Predator Ch 07

She'd always considered herself an anarchist, and she thought that ironic -- or she had, anyway -- once upon a time.

Anne Rutherford left Grand Island, Nebraska for Cambridge, Mass, and in a way unlike any before her. Wide-eyed and sure of herself, academically accomplished and politically naïve, she made it into Harvard on a Wadsworth scholarship, determined to make a real difference in the world. Yet she'd grown up in the Methodist Church, and had even believed some of the things she learned there, and she had been raised to become someone's wife. But it time she picked up on some of the glaring internal inconsistencies within the Good Book, and that came to her as an awakening of sorts. She began to focus her inquiries on the internal inconsistencies she found in her home, and then, soon enough, everywhere she looked -- and always through that same prism of questioning.

One of her father's oldest friends, a deacon in a nearby church, ran a hand down her skirt one Sunday after services, and when he slipped a finger inside her he played with her physical emotions for the very first time. Far from being scared, or even upset, she was curious about the feelings she experienced, and when he pulled out his penis and almost forced her to take him in her mouth she grew only more intrigued at the man's inconsistencies. He did the same thing almost every time he came over on Sunday after services, and in time she began to anticipate his various little comings and goings, looking forward to things she might learn by examining the man. And in time, she learned how to gauge his emotions, chief among them the need to control her, and then she used his errant feelings to tease him -- just a little. She began to see how easy it was to manipulate the old man, to use his lust as a weapon, and eventually, to turn it against him to her advantage -- to take a perceived strength and turn it into a weakness, to play with him, if only for her private amusement.

She began to watch people, men mostly, after that, and she began to see patterns in their behavior. She saw how men expected to be treated, and how they reacted when they weren't. Like her little brother, she thought, only in grown-up clothes. She was twelve, maybe thirteen years old when a local city councilman did the same things to her, and she let him. She led him deeper into a relationship of her own design, then she dumped him, and she regaled as she watched the man dancing on strings she alone knew about. When he pushed back, she exposed him, and she laughed inside as the police took him away -- while the world saw her tears.

And her ability to exploit men had set a pattern of sorts, when she began high school. When she had trouble with a class, when the material was just too hard to get a handle on, she went to her teachers and got all the help she needed. Men, women -- it made no difference. All had their needs, and she knew how to take care of them. She began to see herself as a chameleon, able to change color in an instant, recognize danger and adjust, quickly, to the needs of the moment. To survive. That was, by that point in time, the 'all' of her existence.

And as a result, she didn't have time for 'boys' in high school. They seemed focused on just one thing: using sex as a crude means of control, and when they couldn't control, usually because they were so clumsily arrogant, they became jealous -- and violent. One boy tried to 'make it with her' after a football game one night during her junior year, and she sensed, as she rejected him, that he was going to rape her. And the whole thing was so pathetic, she thought at the time. She simply laughed at the boy, made fun of the size of his penis, and he dissolved before her eyes -- and then disappeared. It was just that simple. Learn the mechanisms of control, then use them.

Then one Sunday a cousin asked her to come with her to a presentation.

"About what?"

"Oh, you'll see."

And so she had gone along, curious why there was a need for such secrecy.

The event was held in a conference room at a local motel, and there were a few hundred people gathered there, and then a fiery pastor of some sort came out and began to exhort the gathered about how to best live their lives. Using a skillfully woven narrative, the woman related biblical passages to current events, leaving no room at all for any other conclusion that the end was nigh, that the Second Coming was at hand, and that the only way the people in that room could avoid damnation was to reach deep down into their pockets -- and GIVE!

Despite the crudeness of the message, let alone the messenger, what struck Rutherford was the rapt adoration she felt being showered on the pastor. There was an unquestioning acceptance of everything the woman said, even though, to here, anyway, much that she heard was patently absurd. Still, it was hard not to be taken in. There was talk of love and brotherhood, and a community coming together through a shared love for the Lord, and for Jesus Christ.

