The Vengeance of Erin

Jason had started, and I had tried to respond with the vaginal responses that Tara had taught me, but something was just not right. I started crying – something that I hadn't even done when I had lost my virginity.

Jason looked at me. Realizing something was not right, he pulled out and laid down next to me. Embracing me, he just held me until we both fell asleep.

We had an appointment with my counselor, Dr. Lund, today. She asked us how the rape had affected our relationship. Jason told her about the incident with Detective Backer at the hospital. She nodded, saying that it was normal for him to be angry, emotional, and above all else, protective. Then, I told her about what had happened the night before.

"Yes," said Dr. Lund. "Again, that's normal. You still have deep emotional and mental scars. Lovemaking is an act that your mind and body probably both associate with the rape, preventing you from actually being able to follow through. It often takes weeks, even months, before a rape victim can recover to the point where they are comfortable with sex again and can actually enjoy it."

When we walked out of Dr. Lund's office, I felt very depressed. If I couldn't even have sex and enjoy it, then things were worse than I had thought. Jason promised to pick me up from class later that afternoon. He hugged me – as if he would never let go, the way he had since it had happened. Then, he left.

It was time for Form and Analysis with Dr. Mitch Cadiz. This was the class I hated most, partly because it was an absolutely horrible class, and partly because Dr. Cadiz was a horrible teacher. He thought he was just the absolute shit, and made no bones about it. When he spoke, it was almost as if slime was oozing off of his tongue. I didn't like him, and I didn't like the class.

At the end of class, as I was walking out, my friend Kara walked into the classroom to say "Hi." A former music major herself, she had just gotten out of the choir she was still in, and seeing me, walked in, and gave me a hug. As she was embracing me, Dr. Cadiz walked up.

"Ms. Benning," he oozed, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but your homework from chapter seven is two weeks overdue."

Overdue homework? I never had overdue ho-

Oh, wait a second. That's what I had been working on that night with Tara and Andrea.

"Uh, Dr. Cadiz," I started, "I'm sure you heard, but I was uh… raped a couple weeks back, and when it happened, the homework was stolen out of my purse, along with about half the contents of it."

He looked at me with a disgusted look on his face. "Uh-huh. Right. Whatever, you still need to do it. If it's not in by Friday, it's a zero."

Kara looked at him and shook her head. "Jesus Christ, Cadiz. You're a bastard. And the music department wonders why so many of your students leave the department – like I did."

With that, she turned and headed for the door. I followed suit. We were almost out the door when Kara turned around and said, "You know what, Cadiz? Why don't you go fuck yourself."

"You can't talk to me that way!" he started to reply, but she slammed the door shut on him.

And with that, for the first time since I had been raped, I started laughing. I couldn't help it – I was laughing hysterically. I had to sit down on a bench in the hallway. Kara was dying from laughter as well.

After a few minutes and more than a few odd glances, we both recovered and composed ourselves. "Damn," I said, drying my eyes. "Telling Cadiz to go fuck himself – that was one of the funniest things I've ever seen!"

The good feeling was enough to last me through dinner, but as night set in, I started becoming more and more depressed, as was the norm for this time of day. Even when Jason spontaneously did Cartman's German Dance from South Park while holding a bowl of spaghetti, I could only manage a small laugh – and that was something that usually made me lose it in laughter.

Dr. Lund was right. I had a long road ahead of me.

March 21st, 2005

I was awakened on the morning of the twenty-first by my phone ringing. I woke up, and said, "Jason, answer the phone."

I got no response, and the phone kept ringing. I said it again, and then remembered – Jason hadn't slept here the night before. Or the night before that. Or the week before that.

On March 11th, the first day of Spring Break, Jason had sat me down for a "talk."

"Look," he said. "I love you. I care about you like none other, and nothing will ever change that. I will always be here for you, as your anchor. But right now, I think it might be easier for you if I wasn't around as much. I was talking to your counselor, and she said that she thinks you've grown dependent on me, possibly because I was the first person to reach you after what happened. She says that I should spend a little time away from you, and though it will be painful at first, she thinks that over a couple weeks, the dependency will end, you'll begin to emotionally recover, and we can begin to rebuild our healthy relationship.

"I think you can do this, because you're a strong woman," he had continued. "You've shown amazing resiliency in the last month. But if it ever gets to be too much, if you can't possibly go on another minute without me, just call me, and I'll be here right away."

