by a b
“Where’d you get that scar anyway? Was one of the guys pierced with a fishing hook?”
Darci touched her neck, a protruding scar, called a “visceral scar” because of the way the tissue extrudes and forms a lump of tissue. It was misshapen and sported pigment that was like a bright red volcano. Most people who have such a mark pretend it’s a birthmark because the kind of cut that makes them is almost always the result of the insertion of a surgical steel blade or needle.
“It’s a birthmark.” Darci sneered.
“My dad’s a dermatologist, that’s a scar. So what’s up with the neck, baby?” It might have been all the concern a teenager could muster, but it sounded like a taunt.
“Go home.” She turned away from him then hearing his wheels hit the pavement, she shouted after Him: “Don’t come back till after nine.”
She pressed the scar between her thumb and forefinger, annoyed. She was a long way from home.
Chapter 8 The Voice In His Head
A voice in his head cried “Legacy!” and then again “Legacy!”
The voice in his head was actually in the room. Wagner was inches away from his ear, and her tone was anything but secretive. She had a distinct “I won’t be taken for granted” attitude of a rankled subordinate, the kind that begs not to sound needy. Odd combination, Legacy thought.
So was the sight that Legacy lifted his eyes to see after finishing his thought. Wagner was now across the room, waiting with an impatient pose, more proof that Legacy needed to think faster.
“Are you listening now? What do you think?” With a gesture to her outfit like she was a runway model showing off the newest fashion.
Legacy’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. Wagner had to be referring to the form-fitting sheer black top that she was now wearing. Under it, a bright fuchsia bra radiated a call for attention. Wagner explained that she didn’t want to appear uncomfortable under scrutiny, and since Legacy made her more uncomfortable than anyone she’d met, she had decided to run her wardrobe by him first. The stunning part, other than the obvious stunning part, was that Legacy had the feeling he’d seen the outfit before.
“This is an exact copy of something I saw on a prostitute-”
Legacy turned to hide a smirk. “I can tell.”
Wagner wasn’t in the mood for a joke, “I am going undercover, pure and simple. It is immature for anyone to think anything else about the outfit. This will make me fit in better for this afternoon, right?”
Legacy snapped back to the present “Laci,” Wagner looked lost. “from the subway entrance on 25th. You copied Laci. I walk by her corner every night on the way home. She wears that on Thursday.”
“It’s Friday.”
“I told you my methods aren’t 100 percent.”
Wagner crossed her arms in front of her body in a gesture that resembled one that a pissed off prostitute waiting to be paid would give. Legacy quickly buried that thought and its origin. “So, I’m going into the field –”
“When I said they’ll think you’re an undercover cop in the suit, I didn’t mean that you had to dress as a local. I just was looking for you to tone it down so they didn’t run away.” Legacy could see the self-consciousness flooding into Wagner’s face along with a wash of fresh blood. She had taken the initiative to dress like a whore for no reason at all. Legacy knew what she needed. He turned away, “But now that I think about it, this might make your job much easier.”
She shifted in her high heels. Wagner walked with perfect balance even on uneven ground. “I still don’t see what we need with adult film stars. We’ve brought in experts-”
“I read their reports, none of them has ever been in a position of subordination like these girls. None of them have an idea what’s going through her head.” He tapped a photo on the wall. It was Missy looking at the camera, right before a session was set to begin. Her eyes looked vacant, her hair and make up looked like a movie star’s. She bore no resemblance to the woman they’d kidnapped. The seriousness of the task flooded into Legacy’s voice. “I need to interview five to ten women, have them in the office at one.”
That gave him a few more hours. He looked at the photos on the wall. Wagner had done an excellent job recreating the exact placement of the papers as they were spread across his room at home. Part of Legacy’s gift was spatial geometry. His eyes had a mind of their own, automatically drawn to and connecting specific parts of the investigation like constellations before his brain made the connection.
Many times, Legacy would find that his eyes were staring at exactly the report, or the exact place in a photo where his mind could find the next breakthrough in the case. He explained it this way: all the years extracting observational information out of others had made his eyes smarter than his brain. Interrogation is all about adding up all of the visual information the subject is showing then piecing together what is missing. There are unique rhythms to a man while he’s under stress. Find out what makes him sweat on the upper lip while his underarms remain dry, and those lips will be flapping soon.
Legacy was staring at a picture of a computer screen shot. He didn’t know why. It was a money counter. The real time updated ransom that was the hallmark of the financial side of the abduction scheme web site.
Missy’s body and soul had been worth 2 million dollars. It was an approximate figure based on estimates of viewership and commerce patterns in the industry.
The money side of the crime verged on elegant, Legacy thought, tapping the progress bar that never gave out the amount of donations, just charted the progress from 1 to 100 percent of the ransom paid.
