SHY
The Casamajor kidnap case made headlines, even in a city where major
crimes were now happening every day. Someone snatched 17 year-old
Jocasta Casamajor, heiress to the Sucra-F soft drink fortune on her way
home from a friend's party, leaving behind them a bullet-riddled car and
the bodies of her driver and two armed bodyguards. Two days later, the
Casamajor family received a ransom demand for $5 million, relayed in a
message recorded by Jocasta herself on her mp3 micro-player and
delivered anonymously to the offices of the San Paro Standard. SPPD
Forensics identified the voice, finger-prints and blood sample that came
with the device as all belonging to Jocasta. The SPPD and the
Praetorians, working separately, started tearing the city apart
searching for her, while the Casamajor family also secretly hired the
services of the Praetorians' covert Shadow Strike unit to find their
daughter's captors.
The ransom was paid, the money tagged using military level
surveillance and tracking techniques that the kidnappers probably
couldn't even begin to guess about, with the satellite surveillance time
alone - negotiated with the Feds - costing over half a million dollars.
Shadow Strike found the targets first, hiding out in a disused
abattoir in Red Hill. Grissom and his team went in fast, hard and
quiet.....and found that someone else had been there first. Six dead
kidnappers. No Jocasta, dead or alive. And no $5 million ransom money,
with no trace of where it had gone, and the means by which it had
originally been tagged and tracked now completely disabled. Whoever had
beaten them to the target had known what they were doing.
Four days later, Jocasta Casamajor was released unharmed, an SPPD
prowl car finding her wandering, slightly dazed and confused, along
Shianxi at 6am in the morning. She had her schoolbag with her. Inside
was $2.5 million dollars of her original ransom sum. She claimed to have
no memory of what happened to her, of who took her and who killed her
captors, or where she had been or what she had been doing for the
previous four days.
Two days later, the mayor's office received a communiqué from a
group calling itself StrikeBack, which said that it had been responsible
for freeing Jocasta Casamajor from her kidnappers and was happy to have
secured the safe return of her and the ransom money, half of which it
was deducting to further its citizens' justice activities.
Despite police eagerness to investigate further - nothing further
has ever been heard from 'StrikeBack', and the organisation has never
appeared among San Paro's ever-growing list of officially recognised
vigilante groups - the Casamajor family lawyers blocked all further
access to Jocasta herself, citing her amnesia as a sign of the
psychological stress she had suffered from her ordeal. The family were
just glad to have their daughter (and half the ransom money) back and
apparently unharmed.
So what really happened back then? Only Jocasta Casamajor knows for sure. Well, her, and the Blood Roses.
It was Byron Bloodrose's intel hooks into Red Rain's cell phone
set-up that first picked up hints that the kidnappers were a known
professional heister gang with affiliations to Whispa's crew. Jeung's
interest was piqued - his family knew the Casamajors, and he had briefly
dated Jocasta's older sister back in high school - and the arch-snob in
him disliked the idea of the kind of lowlife dregs employed by Red Rain
treating people of his and Jocasta's class in this way. Besides, the
kidnapper crew were rivals of the Blood Roses, and the idea of cheating
Whispa out of his share of the ransom money was just too delicious.
Jeung sent the Blood Roses into action, and they hit the gang's hideout
and brought back Jocasta and the money before anyone knew they'd been
there.
Which only left the problem of what to do with Jocasta. The kid
was terrified and traumatised. It was Charlotte's idea to cheer her up
by taking her clubbing. Banshee. Beltane. Gaijin. Opening night of some
exclusive new club up-top the Needles in Havalynd. Uptown to Montebank
to check out the new after-hours joint called the Shooting Gallery that
everyone's talking about. Jeung, Charlotte and the inner circle hit them
all, with little Jocasta Casamajor accompanying them in clothes and
makeup lent to her by Charlotte and the other girls. Jocasta -
traumatised, completely dislocated by the experiences of the last few
days - loved it all.
In those four days, her new alter-ego Strega Bloodrose was born.
At the end of the four days, they cut her loose again. It was
Byron's idea to return half the ransom money with her, to throw the cops
and the Praetorians off the scent. $2.5 million was still a good return
for a couple of days work, and everyone got a great laugh out of that
'StrikeBack official communiqué' bullshit that Charlotte and Jeung came
up with.
Still, Jeung was only half-surprised when, a few weeks later,
Jocasta Casamajor started turning up at the gang's usual club haunts in
her Strega Bloodrose disguise. The ordeal of the kidnap must have messed
with the wiring inside her head more than anyone had realised. She had
seen something in those four days hanging out with the Blood Roses - a
wild glamour so different from her previous safely moneyed existence -
and now she wanted more.
That was almost two years ago. Now she's part of the
organisation, earning - as the two Prentiss Tigers whose corpses were
washed up on the shore of Green Spit can testify - the right to the now
ritual scar tattoo. Whether she's a spoiled little rich girl playing at
being a badass criminal for a few years before she receives her share of
the soft drink family fortune, or whether she's genuinely been
converted to the Blood Roses way of life, remains to be seen.
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