After a few hours of this, there came a pause, and the pastor asked those in attendance to stand -- but only if they had taken the Lord Jesus Christ into their heart. And people stood while the woman shouted about Christ's love, about Christ's willingness to forgive, to accept -- and when the woman stopped speaking everyone in the room turned to Rutherford, for she alone had remained seated.

And she had never, not once in her life, felt so much hate in one room as she felt just then.

And then the pastor turned to her with something akin to fire in her eyes, and she pointed at Anne, called her out as an agent of Satan, and the hatred she felt in the room turned to something far more sinister. Men turned and faced her, and a man by the stage handed out canes, the pastor screamed for the assembled to strike out at Satan, to drive Him from their midst.

She stood and ran for a door, but the way was blocked -- by more men with canes -- and she turned, slipped through the converging crowd, made it to a fire escape and burst out into the night, ran all the way home -- and yet as she ran all she could think about was the woman's power, her ability to control an otherwise normal group of people, and it took years for her to get the woman's fiery eyes out of her mind.

By the time she was a first year at Harvard she knew the stakes had increased, but the game was still the same. She could still lead men around by their needs, get what she needed from them by playing along with their game, and still use them up and spit them out, move on to the next errant fool -- but she discovered something even more interesting in Boston: there were more people here, people just like her, playing the same game. And, she soon learned, the stakes grew even higher in this league, the state of play was more polished, and, not infrequently, the game was played to the death.

Her second year roommate, Julie, told her she had good legs and that she ought to wear more provocative clothing, but she simply didn't have the money for that, or so she explained. "That isn't a problem," Julie explained, and she put forth a solution. They went to an underground club that next Friday, and Julie explained Anne's problem to an older gentleman, and he said he'd be more than happy to help Anne out.

And he had been, too.

He picked her up the next morning, in a limousine, no less, and had spent the day with her. They visited the trendiest boutiques on Newbury Street, and some of the lesser known but no less trendy fetish shops on the other side of the night, then he took her to get her hair done. She had her first manicure, and a pedicure too, and by the time Saturday night rolled around she was, in his estimation, anyway, ready.

And he came by her dormitory at nine that night, in the limo again, and took her to a club "not very many people know about." There were lot's of limos dropping off people in an underground garage downtown, and these people were dressed, by and large, in black leather, and they carried bags in with them. They dressed inside, dressed in outlandish costumes, and they wore props like she had seen in some of the seedier shops earlier that afternoon. She saw her roommate then, with a short whip in hand, and a phallus strapped around her waist, working over a man, while another woman was doing her level best to suffocate the poor chap with her vagina.

Her escort, the old man, seemed to understand this was Anne's first exposure to such proceedings, but he proved a gentle teacher. He was, he explained, a top, or a master, but that, obviously, not all men were tops, and as he led her from scene to scene he explained the roles on display, what he called the transfers of power, who was doing what, and, presumably, why. And the why was suddenly of great interest to Anne, for she was seeing a new, much larger vista into the inner workings of power and control that women, in particular, exerted over men, and as suddenly she knew she wanted to be a top, too.

Yet she could feel her escort's growing lust -- for her -- and she intuitively understood that she would have to play with him -- on his terms. But rather that wait for him to take charge, she stopped at one point and held out her hands, wrists together, and she said four words that forever changed her life.

"Please, Master? Teach me?"

He had taken her to a room that night, and with several other women to assist him -- his women, she learned -- she was taken in, indoctrinated, and she became his plaything, for a while. Until, a few months later, she felt him falling in love with her. Then, and only when she was sure he was under her control, she turned the tables on him. She asserted control the next weekend at the club, she wielded the whip, wore the phallus, and she began to bend him first to her need, then to needs of his own he had long repressed.

