Abandoned

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Attention, everyone,” I say. “Before we go any further, I have an announcement to make.”

“Do tell,” Callie says.

Alan puts down his pen and waits. James gives me a sour glance and continues working.

“Tommy and I got married.”

Alan’s eyes widen. “God damn!” he says, laughing. “That’s great! When?”

“We did it in Hawaii.”

“And just how long were you going to keep this a secret?” Callie asks, her tone and expression severe. “Just until now.”

“I’m displeased,” Callie says. “Very displeased. You’ve cheated me. Us.”

“How exactly did I cheat you?”

She looks heavenward, a prayer for patience with fools. “Do you not remember my wedding?” she asks. “Picking out dresses, flowers, a cake, a ceremony? Don’t you think we’d enjoy doing something like that for you?”

“Maybe. I guess.”

“No. No maybe.” She shakes a finger at me. “It’s a fact.”

“After all,” Alan snorts, “look how great your wedding turned out.”

“Keep quiet,” Callie orders him. She turns back to me. “You need to have a real wedding.”

I shrink, dismayed. “What? Why?”

“Because that’s the way these things are done,” she says, her voice frosty. “We don’t gallivant around, slipping rings onto each other’s fingers and getting some civil servant to sign a paper, and call that ‘married.’ It’s not right.”

“Love is just a chemical reaction designed to encourage propagation of the species,” James declares, without looking up from what he’s doing. “Weddings are a colossal waste of money.”

“Really?” Callie says. “If it’s all about propagation of the species, then how do you explain homosexuality, honey-love? Those of you who wear the ruby slippers?”

He shrugs, continuing to work, not missing a beat. “I don’t know. My theory is that it’s a chemical imbalance or some kind of genetic abnormality.”

Callie says nothing to this. Alan and I stare at him.

Is that what he thinks about himself? That he’s defective?

James senses our attention. “Oh, are you all feeling sorry for me now? Worried about my self-image? Don’t be. I have a lot of value to the species. It’s just not in the baby-making area.”

“This is all very uplifting,” I say, “and I appreciate the offer, Callie, but it’ll have to wait.”

She points a stern finger at me. “This isn’t over.” Now she smiles. “Having said that, and now that you’re properly chastised: congratulations. It’s about time he made an honest woman out of you.”

“No kidding,” Alan says. “Congratulations.”

“Yes, yay, wonderful,” James says, exasperated. “Let’s get back to work.”

For once, James and I agree on something. “Alan, did you talk to Leo?”

The door to the office opens before he can answer, and Leo walks in. “He’s going to tell you he has all the information from Hollister’s computer,” Alan tells me.

“LAPD CCU did a good job,” Leo affirms. “They scoured his hard drive and were able to resurrect quite a bit of data. People make the mistake of thinking a simple delete means the file’s gone.”

“So?” I ask.

He points to the computer at Alan’s desk. “May I?”

He sits down, connects to the Internet, and opens a browser. He types in a URL: http://www.beamanagain.com.

“This is the website Douglas Hollister spent the most time on.”

“Beamanagain?” Alan says. “What the hell is that?”

“You have to separate the words,” Leo explains. “Be a man again.”

The layout of the site is simple, not graphics-rich. A menu of options is listed on the left side. I read them aloud.

“Forum. Bitch Stories. Brother Stories. Bitch Photos. Bitch Chat. Brother Chat. Books. Wow.”

“I spent some time looking through this already,” Leo says. “The site is built around a pretty simple philosophy: American men are being emasculated by American women and the radical feminist movement. It says that American women have, over time, been changed by the feminist movement into narcissists and ballbusters—their words, not mine—and that American men have bought into this and accepted the idea that they are fundamentally bad. They call it the brute paradigm.”

“Which is?” I ask.

“Essentially that men are brutes. They’re genetically programmed to be brutes, and they can’t be trusted to be masculine men because masculine men rape and subjugate women.”

I scan the menu. “Let’s see the photos first.”

He clicks that option and a new page loads, filled with thumbnails.

“From what I could tell, there are basically two reasons photographs are posted here,” Leo explains. “One is simply to put a face to a story.”

