by Greg Rucka
“No. Thanks.”
He dropped back into his chair, smiled. “Graham called about three minutes after you did.”
“Did he?”
“It’s a Tailhook issue as much as it’s an issue for you.”
“I’d think it’s more for me.”
“He said you’d say something like that. But you’re still part of Tailhook.” He extended an open hand. “Did you bring it?”
I hesitated, then pulled the folded sheet from my pocket and handed it to him. Chapel unfolded the paper and looked it over, then raised his gaze past it and looked me over in much the same way, and though there was nothing reductive or objectifying in the gaze, I couldn’t look at him while he did it, and so settled on the view of Mount Hood out the window instead.
“Is it possible that the photograph is a fake?” Fred Chapel asked. “Could someone have edited your head from a publicity shot and then grafted it onto the body of someone else?”
“It’s me.”
“You’re positive?”
“If it’s a fake, they’re working from an original,” I said, shrugging out of my jacket. His look was quizzical, then turned to slight alarm as I began pulling off my overshirt.
I let him worry while I got my arms out of my sleeves, leaving the shirt around my neck, revealing the tank I was wearing beneath. I turned in the chair, left and then right, showing him each of my arms. “The ink’s the same.”
“You’ve had shots showing the tats,” he said, musing as I got my shirt back in place. “Could be whoever did this just edited the tattoos, as well. Doesn’t seem likely, though. Can I ask where you got this copy?”
“My brother gave it to me this morning.”
“Did he say how he got it?”
“Someone e-mailed it to him.”
“Your brother has friends e-mailing him pictures like this of his sister?”
“I think this was a friend asking if he knew about this, rather than saying, hey, your sister’s got a great rack.”
He didn’t smile. “Do you know where the friend got it?”
“Mikel—that’s my brother—said it was off of some pay site, one of those ones that does naked-celebrity pictures.”
“Do you know the name of the site?”
I shook my head. “But I can give Mikel a call, he’ll know.”
“Maybe later. One of my assistants is looking on-line right now. When he gets back to me we’ll want to determine if the sites are the same. Let’s assume for the time being that the picture really is of you, and not a fake, then.”
“I’ve never posed nude for anyone,” I said.
“Never?”
I just looked at him.
“Maybe for a boyfriend, for fun? Or as something romantic between the two of you?”
“You’re confusing me with Vanessa. She’s the one with all the boys. I’m the one who sits in the hotel room with a guitar in her lap and crap on the TV.”
Chapel grinned. “You’re keeping your sense of humor, that’s good.”
“Am I? I’m not trying to be funny.”
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“You mean more questions? Sure.” I freed a cigarette and stopped myself from lighting it long enough to get a nod from him.
He took an ashtray from a desk drawer and slid it over to me. “You have any idea when or where the picture could have been taken?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been in over one hundred hotel rooms this past year, easy. It’s not a dressing room, I’m sure of that. I can’t remember ever being totally naked in a dressing room. In my undies, yeah, but not in the buff.”
“So you think it’s from the tour?”
“It must have been.”
“Do you take drugs?”
The question surprised me, but only a bit. “I did a few on tour.”
“You understand why I’m asking?”
“You’re worried that there might be pictures of that, too.”
“I’m not judging you here, please understand that,” Chapel said. “This is all confidential, between us, unless you tell me you’re going to commit a crime. That happens, I’m obligated to act.”
“Not planning on it.”
“Always good to know. So this is between the two of us. But I want to be prepared if more pictures surface, maybe showing things you’d rather the world didn’t see.”
“I never did drugs alone,” I told him. “Parties sometimes, or with Click, but never alone.”
“What about sex?”
“What about sex?”
He gave me the professionally reassuring smile. “I hear you rock stars get a lot of it.”
“I’m not one of them.”
“You never took a groupie backstage or back to your room?”
“Wasn’t my thing. Van’s thing, sometimes Click’s thing. Never my thing.”
“Are you gay, Mim?”
I stared at him.
“Like I said, I’m not judging. Just asking. I told you Graham called.”
I fidgeted, feeling the heat come back, rising along my neck. “Yeah.”
“I asked him a lot of these questions, too, just for background. He says he remembers you taking a groupie back to the hotel when you were in Montreal. He remembers it because it was the only time he can recall it happening. He also remembers it because it was another woman.”
“I don’t remember doing anything like that.”
“It’s important, because if you took someone back to your room, I’m less inclined to think that’s a setup, rather than you going with a groupie to her house.”
“Well, it never happened,” I said. “So you don’t really need to worry about that.”
Chapel stared at me, then nodded slightly, as if willing to let it go for the time being. “All right, could the picture have been taken with your permission and you just forgot about it?”
I crushed my cigarette out, lit another one. I didn’t want to get bitchy, but I felt it, and I knew it was in my eyes.
“I understand you drink pretty heavily,” Chapel said. “That’s why you’re on hiatus.”
“That’s why Van says I’m on hiatus.”
“I understand that there were a couple of instances on the road where you passed out.”
