"That isn't good enough." A steady dribble of snot and tears run from the holes in his face. His blue eyes are watery and blood shot, full of fear and self concern. They say psychopaths can't feel pain or sympathy, but I think that's a lie. They can certainly feel it for themselves. And this bodily display of pain and fear, animal like, primitive, is certainly real enough. I suppose it should calm me, this son of a bitch being brought right down to begging level. Frightened. Alone. No longer planning attacks and congratulating himself on his own cunning. But it doesn't. It just makes me angrier. The fact that he expects mercy makes me angry.
"I will ask you again," and I pull his short hair in my fingers and yank his head back. "What did you do with her?"
"I didn't do… I wouldn't," he whispers.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a morally upstanding citizen. You don't think of little girls that way. Only a monster would do that. I know. You told me. Now tell me the truth. Because I'm not getting any more patient but I can keep going all night. Should I do a little more softening up?" I get into his face and scream full pelt, "Nothing would make me happier."
Oh I do hate child rapists. And I don't feel conflicted about their nasty childhoods or their warped impulses or that society has forsaken them because I just plain hate them. Maybe it isn't a cockroaches fault it is a disgusting scuttling parasite, maybe evolution made it that way, but it is still repulsive.
"Come on, Richard, what did you do? You raped her, didn't you? Had your way with her. You liked her soft skin, her hairlessness. Her innocent eyes. She was just so… tasty."
I look into his eyes. He breathes fast and says, "No, I…"
"Deny it," I say, "who are you talking to? Me? God? What's the point, Rick? Do you think I will report you to the police?"
He screamed for a couple hours, old Rick, vigorous enthusiastic child rapist who tried to break his bonds. But my tying techniques held, and here he still sits, waiting to receive his punishment. Oh, Richard, tell me so we can both get this over with. You slimy, stupid, son of a bitch, how much time do you think I'll waste indulging your watery lies?
"I touched her," he admits.
"Continue."
"You're right she was… Seductive. She smiled at me. When she was in class. She would smile at me whenever she caught a ball or finished a drill. She was so beautiful."
"Why her? You coach girls basketball. Plenty of other seven year olds to choose from."
"She was special. She liked me."
"And she wanted you to fuck her?"
"No."
"But you wanted to fuck her, right? You thought about it? Did you get hard during training, have to cover yourself up with the clipboard?" I laugh dryly.
"No, I have learned to control it, when-"
"What do you do?" I ask, "think about an adult woman with hair and hips and all that yucky stuff?" I laugh again.
He flinches. "No, I have, strategies though. I just think about stuff that's, boring."
"No, you don't… What do you really think about to keep you from getting too stimulated?"
He swallows. "I think about getting my penis chopped off."
"I'm glad you're being honest. Mommy threaten to chop it off when you were a kid?"
"No. But my neighbor did, when she caught me, watching her kids swimming naked in their back yard pool, over the fence."
"Start young did you?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"Seventeen."
He's being awfully cooperative. Probably thinks that if he's just honest everything will be alright. I'll have to have mercy on him and let him go because that's what good non predatory people do. But he doesn't know who I am.
"And what did you do? Who was your first?"
"Her name was Eliza. She was six. I grabbed her, she was walking home from school. She lived a few doors up from me. I touched her. I let her go. I felt so scared that I would get caught afterwards. She told her parents but they didn't believe her. Thought she was making stories up. A man who dragged her into the bushes. I got away with it."
"Lucky you. Funny how people think kids are any more likely to make stories up than adults."
"Yes," he agrees, nervously, looking at the door once again.
"This is my place, and it was chosen carefully. No one will come for you. No one will hear you. I am all you have now, Rick."
