“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
