After an hour and a half on I-64, John carried his pilfered garbage bags into the brightly lit tumult of a last-minute costume fitting. A sewing machine had taken over his dining room table, along with lengths of green cloth that seemed to have grown there like moss. An iridescent, black-bronze cape glistened on the couch, edged with black velvet.
John followed feminine voices to the bathroom, where Lizzie posed in a skin-tight green catsuit. Two blonde middle-aged ladies bent thoughtfully over her derriére, where the unfortunate rip ran from Lizzie's beltline halfway to the front, exposing her gaily polka-dotted bikini panties like a circus flag.
Lizzie wrinkled her nose. "Johnny, what're you bringing trash in here for? It stinks!"
"I've got to go through it. It's for a case," he said. "Can you ladies use the bedroom, maybe? I'm going to do this in the tub so I can scrub it after."
"You'd better!" said Lizzie. "You guys, this is my police-detective boyfriend, John. Johnny, these are our costumers, Cameron, and that's Patty in the glasses."
John hoisted the trash bags a foot higher in salute. "Ladies."
"Hi, Johnny!" both women chorused. Patty-with-the-glasses fixed Lizzie with a look. "Say, Lizzie, you weren't kidding—he is cute!"
Lizzie blushed, and, smiling, shook her head. "Let's get out of here before we get stunk out of here!" She flipped on the exhaust fan as the women piled out.
John dumped the bags into the tub and went to the kitchen for rubber gloves. Snatches of talk drifted from the hallway: "I think we're just gonna have to insert a gusset. It's the only way it's gonna work, and nobody's gonna be looking there anyway."
"Let's admit the facts," Patty's voice carried. "She's a model, nobody's gonna be looking anywhere else! Seriously, Lizzie, where've you been hiding him? He looks like he should be modeling!" John smiled. Lizzie had said that before, too.
John dumped a trash bag open and leaned over, practically on his head, picking his way through the pile, trying to ignore the sweet-rotten stench of mushy tomatoes and bananas gone long past their prime, looking for anything potentially incriminating: bank statements, credit card statements, phone bills, receipts. Ad circulars and junk mail had been thrown away whole, but the man threw no important paper away that wasn't shredded. John did find a small pile of shreds that appeared to be a nursing home bill and a mortgage statement. He put these aside to piece together later.
As he dumped the last bag into the tub, the reek of ammonia rose into the air, thick and choking. His eyes smarted and stung. Through the tears, he heard it hit the tub with a mushy flop: kitty litter. If 842 First Street housed neither wife nor girlfriend, one thing lived there for sure─a cat. Or, possibly, ten.
John stood up, caught his breath, and tried to adjust to the noxious fumes. After a few minutes his nostrils dulled to the smell. He bent down again to brown balls of cat feces. And then, impossibly, his eyes focused on something worse.
Worms! Long, straight, thick, white, worms.
A retch tore his stomach and he stumbled away to hang expectantly over the commode, heaving. He had always had the weakest stomach at surveillance trash-pickings. Thank God the guys weren't here to see this.
He had to get done. He had to pack this shit out of here, now. John took a deep breath and turned back to the tub. Strange—all of these worms looked ramrod straight. John reached out with a gloved finger. Lollipop sticks?
He picked two up. A soft marble of chocolate candy topped each stick, crunchy crystals of hard chocolate candy clinging to the stick beneath. If you liked chocolate lollipops, why on earth would you eat only the hard candy and leave the soft interior on the stick? Did Clay have some kind of sticky dental work? Another addendum to John's head file of completely useless information.
With a silent prayer of thanks that there were no worms, and less cat stool than he'd thought, John hurriedly finished picking through the last bag of trash.
He carted the bags out to the trash bins in the alley and was halfway through scrubbing the tub when Lizzie cut through the buzz of the ceiling fan with a knock.
"Hey, Johnny? Maybe you want to come out here for a minute. Patty thinks she knew Julie."
John knew immediately which Julie she meant. Julie Samuels, the young model at Lizzie's agency who had been found strangled some six months ago. Lizzie had known the girl and had cried on and off about it for days.
"Don't let anybody leave!" he half-shouted over his shoulder. "I'm gonna finish up here and scrub my hands."
The ladies had camped out in the dining room with the radio and more vile instant coffee. Lizzie stood wrapped in a robe while the blonde without the glasses ran the catsuit through the sewing machine.