Out in the vast digital distribution center, every minute of every day since Missy went missing, her abductors were amassing a small fortune.
A series of offshore web sites broadcast every moment of the show. Three to five daily broadcasts showed her stripped naked and used as an instrument of pornography by one or more of her abductors. The real perverts kept the channel on well after the sex was over, to watch the girl wait, frightened and alone, for the next session. The money poured in. Legacy had read that the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee tape had been worth over 300 million dollars in direct sales. People came out of the woodwork to get a glimpse of pornography with a recognizable face, something they weren’t supposed to see. Now, these abductors had found another way to market to those buyers.
The free version of the site broadcast a still picture every six minutes. Ten dollars gave the viewer ten minutes of streaming video, then, like a peep show, the window would close.
The sites started out as a novelty item, advertising that a prom queen from Florida was about to become cum queen of America. They boosted the authenticity of the site by scanning a newspaper photo of the girl and the story of her abduction. The sites themselves were outsourced to foreign soil, countries that had become cottage industries to smugglers, thieves and money launderers and where laws regarding corporate privacy gave the companies almost complete amnesty regarding “information” transfer.
The outlets were further protected by a threat leveled by the abductors. They promised that if any of the distributors were shut down, or if their offices were raided, the girl would be killed. Add to that the fact that whoever had built the security around the router keys that repeated the signal from its origin to the outlets where it went out live to the public was a certified genius. Legacy went over the list of suspects they had that possessed the kind of qualifications that would baffle an entire federal investigative team for months. It was a very short list. Much of the original focus of the investigation had been on finding the programmer. If they could find the go-between that linked the broadcasters to the distributors, the investigation would be over in an instant. However, the investigation had turned up nothing.
Legacy felt the futility of the reports like Braille beneath his fingers, it was a physical force and the message was clear.
He decided to review the timeline. Broadcasts started almost three months ago, in
early June. Viewership began slowly, and then picked up when more people began to believe that what they were seeing was real. Like the symptoms of a sickness, a “viral” audience grew. It’s more than a little bit disgusting that authenticity peaks curiosity in this area, but all the reports by the “sex experts” that Wagner had mentioned agreed that it wasn’t the actual act of sex that drew the crowd. It was sex with someone that the crowd felt like they “knew.”
How did they know the prom queen? Everyone has a prom queen in their collective pasts. Most of them are not known for their beneficent personality as much as their beauty and attitude. Legacy’s prom queen was a pedestal type. She liked looking down from the podium at everyone. She hadn’t noticed the way that many of the guys were looking at her as she gave her acceptance speech. Kids can be cruel, Legacy thought, while looking at the work of adults scattered over his walls. He was looking for a sophisticated organization based upon high school impulses.
Ten minutes for ten dollars. It sounded like chump change, the kind of money an afternoon pole dancer earned sliding up the leg of a stock broker on his lunch hour. The piston driving power of ten dollars can only be fully understood with the scaling factor of computers. Ten overfed, undersexed, prom-queen reminiscent guys hit this site like a fly to flypaper. They want it on all day so that they can tape it and keep it close to their collection of figurines from some science fiction movie that totally changed their lives and broadened their understanding of man’s place in the universe. That kind of devotion is 240 dollars a day, times ten. Now let’s throw in the mix a spike in viewership when the action really gets going, maybe 100 people stop in for a quick peek for one of the three to five sex shows a day.
That's almost ten thousand dollars. Now, add in the foreign market - the guys that never had a prom queen but wouldn’t mind seeing one spread wide, tied to a chair.
The hook for the site had teeth, and brought bile to the back of any decent person’s throat. The site claimed that every dollar went toward the ransom for the girl. The individual consumer was buying the girl’s freedom. At an undisclosed target price, the girl would be released. The people who paid the ransom were encouraged to think that they were doing something good, something helpful to this girl. This little grace note opened up a new market, the people who sought to justify their perversion. The despicable result was that in ten days, their first victim had netted her entire ransom.
The second was a weather girl from New Hampshire, Carla. Her take was estimated at double Missy’s total.
The next was a weather girl from Texas, Brit. Her angel face brought in an estimated “ransom” of over ten million.
The next girl was an animal rights activist in northern California, Jamie. She stalled out at ninety percent of her target ransom. Hers was the body they’d found in the woods outside of Brunswick, Maine.
The girl on screen now was a stage actress from New York, Tracy Bell. She had been in captivity for over a week, and with the publicity spilling over from an underground sex industry to a mainstream national case, the money totals were staggering.
It wasn’t quite a credible news story yet. All of the girls filed police reports, but half had then publicly recanted that they were the ones on the Internet. The public didn’t know whether to believe it or not. Clearly everyone wanted the whole thing to be a staged hoax, designed to make money off of the gullible, but that became harder to swallow when Jamie did not come home. A dead body is a hard thing to argue with.