He was right. I had been dependent on him, and I needed to take care of that, because as long as I was dependent on him, our relationship would not have the "give and take" that it needed. So, I hadn't seen him once the last ten days, nor talked to him on the phone, although we had exchanged several e-mails.

E-mail is, well, more impersonal, he had written.I still want to know everything that's going on, but I think – and the counselor agrees – that if you actually heard my voice, it might weaken your progress, whereas e-mails are just text on a screen.

He had promised that he would take me out for a "recovery" date on March 31st, three weeks after our separation period had begun. I was counting down the days until that day, although every day I felt less like I absolutely NEEDED him to be around, and more just that I wanted him to be.

And so, when I realized that Jason wasn't in my bed, I rolled over and picked up the phone. "Hello?"

"Erin Benning?"
"Yeah."

"This is Detective Backer with the Fresno Police," the voice came over the phone. "Uh, we got the DNA test back on your attacker's semen. Unfortunately, it doesn't match with anything in the FBI database, which means that he's never committed a violent crime before – or at least, never been convicted of one. We also checked it against the databases that the Red Cross and United Blood Services have, but that came back negative as well. That's also not much of a help, unfortunately, because over half of the adult males in California have never donated blood."

"What about his blood type, though?" I asked. "You can tell that, can't you?"

"O positive," was his reply. "The most common blood type."

"Yeah," I said, "but you said that since he called me by name, he probably knew me. Doesn't that help at all? Can't you narrow it down with that?"

"Well, we could," he replied, sounding a bit uncomfortable, "but the fact of the matter is, there's probably at least 10,000 men in this town who would know your name. Since you're in the FSU Master Chorale, you've been seen at every choir concert FSU has had for the last three years, and those generally tend to average one to two thousand people in attendance. Any one of the men at any of those concerts could've seen you, and recognized you enough to call you by name."

I was crushed. If one of the goth-punk weirdos who I saw down in the art studio had been raped and called by name, the police probably would've been able to identify their attacker almost immediately – but since I was a "high-profile" figure, my chances went straight down the tubes.

I thanked Detective Backer and hung up. After a moment of just staring at my feet, I got ready for the first class of the day – Diction. With Satan, uh, Mitch Cadiz. Oh joy.

As I sat in Dr. Cadiz's class that day, I was practically falling asleep. I was doing my best to stay awake by just drawing random sets of musical notation on my notes, when suddenly Dr. Cadiz said something that brought me fully alert.

"I was having trouble with my car this morning," he was saying. "It just wouldn't start, so after the fourth frustrating try, I just said, ‘Stop fighting me, bitch!' and lo and behold, it started!"

The class politely laughed, but I felt like I had been punched in the gut.Stop fighting me, bitch! resounded in my head, in my attacker's voice. It all started flashing back – gagging on my attacker's cock, having my clothes ripped away from me, the ring hitting me in the face…

The room started spinning, and then I slipped out of my chair. Everything went black.

When I came to, Dr. Cadiz and several students were gathered around me in a circle. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Ms. Benning," Dr. Cadiz said as he lifted me to a sitting position. His left hand was supporting my head, his right hand my shoulder as he brought me upward. I looked to my right –and there it was. The ring. The ring that said "AC."

"Do you want me to call an ambulance?" he asked.

No, I want you to call the police and turn yourself in, you monstrous FUCK!I thought. But I really had no evidence. At least, I didn't have enough to make it stand up.

"Um… uh, no, that's okay," I replied. "I think I should probably go home, though," I continued.

"Alright," he said. "If you think that's best."

I just nodded, collected my stuff, and walked out the door. Zombie-like, I staggered through the halls of the music building. When I reached my car, I just collapsed in the driver's seat and began crying. How could this have happened to me? Why, God, why? Not only had I been raped by one of my instructors, but I couldn't prove it!

Then I had a flash of inspiration. With an energy I didn't think I had, I got back out of my car, quickly walked through the halls of the music building, and pushed into the office of my advisor, Dr. Rochell Harris.

Dr. Harris is the coolest woman on the planet. She's fifty, from Detroit, Michigan. Growing up African-American in the slums of Detroit, she had experienced more abuse, racially, physically, and sexually in the first fifteen years of her life, than five people would in a lifetime. But despite that, she decided to move on with her life, and try to change the lives of other people.