“This is her, the bitch that ruined my life,” Callie fills in.

“Exactly. Then there’s a whole other kind of photo, and it dovetails with another point that gets brought up on this site a lot: the idea that American women let themselves go.”

“As in …what?” I ask. “They get fat?”

“Get fat, wear sweatpants to the grocery store, et cetera. It’s generally image oriented and ties into the later complaints about withholding sex as a weapon.”

“You seem very well informed for someone who’s been studying this subject for only a morning,” Callie observes.

“I’m a quick learner,” he says, undaunted. “Anyway, the guys on this website lose their credibility early.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Too much anger, which becomes hate in a lot of instances. If you have a thesis, it should be provable on its own merits. The guys posting here don’t make a good argument for men. They end up perpetuating the stereotype they’re protesting.”

“Show us some examples of what you’re talking about with the photos,” I tell him.

“Ummm … here.”

He clicks on a thumbnail of a woman with a large, round face. A page loads, and it’s a series of three pictures. One is of the woman in a grocery store. She looks like she’s having a rough day; she’s wearing sweats, and her hair is barely brushed. She seems tired. She’s overweight but not obese. The next is a more professional photograph. The woman is smiling. She’s made up in this photo, and her hair is styled. The last is the most unflattering. She’s lying on her back in bed, sleeping. Her mouth hangs open. Her right arm is thrown to one side.

Underneath the photos is a paragraph. It reads:

“When I married this bitch twelve years ago, she was hot. Skinny, took care of herself, and was into everything in bed. We’d fuck ’til the sun came up some nights. Three years in, we had our son, and that was the end of happiness. She let herself get fat, she quit work to take care of the kid, and, worst of all, she became a whining narcissist. Sometimes I watch her sleep or eat and it’s all I can do to keep from puking. I’ve asked for a divorce, and in true bitch form, she let me know that she’s going to take me to the cleaners.

“Pretty angry,” Alan murmurs. “Let’s see another.”

Leo clicks the photo of a smiling blonde woman. The page loads. The woman is in a bikini bathing suit, standing on a beach. The sun is out, and she’s laughing. She’s in her early twenties, effortlessly beautiful, endlessly happy.

The paragraph under her photograph begins:

Inside every hot American woman is a harpy waiting to be let out. Sally and I have been together for fifteen years, married for ten of those. In the beginning, we had a great time together. I’d go so far as to say that everything was perfect. We traveled the world together, backpacked through Europe, smoked hash in Amsterdam. She was always up for adventure, and the sex was great—she was smoking hot in her twenties, and she doesn’t look too bad now. Then we finished college and got married and settled into life. She started watching feminist sitcoms that degrade men and quote empower women unquote (all that “you’ve come a long way, baby” bullshit). The changes were slow and subtle, but what it boiled down to is that she started treating me like the enemy. We fight all the time now, and we haven’t slept together in years. She accuses me of cheating constantly—even though I haven’t. When I try to defend myself, she attacks me and says that I’m full of shit, all men are scum who cheat, etc. Sometimes she cries for no reason, and it will last for days; other times she can get so rageful that it literally scares me. One time she grabbed a kitchen knife while we were fighting. I’ve tried to be the good guy again and again. I’ve tried to talk to her, but when I ask her what’s wrong, she just tells me I’m a “fucking man and would never understand what’s going on with her.” I’ve had it, and I’m going to ask for a divorce.

“Sad story,” Callie says. “Too bad he hasn’t sought out professional help.”

Deep, sudden changes in personality always have root causes. The woman this man is writing about could be bipolar and it’s just now manifesting, or she might have experienced a trauma in her life that she hasn’t revealed to him, such as a rape or an abortion or some other personal loss of magnitude. Perhaps she’s remembered something from her past that’s come back to haunt her. There’s always the possibility, of course, that he’s leaving out details and that he’s the source of her trauma.

Assuming his account is factual, this is the story of a woman in crisis, not a woman out to “destroy men.” Callie’s right. It’s tragic.