She knew by then, of course, that he was an immensely wealthy and powerful man. He walked the corridors of power in Washington as easily as he helmed his schooner off the Vineyard; he had a jet, of course, and took her places on weekends, and she knew enough by then to not ask about his wife. He took her skiing in Austria and fishing on Scottish rivers, became her tutor, her mentor, advising which classes she should take at school, helping her some nights with her studies, and as his was an able mind she listened, and learned, about his world. When they went to the club he taught her even more, more about the inner dynamics she observed, the tormented inner psyches, the hidden impulses on open, and sudden display. There was no act depraved enough, she soon learned, no personal backstory dark enough, and in the end she understood that all life revolved around power and control -- and nothing more.

She thought of all the boys in high school who had 'come on' to her, and she began to see their clumsy efforts as nothing more than the pathetic attempts of lost children. Children not open to or aware enough of their own cravings to assert control over their darkest needs, and she began to reclassify people. People who knew, who understood the nature of these needs, and people who remained clueless, children who let half-understood impulses control their lives. She began to see that very powerful people were, by and large, very tuned in to this part of their Selves, and that they were very tuned in to others on the same wavelength. Like neurons in a vast body, they were linked by this awareness -- and in time she was, too. She began to study this connection, the way it worked, and could not work absent this special 'awareness,' but once the connection was made it was like whole new worlds opened up to her.

They spent a week together on his yacht the summer after her junior year, and they sailed from Boston to Southwest Harbor, Maine. He gave her a book to read their first night out -- Rand's Atlas Shrugged -- and he told her it was an important book in Washington, but that the hidden parts of the story could be found in the heroine's extraordinary submission to men. The author had been, he claimed, a complex, introverted woman, yet a very dominant presence in the world -- until she was around a true Master. Then she had reverted to type, he said, and wanted nothing more than to be raped, to be physically consumed by the real Master, the World Historical Figure, the real men who moved about world creating massive societal change. She would have to be, he told her, willing to bow before these real men in her quest for power, or in her ascent they would crush her -- if only in their sport.

Then one evening he had asked, and seriously, too, if she would like to get married -- to him.

"Why?" she asked. "Do you love me?"

"You are the only person I've ever loved. I was born to love you."

"I don't feel that way about you."

"Oh, I understand that."

"Then why?"

"Because I want to help you achieve your dreams."

And so she married him, and he guided her through the ins-and-outs of Washington until one day he was gone. She was surprised how much his passing hurt, but by then she had grown immune to such things. She in fact viewed herself now as a shark, cruising reefs in solitude, feeding when necessary, but most of all enjoying the feeling of immense, unquestioned power. She was a predator, she knew, consuming anyone and everything that got in her way, and she moved up the career ladder at FBI headquarters with patient, monotonous regularity.

She was a good cop, and she was good because she understood the repressed sexual dynamics that seemed to drive the human mind. And criminals were, after all, human beings -- of a sort, anyway. The sort who had little control over such things, just the type she most loved to crush.

+++++

Over the years, one other fact of life emerged in Anne Rutherford's world that seemed to edge out all other concerns, and that was the continuing social injustice women faced in society. The fact bothered her intellectually, and from a distance, for as a career law enforcement officer many such facts of life had been eased by federal regulation. Such things as unequal pay and sexual harassment no longer 'obvious' issues in the workplace, but of more importance, in her capacity as a law enforcement officer she ran into the real savagery such inequality visited upon women and children, and on an almost daily basis.

And she learned two things very quickly in her first years on the street.

The first was that there appeared to be real predators out there, predators whose crimes were not simple, accidental encounters. Their crimes were nothing less than the pre-meditated savagery of men who preyed on weak women, and who most often did so to exert control over a powerless, terrified victim. The second: that there were men in law enforcement who simply saw this predation as a part of the natural order of things, and as such, these crimes were rarely worth bothering with. She listened to agents toss off brutal jokes about women serially abused and murdered, jokes referencing mutilated vaginas or the emotional vagaries of PMS, and she wondered why some men thought these things funny. Perhaps because they knew so little about themselves?