The FBI had tried to keep a lid on the scope of the investigation. They thought that the publicity would give the Vinyl Men exactly what they wanted, a greater audience. With no ransom drop off, no geographical clues for where they were hiding and no contact from the abductors, the FBI needed more time.
Time was running out, and Legacy knew it. The girl who was just taken was the daughter of the FBI director, a pretty smile who was the public face of the bureau, even while finishing her training. It was a tradition to have a junior cadet fill this position. The idea was that as they were transitioning from civilian to agent, they were well suited to transfer information from the inner culture to the outer culture. They were making the change themselves.
The scrutiny would become national the moment she hit the air. There was no hiding this kind of truth. The director of the most powerful institution in the nation was going to witness his daughter stripped naked in front of a camera lens. With the largest standing army of law enforcement officers in the world at his disposal, there was nothing he could do but watch and wait. Rape, real and undeniable, was about to become a mainstream spectator sport.
Thousands of miles away or perhaps even next door, something awful was about to happen.
Chapter 9 Blue
A raven’s hair nest moved slightly on the overstuffed pillow on the bed in the center of a perfectly rectangular room. Her head was throbbing like her brain was trying to pound its way out of her skull. “Mitch?” Her voice grumbled, dark and yet playful “Mitch, I think I melted my head.”
In the echo of her voice back to her, bouncing off of the tin walls, soaking into the carpet, something was wrong. This wasn’t her room, she could tell by the way her voice traveled through it. Laura knew that she wasn’t at home. Her eyes snapped open. She decided in the darkness that she’d overreacted. She was on a bed, in a comfortable position. A voice in her head chastised herself for acting like a child. She moved her hair out of her eyes and peeked out at her surroundings. Danger.
“Not in Kansas anymore,” she muttered. The bed creaked. Her legs folded into a crouched position underneath her. This was a dangerous place suddenly. Her training kicked in and she “cased” her environment like a thief planning to rob something from it, steal herself away.
Walking from end to end, she felt the uneven floor shift slightly as if it were on springs. There was no foundation. The walls were thin, a tap from her nails brought the sound of a metallic snare. A cool breeze circulated from an evaporative cooler in the ceiling. Her fingers skidded along one of the narrow metal ridges that reinforced the structure halfway up the wall. A slot wide enough for videotape interrupted the journey of her fingers. The odor around the opening was stale, like the kitchen in a nursing home. She would be fed through this slot. Laura knew that she now that she was on a mobile platform, a boxcar, or cargo trailer, converted to house laboratory animals. What exactly was the experiment?
Close by, Blue was carefully methodically sponge bathing an unconscious Tracy Bell. His hands messaged the glistening tan skin, skimming the curves. As the warm sudsy water poured over her body, she began to stir. Blue moved to her feet and began messaging them.
There was something giddy about Blue’s movements. It was like he was watching himself from some kind of distant perspective and trying to make a good impression. Or maybe it was just an active mind spilling out into spastic, over-thought physical expression. Either way, when he spoke, his tone was measured and assured.
“Rise and shine.” He dusted her legs with golden glitter. “Somebody has ninety percentage points to be happy with this morning.”
Tracy perked up, but found her hands and legs shackled to the floor and spread in a depiction resembling triumph and helplessness all in one. “How long do I have?”
“They’re cutting you loose after initiation – about twenty hours from now.”
“What if I don’t get to one hundred percent? What will they do to me?”
“You will,” Blue began painting her quivering lips with fire engine red lipstick. “give it all you got, and the money will come flying in.” He jingled the lock on the chain while pulling up the fishnet stockings through the cuff of the restraint. “They should give me keys to these things. Don’t know why they don’t -”
“You told me once that they didn’t trust you.”
Blue gave a bashful look to the floor, as if he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes. “I never told you that.”
“What do they think you’d do if you had th
e keys Blue?” Tracy’s eyes shone through a satin mask that Blue tied gently behind her head. She leaned her head forward and kissed his palm. “I’m worried, Blue.”
Blue pulled away “There, you look like a – a fallen angel. You are going to pile up the money today.”
Tears began to run down Tracy’s freshly rouged cheeks, the smears looked like war paint. Blue tisk tisked with a sugary fatherly tone. He cupped her face with his hands and gently tilted her eyes to meet his sky blue pupils.
“I’m only letting them send in two today. You need a break.” He added in a pleading tone “ I want to take care of you.”
He blinked and his colored contacts shifted just enough for Tracy to notice them. She could not have known that if the contact seats itself quickly after a blink, the pupils are in rest state and the speaker is telling the truth. An active pupil, one that is engaged in generating a story, will cause the contact to seat in a two-stage triangular fashion. If she had known what to look for, she might have known that she was being lied to.