“I never missed a gig. I never couldn’t play.”
“Would you call it passing out or blacking out?”
I snorted smoke at him. “There’s a difference?”
“When someone passes out, they don’t do anything else. When someone blacks out, they don’t know what else they might be doing.”
“Sometimes I black out,” I admitted.
“So it’s possible you could have had a blackout on the road and someone could have taken these shots then?”
“No.”
“You sound awfully certain considering that you wouldn’t be able to remember.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because when I drink like that, I drink alone. Consequently, I black out alone.”
That stopped the questions for a few moments. Chapel’s hand went to the folded photograph on the desk, almost idly, caressing the edge with his fingers. Then he leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk.
“These are our options as I see it. Further action, or possible action toward prosecution, will require discovering who took the picture, and how. I can get a TRO against the Web site, as soon as it’s identified.”
“TRO?”
“A temporary restraining order.”
“I don’t want temporary. I want it stopped for good.”
“A TRO is the first step in any injunction, so we’ll have to start with that. It won’t be a problem, you’ve got multiple grounds—appropriation, right to publicity, public disclosure of private facts, even emotional distress. The TRO will force the site to take the image down. Then there’s the issue of damages.”
“I don’t want money. I want it stopped.”
“I understand. But
there’s the issue of where the photograph came from, how the site acquired it. Until we know who took the picture, we can’t move against them. And if they have multiple images, we could have the same problem, but at a different site. I can contact the Portland PD, let them know about this. Oregon has a specific statute for this kind of crime, the ‘Video Voyeur’ statute—a lot of states have yet to address this issue specifically, so we’re ahead there. We can even contact the FBI, since this is obviously an interstate activity.”
There was a new tone in his voice, not a lack of confidence, but almost a hesitation, a lack of conviction.
“You don’t sound certain,” I said.
Chapel made a slight shrug. “We talk to law enforcement, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s local or federal, we’ll get publicity. As soon as that happens, this picture will be everywhere, we’re talking millions of people around the world seeing it. A TRO won’t stop people from e-mailing it to each other.”
I just sat there, trying to fathom a million people looking at the picture. It was too abstract to be humiliating. Sitting opposite Chapel when he looked at the photo was one thing; a million teen boys at their computers was something else. But then I thought of those three kids at the Fred Meyer, the way they’d looked at me then, and the way they would look at me now.
It hit me that I was totally helpless, and I opened my mouth to tell Chapel as much, but then there was a knock at his office door. I turned in my chair as another man leaned through the doorway. He was younger and dressed a little more formally than Chapel. He gave me a glance, then looked to Chapel.
“Fred? You should check your e-mail.”
“You find the site?”
The man glanced my way again, as if he couldn’t help it. “Two of them. You should check the e-mail. I’ll be in my office.”
He pulled the door gently shut after him. Chapel was already clicking his mouse, focused on his monitor. I felt the same slow-motion-can’t-stop-it-something’s-wrong feeling coming on me, the way it had when I’d entered the lobby in Sydney to see Van and Click and Graham all waiting to give me my walking papers. My hands were trembling, the way they never trembled before a gig.
“How bad?” I asked.
He frowned at the screen. I got out of the chair, started to come around his desk. Chapel put a hand up, as if ready to swivel the monitor away from me, but I was already at his shoulder, then, and he dropped the arm, conceding.
The pictures were open in a viewing window on the monitor, side by side, and it took only an instant to realize why his instinct had been to hide them from me, only an instant to realize just how bad it was.
What stung was the pose—hand on my hip, hips cocked to the side, pouting. It would have been a convincing mockery of a Van pose, if I’d been clothed and not holding a bottle of beer. As it was, it looked like I was giving the photographer an eager show.
The border—again the blue and red motif—once more named me as Miriam Bracca of Tailhook, but this time the caption read HERE SHE CUMS AGAIN.
It was Picture Three, though, that was like a punch in the stomach.
I was lying on my back, on a bed, the sheets mussed beneath me, and again I was totally naked. The shot was from above, as if the photographer had straddled my body, looking down. My eyes were half-closed, my mouth slightly open, my hair a mess, and some of it hung over my eyes, but not enough to disguise my features. My right hand extended up above the pillows and out of the frame, with the shot cropped just above my knees.
My left hand was resting between my thighs.
The caption read COME MAKE PUSSY PURR.
Chapel hadn’t moved in his chair, hadn’t even turned to look at me, but I put my back to him, anyway, trying to find something else to see. Mount Hood didn’t help; it didn’t matter where I looked.
Me with my hand between my thighs. Me with one hand between my thighs and the other over my head, and what’s next, a shot with me taking it from behind?
I put my head against the window, closed my eyes. The glass was cold and a relief against my skin.
So now I’m a whore, I thought. Now the world thinks I’m a drunk and a whore.
Graham and Click and Van would see these pictures, they’d see them, the people at the label would see them, the reporters and the photographers and Pete from Christchurch and the groupie from Montreal. Joan’s students would see these pictures, would trade them back and forth in e-mails, maybe print them out, maybe bring them to school. Would they tell her? Would they laugh? Would she see them, too?
