Abandoned: A Thriller (32 page)

His face turned ashen—with anger, yes, but also with a glimmer of fear. I was like a shark smelling the blood, not just hungry but enraged. He’d violated me. I was returning the favor, and a slap wasn’t enough. I wanted to turn him inside out.

“You’re not a real monster, Frank, I know that. I doubt you’ve ever raped anyone. But you feel the pull, don’t you?” I nodded at him. “That’s why you said what you said to me. Catharsis through sublimation.”

“Cunt.” It sounded like he’d been punched in the stomach.

I bet your cock’s limp now!
I remember thinking, ugly and satisfied, my meanness a brightness, like a bitter penny.

He backed away, heading toward the door. I watched him all the way out, still grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. He’d turned once to look back at me, and I saw something new there, an incredibly complicated mix of emotions and tiredness and oldness. There was respect, and anger, along with shame and fear and a certain thoughtfulness. Behind it all, like a child peeking around a door frame, was a younger Frank, from a time when he was still clean. I saw he could remember that time and yearned for it. I’d reminded him that he had a mother.

That was the first time I truly understood the difference between a bad man and an evil man. Frank put in for retirement a week later.

I’ve been blessed and cursed, depending on viewpoint and circumstance, with unique insights into the truth of human beings. I’ve been raped by a man, but I’ve watched a video of a young girl giggling as she strangled cats and buried them in her backyard. The overwhelming majority of those I chase are men, but I once arrested a woman who cooked her six-month-old in the oven because he “cried too much.”

I am not blind to the differences between men and women, but I have seen the truths: The capacity for violence is there in all of us, and there’s a world of difference between the flawed and the evil.

It’s this knowledge that let me keep doing what I do after Sands’s assault. I was worried that I’d be driven by rage, or a desire for revenge, and that these would cloud my judgment. I was relieved to find that I was driven instead by my desire to save the flawed and not by a need to
destroy the evil. It’s a small thing to say, but the difference inside your heart is immeasurable.

“Let’s take a look at the chat,” I say.

“Which one?” Leo asks.

“Bitch Chat.
I imagine that’s where he found Douglas Hollister. Douglas doesn’t strike me as the philosophical kind.”

Leo clicks on the menu option and the chat loads into the browser. A long list of names appears.

“Pretty active place,” Alan says.

Callie leans forward. “Look at the names. USAWomenSuck. Single4life. NotYrBalls. I continue to see a theme.”

“Some chats require a log-in to observe the conversation. This one doesn’t, so you can watch without participating,” Leo explains.

I read the back-and-forths, fascinated at this subculture of aggrieved man-boys.

“Charming,” I observe.

The dialogue continues elsewhere.

Various responses fly:

This is just one of three or four conversations going on in the chat.

“Why are some of them silent?” I ask Leo. “I see some names that are just sitting there, not typing anything.”

“They’re probably PM’ing—private messaging. One of them can double-click the name of another, and a separate chat window will open up. Then they chat privately. No one else can read the conversation.”

I scan the names and their activity. “Quite a few of those, I guess.”

“The really personal stuff generally takes place in PMs. Anything you say here can be read by anyone.” He sweeps a hand to indicate all of us. “Including law enforcement. In sex-based chat rooms, for example, you rarely see anything steamy going on out in the open. People come in to the primary chat to flirt; they use PMs to … you know.”

“The word you are searching for is
fuck
, honey-love,” Callie purrs, teasing him.

“Right,” he says, blushing a little. “Point being, the same applies here. If someone isn’t comfortable talking about something out in the open, they’ll ask for a PM.”

“You talked about ’bots,” I say. “You said they could be programmed to respond to a private message.”

“A canned response, sure.”

“Then why don’t we just go down the line of names there and start clicking? We should be able to tell who the ’bot is, if there is one, right?”

“If I were him, I wouldn’t have set up a canned response for just that reason. He’d assume someone like me could figure it out.”

I frown. “Won’t a lack of response raise a red flag too?”

“Not really. It’s fairly accepted that if someone doesn’t reply to your PM, they’re either not interested in talking to you or they’re already busy.”

“So much for easy,” Alan says. “If we want to find him through the Net, we’re going to have to develop a real cover for this one. The whole enchilada.”

“What’s that mean, exactly?” Leo asks.

“One of us is going to have to make himself an enticing target for our perp,” Alan explains. “That means developing a full identity that will stand up to scrutiny. It means coming up with a name, backed by verifiable information, and a cell phone that he can call and that’s traceable to that identity. So on.”

“It means having an address that matches the identity,” Callie chimes in. “In case he has some way of tracing the Internet provider you’re using. Mostly,” she says, “it means a lot of research. Reading all the ‘manifestos’ of the very lovely men from this website, wading through hundreds of forum postings. Et cetera and on.”

“I get the house and cell phone, but I don’t really see the need for research. Things seem pretty straightforward here.” Leo smiles. “Just put on my wife-beater, drink some beer, and say ‘bitch’ every now and then, right?”

“Wrong,” I tell him. “What you’re talking about is a stereotype, and it’s a common and sometimes deadly mistake in undercover work. A stereotype is a two-dimensional view. You need to exist, when you adopt an identity, in three dimensions.”

