Models

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kendall Dee disappears on her first day as a professional hairdresser at a New York Fashion Week runway show. When she turns up murdered, her friend Corry Lindstrom decides to find out what happened.

Because Corry, a professional fashion photographer, got Kendall the job in the first place.  A job that put Kendall in a kind of danger no one expected. 

Chosen by the readers of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine as one of the top five stories of the year, "Models" takes place in a world not often seen by outsiders—a place where glamour gives way to sweat, and jealousy can lead to murder.

"Kristine Kathryn Rusch's crime stories are exceptional, both in plot and in style."

—Mystery Scene Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Jan 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393543596

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

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Models

Models

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing, Inc.

Contents

Models

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About the Author

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Models

SKINNY SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS, bones for legs, lips pouty, eyes half-mast, walked the runway with a big-girl sashay. Hands out for balance, chin jutted forward, they looked like starvation victims posing as high-fashion models.

Payment in food.

She wished.

Corry knelt at the edge of the runway, camera in hand, the constant clickety-click, clickety-click of each shot adding sound effects to the lowering of her own eyelids. Shutting, opening, seeing, not for the first time, those girls that passed as fashionable in America.

They weren’t beautiful, they weren’t even pretty, most of them. But the camera drew out some part of them, some part the naked eye could never see, an attitude, a posture, a shine—the soul, her mother would say. The essence, the reason Native Americans never liked photographs, a little bit stolen and held, forever, in an illusion of light and shadows.

Halfway there, Corry thought. Halfway there. But she wasn’t sure if she was thinking of the money, stashed in her account, her freedom fund, halfway to the day she could toss her Nikon in her boss’s overmade-up face or if she was thinking of the show itself.

Come on, Corry. You know we have an afternoon of this. Richard spoke beside her, voice nearly lost in the blaring rock music, behind the clickety-click of the cameras, his and hers.

She must have spoken aloud. She smiled at him, feeling distracted, and went back to shooting clothing on models so thin they looked like they belonged in Save the Children commercials on late night TV.

She was leaning against the runway, her favorite spot, not too low, not too high, able to get the girls’ faces and the clothes. A moment to change lenses, then focus, focus, focus: shoes, hats, scarves. Accessorize, glamorize, immortalize, all blurring together in a moment frozen in time.

So many years she had done this, now photographing girls half her age, twice her height, two-thirds her weight. She could tune out the blaring rock music, the inane descriptions (teal with a touch of rose, hinting at the blush in the cheek), the ooos and aaaas of the crowd behind her. Once in a while she was still awestruck—the sight of Claudette Colbert at a New York fashion benefit a few years before her death—but mostly she gaped in silent shock—Demi Moore’s bald G.I. Jane haircut—or didn’t look at all. She had long ago stopped worrying about her own looks, dressing in the uniform for fashion photographers: loose shirt, ripped jeans, hair pulled back in a pony tail, three Nikons around her neck, pockets jammed with lenses, too-full photography bag at her feet.

The photographs sold and sold and sold: New York Times, Vogue, Cosmo as well as to fashion mags the teeming masses had never heard of, never seen, but somehow the money went—to more equipment, New York rent, the occasional upscale dinner—a treat, at a hundred bucks an entree, that she could easily live without.

What’s left? she asked Richard.

His ponytail was coming loose. He was holding a telephoto in one hand, focusing on some skinny child-woman-model’s shoe. Three evening. Clickety-click. I think.

I’m not doing evening, she said. Hired for daily wear, as if any real woman would wear a pink and green organdy suit