“Miriam—”
I shook my head. I didn’t trust my voice, I didn’t trust that I could tell him to be quiet, to go to hell. I was thinking of Steven and how at least he couldn’t see his daughter like this, wouldn’t know that the world had seen it, too. God in heaven, even I thought it looked like I was doing myself, that damn pose, that left between my legs, my right above my head, I might as well have been arching into it—
“Miriam—”
I snapped back, launched myself at the desk, grabbing past Chapel for the mouse. I clicked in vain, frustrated, tried to find a way to do what I wanted, but I couldn’t make the computer go, and Chapel had to reach for my arm, saying my name again.
“Mim. Calm down.”
I shoved the mouse, stepped back, pointing at the screen, at the third picture.
“I’ll close them—”
“No!” I snarled. “No, no, my arm, dammit, my arm, in the picture.”
Chapel looked at me, utterly lost.
I jabbed my index finger at the picture, at my right arm, extending out of the frame. “There!”
He looked from it back to me, then again, bewildered. “I don’t—”
“Bigger! Make it bigger!”
Chapel hesitated, but only for a second, then took the mouse and began clicking. He surrounded my arm, clicked again, and it filled the screen. Glorious full color, my arm.
With blood just barely visible, seeping out from beneath it.
Chapel turned, confused and concerned and hoping for an explanation, and I just couldn’t talk. The only thing I could give him was my right hand, palm up, the bandage Joan had put on me still wrapped around it.
He looked from my palm to my face, still not getting it, and he said, “I don’t understand—”
“Home,” I managed.
CHAPTER 14
There were three of them, from a firm called Burchett Security: a woman in her early thirties who looked strong and intense and never spoke and frankly scared me; a man in his late twenties who reminded me of the sailors who’d attended the Tailhook shows we’d played in San Diego; and Richard Burchett himself, who was perhaps in his mid-fifties, light brown hair a little shaggy, beard and mustache trimmed, in Levi’s and cowboy boots and a St. Louis Cardinals fan shirt.
Chapel told me that they were professional, thorough, and discreet. He told me they knew what they were doing. He told me to trust them.
Burchett and his crew used gadgets that they held in their hands and gadgets that hung from their belts and gadgets that they slung over their shoulders. They wore headphones and waved magic metallic wands. They dismantled outlets and fixtures and searched moldings and pictures and unplugged appliances and utilities. They moved furniture and lifted rugs, and every time they found something, they used a little pin with a hot pink plastic flag on its end to mark the location.
They’d used twelve of those pink plastic flags before they were through.
Chapel sat with me on the back porch while Burchett and his crew did their work, and that was when I told him about my two stalker incidents.
“You were abducted at gunpoint and you didn’t think to call me?” He looked like he was on the verge of a seizure. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I didn’t fucking know you existed,” I reminded him.
“Tell me you at least called the police.”
“They thought I was full of shit. They didn’t go so far as to actually say
it, but it was pretty evident that that’s what they thought. They told me it was probably a mugging gone wrong or something like that.”
“A man points a gun at you, puts you in the back of his truck, strips you, and they call that a mugging gone wrong?” Chapel shook his head.
“They wanted me to go to a doctor, have a rape kit done.”
“Did you?”
“I wasn’t raped. The only time he ever touched me was to get me into the truck.” I thought about it for a couple seconds, then said, “Maybe that’s why, you know? He wasn’t about me, he was about the cameras. Maybe that’s what he was doing, why he was in the house last night.”
“Maybe, but then why the whole bit with the truck and the clothes the first time?”
“I don’t know.”
“You called the cops after last night?”
I shook my head.
“You should have called the cops as soon as you were out of the house.”
“They didn’t seem to take me real seriously the first time.”
“You should have called them, anyway.”
“So we’ll call them now.”
“You could, but with the discovery of the cameras, we’ll have the same situation we were talking about at the office. Unless you’ve changed your mind about the media.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then we don’t call the cops at this juncture. We’ll see what Rick finds, take it from there.”
I didn’t say anything, and he went back inside, to follow Burchett and his people around, leaving me alone. After a few minutes I went down to the music room and grabbed the Taylor, then returned to the porch. It seemed best to stay out of everyone’s way.
I played for a bit, but nothing sounded right, and after a while I gave up. Once I started thinking about the pictures again, about all the people who had seen them, and all the people who would see them, and it was enough to start me feeling good and sorry for myself, and it almost brought tears.
But it brought a memory, too, of being maybe seven or eight years old on a late summer afternoon, the coolness of our tract home in Gresham. Tommy, still in his work clothes, caked in a mix of dried sweat and cement dust. He’d bought a six of Coors and a pack of Marlboros, and dropped himself on the couch to smoke and drink and listen to music on the hi-fi, and I was sitting with him, my head against his chest as we listened to Gordon Lightfoot singing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
