James Grippando - Last Call

She was moving, and as the camera angle widened, it was clear that she was dancing. Her breasts were fully exposed, and she wore only a red thong, gold hoop earrings, and gold stiletto heels.

Andie said, "Can you turn up the volume?" There's no sound.

Even with no music, Portia's movement on-screen seemed smooth and rhythmic, as if Theo's appreciation for all things musical hadn't come entirely from his uncle. Behind her, in a ragged semicircle, a crowd of men stood and watched her dance, all of them smiling, most of them holding large plastic cups in one hand and a smoldering cigar in the other. With such bad lighting, and with the camera's focus entirely on the dancer, the spectators and background images were distorted and obscured.

Andie said, "Looks like this even predates VHS recorders. Probably a handheld sixteen-millimeter."

"I guess that would have been state of the art when Portia was a teenager."

"Yeah, early seventies."

Jack said, "And from the amount of jerky footage, I'd say the cameraman was one of the drunkest guys in the room."

On-screen, Portia showed her back to the camera, and the cameraman zoomed in on her ass. She bent over and grabbed her ankles, knees straight, and slid the thong down her legs, kicking it across the room with a flick of her foot. The cameraman tried to follow the thong as it sailed into the crowd, but it was just a blur.

She continued to dance nude, wearing only her spiked heels. One of the men came forward and started dancing with her. Staggering would have been a better word for it. Portia didn't pay much attention to him, but that only made him bolder. It was a silent video, but the other men appeared to be shouting and egging him on. The closer he came to her, the more she pulled away. He stumbled after her, apparently trying to kiss or lick her breasts, but he managed only to spill his cup all over her.

Portia stopped dancing. From her reaction, the contents of the cup must have been ice-cold. She said something to him. He spoke back to her, clearly angry. Another man tried to pull him back into the crowd. He made some kind of remark to Portia as well. She responded in kind – the same nasty body language – and he threw his drink on her. Another man did the same. Soon, plastic cups filled with beer were flying through the air. Portia was being pelted. She gathered up her white tube top and orange hot pants from the floor, but another man snatched them right back. Suddenly surrounded, she started looking for an escape route. Cups were still flying, and even with no sound it was clear that people were shouting and that things were getting out of hand.

Portia ran.

The cameraman followed.

So did the mob.

The screen was one bouncy frame after another as the cameraman and his drunken friends chased Portia out of the room and down the long hallway. The heels snapped off her shoes, and she gathered speed. She glanced back over her shoulder, tripped on a step, and hit the floor hard. She lay there, naked, sprawling.

Two men grabbed her, their images a blur in the confusion. Portia kicked and punched, but other men grabbed her arms to restrain her. Someone else took her legs. The cameraman zoomed in on her face. Portia was screaming.

Jack looked away from the screen. He'd watched it twice already and didn't need to see it again. He glanced at Andie, her face aglow with the on-screen events. Even with no audio, it seemed as though Andie could hear Portia's screams. The notepad in front of her had not a single notation on it. Andie simply watched the filmed frenzy unfold on the computer.

It went on for several minutes. Close-ups of the penetration, close-ups of the terror in Portia's eyes. The men's faces, of course, had been carefully edited out. When it was over, the red letters tumbled back onto the screen to spell out a final message in lieu of credits. It read: "Reality Bitches get what they deserve."

Jack closed the website.

Andie was silent. Then she looked at Jack and said, "I'm glad Theo didn't watch."

"So you see it like I do? This is not acting. 'Reality Bitches' means it's real?"

"No doubt about it," she said. "Theo's mother was raped. Before she was his mother."

Andie ate dinner at her desk. This was becoming a bad habit. Nearly four months had passed since her last date with Jack. Fifteen weeks since he'd wigged out over her remark about Theo and called it quits. One-hundred-something days without another date of any promise. Two-thousand-plus hours without any hope of… "it."

Suddenly she was counting minutes as the theme song from Rent played in her head.

She popped open another diet soda and unwrapped her spicy tuna roll from the local sushi-on-wheels. The bright side was that she was impressing her supervisors and proving herself worthy of advancement to the elite criminal profiling unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico. With every dinner alone at the office, however, the computer dating option seemed less absurd. That so-called cyber expert she'd blown off on Miami Beach had been dead right about one thing: it was hard for a female FBI agent to find love outside of law enforcement. Andie got plenty of interest from men who wore badges. That was one reason she'd been so attracted to Jack. That and… "it."

Funny how with certain people you just knew "it" would be good.

She glanced at the phone. Every now and then, she felt the urge to call her former supervisor to see if returning to Seattle was an option. Jack, however, had made that impossible. Even though he was in and out of her life in the span of two weeks, people would have said she jumped on a plane and flew across the country after getting dumped by the former governor's son.

A few more dates with Jack, and maybe it would have been true.

Good thing he wigged out.

Her appetite was gone. The files on the floor called out to her. Each stack was its own case, another investigation, a different victim. Andie had one of those filing systems where the work piled up – literally. Even so, she couldn't stop herself from going back to her computer and that movie again.

The FBI's tech experts had cleaned up the downloadable version of the film and burned it onto a disk, which she now inserted into her PC. It still had its shortcomings – shaky frames, grainy images, poor lighting. The geek masters were good, but they weren't magicians.

Andie let the frames advance in slow motion. It was like laying out the pieces to a puzzle with two parts. One, who raped Theo's mother? Two, why did Isaac want Theo to see it? So far she had the faces of two drunks – the heckler and his friend – in a dark room somewhere in the early 1970s. Those guys were in their fifties now, and it would be impossible to find and identify them if she didn't nail down the location. The answer had to be on this disk, and Andie was determined to dissect it from every angle. Portia's striptease in the darkness. Her argument with the drunks. The ensuing frenzy, the mad chase down hall, the -

Andie hit pause. Something had caught her eye.

She rewound several frames, still in slow motion, and watched even more intently. A flash of light brightened the screen, and she hit pause to freeze the image. The white flash had been the camera's spotlight reflecting in a mirror on the wall. She advanced one more frame – and there he was.

The cameraman.

Whoever had posted this film on the Internet had gone to some effort to protect the guilty, carefully editing out frames that would reveal the attackers' identity. Apparently they'd missed this split-second appearance of the cameraman in the mirror. Andie burned the image to a separate CD and took it upstairs to the tech floor. By definition, these guys had no life, and of course someone was still there after hours.