Miss-Take? Miss 1998? If this was an example of his writing talents, I was worried about him feeding his wife and children. I couldn’t believe that fucker had sneaked in that shot of me. Did he laugh about it with his wife?

I was sure I was the only girl in the picture who didn’t now have two different children with two different fathers. Jack must have known that things were going so well for me now, and he wanted to shit on me by putting the old photo with the nasty caption on there. I quit out of Flickr and turned off my computer. What a jerk. I should just be glad that life in Tarzana hadn’t ended up being my life.

FIFTEEN

FIFTEEN

The Idea sprouted at work, where all my ideas usually start.

The Idea came while I was writing a scene where Maggie would have to peel away the skin from a corpse’s finger and slide the skin over her own latex-gloved finger in order to take a fingerprint. As a body decomposes, the fine ridges that make every finger unique sometimes become impossible to print correctly. This technique would be very visual, and in the latest memo from the network we’d been told, “the science should be more sexy.” I decided that the memos were just another way for people to make you crazy. The really smart and successful people just didn’t read the memos, but I wasn’t successful enough, so I couldn’t escape.

In this scene, Maggie would show the novice investigator how to lift the fingerprint. The sight of Maggie slicing the skin from the finger of the corpse would make the newbie nauseated. Postproduction would add a little sound effect to emphasize the cutting. Sliding the skin on her own finger, Maggie would look seriously at the newbie:

MAGGIE

The body tells its own story. The body is trying to tellus what happened the night she was killed. If we can lift a fingerprint, we can identify the victim. That’sour first step in finding out who murdered her. The fingerprint is the key.

The key.

So that’s when the Idea first came to me.