“For example,” Callie supplies, “you are a computer nerd, yes?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, then, all I need to do is put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, grow some pimples, and know the difference between an IP number and a DNS server, right?”

“Okay. I get it.”

“Who do you want doing this?” Alan asks me.

“You and Leo. It needs to be men doing it. I might miss something unconsciously as a woman. I want you as a backup. Leo’s too inexperienced. No offense, Leo.”

“No, you’re right. I’ll feel better if Alan’s there.”

“Shit,” Alan grumbles. “But that means I’ll be stuck.”

“Why?” Leo asks.

“He might have seen my face at the wedding, when he dumped Heather Hollister. If he’s watching the house, and he sees me, the jig’s up. Which means you’ll be doing all the shopping, roomie.”

“Wait,” Leo says, “are you saying I’ll have to
live
there? Full time?”

“Of course.”

“But how do I explain that to my girlfriend?”

“You lie.”

“Lie?”

Callie pats him on the top of the head. “Ah, I was once young and naïve too. Yes, honey-love, you’re going to lie. Tell her something exciting. You’re being whisked away on a top-secret mission; you might not come home alive. That’ll cover you and perhaps get you some hot good-bye sex too.” She winks. “Women love secret agents.”

“Fuck,” he mutters.

Alan claps him on the shoulder. “Think of it as an adventure.”

Leo nods glumly. “What do you want me to do about the other stuff?” he asks me. “Liaison with CCU and the past cases?”

“Those go on hold for now. You said the LAPD CCU was competent enough.”

“Okay.” He sighs, resigned to his fate.

“Division of duty,” I say. “James, you stay on the job of getting those files to Earl Cooper.”

“He’ll have everything by end of day.”

“Good. Callie, I want you to do all the legwork of setting up the identity and location. You know who to liaise with. I’d like to have things in place by tomorrow.”

“Shouldn’t be too difficult. It doesn’t have to be fancy. We can have him work from home, so we won’t have to contend with building a workplace cover. I’ll have to find him an ex-wife. That might take a little longer.”

“Find someone who’s not on the radar yet.”

“A promising, fresh-scrubbed graduate to be. I’m on it.”

“What are we going to be doing in the meantime?” Leo asks.

“Research,” I say. “Lots and lots of research.”

“There’s different ways to approach it,” Alan says. “My opinion,
the best is to look for the things you can agree with, empathize with.” He points to the website, which is still sitting on the computer screen. “Find something in there that makes sense. Align the rest of it to that. That’s what a guy coming to the site’s going to do. He didn’t come here to find out everything about everything.”

“He’s there to find the solution to his own problems,” Leo finishes, getting the idea.

“Exactly.”

“Everyone know what they’re supposed to do?” I ask.

Silence is assent.

“Let’s get to it.”

We work late into the afternoon, each of us at our respective computers, reading over forum postings, lurking in the chat rooms, looking at the photographs.

Sex is here, and so is rage, but most of all, below it all like a toxic river, is the pain. The anger is the top layer, the loudest voice, the most visible, but pain is the fuel that drives the engine.

When rage outstrips agony, you have murder, and it’s this that I search for on the website. There are men, few and far between, who have long since passed the point of simply feeling their pain. It is their anger that drives them, anger that has mutated into rage. It’s a subtle thing, but as I read, the small tics become signposts.

One man writes:

Anger is present but has not yet taken over. He is still grieving, not raging.

Another man writes:

Angry, but this is anger toward a principle, not a person.

Then there are the ones I’m starting to the think of as “the dark men.”

That’s an obvious example. There are subtler, even darker ones. Such as:

“This is tiring as hell,” Alan laments, standing up to stretch and groan. “I’ve never seen such a collection of whiners in my life. I mean, what’s the problem? You want to be a man? Be a man! You want to think differently than the quote
feminists
unquote? Think differently! No one’s putting a gun to your head.”

“What about the ones who lose their kids? You don’t think we have a system skewed toward the mother when it comes to custody?” Leo asks. “Just playing devil’s advocate.”

“There are countries where the kid goes to the father by default. You think that’s right?”

“Not especially. I think custody should be based entirely on who is the fittest parent and not biased toward gender. Women are considered a safer bet as a parent. Why?”

“That’s good, Leo,” I say. “Sounds like you found one of your points of agreement.”

He smiles, showing me that his comments had been more intellectual than passionate. “I saw their side of the argument, but the jury is still out.”

“Who raised you?” Alan asks.

“My father, mostly.” He looks uncomfortable. “Mom was a drunk.”

“How would you feel about incorporating that into your cover?” Alan asks.

“Okay, I guess. Not pleased, but okay.”

“That’s the point. A good cover has just enough truth in it to make it believable. If you can incorporate things that give you real emotional response, response you don’t have to fake, so much the better.”

“Are we ready, then?” I ask Alan. “To build the cover?”

“I think so. I’ve read plenty. Leo?”

“I have a pretty good understanding of it all.”

“You seem to have a pretty strong connection with the child-custody aspect,” I say. “Sorry to get personal, but in the interests of motivations for your cover … I’d guess you object to the bias for the mom based on your own experience as a child.”

“That’s fair. Dad is the one who held the family together, fed us, clothed us, made sure we went to school and did our homework.”