He led them back there and turned on the computer. While it was booting up, he explained the origin of the photograph in question, where it had originally been taken and under what circumstances, and how it had ended up circulating far and wide on email accounts and internet bulletin boards. He then opened up his inbox and showed them the original email that Ron the ramper had sent out, including all the photographs that had been attached to it.
“This certainly makes sense,” Stivick said after reviewing everything. “Can you send a copy of this email to the department’s inbox.”
“Sure,” Jake said. “What’s the address?”
Stivick recited it for him and told him to put “Original Jake Kingsley email” in the subject box.
“Now then,” Jake asked after sending it, “are you satisfied that there is no citizen of Venezuela, or any other country being held here?”
“I am satisfied,” Stivick said.
“Then you’ll write that report for your PIO guy?”
“I will,” he promised.
“Thank you,” Jake said, his gratitude genuine.
“I thank you for your cooperation, Jake,” Stivick said. “I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen when we came up here to talk to you about all this. You have quite the reputation in the law enforcement community you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jake said. “And you cops have quite the reputation in the circles I move in as well, but I found you quite polite and efficient and reasonable. That is a good thing to find out about the guys who are going to come up here to save our asses if they need saving someday.”
“That’s good to hear,” Stivick said.
“Listen, I like to help support community resources where I live,” Jake said. “Do you have any organizations I could donate to?”
“Well ... yes,” Stivick said, his tone a little dubious now. “We have the PAL and the 11-99 Club and the law enforcement chaplaincy program, and they can all use more funding, but ... well ... I don’t want you to get the idea that by donating money that you will be given any special treatment in any way.”
“The thought never entered my mind,” Jake said, fibbing a little. He knew that, despite what Stivick was saying, a generous philanthropist was always given special treatment to some degree or another. He wasn’t expecting to be given a get out of jail free card or to have them overlook a crime that he might commit, but it never hurt to have the local law enforcers know that you were helping support them and their causes financially.
“In that case,” Stivick said, still dubious, but warming to the idea, “I’ll give you some pamphlets I have in my car.”
“I’ll take them,” Jake said. “And there’s one other thing I can do for you. Do you guys have a bar you drink at?”
Maxwell and Clark and Stivick all chuckled at this question.
“Of course we have a bar we drink at,” Stivick said. “We’re cops. It’s called the Pine Cove. It’s just down the street from the station in SLO city. SLO PD and the local CHP officers drink there too. Why do you ask?”
“You think maybe they’d like it if I popped in every now and then and played a little guitar and sang for you all?”
The cops all looked at each other and then back at Jake. “I think they would,” Stivick finally said. “How much would you charge for something like that?”
“It would be on the house,” Jake said. “Or ... nearly on the house. I’d do it for the price of free beer while I’m there.”
“Wow,” Stivick said. “I’d have to ask the owner, of course, but I think he’d be up for it.”
“Email me his name and number and I’ll get in touch with him,” Jake said. “There’s just a few stipulations. He can’t charge a cover fee or advertise by anything other than word of mouth on the nights I’m there. If there is money being directly made because of my performance, that runs into copyright issues if I play anything other than my own solo music. I can’t do any Intemperance stuff at all because National Records still owns the rights to it, but I can lay down some Led Zeppelin or some Kansas, or anything else that I want to play as long as money is not changing hands.”
“I’ll let him know,” Stivick said happily.
The three deputies all shook hands with Jake before getting back in their cars and driving off to other missions. Jake was left with a good feeling that he had accomplished something. Again, he was only half right.
The SLO News was the most popular local newspaper in Jake’s neck of the central coast of California. They did indeed print a story about the Jake and Laura Kingsley transvestite email, explaining in detail that it was not true, presenting the facts, reciting quotes from the SLO Sheriff’s department PIO who summarized the visit to the Kingsley house, and even showing side-by-side pictures of the original shot and the doctored one. The story was sent out on the AP wire for use by other news publications across the nation. Unfortunately, the only other paper that picked it up and published it was the Pocatello Register. In these two towns, at least, a good portion of the citizens were forced to conclude that the email they had been receiving and forwarding to others was not exactly genuine. This did not stop a lot of them from forwarding it on anyway, but it did erode the innate belief in the story in those two places.
Everywhere else in the nation, the email continued to circulate about. Though no newspapers and no television program printed or aired anything about the accusation, the story continued to proliferate. Much of this proliferation was on the internet as it became one of the first things to go viral, nearly two decades before that term was even coined. Others spread the story around orally, telling friends the tale, and those friends told other friends, and those friends told even more. And a good portion of those who read or were told the tale believed it.
After all, it had been written down. There had been a photograph. It had to be true if it was written down and there was a picture, right?
And so, by the time that the Kingsleys hosted their annual Christmas gathering at their house on the hill (they had still not told any of their friends and family apart from Elsa about their plans to have another member at the following year’s gathering, although most of the town of Oceano already knew this), there were literally millions of people in the United States and other parts of the world who sincerely believed that Jake Kingsley and Laura Kingsley were keeping a transvestite sex slave in their home and were regularly abusing her.
This belief and this topic of conversation by a certain subset of society would persist for decades into the future.
Chapter 15: Ziggy
This was a very dangerous time for the young zygote. More than half of all human pregnancies ended right here in this phase when something went wrong. Usually, the woman who lost them had not even been aware she had been pregnant, did not even miss her next period. But nothing went wrong in this case. The cells continued to divide over the next forty-eight hours, getting bigger, and secreting more and more progesterone and follicle stimulating hormone, which flowed down into the uterus and signaled that a little passenger was on the way. The uterine lining continued to grow instead of shedding away like it normally did at the end of a cycle.
After three days, the zygote broke out of the zona pellucida layer and became a blastocyte. It then began to move toward the uterus, slowly pulled along by millions of little cilia on the fallopian tube walls. It continued to rapidly replicate its cells on the journey, until at last, eleven days after Jake had sent out the sperm, it reached the uterus and implanted itself on the posterior wall. Once there, it continued to grow at an exponential rate.
April 11 was Laura’s thirty-second birthday. They were still in Oregon, still staying in KVA’s clifftop house there and working on the V-tach CD, which was now in the mixing stage. Unlike with Brainwash, who always had to return to Providence and their jobs after the tracks and overdubs, the primary musicians were staying to help with the process, thus teaching them the basics of the skill and hopefully making the final product better.