Chapter 29

Stacey sat back and took an eye-break from the grid that was almost complete.

Every girl and every local pageant had been logged, along with the placement results. In total there were 127 names on the grid. The bottom fifty-seven names belonged to girls who had done the odd pageant here or there during that seven-year period.

The middle section consisted of around forty girls who had been consistently attending but only for a portion of the years that Katie had been active. That left a core group of thirty girls at the top, the most prolific at that time.

Stacey was now working her way down the list, searching for criminal records or scandal. She seriously hoped she was going to find something before having to go through all their social media accounts looking for clues.

So far, she'd found two drug addicts, one deceased and one incarcerated, and a prolific shoplifter with no form for violence.

On the other hand, she'd found a couple of models, one swimwear, one editorial, plus two doctors, an army recruit and a bakery owner.

After everything she'd read, she still wasn't sure of her opinion on pageants and wondered at the ratio of successes and failures compared to other early endeavours. Was pageantry more or less likely to have adverse effects in the future? Were there any detrimental long-lasting effects of taking up kick-boxing, or netball or football? Was participating in pageantry as a child any more harmful than any other hobby? But that was a whole new set of data, she thought, typing in the next name.

No criminal convictions, no form, not even known to them.

Ah, Carly Spencer had followed the profession and was now a pageant director herself, working out of an office in Hagley.

‘Hang on,' Stacey said, scrolling further down to a tiny search result from the local news. Yes, she'd definitely got it right.

Stacey picked up the phone and called the boss.