Number One Fan by Meg Elison

Author:Meg Elison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HQ Fiction
Published: 2022-07-30T20:14:29+00:00

* * *

Joe Papasian worked quickly, efficiently, with calm running out of him like sand through a sieve. He poked around in a few hacker forums to find out whether it was possible to pull location data off an Instagram photo.

It was not.

He was pretty sure it wouldn’t be, or celebrities would have dumped the app a long time ago, but it was worth a shot.

He went through her emails, her bank account, her texts sent through Google that would be logged in her account, and everything else he could get his hands on. It gave him the willies at first, but he was able to set it aside when he considered the kind of trouble he was sure she was in.

Famous authors do not get kidnapped. Few were even credibly threatened. If someone had held Eli for ransom, the asking amount would have to be pretty modest for her people to pay it.

Eli was the kind of author that did get threats, however. She got fairly regular Twitter threats of the vague and infantile variety: die U cunt directed at her from a minutes-old account with an egg for a face. She had gotten a handful of more credible threats over the years, most of them relating directly to her more overtly feminist works or her comments on the same. With the film, her profile had gotten higher and the quality of threats against her had improved somewhat.

Digging through her cloud storage, Joe found her file marked FBI. It contained copies and screencaps of threats dating back to the beginning of her career. She had told him that she kept it because a more famous friend of hers had said she should. Just in case there was a clear pattern or a stalker should arise.

Once he found the file, he was staggered by the size of it. There were hundreds of pieces of mail, over a thousand screenshots of tweets, Facebook and Tumblr messages, as well as a lot of photographs. Some were of Eli herself, photoshopped into pornography. Others were pornography involving her characters, typically Millicent bound and gagged and being hurt or humiliated in some way. Joe’s face twisted as he clicked through these and on to the gallery of unsolicited dick pics.

He remembered the day she had told him about this archive. She had described it as small and not that shocking.

What in the hell would count as shocking? He found a photograph of someone ejaculating on Eli’s signature on a first edition of the second Millicent book.

“I’ll go back and read some emails later,” he mumbled to himself with disgust.

According to her bank, Eli hadn’t touched a penny in her accounts in over a week. She’d had two royalty checks drop in since Joe had heard from her. Eli had savings, but she spent like the money wouldn’t last and had to be shoveled out the door as quickly as it came in. What’s more, she usually tweeted some veiled reference to payday. A gif of Scrooge McDuck, a rapper making it rain.

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