“That’s actually a fairly nice one,” Leo says. “Most of them are like the first: bitch this, bitch that, she got fat, she won’t have sex anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Bitch Stories on the menu takes you to more and much longer versions of the same.”

“We get the idea,” I say. “Let’s look at the forums.”

He navigates to the forum index page. There are three different forums to choose from: General Discussion, Man Talk, and Bitch Talk.

“I think we get the idea on Bitch Talk,” I say. “Let’s take a look at Man Talk.”

Leo clicks and the forum opens. A list of thread subjects appears. I scan them and see one called Reclaiming the Right to be a Man. “That one,” I say. The page loads.

Men today are marginalized without even knowing it. They have come to accept that they are “the brute,” “the abuser,” “the rapist,” and worse, that these qualities are inevitable and can be reversed only by women. We accept today that we do not hold the keys to our inner selves, that it is the wife or girlfriend who holds the key, and that we must listen to her as our most important teacher.

That men have been brutish in history cannot be disputed. That women have been treated poorly by men, even oppressed, cannot be disputed. But this has gone beyond a dialogue about aberrant behavior; it has instead become the accepted indictment of all men everywhere. John Bobbitt is the image held up, not Leonardo da Vinci. Ted Bundy is the example of “the lows that men can sink to;” Beethoven is not similarly held up as the “heights that men can rise to.”

Because we love our mothers, we have come to accept this image and the inherent guilt that goes with it. There are men who have never touched a woman in anger that live in fear of the possibility they might.

So let’s discuss—what are some things we can do to reverse this process in ourselves? How can we reclaim not our brutishness but our masculinity, which—current opinion aside—does not contain brutality by default as its birthright?

“This is a long thread,” Leo observes. “This first post, the one that starts the thread, is two years old. There are almost two hundred pages of replies and discussion.”

I scan down through some of those that most immediately followed this post.

One reads:

It’s hard for me to admit this, but I read your post and I cried. It was pretty unexpected. See, I’m a decent guy. I was married for ten years, and I have two children, a boy and a girl. I love them to death and I really work to be a good father. I never cheated on my wife. Yeah, I know, a lot of guys say that, but it’s really true. I had my temptations, but I never felt the pull strongly enough to actually stray.

My marriage fell apart about two years ago. I see a lot of guys on this site are pretty angry, but that’s not my scene. We fucked up the marriage mutually, and the real basis of it is that we should never have married in the first place. We weren’t marrying each other because it was what we most wanted. We married each other because it seemed like a good match. It “looked right.”

To make a long story short, I read your post and I cried because I realized the basis of making that decision was exactly what you wrote about. Cheryl was a good woman, and I needed a good woman in order to be a good man. God, what heartache I could have saved us both.

“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.”

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.

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 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:

God, sometimes I hate my ex-wife. I wish she’d just fuck off and die.

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

Another man writes:

Feminists have all but destroyed the culture of manhood. We need to reclaim our right to be men, and fuck the women who disagree.

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.”

I lie awake sometimes in my bed at night thinking about her. About what she did to me. She fucked my best friend. She filed for divorce and got custody of my kids. She took my house and half my income. I live in an apartment, and I go to work every day, and I’m angry. I come home and eat alone, and I’m angry. But at night? When I’m in my bed and thinking about her? Sometimes I close my eyes and pray to God, or wish to the wishing genie, that she’d have a stroke, right now, or crawl into a bathtub and slit her wrists, or have a heart attack. I wish her dead. I actually lie there and try to will it to happen.

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

God took a shit, and there was a woman. Sows, every one of them. The sow who took my son from me, I watch her from my car after work every night. I sit outside, parked, and watch that bitch.

“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.”

“Good, that’s good,” Alan says. “That’s exactly what you’re going to use for your cover. You are a newly divorced, disillusioned twenty-eight-year-old.”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Right, twenty-nine-year-old with a baby face, got it,” Alan teases. “You were raised by a solid, dependable father and an alcoholic mother.”

“Who physically abused you,” I interject.

“My mother never abused me.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but here is where the narrative veers away from the truth and into the profile we need. Your mother abused you physically. She did it when your father was not around, and you hid it from your father.”

