Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

“I’m starting to understand,” James says. “This site is built on a set of dichotomies. Brother Talk is more philosophic. It involves in-depth discussions on the subject of masculinity, as opposed to Bitch Talk, which is more of a full frontal assault on women and feminism in general.”

“That’s a pretty accurate summation,” Leo agrees.

“I can see how that would help our perp,” I say. “He’s not interested in posts like the one we just read. He doesn’t want the grief; he’s looking for the hate.”

When it comes to the relationships between men and women, it always seems to be the extremes that rule: love or hate, no in between.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with the war of the sexes for most of my life. I was raised by a father who treated me less as a female and more as a human being. My father was a dreamer, a man who’d tilt his head up in wonder to search for the blue sky peeking between the tree leaves. He appreciated simplicities, the small things, and he tried his best to transfer this understanding to me.

My mother was the one who loved the dreamer but kept her head out of the clouds. She anchored him to the ground with a mix of love and anger so that he didn’t float away. The problem with Icarus men is that they forget the sun can burn, that even if they manage to escape the earth’s atmosphere, space is cold and dark and deadly.

I landed in between the two of them. I have my mother’s anger, but I’m capable of my father’s wonder, and the truth is, when I think of my parents, I see myself more through my father’s eyes than my mom’s. His eyes said one thing to me: You can be anything you want, and I’ll love you.

He let me shoot guns at eight, even though he hated them himself. He didn’t bat an eye when I told him, during high school, that I planned a career in law enforcement.

The men in my life, those successors of my father, have all been good men, not intimidated by my dreams but loving me for them instead. We’ve used our strengths to fill in for the other’s weaknesses, and not because we were trying to prove something. I don’t cook, because I never learned, not because I’m trying to make a statement about women’s duties in the home. When Matt and I were married, I cleaned the toilets, not because it was “my job” but because Matt begged me to. Cleaning toilets truly grossed him out; I had no problem with it. It was a love thing, not a man-woman thing.

Still, I haven’t been immune. I wasn’t just a woman when I joined the FBI, I was a woman-child, and physically small. This made me a target to some.

The most significant encounter was with an old-timer by the name of Frank Robinson. He was over fifty years old and had been with the Bureau since he was my age. I was assisting on a case in an administrative capacity, and Frank was either second or third in command.

At one point after a briefing, I found myself alone in the conference room with him. I was gathering up papers and putting them into folders. Frank was sitting in his chair, leaning back, chewing on the cap of his pen while eyeing me thoughtfully.

I tried to ignore it, but he kept staring, so I stopped what I was doing and confronted him.

“Do you need something, sir?” I asked.

He smiled, and I saw the shades of ugliness there. The hints of a leer. “I was just remembering why I never liked having young female agents in the Bureau.”

“Why is that?”

He stood up, downed the last bit of coffee in his Styrofoam cup, and let the leer fly. “It’s distracting. Always wondering the same questions. Satin or lace? Natural or shaved? Big clit or little?” He licked his lips and the next words were practically a purr. “And the most important question of all: Does she swallow?”

I remember how shocked I felt in that moment. How violated. He wasn’t touching me, but he was. His hands were all over me, even though they were hanging there at his sides. I felt myself blushing and hated my face for the betrayal. In the midst of it all, his eyes, drinking my reactions down.

Everything I’d dealt with up to that point had been essentially harmless. Less harassment than hazing, testing me to see what I was made of. I’d push back hard, give as good as I got, and that would be the end of it. 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.

It’s the work of a distracted man.

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.

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.”