Free Stalked by Brian Freeman Page A

insisted that he pretend to rape her every time they were in bed, how she masturbated in the shower to rape fantasies every day, and how she posted erotic stories and poetry on the Internet that dealt with stranger rapes.
    Within days, Tanjy became a pariah. The story went national. She became the butt of jokes by Jay Leno,
Saturday Night Live
, cable news channels, YouTube videos, and dozens of bloggers. Her support in the city evaporated. A week later, Tanjy met Stride in a coffee shop and admitted what he already suspected. She had fabricated the entire story. There was never any rape. It was a fantasy.
    Stride wanted to file charges against her for filing a false police report, but he let it go under pressure from Dan and K-2, and the story disappeared from the headlines. Tanjy went underground.
    Stride called her several weeks later. He was still angry with her, but he was worried that she might have suffered a breakdown under the barrage of media attention. Tanjy thanked him for his call in that silken voice of hers but declined his offer of help. In a way, he was glad of that, but he learned nothing new from the call. She was as calm and emotionless as ever. The same erotic enigma.
     
     
    And now she was missing.
    Nothing was disturbed inside her apartment. There was no evidence of violence or trouble. His first thought was suicide, and he kept his eyes open for a note, but wherever Tanjy had gone, she hadn’t left a message behind. She also hadn’t taken much with her. Her clothes were neatly hung and folded in the closet and dresser in her bedroom. Her suitcase was there, too, but he didn’t find a purse, wallet, or keys.
    Stride sat down on the end of her queen-sized bed, which had a red quilt neatly laid across the mattress and matching fringed pillows. He studied the books on the shelves near her bed—religion textbooks, a pile of romance novels, vegetarian cookbooks, and psychology books about rape. And, of course,
The Da Vinci Code
. The bed was prim and conservative, with another icon of Jesus hung over the headboard. He thought about Tanjy indulging in rape fantasies underneath the cross. Maybe that was part of the thrill, a forbidden mix of sacrifice and sacrilege.
    He hunted on her rolltop desk for a date book or Palm Pilot and didn’t find one. The desk was clean and organized, with a manila folder for bills, a neon purple folder from Byte Patrol with instructions for her laptop computer, a stack of software cases, and a collection of fashion magazines like
Elle
and
Vogue
. That fit her. Tanjy worked in a high-end dress shop, and she looked like many of the models on the pages.
    Stride turned on the desk lamp and picked up a small cube of notepaper to see if he could see indentations of anything Tanjy had written. He was able to make out a phone number, but when he called it on his cell phone, he found himself connected to the local Whole Foods market.
    He booted up her laptop computer. She didn’t use Outlook for e-mail, which meant she probably used a Web-based service, which would make it harder to find a record of her messages. There were no appointments recorded in the online calendar. He checked her Internet favorite pages and shook his head when he found a mixture of Christian sites and hardcore pornography, including rape sites with brutal, disturbing imagery of women bound and humiliated.
    When he checked her recent documents, he clicked on the first one, a Word file labeled ISLAND. The text flashed onto the screen:
     
     
The natives tied Ellen spread-eagled to stakes they had pounded in the mud. One by one, they took turns ravishing her with their pierced tongues. She begged them to stop—No! No! she cried, you can’t do this!—but they were deaf to her desperate pleas. Despite herself, she felt the most intense of orgasms welling up inside her…
     
     
    Stride closed the file and checked the other documents, which were of a similar nature. He wondered again how to reconcile the