Now she was the director of choral studies for Fresno State. She was always willing to listen and talk to her students – and there was nothing she didn't know. If something was going on with any of the students or faculty in the school of music, she knew about it.

When I walked into her office and sat down in a chair in front of her desk, she was working on something on her computer, but immediately stopped when I walked on. "Miss Benning," she said, "are you alright? You look awful!"

Instead of replying, I just jumped right in. "What can you tell me about Mitch Cadiz?"

"Mitch Cadiz," she said. "Mitch Cadiz is a hyena. He stands aside and laughs as people are brought down, and then when they're down, he jumps in and destroys them. He's destroyed the careers of at least two instructors at this school, not to mention the lives of countless students."
"How?" I asked.

"He's a drug dealer," Dr. Harris replied. "One of the biggest cocaine dealers in Fresno. The only problem is, nobody can prove it. The police have never been able to find anything, nor have any of his customers been able to unequivocally identify him as their dealer.

"Beyond that, I think he's a sick, sick man. I don't know what's wrong with him, but there's just something there, and I think that someday he's going to snap, and it's all going to be over, because he probably owns more guns than the Fresno Police Department. And that's the story on Arthur Mitchell Cadiz."

ArthurCadiz? AC!

"Why do you ask?" Dr. Harris said.

Taking a deep breath, I voiced my suspicion. "I think he's the one who raped me," I replied.

Dr. Harris was speechless for a moment. Then, raising an eyebrow, she said, "That's a very serious allegation. Do you have anything to back it up?"

"No," I replied in frustration. "All I have is that he said something in class today that my rapist said. On top of that, he has a ring that says AC on it – my attacker had a ring that said AC on it."

"Was it the same ring?" she asked.

"I don't know," I replied. "It was practically impossible to see during the attack – it was almost pitch black. But I looked in the Fresno phonebook – there's over 5,000 men in Fresno with the initials AC. I don't even have enough for the police to force him to submit to a DNA test."

"What are you going to do?" Dr. Harris asked in a very concerned tone.

"I don't know," I replied. "I'm going to pray – pray that something will turn up that will be evidence."

"Please keep me updated," Dr. Harris said as I left. I promised her I would.

I hadn't been completely honest with her, though. I knew exactly what I was going to do – I was going to wait until I had something more, something that would make me absolutely sure that it was Mitch Cadiz – and then I was going to kill him.

"Something more" came on Wednesday, once again in Diction class. Dr. Cadiz came in wearing a Red Cross armband. When one of the students asked him why, he said he'd taken part in a blood drive to replenish the supplies that Army hospitals in Iraq had. It was the first time he'd ever given blood, he said. "Apparently, I'm type O positive."

O positive, Detective Backer had said. And now, I was positive. Dr. Cadiz was my attacker. Now I just had to plan how I was going to do this.

March 30th, 2005

At 10:30 PM, Andrea knocked on my door. She was going to drive me.

We were both dressed in black. Andrea's car was black. There was heavy cloud cover that night, so no moon.

The plan was for me to break into Dr. Cadiz's house, shoot him with one of his own guns, and then spread drug stuff around his body to hopefully make it look like a drug-related murder. The only problem was, Andrea was going to have to park several blocks away, and I would have to walk in, and hope that I could get in without Dr. Cadiz's alarm going off.

It had started raining by the time we reached Dr. Cadiz's house. "Wow, nice house," Andrea said as we drove past.

"Yeah, it's amazing what you can do on the drug money of coked-out college students," I said tightly.

It was then that lightning struck. Literally. A lightning bolt struck a power transformer at the end of the street, sending the entire block into pitch blackness. Dr. Cadiz's house went completely dark. Andrea and I just looked at each other. Yeah, this was going to work.

Andrea parked three streets behind Dr. Cadiz's house. Keeping to the alleys behind the houses, I quickly made my way to the alley behind his backyard. I scaled the fence, and landed softly in his backyard.

I made my way around his pool, being careful not to slip and fall in in the darkness. When I reached his back door, I tried it – and it was unlocked. I wasn't going to have to break anything.

