to make you wonder if the author is willing to expedite April's visit to hell, if you know what I mean."

  "Well, as counsel for the Mothers of Propriety I can tell you that we as an organization have done nothing to harm or threaten April Dancer in any way," said Brown. "In fact, I don't believe she's been mentioned in any of our newsletters. Frankly, we have bigger fish to fry, though her blatant sexuality is a concern to some of us. In any event, nothing you've said indicates you have anything actionable against us or any of our officers."

  "I never thought I did," I said. "I'm not interested in action of that sort. My only interest is finding April Dancer. You have an interest in that, too."

  "Why?" asked Brown.

  So I explained about the cops and the media and the big sign saying "Clue" and pointing at the Mothers and how finding April quickly might be able to prevent all the bad publicity and general mess.

  "I know that your organization isn't legally responsible for actions your members may take on their own," I said, "but the media, and the general public, tends to miss subtle points like that. So I was hoping you or someone in your organization might be able to steer me toward someone among these letter-writers who might be enough of a loose cannon to try to help April see the light, whether she wants to or not."

  "Mr. Bowman, I can think of no one whose name I can give you, and frankly, I can't think of any reason why I should," said Brown. "We will deal with the police if they make inquiries, and the media as well. We have dealt with them before, and we get along very well with them."

  "Fine," I said. "Stonewall me. Maybe you can stonewall the cops, too. But you can't stonewall the media. If you don't give them what they want, they'll just make up things, or they'll make you look like you have something to hide. Almost certainly they'll do both."

  "We have some experience at controlling our image," said Brown.

  I looked at her and tried to keep from letting my frustration show. At the same time, I watched her more carefully now. I sensed different layers of motive behind her words, but I couldn't tell what they were.

  "Do you know what it's gonna be like?" I asked. "Because this is a not just a celebrity story, it's a sexy celebrity story, which means it's going to be absolutely irresistible, not just to the local media, but to the national media. And the one who's been kidnapped is a beautiful, sexy, humble belly dancer and you are going to be the deranged old biddies that hate her because she's all the things you are not. Hell, I could write the stories myself. They'll show up on all the TV news programs, in all the tabloids, and in all the magazines. Do you really think you are going to be able to control your image? They
will be all over you."

  "That's our concern and not yours," said Brown. "We can't help you, Mr. Bowman."

  "Can't or won't?" I asked.

  "What difference does it make?" said Brown. "It wouldn't serve the interests of our members to hand them over to every, uh, investigator who comes to us looking for us to do his investigating for him."

  "Fine," I said. From the set of Brown's jaw and the look in her eye, it was obvious that she was ramping up to throw me out of the place. Time to play my trump card. "I understand that you have to serve the interests of your membership. But if it turns out that April has been kidnapped or killed, and one of your members was involved, whether your organization helped or hindered them, you are going to be the most despised organization since the Symbionese Liberation Army."

  "The who?" asked Brown.

  "The people who kidnapped Patty Hearst," I said. "I can understand your not knowing who they are, most of their members are dead or in jail."

  "I'll take that under advisement," said Brown coldly. "And now, Mr. Bowman, I must inform you that our interview is over."

  "All right," I said. Nothing doing with Brown, obviously. In defeat, I slid my card across the table to her. "Please give me a call if you do find that it will serve your organization's interests to do so."

  As I drove away from the Mothers' building, I went over the interview in my mind, trying to think how I could have done better. Maybe a softer tone? I doubted it. Brown struck me as a pit-bull type who'd have to have the facts dragged out of her with pliers. She wouldn't give the cops any more than she'd given me unless she was either legally required to or compelled to by her higher-ups.

  There was a good barbecue joint, The Southern Pig, on the way to Scormus' place, and I hadn't had anything to eat for hours, so I pulled in. It had a nice, relaxed feel to it, with polished wood tables with paper towel rolls on spindles at each table to clean up the mess, and pictures of people catching fish on the walls. The lunch rush was over and I was able to get my sandwich and a table in short order. I was wolfing down the chopped pork and the Brunswick stew when my cell phone rang.

  "Hi John, this is Daniel," said a familiar voice. "We got something for you."

  Daniel was the head of video analysis at Media Research labs.

  "Great!" I said. "What have you got?"

  "I think we have a video of someone being grabbed and put into a van," said Daniel. "That unusual enough to suit you?"

  "Yes, definitely," I said. But as I spoke the words, I felt my heart sink. Until that moment, I would have given pretty goods odds that April was going to show up hale and hearty after having had some fling, or turned out to be hiding in some Gorean mentor's home, having a personal crisis of some sort.

  But this was a Worst Case deal. April had been kidnapped. Which meant that suddenly her life had become something not only precious, but precarious.

  "What kind of resolution have you got?" I asked.

  "Not very good, I'm afraid," said Daniel. "We're dealing with extreme magnification and enhancement of a portion of a camera image designed to show people defacing or stealing cars on the other side of the street from the lot where the kidnapping occurred. We can't give you much detail on clothing, much less faces. What we have are blurry figures moving, the blurry image of a van. That's it."

  "That'll be enough to establish a crime with a time stamp," I said. "Hold on, I'll be there shortly, and probably with my client."

  I called Jeff and told him we had some video he needed to see and told him where to go to see it, then grabbed the rest of my sandwich and headed for Media Research. I wolfed down the rest of my sandwich in the car and then called Randy, my electronics specialist. He wasn't in so I bounced over to Plunkett, an electronics guy who'd done backup for Randy before. Plunkett said he'd be glad to head over to Jeff's house and set up a quick record-and-trace rig and man it in case there were any ransom calls in the next few hours.

