This was different. It was a direct assault based on a perceived imbalance of power, and it was overtly sexual in nature.
I was young and unscarred then. I hadn’t taken a life yet, and my proximity to the low men I’d later hunt was still more than once removed. My gift of seeing was just a seedling, but it had begun to put out shoots. It was taking dark root in the dark cellar part of me, and on that day, it spoke.
Robinson had done fairly well in the Bureau, it whispered to me. He’d spent years in financial crimes, doing excellent work, but had fought hard for entrance into the Behavioral Analysis Unit. His work there had been less than exemplary. Sufficient, but not stellar.
The whisper was like a caress in my mind, and in that moment I knew who Frank Robinson was. His actions had exposed a need. The thing inside me had taken it close, battened on it, and delivered him up to my knowing.
“I understand now why you wanted to be in the BAU, Frank,” I said to him, “and why you’ve played second fiddle there.”
His eyes narrowed at that. I walked up to him, got close, so that I had to tilt my head up to see his face. I was absolutely unafraid.
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
I remember how I smiled at him, how I knew it was a cruel smile, an unfrightened smile, a grin of satisfaction powered by certainty.
“You’re a voyeur, Frank. Some part of you likes what you see. The part that makes you go home at night and masturbate, thinking about what those men do to those women.” I leaned into him, even closer, still smiling, unable to stop myself and not wanting to even if I could. “Do you ever take a case file home, Frank? Maybe copy some photos? I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you have a folder hidden away in your house, full of victims’ photos you’ve cherry- picked along the way.”
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.
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.
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.
Marriage is just another form of prostitution.
You got that right. My wife actually had a system. If I worked on the honey-do list, fucking was an option. If I completed it, sucking was an option. If I sat and watched the game, nothing was an option.
What did you have to do to get her to swallow?
Find another woman!
LOL!
“Charming,” I observe.
The dialogue continues elsewhere.
Thing is, I still hope sometimes to find a decent woman I could spend my life with. Does that mean I’m a pussy?
Various responses fly:
Yes!
Pussy!
Not really. We all hope for that to some degree. If we say otherwise, we’re lying. But the odds of you finding an American woman who’s not a cunt-on-wheels is pretty slim. You should look outside the U.S. if and when you’re ready.
Mail-order bride? I don’t know.
Russian women, Romanian women, Thai women. All of them know how to treat a man. And they’re all looking for American husbands. Supply and demand goes the other way, in those places.
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
“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.”