“Why did I hide it?”

“Because you were trying to keep the family together. You still loved your mother, and your father had said, many times, that if things got much worse, he was going to divorce your mom.”

Leo’s face reddens. He looks away.

“Hit a nerve there?” Alan asks.

He seems to shake himself. “Dad always called Mom ‘a woman of trouble and fire.’”

“What did he mean by that?” I ask.

“It meant that she was full of life, and full of trouble, both, together.” He bites his lower lip, pensive. “I remember one Saturday, I woke up and Mom was sober. I guess I was about twelve. I walked into the kitchen and she was awake, not hungover, and she’d made me breakfast. A great breakfast. Pancakes and bacon and fresh squeezed orange juice. I’d never had fresh squeezed orange juice until that morning. I remember drinking it and thinking it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

“After breakfast, Mom asked me, out of the blue: Leo, do you know how to dance? I didn’t, of course. I was pretty geeky, and I told her as much. She grabbed my hand and took me into the living room. It’s never too late to learn! she laughed.” He pauses, remembering. “Mom had a great laugh. Anyway. She put on one of my CDs, and we spent the afternoon dancing. Dad was on a double shift, so we were all alone.” He picks at the knee of his pants, glum. “I wasn’t a great dancer by the end of it, but I’ve danced ever since. Mom started drinking around dinnertime. She was angry by six, crying by seven, and blitzed by eight. Fresh squeezed orange juice and dance lessons, followed by vodka and puking and tears, all in the same day. Trouble and fire.”

“You need to tell that exact story when you’re on that site,” Alan says. “It’s real, son. So it’ll ring true.”

“I understand.”

“The child end of things is more problematic,” I say. “We can’t pull a child into this operation.”

“I have an idea on that,” Leo offers. “Go ahead.”

“What if my ex-wife had an abortion?”

I resist the urge to put a hand to my own stomach. “Go on.”

“What if she got an abortion prior to the divorce to avoid child-custody issues?”

Alan whistles. “Yeah, that could generate some hate.”

“It could tie in with my whole story,” Leo continues, picking up speed as his certainty increases. “My dream was to raise my own child in a good home, with a stable mother and father. She destroyed all of that.”

“It’s a good stressor,” I agree.

“Just the kind of thing to bring a young man out of despair and into a nice, simmering rage,” Alan says. He claps Leo on the shoulder again. “Good work, son. You’re a natural.”

We spend another hour working out the details. A good cover is not so much about the big picture. It’s about what one of my teachers at Quantico used to describe as “moments of undeniable humanity.”

There are things you hear, he’d said, that you know are true. Moments of undeniable humanity. Like when a character in a book admits to us that he eats his boogers, or a husband fakes an orgasm, or a wife adds spit to her cheating husband’s BLT. Perfection is not empathetic. We feel intimate with other strivers and failers; we’re comforted to find that someone else also stole a dollar from Mom’s purse.

“An important aspect of undercover work,” Alan says, “maybe the most important aspect, is patience. Criminals are a suspicious bunch of people. Their first assumption is that you can’t be trusted, period. You prove otherwise by not seeming too eager, by just playing the part. You don’t do anything out of the ordinary, until you do.”

“What’s that mean?”

“People are unpredictable. Being too predictable can be suspicious. The bank manager who slinks off to put on women’s panties is more believable than the bank manager with a drinking problem.”

“Why?”

“People like drama, I guess. Point is, every now and then, you throw a curveball. Not a big one, just enough to show them, yeah, this guy’s human. A key one can be to break an appointment. If he says, Meet back in the chat tomorrow at two o’clock, you agree and then don’t show up ’til four or maybe not until the next day. When he asks why, you say, I fell asleep, or I got too depressed to move, or I went to a movie. It pisses him off, and that’s real, you see?”

“I’m starting to.”

Callie bursts into the office, carrying a stack of documents and with a young woman in tow. The woman is about the same age as Leo. She’s around five feet four, with dirty-blond hair down to her shoulders and a trim figure.

“I have what we need to get started,” Callie announces. I raise an eyebrow. “That was fast.”

