Part 1 of 1
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The Skinner Co. Network
FP316 - Under Wraps: a Collective Detective Chronicle, Part 1 of 1
Some days grew me, my hours are slumberless Dear is the shadows I live with I'm underless Little wife flowers will never wake in you Not where the bright culture's solid's taking you Angels have no fire ever turning you Or they'll be angry if I so don't join in you Ooooh, Sunday Welcome to Flashpulp episode 316 This evening we present Under Raps A collective detective chronicle Part 1 of 1 This week's episodes are brought to you by JohnJohn.net In 2005, the crack unit of the bloggers were banned by a weather administrator for spam they didn't send These men promptly created their own website in cyberspace underground Today, still wanting the place to discuss their fandom They survived the bloggers of sci-fi View of a favorite show or movie If no one else can understand you And if you can type "J-O-N-J-A" on your keyboard Maybe you can find JohnJohnJohn.net At JohnJohn.net you can find discussions and reviews in sci-fi, fantasy, horror and everything in between as well as exclusive interviews with some of your favorite celebrities and filmmakers Join our forums now and subscribe to the JohnJohn.net podcast Everything is free and everything is fun We'll see you online at JohnJohn.net [Music] Flashpulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age Three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings Tonight, a member of our band of online detectives finishes his search through the databases Made available by leaked Bush Air Internet wiretapping And arrives at some unpleasant and homicidal conclusions Under wraps, a collective detective chronicle Written by Jaredie Skinner Art and narration by Pope Nax An audio produced by Jessica Mann [Music] 4.33 a.m. Private chat opened Rotten Dane Hey 4.36 a.m. You up? 4.38 a.m. I'm going to call you if you don't answer in five minutes 4.40 a.m. Harassment He said five minutes, but that was two at most You were sleeping anyway What do you matter to you? It would have been another three minutes of unconsciousness That might have been enough to save your life if this isn't incredibly important Oh, it is I've cracked one Great, make an omelet and call me back in the morning Ha ha Fine, but tell me quickly I can still hear my pillow calling my name A week ago I was flipping through the cold case file Pulling up randoms and I found a stub someone had started for a missing person It looked like they tracked down his iPod traffic from his home network But hadn't poked too deeply from there Hell, some of the info that was logged I would later find out was actually wrong Very amateur stuff Well, you do know amateur stuff It wasn't much to go on, so I took a step back and tried to fill out a wider picture Digging through the parents' Facebook stuff made it pretty clear that the dad was deeply religious And the mom was a hypochondriac The sort of folks was plastic on the couch, I imagine I doubt James, Robert, Russell, the kid was even picking his own clothes At least if the newspaper photos were any indication How old are we talking here? Fourteen, old enough to want a rebel, but not old enough to do it properly Okay, why was he so popular as to be in the local paper after he went missing? Well, mom and pop Russell were pillars of the community Well, funded pillars They sold Hondas at a string of five conveniently located dealerships just off I-95 I don't know, maybe they were so religious and paranoid because they were in the business of screwing people Everything I've read from dad's emails indicates that his son wasn't allowed to go to dances, movie theaters, or malls Mr. R also managed to disable most of the useful parts of his son's iPod Or the bits that would have allowed him some outside communication anyway He was worried Satan might friend junior on Facebook, I guess Baby Russell's social interactions were generally limited to classroom hours And his uncle Dwayne's Sunday dinner visits Does this kind of turn out to be a homicidal parental? Or is it a suicide? Weird things grow when people are left that much in the dark You're closer than you think, but no They may have been stiff, but it was obvious in their interviews that both parents loved James Robert deeply until they died in a civic That they probably sold themselves Headered with a sleepy transport driver They did always refer to him as James Robert though Huh Now, that's not to say that J.R. was without his rebellious side He smoked, well, at lunch and break And he snuck a game through his dad's filter A shooter called Fox Blisters He played it online with his best friend Zachary Also known as Zack Attack 92 The smoking part came up because the theory that James Robert had been kidnapped outside the school Let cigarettes weren't permitted on the property And it was one of the few times he was regularly alone The ransom demands arrived soon after J.R. was his parents There were three in total Sent to different dealerships each time The first demanded a million dollars The second was a warning that the drop location would be forwarded in 24 hours And the last was basically just where to do so I have PDF copies of the scans, all from the Russell's private inboxes The letters didn't give any clues though, as far as I can tell And papers report that the money was left on the benches instructed But no one came to get it This all happened over a week or so Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone, J.R.'s abductor hadn't been terribly thorough in searching him And the kid was furiously sending messages from his iPod The problem, of course, was that he only had the single stupid game that could connect to anything The notes he sent her sad That starts off as mostly asking for help He describes the place he's in There's no light except the screens But he could tell he was in a little cement block room with a heavy iron door There was no inside knob As time went on, he had a few interactions with his jailer Once a day, the psycho would stomp down the flight of stairs beyond the exit With a huge bowl of instant quaker oatmeal He always wore a grinning white and red clown mask, but never talked White and Zack attack see the messages Mmm, box blisters was a crappy game Bad luck? They hadn't played a turn in weeks And by the looks of traffic, Zack dropped his "I" thing not long after the disappearance And his parents wouldn't or couldn't replace it Wait, you said pod and not phone, right? How did it make it onto the net? That's it James Robert knew exactly who his captor was I think the ransom fell apart when he finally just said the guy's name outright Once his device's battery died See, JR wasn't alone and being raised sheltered That is to say, the elder Russell brothers also had an incredibly strict upbringing James Robert Sr used it to launch into business in the local community But Uncle Dwayne used it to lock his nephew in a basement for ransom money And to send deeply intimate but entirely unsolicited emails to female members of online forums It was one of those confessionals that I learned how they were brought up There was a lot of belt use for punishments I guess Which morphed at some point into Dwayne's obsession with leather and paddles And strapping ladies to painful things His credit card bills ran high with porn and kinky tools I doubt he's ever had a chance to use on anyone At least not willingly JR knew that the silent clown was his uncle He had been to his house before, if not in the basement of horrors And he'd already had the pesky to Dwayne's wifi in his settings Jesus Yeah, but listen, the stub I think it was Dwayne I think he was trying to figure out if it was possible to follow the breadcrumbs back to him He must have spent a lot of hours over the years wondering about the secrets in that pod 4.59 a.m. So, uh, what do you think? Did I get it all? When he holds in my logic? 5.01 a.m. Hello? 5.02 a.m. I'm on the phone, maybe grab a snack, I'll be a bit If we're gonna lose sleep over this, so is management Hell, if we're quick enough about it Maybe so will Dwayne Flashpulp is presented by Flashpulp.com and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com But be aware that they may appear in a future Flashcast We'd also like to thank the FreeSound Project, found at freesound.org For a full listing of effects used during the show, as well as credits for the users who provided them Check this episode's notes at flashpulp.com And thanks to you for listening If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends [Music]