Lorne and Catherine sat side-by-side with arms around each other's shoulders, heads leaning together. "So where are you starting?" She turned her head and nibbled his ear. "I like these adjustable stools — I can reach you now without craning my neck. So where?"

"I'm thinking of Shufflr."

"Shufflr? Why there? Table settings, cute puppy shots, tropical sunsets?"

"Depends on what you're searching for. I'll start with Bottom Line's fixation: penectomy, nullification, neutering. It's all there."

She sat up, turned and stared at him. "No! You're joking." She tilted her head and furrowed her brow. "You're not, are you?"

He shook his head slowly. "No. Great source. Damned near every image on the net has been copied and posted there, tagged, then shuffled, tumbled and re-shuffled. It's a great mine site with histories and links, just takes a lot of digging."

"You're indefatigable, aren't you?"

"Among other things."

"Fuck! I'll show you photos of cute kitties, you show me some of penis amputations. Fuck. Where's society going?"

"Same diversity of direction it's always followed, but now able to communicate it more easily, more broadly. Simple as that."

"Yeah, I suppose it's remained hidden through the ages. Now people can share it anonymously."

"That's what they believe. That's why so much of this stuff is posted, shared, liked, commented on, copied, pasted, reposted, shuffled. Most think they're doing this in anonymity."

"And you can track it?" She was back to rubbing his shoulder.

"For most of this stuff I don't even need to hack into the servers. It's all lying there for those who know what to search for and how to search."

"So what if I type in pussytattoo.shufflr.com?"

"Try it."

She typed and hit enter. "It's come back with a Nope Not Here message."

"Try tattoopussy or pussytat or Tweety's puddytat, be creative."

"Those stupid sixties cartoons... Wow, tattoopussy, look at this. Look at these. This one, her lips look like the snarling cat's tongue." She sat slowly shaking her head. "They really do want to show off, don't they? Look at all of these."

"Over there, on the right side, People I Follow, all those icons. There must be two hundred of them. Roll over each to see their names. Right click a new tab on any interesting ones. Watch what comes up."

"I never realised there was such a broad variety of pussy. Thin lips, thick lips, long ones, short ones. A lot of sad looking lips, though, pierced, ringed, chained... And the tattoos, from crude to creative, some quite pretty."

"Look at this one, Castro on her belly... His beard her hair. That's creative. Click on it, it'll blow up on a new page. There, all the comments, the reposts. It tracks them all. If you dig, you can find where the original came from. It might take you many clicks, but it's there. Everything's there."

"What amazes me is so many of them show their faces also, not hiding, not ashamed. They seem to be boasting."

"Yeah, I used to think that strange also. Now I accept it as part of the... The whatever you call it, disorder, derangement, illness, I don't know. Some of this stuff seems a cry for help." He looked at her, ran his fingers through his hair and shrugged. "Ready to start digging?"

"Hug first. I need some courage."

They stood and hugged, gently swaying. "You need to glaze your eyes to what you see. Focus on the road, the goal at the end of it, not on the dung and litter along the way." He gave her a light squeeze. "You're searching for Cynthia, for pussy cat."

"Yeah, and you're searching for Bottom Line. I'd rather look at pussies than where you're going. Fuck! So sick."

They sat at the counter digging quietly for over an hour, then she squeezed his arm. "Look at this." She turned her screen toward him. "Pussyman, an archive of men with pussies."

"Photoshopped, most of them. That's one aspect I've seen with the nullo and the penectomy stuff. Playing with their dreams or fantasies of getting rid of their junk. Lot of it in the States with the poor social health care. Many trans women looking desperately for ways to remove their unwanted parts."

"Fuck!" She stared to his eyes. "Most of them? What about the others?"

He leaned to kiss her cheek. "Some stop fantasising about it and actually do it."

"Just lop the thing off?"

"Lots of different ways. A common one is to tie it off tight, stop the blood flow. Let necrosis set in, let it die, then go to Emergency for acute care to cut off the dead meat and stop the spread of decaying flesh. Lots of stories about this on the penectomy sites."

"Penectomy sites? You say that as if they were common."

"They are." He grimaced.

"Fuck. So how are you going to find Bottom Line with so many places to search?"

"Persistence. Keep looking. Keep searching. I have nothing to go on except he's mentioned lopping me twice, and he knows about my split and my size."

"How so?"

"His second email, double-headed monster. That's one of the tags Connolly used on my photos... I should follow that, dig through the comments, shuffles, tumbles."

"I wonder if that's..." She paused, tilted her head and nodded. "Yeah, that's likely where they went."

"What went?"

"Nathan's missing parts. In the garbage bags in the alley. Only parts they didn't find..." She paused again and put a hand to her mouth to fight the gag reflex. "They found everything except his right hand and his penis, scrotum and testicles. Fuck! What a sick man we're after."

He put his arms around her and held her tightly. "They'd be for the trophy case he mentioned."

"Yeah, the police had told me there had been a growing number of cases across the country... Missing parts. They didn't go into details, but it's obvious now."

"You want to stop for a break?"

"No, let's keep going a while longer. We'll not get there unless we keep going."

They continued searching, quiet but for their clicks and keystrokes. A quarter hour later, she laughed and stroked his forearm. "You have to see this tattoo. A huge schlong down her thigh. In the side view, it looks real." She turned her computer toward him.

"Does, doesn't it? Could be a male inside wanting to get out. We're all made so differently. Most of the time the outside matches the inside, sometimes it's a near miss, other times it's way off the mark. Woman inside, man out, or vice versa."

"Must be confusing. I can't imagine what that would be like."

"I watched Connolly's torment and listened to it. He talked about when he had circumcised himself to stop his focus on his penis, to forget he had one, to stop him from masturbating."

"So, that's the Kellogg thing?"

"Yeah. He said his circumcision didn't work, it didn't stop the reminding or stop the urge. He started cutting himself further. That's where I came in."

"When he confined you?"

"Yeah. He made me watch and take photos as he did a subincision on himself. He had already split his scrotum, and he continued the split up, cut by cut over the months, cutting and sculpting."

"Oh, my fuck! And you had to watch?"

"He kept asking me if he looked like a woman yet. He kept watching for my erection. Sad. Woman inside wanting out."

Catherine nodded. "Really sad. Tormented. But he was also twisted and sick."

"You want to stop for a while and cuddle?"

"Yeah."