  Then I called Thomson. He reported no luck with any of his searches, but that he'd set up some robots to shoot him an alert if her name or credit card showed up anywhere. He'd already had quite a few internet pings on Dancer's name, largely because it was the name of a character in an old TV series.

  After culling those out and some cases of identical names, he'd found nothing, but would give me an alert if anything promising pinged.

  I pulled into Media Research's lot about ten minutes ahead of Jeff and spent a few minutes in the lobby just sitting and thinking about the case. There really wasn't a lot to go on just yet. Could be a jealous Gorean had done her. Maybe some pissed of ALFALFAns or Mothers of Propriety had grabbed her. Or some desperate, horny loner who'd seen her on TV and fallen in love with her and had her locked up in his basement for his very own.

  I hoped the video would clear some things up. But I doubted it.

  Jeff arrived. He was maintaining calm but was clearly getting frazzled. We were ushered right into a conference room with Daniel when Jeff arrived, which was a good thing.

  The conference room had a huge computer monitor with a relatively tiny laptop hooked up to it. Daniel was seated at the laptop, but stood up to shake our hands.

  "Mr. Reynolds, Mr. Bowman, good to meet you," said Daniel, a frizzy-haired, wiry man with a calm but mildly distracted air about him. "Here's what we have."

  Daniel clicked on his keyboard and a grainy gray image filled the screen. It showed a vehicle that might have been a van parked in front of Athena's Palace. Daniel clicked again and grainy images of people whose indistinct bodies were haloed with light climbed quickly out of the van and disappeared out of the frame. I'd seen that halo effect before, it was a product of extreme enhancement of an image.

  The figures came back a few moments later dragging another grainy figure into the van. There were four of them holding the struggling figure, and they staggered and shook with the effort of holding the figure, but were able to get her into the van in scant seconds and slam the door shut. One figure then walked around to the front of the van and it drove away in that jerky way computer videos have.

  A timeline scrolled across the bottom of the screen. It said, "7:03 pm." That was about when April had disappeared. Actually judging from what we'd just seen, it was exactly when April had disappeared.

  "Can't you focus in a little?" Jeff asked.

  "We've got it enhanced as much as we can," said Daniel. "Here's the unaltered image from the vid cam." He popped up a second window which showed a rank of cars, beyond it the street, and beyond it Athena's Palace's parking lot. The van was visible only as a blob, the figures tiny moving dots on the screen.

  "Point taken," Jeff said. "Well, I can't say for sure that that's April. But it sure looks like somebody got dragged into a van there."

  "Given that April disappeared, and that that was her last known location, I'd say it's a good shot that that's her," I said. "It's definitely enough evidence to turn your case from a missing person to a kidnapping, which means we can get the cops in on it."

  "Do we want to do that?" Jeff asked.

  "Definitely," I said. "They have a lot more manpower and resources than I do. And of course, it's illegal to withhold evidence of the commission of a felony from the police. So the next thing to do is take some dupes downtown and talk to some people. Daniel, great job on finding this. Can you give us a disk with this on it? And the original tapes, they'll want those."

  "No problem," said Daniel. "We've already made dupes, we figured you'd want them."

  In the parking lot, I asked Jeff to come and sit in my car.

  "What's up?" Jeff asked. He looked depressed. I didn't blame him.

  "If we bring the cops in on this, there are some preparations you and your friends should make," I said. "I'm not a cop so I don't care about this stuff, and neither do the cops, really, but they'll use it to pressure you at the very least and they'll be tempted to use it against you if they think you're guilty and they can't make their case. They're going to search your house. If you hav
e any drugs I'd advise you to get rid of them. And don't bury them in the yard, they'll have experts at finding recently disturbed earth and anything you bury will be found. Best bet, drive to some country road and dump it there."

  "We don't take drugs," said Jeff. "Few Goreans do. A few smoke pot, that's about it."

  "If you have any stuff in your computer that might implicate you in criminal behavior, dump it," I said. "I'm not talking about porn, everybody has that. Except for kiddie porn, they'll definitely nail you on that. I'm mostly talking about tax evasion, that kind of thing. They'll search your computer and if they find anything, they'll use it against you."

  "You've got a pretty cynical idea of how the cops work," said Jeff.

  "It's not cynicism, it's experience," I said. "I used to be an Atlanta cop. I was a detective working out of drug enforcement. I know exactly how they work, because that's how I used to work. I quit partly because I didn't like working that way, but mostly because I stopped believing we were doing people any good."

  "Oh," Jeff said again.

  "Yeah," I said. "You also need to think about how you're going to handle the media. The media are going to find you and your Gorean friends a very attractive story."

  "They already do," said Jeff. "I spend a lot of my time handling media inquiries."

  "Prepare to spend all your time doing so," I said. "And be prepared to handle inquiries from the media and the cops which are very, very crude and nasty from investigative reporters, because you will be regarded as suspects."

  "We're having a meet tonight, I'll spread the word," said Jeff. "I just wish there were some way of not getting the police involved."

  "There isn't, if you really want to find April," I said. "They have resources we need, and they'll use them vigorously because April's a celebrity."

  "That's good to know," Jeff said faintly.

  "Hey, they can and will find out who was dining at Athena's Palace that night and track them down and interview every one of them," I said. "It would take me a week to do it, if I did nothing else and hired some guys to help out. They'll have it done by tomorrow afternoon, and they'll have done a lot of other things as well."