I stroke his cheek. Maybe the baby rapist was an innocent victim once, but whatever made him this way, is irreversible. Treatment is notoriously unsuccessful and recidivism rates for rapists are between 80 and 95 percent. You have to euthanize them. The only way to stop the cycle is to save the little children while they're innocent. Save them from their parents, the people that should love them the most. When people say the word pedophile they think of strange men who stand around in trench coats waiting to flash children or grab them and stick them in white vans. Nobody thinks 'Daddy' when they think 'pedophile', or Mommy who tucks the kid in at night and takes them to the doctor when they're sick and wipes their nose and gives them icy poles. The facts are there, but it's just so hard to stomach that a parent would fuck their child, beat their offspring and generally destroy their helpless, loving infant who looks to them for survival, love and attention. This child will forgive so many offenses, so many beatings, and still reach up their little arms. That parents would destroy this vulnerable, precious, child. It's unthinkable. And totally incomprehensible. If you think of the human race as generally a compassionate one, brimming with the milk of human kindness. It's easy to think of these people as simple aberrations. But if you don't believe in a milk sop Jesus and the goodness of people, it starts to make a lot more sense. Even God was a sociopath, the God from the first testament. Before he was edited. He was jealous and mean and sadistic. He told parents not to spare the rod. Child beating was considered positively ethical. And lots of happy yokels think it still is. Most people think humans are fundamentally good, but it's just as possible they are fundamentally weak, evil, egotistical and self gratifying. What if the good people are the aberrations? Almost everyone considers themselves a morally upstanding, sensible, compassionate human being who mostly makes the right decision. The people that are most sure of this fact, like to shoot up abortion clinics and murder gays. They like flying planes into towers. Most people lack self awareness. They are stuck inside their own little box where everyone is out to attack their beliefs that are so right it's just that everybody else hasn't realized. When they are being cruel, stupid and arrogant, most people don't think, I'm being a nasty moron, but I'll do it anyway. Judges that sentenced women who killed their abusive, homicidal husbands to life thought they were doing the right thing. They just never bothered to think about why. There are two categories of dangerous, unethical people. The kind who know they are monsters, and the kind who don't. Which do you think is more dangerous?
Back to Richard. He knows what he does is wrong but he can't stop. He knows it's wrong because he covers it up. I disagree with the legal definition of insanity. And I think, I think this about serial killers, he knows society thinks it's wrong, but does he?
"What happened?" I don't threaten now. I gently tug at the threads of feeling until he comes undone, and tells me everything. Finds it cathartic. Likes reliving the experience. I don't care. I just want to know what happened.
"I don't want to tell you. It's not me, it's something inside me. It's dark, I can't…"
"We can deal with your demons later." You can, Rick, when I send you to whatever the fuck happens to rapists after they die.
"Promise, to let me go?"
"It will be OK, just accept the Lord Jesus as your Personal Saviour. He will let you repent and forgive you and kiss your sweaty brow and all that. And you'll go to Heaven, a land full of little girls and they all want sex, so their parents never try to protect them. They sit around licking ice cream cones in their underwear and they smile all the time. They're just sitting there, for whenever you want them." Heaven is your ultimate fantasy, right? Always wanted to eat like a heffer but be a size six? Always wanted to fuck a movie star? We've got everything on offer, why do people always assume Heaven has to be sanitary? I haven't really made my mind up about Hell and Heaven and God and everlasting life, but I think it's an interesting story, a fascinating literary achievement.
"Tell me," I growl, "what did you do with Charlotte Adams? You stupid, fucking coward. Don't close up on me now."
"I want,"
"You already got what you wanted. What about what I want?"
I pick up the knife again and he starts to whimper. He's already admitted too much to deny so now he's trying to bargain with the only valuable thing he has, information about Charlotte's last days.
I cut deeply on his left upper arm where the skin is soft and white and he screams and it irritates me. As if his pain matters. As if he deserves mercy. This torture is purely necessary. I don't get sexual satisfaction out of it and this point any pleasure attached to the act is gone. I am exasperated. I am dehydrated. I want to go home and take a shower. I have work in the morning.
"Please… Let us, work something out."
"Because I seem like such a reasonable person?"
"You're just, you know. You're doing the right thing. Trying to save her. I know."
"Trying to save her? You're not serious? She's dead. I know that much. I just want to know how. And where you put her."
"Please, I…" He starts to cry again.
"Oh, come on."
Should I tell him I'll let him go? Would it be unethical to lie to a rapist? I hate lying. I wouldn't call myself a good person but I hate to lie.