John folded his arms and leaned against the wall. "Patty, you knew Julie Samuels? How did you meet her?"
Patty's glasses made her look like an owl. She turned blue eyes like saucers on John. "Well, I don't know that it's her, I think that it's her. But she said she was a model, and then we all heard she died, and everybody was shocked. How many dead models can there be in Richmond?" The woman was almost as tall as a model herself. Her hands fluttered like frightened birds' wings.
"I didn't really know her all that well in real life, I knew her on this fansite that we both liked. I'm an author, also, and I did meet her at a signing once, when my book came out last year. She was really tall and good-looking. Thin. Really, really thin."
John suppressed a smile. "Half the girls at Lizzie's agency are tall and really, really thin. Any way we can be sure who we're talking about, here?"
"I think she posted some modeling pictures once, on the fansite," said Patty. "She wanted to prove she wasn't making it all up, about being a model."
"Let's go look them up."
John opened his web browser in the computer room and waited while Patty looked up the pictures. She pointed out an ad for a local hair salon—a whippet-thin girl with clouds of shiny bronze-brown hair. Her face reminded John of young Katherine Hepburn—sharp angles and high cheekbones—but the big, brown doe eyes, the lush Cupid's bow mouth, and the cascading copper curls put The Great Kate to shame. Something about the smudgey green eye makeup and the ethereal delicacy of Julie's face made John think of a Disney princess. "Is that her?"
That photo had hung on the bulletin board at work for months while Pride had worked the case. "Yep," said John, "that's her. What can you tell me about her?"
"I didn't even know her real name until now," said Patty. "She wouldn't tell anyone online her real name. But this is her screen name." She pointed out a message under the name YoungQueen. "I know she read fan fic under this name on another board. PWP."
Lizzie wrinkled her forehead. "P-W-P?"
The older women both laughed. "'Plot? What plot?᾽" Patty explained.
"Also known as 'Porn Without Plot,᾽" said Cameron with a raised eyebrow.
John's instincts leaped at that like a cat at the sound of the can opener. "So you're telling me this young fashion model found strangled in Great Ship Lock Park was involved in pornography online."
"Well, pornography isn't so much the intent ..." Cameron began, squinty-eyed, head waggling to one side. One hand fluttered in the air, pivoting on the long axis. Then she gave it up and waved the evasion off like a pesky fly. "Okay, yeah, it is. But it's porn women write for themselves. You know, women don't have a boyfriend, or they've been dumped, or something. Plot-What-Plot is sort of a ..."
Patty snickered from the computer chair. "A fill-in?" She screeched a high, witchy laugh. "No pun intended!"
"Yeah. A harmless substitute, until the real thing comes along." Cameron shrugged. "But that other site YoungQueen posted on, I didn't stick around there. Someone sent me a link to it once to look at a story they'd written, and you go on there, and there's an online lesbian love affair, and there's people talking about being patients at a funny farm, and one woman's going on about having worked as a prostitute, and I went, 'I don't think I want to stick around here.'"
Cameron shuddered. "There are porny and slashy fan sites, but people were way over the top over there. Too creepy for me!"
"If she posted on there," said John, "it sounds like something the department ought to have a look at." He pulled a sheet of paper out of the printer and grabbed a pen. "What is the name of this website?"
"It's an Estrogen Brigade," said Patty. At the look on John's face, Cameron translated. "A site where women come to drool over some hunky actor. There's pictures, artwork, fanfic ..."
"But this was last year. There's thousands of posts in there now," said Patty.
"I remember some threads in there that YoungQueen posted on that really freaked me out," said Cameron. "I can find them again, but I'll have to search around. People started personal conversations in the middle of story threads and then broke them off and took them to other threads. It was all months ago, too."
"I have an idea." Lizzie tightened her robe around her throat. "People are coming to the con from all over, people who know each other from online, and several people who work on fan films are staying over an extra day at Gary's. He's offering sound people and people who do special effects free lodging and food if they'll stay and help finish the movie before the Atom contest deadline. People are bringing their computers; they'll be working around the clock. It'll be like one big pajama party."
Lizzie pushed her hair out of her face. "Some of them must read that stuff, and they may remember things. I was going to take food over and visit and sign autographs, just to say hi to people and thank them for finishing the movie." She nudged John with her elbow. "I'll bring cupcakes, you bring Mike Little. It'll help you solve your problem, and it'll help Mike solve his case."
She pointed at John and smiled. "You call him."