There was an alarm panel right next to the door – dark. And hanging on the wall just a few feet from the alarm panel, a gun. And not just any gun – an Israel Military Industries Desert Eagle .50 caliber. It would put a hole the size of China in anybody who was shot with it.

A saw a flicker of light, and made my way toward it. Turning around a corner, I saw him. Dr. Mitch Cadiz, surrounded by several bags of cocaine. He was cutting it at his living room coffee table, with candlelight lighting his way.

I raised the gun and aimed it at his head. "Hello, motherfucker."

He looked up, not seeming to be the least bit startled. "Why, hello, Miss Benning."

I walked toward him. "You're a dead man."

"Ah," he said with a laugh. "I see you figured it out. What a smart girl, figuring out who her rapist was with no help from the police."

"You won't get away with this," I hissed. "You're going to die."

"Hah!" he barked. "I've gotten away with this EIGHT TIMES before – three times in Boston, twice in Portland, three times in Phoenix! I've raped EIGHT of my students before you and never been caught. Of course, none of them ever figured it out… but you did. So you have to die."

"I'm the one with the gun," I said.

"Oh, please. Do you really think I'm so stupid as to leave a loaded gun right next to my door where any and everybody who walks in can grab it and shoot me with it? No, it was in case somebody like you walked in the door and got a bright idea."

NO. This couldn't be. I aimed at his head and pulled the trigger.Click. Twice more. He was right. It was empty.

Moving with the swiftness of a cat, he leapt to his feet, smashed the gun out of my hand, and hit me in the face. I was knocked to the couch, and when I looked up, he was aiming a Beretta 9MM at me.

"Oh yes, Ms. Benning," he said. "I enjoyed fucking you. I enjoyed leaving a hot, steaming load inside of you. And now, I'm going to enjoy watching you die."

At that moment, the lights chose to come on – and a voice said, "Eat shit and die, motherfucker."

Then, a muted "pop" – a red spot appeared on Dr. Cadiz's forehead – and the back of his head exploded.

I jumped up from the couch and turned around – and there was Jason, standing in the doorway, a gun aimed at where Dr. Cadiz had just stood.

"What?" was all that came out of my mouth. "What?"

"Dr. Harris called me last week," he said. "She told me about your suspicion – so I've been following you ever since to make sure nothing happened."

I was stupefied. Jason had been near enough to me for the last week and a half to know everything, and to protect me should anything happen – but I never knew.

And then rage overcame me. I grabbed the gun out of Jason's hand – a silenced Colt 1911. Aiming it at Dr. Cadiz's crotch, I fired and fired and fired again – until the gun was empty, and the area where his cock had been was a bloody, mangled mess. Then, I dropped the gun – and fell to the floor, sobbing.

Jason picked me up and held me. But it was much too soon when he let go of me and said, "We need to get going, before the police get here."

"There's one more thing I need to do before that happens," I replied. Turning, I swept all the cocaine off the living room table. One bag burst when it hit the floor.

Then, leaving through the back door, Jason and I snuck back to where he had parked his car. I called Andrea.

"Did it go okay?" she asked. "Are you on the way back?"

"Yeah, it worked, and then some," I replied. "You can go, though – I'm with Jason."

"Jason?!"

It was then that I remembered. When I called Jason the night that it happened.Motherfucker. DEAD motherfucker, he had said.

"Yeah," I said to Andrea. "Everything's gonna be just right."

That night, Jason and I made love for the first time in over a month. He was gentle, tender, passionate. The sweetness of it was almost overwhelming, but I felt no emotional pain. All I felt was love – and ecstasy. When I came, it was, if not the most impressive orgasm I've ever had, definitely the most electric.

As Jason lay there that night, just holding me, I fell asleep with a smile on my face. For the first time in a month and a half, I was at peace once more.

The next morning, between classes, I received a call from Dr. Harris. She asked me to come by her office around noon. When I arrived in her office, she didn't say anything – just motioned for me to sit down, and then put a tape in her VCR.

It was the morning news broadcast. "Dr. Mitch Cadiz was found dead this morning," the reporter was saying. "A neighbor was alerted that something was amiss when they noticed his backdoor standing open at about 4:30 AM. The Fresno police discovered Cadiz's body in his living room. He had been shot multiple times. Police also found about ten pounds of cocaine scattered about Cadiz's living room. Currently, they are treating it as a drug-related murder.