"I won't let you go. There's no where for you to go. You and I both know what you'll do if I let you. You'll go on eating and breathing and shitting and killing little girls. And sure, you think your life is important, but it's really just an illusion. There's a strong biological urge in each one of us to survive. But that's all it is. The necessity of reproducing the species. The way a worm moves around a little after you cut it in half, or a chicken does a loop after you cut its head off. It's just a biological reflex you are feeling. All that pain and fear… that terror. It's just your body's way of keeping you alive, instilling you with that aversive response to impending death. But you can't run. And you can't fight. So your reflex is useless. You're going to die. Accept it."
He whimpers some more. "You're really going to kill me?"
"Yes."
"So why should I tell you?"
"Remember when we talked about Jesus? Consider it a practice run. I'm sure he'll like to know, and his dad too I'd venture."
"You think, I'll be saved?"
"Sure, think whatever you want to think."
"I will be forgiven in the next life?"
"Yeah. And there'll be ice cream."
"Ok. I'm ready. Her parents were late last Thursday, picking her up. I thought it was fate. I thought, maybe I would just hold her. But she was so beautiful. I sat with her in the girls change room. I helped to take her sweater off, then her shirt. She didn't suspect anything. She thought I was just helping her out. I could tell her parents hadn't even told her, that you aren't supposed to let adults touch you in that way. I slipped off her shorts. She was naked. I couldn't stop myself from touching her. She felt so good. Her soft skin. She just let me. And it would have ended there, I swear I wouldn't have done anything else. But it started, the thing inside me. He wouldn't let me let her go. So I picked up a sack, big enough to fit fifteen basketballs in, and I put her in. I took her clothes, and her bag. And she started to scream, so I put my hands around her throat and choked her. My hands, they did it…"
That explains why nobody saw her after practice. She went into the change rooms and never came out. The coach told the police he left her in there to get changed on her own while he went to pack up the equipment, and when he got back, she had mysteriously disappeared.
"I called the police, when I got to my car. I told them, someone must have taken her. And she was in the backseat, still in the sack. If anyone saw me, they'd just see me carrying a sack."
Awfully smart for someone operating powerlessly under the influence of a lusty monster urging him to kill a child.
"Go on."
"I took her home, then into the bedroom. I made love to her. When she woke up I told her where she was. I helped her to adjust. I gave her a glass of water. I felt sorry, because it was me again. I decided to take her home. But then she started asking me, questions, about why she was sore. And I realized, if this go out it would ruin me. And when she knew she wasn't going home, she started to scream, and the darkness came to me again. I bashed her head into the wall. I kept doing it until she was quiet because I hated that fucking noise! I hated that little bitch screaming about me making love to her! Why did she have to hate me?! I thought she was beautiful. We could have been together! But she wanted to tell her parents, wanted to tell everyone, what a monster I was. And I couldn't stand it, looking at her and her eyes weren't innocent any more. She hated me. I had to… Too much anger. Not me. It scares me, the dark…"
"What did you do with the body?"
"I buried her in that old lot, the one with the condemned house. I figured eventually she'd-"
"Ok."
"That's it?" He asks me.
"Yes. That's it."
I drive back to town. I put Richard in my bath tub and I leave him there while I begin to write a letter to the parents, and the police.
Hello. I know you are wondering what happened to your daughter, Charlotte. I know you are hurting because she is gone. I do not know if you ever hurt Charlotte or if you treated her perfectly. But you deserve to know what happened to her. Charlotte was murdered by her basketball instructor, Richard Ainsworth, on the evening of Thursday the 17th of December. He kidnapped her, took her to his apartment, and murdered her. He sexually assaulted her. I will not offer condolences, there will be plenty of people to tell you clichéd things like I'm sorry for your loss, and God has a plan, and all the rest. What I can offer you is the body of the man who killed your child. And you can know that I executed him without mercy after I obtained the details of your child's kidnapping. Accept my gift, and try to come to terms. Try to move on. I wish I could tell you what I wanted in return. But I am a complicated person. But for now, I feel some level of happiness.
M.