Lance doesn't remember how it happens, he's just staring at a bulletin board. He went out and bought thumbtacks, he thinks. Thumbtacks is where it happened, where it started.

There's been a bulletin board in Lance's office, a map with Justin's whereabouts, for the last year. Not because Lance has been following Justin like Elvis or anything, just because there's only so much you can do when you're not writing a book and avoiding your phone.

Justin's appearances are random, and dated. Tabloids place him in Idaho, at a convenience store. In San Diego, buying milk and out for dinner with people Lance doesn't recognize. There's a fuzzy picture in that article from the Examiner, and he's got a copy of it in a stack of papers in his desk. An internet message board has pictures of Justin in his hometown, and Lance has those printed out and stuck between the pages of another file.

He called a friend last week, asked for some help when he was watching the News on mute and saw the same map beside the CNN anchorwoman's face. She was grim and talking silently, and he didn't turn the volume up but the ticker-tape below her said 'two new murders'. So he made a call and then he got the file and he read the file and then he decided he needed more thumbtacks. He went out and bought a new box, and now he's sitting on his desk and staring, and that's when it happens.

Blue thumbtacks on every place where Justin has been spotted in the last two years. Idaho, Memphis, and a cluster all around the Bay area; those ones are familiar. Yellow thumbtacks hold up random notes, a postcard from JC in Italy from last summer, and NSYNC's first press release, Lance's car insurance papers that need renewing.

Purple thumbtacks are currently stuck into gruesome crime scene photos: houses broken into and ransacked, bloody footprints. He got the police reports and FBI profile yesterday. All of that is in his hands, or pinned up in purple, right now.

It's the red thumbtacks that are disturbing Lance the most. The irony that was intentional five minutes ago is now making him sick, red thumbtacks for where the police found the bodies. The first thumbtack, in the middle of the map, is alone and isolated, the middle of Nebraska and not even near a major city.

Number two is somewhere outside Memphis, but this is a map of the whole of America and so there isn't room to label "outside Memphis". The little red pin sits right on the city itself. It's jostling for room with a blue pin, as well, with a tag that says 'three times, last year and three months ago' stickied as close as it can get.

The third red tack, Lance put on top of Seattle WA. He never liked Seattle, it was too rainy and there's a little purple thumbtack on top of this one, as well, because her body was found in her house, laying on the kitchen floor. Its blue neighbor has fallen out twice, the two of them too close together to properly stick in the board anymore.

Four and five sit snugly atop of San Diego, with a forest of little blue pins nestled in between. A piece of paper with all of Justin's appearances in Southern California is wedged in the frame right beside it. The crime scene, purple south of San Diego, is almost lost amid the blue and red. national enquirer

Six is back in Tennessee, this time by Nashville. Red and purple and blue, red and purple and blue. Seven and eight and nine and ten and he ran out of thumbtacks five minutes ago with half a file to go.

Lance's eyes start to water, staring at the bulletin board. It's all just a wash of color, too many pins and they were all trying to crowd around each other. He traces the roads between Memphis and Boise and Seattle and San Diego and everywhere, hits a red and blue thumbtack.

Lance puts the papers down carefully, and picks up the phone.

~

"Some of this story is true."
-- Neil Gaiman, "An Introduction"
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