Her first assignment, after completing her post-academy training at a field office in Hartford, Connecticut, had taken her into the bizarre realm of profiling, the reconstructive/predictive psychoanalysis of criminal behavior. With her academic background in sociology and psychology, this was a natural progression for her, and with her less well known sexual predilections an integral part of her deeper background, she discovered she had a real interest in this work.

She was sent to the field office in Cleveland, Ohio, when a series of disappearances gained national attention, and she began looking over the information gathered to date. The first things she noted were the victim's names, names like Anna and Hannah. Palindromes. Every victim's name was a palindrome, so instantly she knew these people had been chosen, that their disappearances were not random. So, if they weren't random, were there other unifying characteristics?

After she posited her 'palindrome insight' with the SAC, or Special Agent in Charge, she found that men in the office tended to avoid her, but soon other women in the office took a more serious interest in her work, and her methodology; soon these women started working the area with her for clues, then developing ideas with her, helping her re-interview victim families, for instance, then charting the results on maps of the city, then Cuyahoga County. When all this information was collated, like the spokes on a wheel the abductions seemed to point inward to a small area in an older suburb called Brook Park. And all the victims belonged to Methodist churches, which rocked Anne's personal world, if only a little, but perhaps her involvement became a little more personal after that.

She and her little crew of female agents visited churches in the area, developed lists of names, then cross-checked their names with other lists of known and suspected sexual predators, and they began to focus on a handful of homes in the area.

One afternoon she began watching a man who lived alone in a small house on Holland Road, and she followed him to the airport. He pulled into a parking garage but remained in his van, and an hour later he left -- without once getting out or doing much of anything -- except to look at two women through binoculars.

She knew then that she had found their man.

So she returned to the field office and swore out an affidavit for a search warrant and took it down to the courthouse. And it was denied. No probable cause, the judge said. Not enough to warrant such an intrusion, anyway. Get more solid information, he told her, "and don't come back until you do, little lady."

So she joined up with another female agent and they sat up on the man's house, watched him for days.

And nothing happened.

He went to off work in the morning, invariably stopped off for dinner on his way home in the evening, then he went inside his home for the evening -- and that was that. But then one evening he returned to the airport in his van, and he parked next to a new Chevy, and they parked almost out of sight and watched as he moved around inside the van. They waited for hours, then looked on as a flight attendant walked up to the back of the Chevy and put her bag in the trunk, then moved around to get in the car -- and when the van's side door slid open the man reached for the woman, grabbed her by the throat and put a hooded-cloth over her face, then pulled her inside the van. By the time he had sedated the woman, Rutherford and her partner had pulled their Explorer behind the van, blocking his escape, and moments later they had him on the ground, in handcuffs. Dozens of units converged on the scene after that, and the man was taken away to be interrogated, leaving Rutherford and a handful of other agents free to search the man's house.

They found an ordinary enough home on the main floor, and a carnival or horror in the basement. Tables where women had been tied down and dissected, a butcher's counter where the bodies had been further reduced, and vats of acid where their remains had been discarded. There were still bones in those vats, and teeth, and in the end Rutherford accounted for nineteen women who had passed through the man's carnival of horror. Nineteen lives snuffed out by savage need, a need to control, an all-consuming need to instill fear, a need to torture.

Then they found the video recordings.

Of each victim's last hours among the living, of the man's twisted love for these women. For he had indeed loved them, indeed, he worshipped them, intoned Godly incantations while he kissed them and fingered them, went into fervent prayer as he slit their wrists. He drank their blood, eventually bathed in each victim's blood, recreating a bizarre, almost medieval ritual after each murder. She saw patterns of obsessive-compulsive behavior in his rituals, and she knew these usually formed in childhood so she reached out and revisited the man's past, reconstructing the elements within his upbringing that had helped shape and inform his extreme needs.