Smelling disaster, Tse instructed the theater manager, Lilia Greene, to speak to the audience before the second opening act, the singer-songwriter Lissie. Greene informed the well-dressed throng that Molly Metropolis was suffering from food poisoning and the price of the tickets (minus processing fees and shipping costs, if applicable) would be refunded. Tse called SDFC. The head of their in-house pubic relations team, Kelly Applebaum, immediately issued a press release. Quoting the release, The Hollywood Reporter called Molly’s absence “a sudden illness,” and published Tweets from fans angrily leaving the venue. Someone logged into Molly Metropolis’s official Twitter account using the iPhone Twitter application and wrote: “To all my amazing Chicago monsters. I would give anything in the world to be with you right now and not cold & alone.”g
A quiet search party — consisting of dancers, security personnel, Berliner, and Nix — scoured the dark and icy city. Applebaum’s staff monitored news sources and gossip sites for any Molly Metropolis sightings. They didn’t find anything, no trace of Molly Metropolis in Chicago and no whisper of her whereabouts on the Internet. They wouldn’t find her rental car for two more weeks, abandoned in a region on the border between Michigan and Indiana called Michiana, in the driveway of a rarely used lake house. All of her clothes, costumes, and personal possessions were left behind at the venue and the hotel; not a single shoe or pair of underwear was missing.
Molly Metropolis didn’t appear the following morning. Applebaum informed Molly’s family and called the police. Normally, the CPD waits forty-eight hours to file a missing persons report, but Molly Metropolis’s fame made it unlikely that she could move idly around the city without being spotted, so police Sergeant Jordan Pierce decided to waive the usual time limit. Pierce and a team of detectives interviewed each member of Molly’s touring crew. Nix gave the longest interview; Berliner gave the shortest.
The next day, SDFC executives and Applebaum officially canceled Molly’s January 12 show in Detroit. In their official statement to the press, Applebaum and SDFC claimed Molly Metropolis still suffered from food poisoning — related complications, namely “dehydration and exhaustion.” They closed the release with, “Molly Metropolis apologizes to fans in Chicago and Detroit and will appear at scheduled Atlantic City and New York City performances.”
Applebaum did all she could to hide the truth, but the Gossip Media smelled a rat. Gossip websites The Superficial and TMZ speculated that Molly was suffering from complications from drug use or anorexia. Perez Hilton, on his influential gossip blog Perez-Hilton.com, posted an entry titled, “Where Have All the Mollies Gone?” accompanied by a concert photo from a previous tour date, with a Photoshopped dribble of a white substance spilling out of Molly’s nose, meant to allude to cocaine use (a common characteristic of Hilton’s altered images). Perez thought the food poisoning story was “too convenient,” the kind of things celebs’ reps always say.
On January 14, a freezing and overcast Monday in Chicago, the chief of the CPD, Jody Peter “J.P.” Weis, and Applebaum, speaking on behalf of SDFC Records, called a 9:30 a.m. joint press conference. They announced that Molly Metropolis had been missing since January 9 and they detailed the actions taken to find her. The video of the press conference was uploaded to YouTube where it has been viewed approximately 250 million times, as of this writing.
Elsewhere in Chicago on January 14, Caitlin Taer was nursing three separate obsessions: becoming a professional music critic, the Molly Metropolis song “Apocalypse Dance,” and the prices of hardwood flooring — none of which helped to improve her unsatisfactory post-collegiate life and, despite growing up near the city, her hatred of Chicago winters.
Short and curvaceous, with curly dirty blonde hair and a small smattering of freckles, Taer was also a trendy dresser, who spent most of the summer in long jean shorts and thin backless T-shirts. When winter set in, she wore skinny jeans and giant, thick sweaters. She also wore a black down winter coat that covered her from chin to ankle.
Born and raised in a southern suburb of Chicago called Flossmoor, Taer spent her childhood dreaming of living in Chicago, according to her journals. At age eight, she compulsively played and sang along with a cassette tape of Frank Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town (Chicago),” given to her by her father, and covered her walls with black-and-white poster prints of the city’s impressive skyline at night with the word “Chicago” in a white cursive along the bottom — the kind of images purchased by tourists.
On warm weekends in the spring, her mother would take her shopping on Michigan Avenue. They woke up early and walked to the train station on sidewalks bracketed by dewy grass. They traveled to the city on the Metra Electric Line, from the train station in downtown Flossmoor to the Randolph Street Station in the middle of downtown Chicago, at the shopping district along Michigan Avenue known as the Miracle Mile.
Because the train took her to Chicago, Taer also developed a passion for Metra Electric. She didn’t want to play with the electric train sets her parents bought her to try to feed her obsession, but they had to watch her closely because she would occasionally run away to the train, sometimes just to sit by the tracks and watch it go, sometimes to try to climb aboard.
Once when she was ten, she made it all the way into the city by smartly sticking near a woman with three other kids; the conductors assumed she was with the family. When the train reached Randolph Street, its final stop, young Taer followed a familiar path from the platform to the underground station’s exit, emerging onto the intersection of Randolph Street and Michigan, directly into the bustle of the Loop, full of hope. Unfortunately, she didn’t know where to go next. The rush hour crowds were thick, and commuters, in their hurry, jostled her. A homeless man started shouting. Very quickly, Taer realized that she shouldn’t be in the city alone. She began crying and screaming loudly until a security guard from the train station noticed her. After the security guard calmed her down enough to figure out where Taer came from, a young conductor escorted her home. He let her play with his Game Boy and bought her Skittles, which her mother would never let her eat. Taer’s love of the city remained untarnished. The story of her solo visit to Chicago quickly became family lore.h
In 2000, Taer began her freshman year at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. Physically, she had matured earlier than most of her female classmates and attracted attention, mostly mocking, from the boys. She wore baggy shirts to hide her breasts (“They seemed to grow, like, every second that year,” Taer recalled in one of her journals) and defensively shouted “asshole” at every boy she caught looking down her shirt. The taunts didn’t stop until her senior year, when such teasing suddenly seemed immature.
Gina Nix attended the same high school. The girls knew each other marginally. They didn’t run in the same circles, but Taer’s best friend played on the same field hockey team as Nix, and sometimes they hung out at sports parties. Nix didn’t care much about the typical social hierarchies, but Taer was hung up on them.