Home of the Governess

 Sorry for the lack of a caption last week. I have been horrendously busy with work.

Detective Finn Collier ducked under the police tape and strode into the crime scene. If seeing ten police cruisers parked outside the old mansion on the hill had seemed surreal, things were just about to go to whole new level of weird. He spotted his partner, Detective Pam Larsson, talking to a crime scene photographer and walked over. “What do we have here, Pam?” he demanded. “Kidnapping? False imprisonment?”

“Looks like it,” Detective Larsson nodded, “Fifteen vics so far. All like this...or worse.” She glanced at the two figures standing in the corridor, both in short maids' uniforms and heels, their arms bound behind their backs and ball gags stuffed deep between painted lips. “Poor guys...”

“Guys?!” Finn's eyes went wide. “You mean...”

“Men?” Pam nodded, “yes, all of them. Some have been here quite some by the looks of things. These two are some of the newer additions by all accounts. Their transformation seems to have been mostly cosmetic. Hence the bonds, I guess. Some of the guys further into the house are nowhere near as lucky. They are much further gone. Psychological conditioning, we think. Probably drug induced too.”

“Good Lord...” Detective Collier gasped. He eyed the desperate look of the blonde maid before him and immediately wished he hadn't. He tried to avert his gaze but only succeeded at staring at a pair of glossy legs in fishnets perched on open toed heels instead. He was having a hard time thinking of these poor men as lucky. “Who would do something like this?”

“We're pretty sure it's a woman,” Pam said consulting her notepad, “judging by the strapons we found in the sex dungeon. Oh right, that's a thing too. There are also hypnosis tapes we found with a woman's voice on them. Thirties or forties by the sound of her voice. Some of the officers are calling her the Governess. There's a large dressing room full of outfits like these and...others. We're trying to track down who bought them, but nothing so far.”

“Okay,” Finn scratched his head. “How about in the meantime, we get these poor guys out of them?”

“Oh, they are much too far gone for that. Some of these men have undergone serious mental conditioning. It's going to take some of them months, maybe years, of therapy to reconnect them with who they really are. Not that we even know who they are yet. Even these two,” Pam pointed at their prissy welcoming committee, “seem to be deep into hormone cycles. They need to be weaned off and will still have curves for a very long time. In the short-term, our focus needs to be on finding the Governess. Because someone who does something like this has an obsession. They aren't just going to stop because we found some of their maids...”