by I.B. Holder
*****
Legacy sat in a room with a group of silo-chested women. It was all silicone and attitude with this crowd, and with the number of administrative gawkers slowly walking by his open door, Legacy perceived that attention was the fickle servant of nature. In other words, it didn’t matter how it got there as long as it was there. Fashion hugged, tugged and stretched sparingly over all the areas that men discover with their eyes. The posture in the room was strangely competitive. It was like all of them were vying for the attention of the straight-laced, square-jawed, Agent Legacy.
He must have been a complete change from the crowd that they usually entertained. He began in a commanding voice. Wagner noticed that all of the pierced belly buttons were suddenly at attention, something Legacy surely would have noticed, had he been looking there. His eyes were on their eyes; his voice was confidential like he was speaking to a room of equals. He worked to give them immediate, unconditional respect, because he needed expert answers and they had the experience.
“I have slowed down four areas on the tape that indicate what I believe to be a significant behavior by our abductors. I could be wrong, but any comments that you have will inform me on how to catch a group of sex offenders that deeply deserve to be in a prison system where they will certainly get similar or worse treatment that they are dolling out.”
The unexpected barb at the end took a minute to sink in, but it was evidently very appreciated by the crowd. A young Latina with a stretched t-shirt that said “sexy” began to tear up laughing. The crowd joined her laughter and the gathering became more like a social hour than a formal questioning.
Legacy had summoned up just enough charm to bring the group to him. He wanted to immediately retreat into his normal detached self, but he knew that this was just the beginning. A curt nod to Wagner who stood at the large television screen that they’d wheeled in for the proceedings. and she began the presentation. She pushed “play” on the VCR and the events unfolded on tape, accompanied by a room filled with comments. Everything was fair game, the voiced conversation with the screen seeming a bit too candid.
“None of the standard viewing positions.” A sassy black tube-topped sexpert criticized. “You want to see this, this and this, and all you see is this.” She paused then huffed. “Nothing special about that.” She pointed to areas on the screen with a perilously long, pink-glitter painted fingernail.
Wagner entered the conversation, her voice sounded more abrupt than she intended “What’s wrong with that?”
Legacy shot her a glance. She knew that he didn’t want their guests to feel like they were among cops.
Tube Top laughed it off, she pointed out angles like a pool shark “Honey, if you got this, this and this going on, you want people to see it! Why else would you want to have it going on?”
Sexy noted, “Look at her face, she didn’t want any of it.” The levity was sucked out of the room.
“What tells you that?” Wagner burst in again.
Sexy squinted, as if she didn’t like the question, “Lots of things.”
Tube Top picked up the thought “She’s got a survival face on. Everybody in this room has gotten themselves in too deep once or twice in their career.”
A young-looking brunette with thick black eyeliner tattooed in a pattern that continued down the smile lines giving her a permanent cat-eye look “Or they get too deep in you. The one in the violet is in no danger of that.” She pointed to Violet, a huge man in all ways but one.
Tube Top had a belly laugh that shook the floor. “That’s unprofessional, that is.”
Legacy could feel the air returning into the room, and with that feeling, he knew that they were ready for the tough questions. “So this strikes you as wrong. You never worked with anything like this?”
Sexy stood and did a little shimmy. “See ‘tese? They’re fake, and I wouldn’t be in fron‘ a tha camera without them. Purple man is wrong as you get for this kind of entertainment.” She looked Legacy up and down. “Let’s say agent, that you are like Purple man under your clothes, that’s aieet with me.” The room murmured agreement and Legacy suddenly found himself being regarded as if he were a prize at auction.
Tube Top snickered “Dress him up as Bo-Peep and I’ll be one of the sheep.”
Legacy gave a wink to Tube Top, and she had to fan herself. Wagner watched through a shocked expression as he played to his audience. Legacy quickly took advantage of his sudden status in the room “I’m curious about this behavior here.”
He showed a section of tape where the girl was blindfolded, then the camera jiggled just before Blue entered the frame holding a sex toy.
The women in the room flinched watching Blue go to work on the girl. A scream escaped the lips of the girl. It poured out of the speaker before Legacy could pause the tape. “This isn’t normal either, I would guess.”
Tube Top “I seen people beg for worse.”
“The action of bumping the camera, it’s the only time he joins the action, I have no explanation for it.” Legacy was frustrated at himself. He scanned the room and found something in the way Sexy stared at the screen. “This make sense to you?”
Sexy started slowly. “I seen somet’ing like that. A producer on my 27th film had a limp biscuit and he got off like that on a girl in the film.”
Tattoo “How many films did you do before you stopped counting? That’s when you know your innocence is lost.”
Tube Top chimed in “I stopped at 150.”
Numbers cascaded into the room. One of the girls counted all the way to 600. Sexy finished the discussion “I counted till 27.”
After four hours of questions and answers, Legacy abruptly thanked the group and moved to the door. As he left the room, he signaled to a young agent standing outside the door with a large cardboard box. Legacy had arranged for FBI windbreakers from the central office gift shop to be sent over. A glance into the room from the hallway revealed that the group of women was overjoyed, fighting over sizes and genuinely thrilled with the show of appreciation. Instead of being pleased, Legacy allowed himself a rare moment of emotional judgment to creep into his mind. Legacy saw the adult film stars for a moment as girls who had fathers somewhere. His daughter was home, waiting for him to return.