Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

“Unlike some people,” he replies, not looking at her, “I’m constantly working on my academics. Intellectual stagnation isn’t just slothful, it’s unattractive.”

Callie laughs. “Good one.”

“Look at this,” I murmur, reading the menu of the site Leo called up. “There are options for real-time chat, forums, social groups, buddy listings—wow.” I stand back up, rubbing my lower back. “Lot of passion on this subject.”

“I can understand it,” Alan says. “Equality is equality, and I’ve always been cool with that. But men as the villain? That’s not equality, it’s hate, and that seems to be the direction of radical feminism today.”

“With everything we see,” Callie says, “how can you say that? When’s the last time we were chasing a woman who rapes and kills men?”

Her back is up, and I see Alan ready to return the salvo.

Here it is, I realize, bemused. A version of the argument that led Douglas Hollister to our mystery man. Watch and learn.

Alan stabs a thick finger at her. “See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about! Serial murderers are not what I’d called a representative cross section of the male population. But, hey, since they’re usually men, men must be beasts at the core, right?”

“If it walks like a duck …” Callie says, shrugging.

I watch as Alan struggles to lower his blood pressure. The effort to do so is the essential difference between an Alan Washington and a Douglas Hollister.

“Look,” he says, his tone reasonable without being conciliatory, “I’ve never bought into the boys-club mentality of law enforcement. I’ve never cared who carries the gun, man or woman, black or red or white. I’m fine with a female president and women CEOs. What I’m not fine with is being categorized by my gender. That’s no different than me assigning traits to you because you’re a woman, right?”

“I suppose,” Callie allows.

“Well, that’s what radical feminism has skewed toward, in my opinion.” He emphasizes the last three words, with more than a little bit of irony.

“I love you, honey-love,” Callie says, reaching out to pat his cheek. “Always have, always will. And Lord knows I’m the last to ride the horse of political correctness. But—taking a cue from our current psycho, speaking pragmatically—a man criticizing feminism is always going to be suspect, just as a white man criticizing any black movement would be.”

“I can see that.” He gives her a sly grin. “So, really, what you’re saying is that we’re brothers and sisters under the skin. We’ve both been oppressed by the white man, right?”

Callie sniffs. “Speak for yourself.”

Their differences resolve easily, because the element of psychosis is missing. Callie and Alan can argue, even on a subject they feel passionately about, and walk away friends. Douglas and his pals could not.

“Thank you for the live case study,” I say to them. “Now let’s refocus. What you were saying, Leo, is that he could search for clients any number of ways.”

“Yep,” he says, bobbing his head. It makes him look young in spite of his suit and tie. “The Internet is about a limited number of things, at its core: information, communication, and community. You can find anything on the Internet if you know how and where to look and are patient. Anything,” he says.

“There’s a big difference between venting and taking action,” James says. “Most of the men in those forums are going to be talking, not doing. It seems very needle-in-a-haystack, even if he did narrow it down to a site like this one.”

Leo considers this. “He could write a program, have it do searches against a set of regular keywords within the chat. For example, bitch, cunt, dead, kill her —anything that might point to an interest in or intent to harm. He could also put out bait—forum posts or, in the live chat, hints that he wishes he could do away with his spouse, and wait for kindred spirits to reply.”

“Possible, but unlikely,” I say. “That leaves too much of a trail.”

“Then I’d go with the ’bot concept,” he says.

“’bot?”

“Sorry. Short for robot. In this case, an automated software program. It runs on its own, either on a timer, being told to perform a specific function every x seconds, or in response to input. For example, you can insert a ’bot into a chat room. It’ll look like a live person, but it’s not. It’s just a program. It can be set up to give a response to a query, so that if someone initiates contact, the ’bot would have a canned reply ready.”

“Like?”

“It’s been popular in promoting porn sites. You create a profile for a hot twenty-year-old with big gazoongas.” He reddens. “Sorry.”

“No, I think ‘gazoongas’ is the technical term,” Callie says. “Please continue.”

He clears his throat. “You create a profile for an attractive young woman. She’s not real. It’s fiction. The ’bot is inserted into a chat room full of single guys looking for girls, and you assign that profile to the ’bot.”

“They think the program is the girl,” Alan says, catching on.

“That’s right. So, of course, all eighty of the guys in the chat room send her a hey, you come here often? instant message. The ’bot is programmed to respond to any query with: Hi, sorry, I’m away from my computer for a sec, but you can come and see my naked pics and chat with me live at… You see?”

“Men are stupid, that’s what you’re saying?” Callie asks. “A sound hypothesis.”

“How would that approach benefit our guy?” Alan asks. “Well, it wouldn’t, not really,” Leo allows, “but there are other things the ’bot can do once it’s in the chat room.”

“Searches,” James supplies.

“Exactly. Back to the timer concept. The ’bot is inserted into the chat room and told to search every five milliseconds for any of the following terms: bitch, cunt, whore, hit man, death , and to alert the program operator if one is used by anyone in chat. If he really wanted to be advanced about it, he could have the ’bot send a generic reply to the originator of the keyword. Something like I hear that. It’s not that hard.”

“How secure would that be for him?” I ask.

“If you do it right? Very. If we’re watching and waiting and the ISP is cooperative, maybe we could trace something like that —maybe. But you have to understand, most providers don’t keep any logs of chats at all. Privacy is a huge issue, and you can’t be competitive if you’re not providing it. Many providers who have instant-messaging services, for example, have option settings for full encryption, and these days, full usually means full, as in government grade.”

“But we can wiretap if we need to, right?” Alan asks.

“Not necessarily. There are two different services out right now in the instant-messaging arena that are essentially impossible to, quote, ‘wiretap.’ They use a combination of encryption and peer-to-peer architecture—” He waves his hands in a gesture of dismissal. “I don’t need to get too technical. Suffice it to say that in those two cases, even if the company wanted to cooperate with us, they wouldn’t be able to.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Those two are the most popular.”

He nods. “Anonymity is everything. Most of it isn’t illicit. People just like their privacy. They want to talk and not worry about Big Brother—us—listening in on them. The problem is, the pedophiles and terrorists support it too.”

“What about before the Internet?” James says.

Leo shrugs. “Not my area, sorry. But he could have been using the Net for a long time, anyway. Chat rooms have been around for a while, and BBS’s—electronic bulletin board systems—were already popular in the late seventies. He could have been operating on a primitive version of what we’re talking about for the last twenty-five years if he was really tech-savvy. A little longer, even.”