The case of the missing model Episode 1
By the Masked Writer
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My name is Anika Cross and I am a private investigator. When Mrs Johnson came into my office and hired me to search for her daughter Kate, I figured it would be a rather classical case. I mean : young promising fashion model stops calling her mother and the older lady wants to know her whereabouts. How hard can it be ?
I did not know what I was getting into.
I mean I am 56 years-old and I have a detective training. Done the job for 30 years. I have seen a lot. At 5’5, 130 pounds, I took some self-defense lessons (OK, that was 20 years ago) I do swimming, run and play tennis (OK, only intermittently). I have a nice body with DD breast, rather good-looking for my age, I think and I still have not a lot of grey in my black hairs. I used to think I could handle just about any situation.
I will have to think again.
So it started when Mrs Catherine Johnson came into my office. She was a good-looking woman in her early sixties with short white hairs. Tall and slim I had no trouble figuring out that her daughter would be a model. She could have been one herself in her youth.
So she told me her daughter Kate disappeared after leaving her beauty salon about a month ago and nobody heard of her since then. Mrs Johnson said she knew her daughter had been in some trouble lately. She did not work as often as she used to. The mother suspected drug abuse but she heard her daughter had met with rather bizarre people.
After the usual discussion about my fee, expenses etc. , I accepted the case and asked the worried lady to tell me all the details she could remember about her daughter’s last whereabouts.
Then she left and I put on my hat to go and start my quest for the missing model.
First, in those cases, you go and meet the last persons who might have seen the missing girl. In this case, there was the people working at the photo studio where she was working just before she went missing.
So I went to ErosPictures Inc. a small outfit in a rather shabby part of town. Obviously, Kate was not working for the best in the last weeks she was working. The place made mostly photos for local businesses’ adds and, I suspected, a bit of porn, too.
The person in charge was a queer-looking guy named Falco, with purple-hair and jewels all around. He told me he hadn’t seen Kate Johnson for a while but that she used to hold out with another model by the name of Erika, whom he had not seen for a while either, but he still had her address and gave it to me.
So I went to meet this Erika. She lived in a rather modest part of town in a three-room apartment. The info I had told me she lived there with another girl called Gina but she was alone when I got there.
I knocked a few times and she ended up opening the door. She was a skinny, even scrawny, pale creature with short blue hairs. She was wearing a loose T-shirt and short shorts. She was barefoot at the moment. Her clothes revealed two skinny arms and long, thin legs. She was borderline anorexic. One look at her face with her dark circles and feverish eyes, her hollow cheeks and pale lips also told me she was a junkie.
-What is it ? she asked.
-I am looking for a girl by the name of Kate Johnson… I began. I could not even finished my sentence. She said :
-Don’t know anything ! and tried to close the door on me.
I don’t like being lied to and that was a very impolite behavior. So I put my shoulder on the door and kept it from closing. She became red with anger ( not bad to put some color in her pale face) and tried to push me back. It was my 130 pounds against her… well, I’d say about 100 on a 5 ft 10 carcass. I easily pushed her back inside and closed the door behind me.
She was furious.
She started to yell at me while I tried to ask if she knew Kate Johnson’s whereabouts.
Then she took a broom who was lying there and tried to hit me with it !
Then I began to be angry too.
I dodged the clumsily waved broom and caught it with both hands. She tried to pull it from me but she was weak and my grip was firm. I simply snatched it from her with a pull. While I was throwing it away she began looking for another weapon and went for an ashtray placed on a small table near the couch. My three piece suit with a knee-length skirt wasn’t the ideal dress for a fight but she was no opponent. While she went for the ashtray I grabbed her T-shirt end pulled her back closer to me. Grabbing her by her bony shoulders, I swiveled her around so that she was facing me and then I shoved her, sending her sitting on the couch. I thought that would calm her.
I was wrong.
She bounced back on her feet, furious, and she pounced on me, head first, trying to butt me in the stomach. She lacked the power necessary to be really fast, so I dodged her easily , grabbed her t-shirt and pulled it over her head, trying to immobilize her arms, while I kicked her behind the knee, forcing her to kneel down. She didn’t wear anything under her T-shirt and I could see how right I was to think she was borderline anorexic : protruding rib cage and flat breast. However she managed to slip out of her T-shirt and, topless, tried to run away. I grabbed her left wrist, twisted it and folded her arm behind her back, in a chicken wing. I put my other arm around her little chicken neck and squeezed a little. Just enough to cut her wind. She stopped fighting and, her legs giving way, she fell on the ground, face first.
Then I sat on her back, still holding her arm.
-Got enough ? I said.
She squeaked something and I left my behind from her bony back so that she could take a breath.
-So, what do you know about Kate Johnson ? did I ask.
-Haven’t seen her for months ! We broke apart when she started to see the wirdos.
-What weirdos ?
-People from a cult !
“What cult ?
-Do I know ? She met them at a place called “The Pit”. It’s a bar and a lot of weird people go there ! Let me go, bitch !
That’s when I heard the door opening behind me. And Erika screamed :
-Gina ! Help me !
I jumped on my feet and forced Erika up, still holding her scrawny arm.
I looked at the door. Gina was there.
And I knew I was in trouble.