“Don’t discount the power of my charm.” She drops the documents down on the desk in front of me, ignoring Alan’s snort. “Driver’s license, Social Security number, bank accounts with a minimum of money in them—you’re not a rich boy, Leo.”

“Good, that’ll make it easier to get into character.”

“Your name is Robert Long. You dabble in freelance computer consulting and are trying to break into day trading—so far unsuccessfully.”

“So I’m a quasi-loser.”

“A dreamer, honey-love, someone who walks the path less traveled. Think positively. This is your ex-wife, the ex-Mrs. Robert Long. Her real name is Marjorie Green. She just started in the financial crimes division. Her cover name is Cynthia Long, née Roberts. Being smart, as I am, I thought you could come up with a nice story about the serendipity of her maiden name being Roberts while your first name is Robert.”

“Glad to meet you, Marjorie,” I say, extending my hand.

“Thank you, Agent Barrett,” she says, shaking my offered hand. She’s looking at me a bit goggle-eyed. “I know it’s not professional of me, but I just wanted to say that I’m a huge admirer. I’ve studied your career and your cases.” She smiles shyly. “I’m not a stalker, just a fan.”

“Well, thanks. I appreciate you taking part in our operation. Has Callie briefed you?”

“To a degree.”

Marjorie Green is one of those subtle women, the ones I secretly tend to envy the most. She looks younger than she probably is, but she radiates a mix of unselfconscious assurance and lack of ego, an air of quiet, unprepossessing confidence.

“We’ll fill you in. Let me introduce you to the others.”

Everyone is welcoming and friendly, except for James.

“We have a house,” Callie continues, when the introductions are complete. “Both the title and the mortgage will be in place by tomorrow morning, held in the names of Robert and Cynthia Long. I went with leaving a fair amount of equity in the home.”

“How much?” Alan asks.

“More than a hundred thousand.”

“Good. It’ll give credibility to Robert Long’s need to get the wife out of the way.”

“Nothing makes more sense when it comes to murder than money,” Callie agrees. “They both have a good credit rating to go with the Social Security number, and there are credit cards with minor balances on them for both. Use them sparingly and make sure you keep all your receipts.”

“I assume you have a place for Leo too?” I ask.

“Of course. Being the slighted young man, he’s in a so-so two-bedroom apartment. All utilities, including Internet and the rest, will be activated tomorrow. Ah, and a joint life-insurance policy as well. Five hundred thousand dollars on each of you.”

I shake my head in amazement. “Jesus, Callie. How’d you manage to get all of this done so fast? This normally takes at least a week.”

“I am owed many favors by many people. And I have my numerous male fans, of course.”

“Puh-leeeze,” Alan says, rolling his eyes. Marjorie watches it all, bemused.

“Additionally,” Callie says, pinning Alan with a scowl, “I told them it could count as a belated wedding gift. It’s called incentive.”

“However it occurred, good job.”

“Thank you.”

“When are we going to start?” Marjorie asks.

It’s a good question, and I give it careful consideration. As Alan had said, the bugbear of a good undercover operation is a lack of patience. There are probably a number of women out there, locked away in dark rooms, losing their minds and picking their skin until it bleeds. He’d warned us about coming after him, and we need to ensure that our actions do not endanger any living victims.

“Tomorrow,” I decide. I look at Alan and Leo and Marjorie. “That work for you?”

“It works great for me,” Marjorie says, obviously excited about her first undercover experience.

Leo and Alan both nod, resigned to their fate.

I give Leo and Marjorie my full attention. “You have to operate on the assumption that you’re being watched, every day. When you’re on this assignment, you’re not allowed to call family, wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, anyone. Success depends on assuming the identities we’re developing for you.” I pause to give weight to what I’m about to say next. “The consequences of having your cover blown go further than your own safety. We’re operating on the assumption that his threat is real, that he has other prisoners. If he thinks we’re getting too close, he could decide to kill them. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Leo says, face and voice sober.

“Yes,” Marjorie replies.

“Good. Then let’s get Marjorie up to speed and finish building your covers.”