“You beat and raped me day after day, week after week, year after year, until they took you. What the hell do you think you saved me from?”
It doesn’t matter, really, what he thinks. He is nothing. Less than nothing. I have no idea why I bother interacting with him. Perhaps on some level I am curious how such a monster can believe himself the victim after what he has done. Or more to the point, how could he possibly do the things he did to me or to any other child and believe he deserves anything less than every ounce of pain I am capable of inflicting?
How has he lived with the memories of his grievous acts against the weakest members of society?
And why did he come back to Nashville? He could have gone to Murfreesboro or farther north. I suspect I know the answer to that one, but we’ll see.
“I saved you from the people who brought you into this world.” Even as he boasts, he braces for my retaliation.
Coward.
I consider kicking him in the side. I’ve done this numerous times already. Why bother?
“Do you know what today is?” I ask him rather than kick him as I first considered.
He shakes his head, fear filling his pathetic eyes. I do not possess the proper words to articulate how very much that fear pleases me.
“It’s day three of our reunion,” I say. “I’m surprised you didn’t think of this when you were planning this elaborate game you set in motion. Do you remember what you did to me on day three after you took me home with you?”
He shakes his head adamantly at first, and then the movement subsides as the memories flood his wretched brain. The fear tightensaround his throat and chest in a choke hold. I hear the change in his respiration. See the growing terror in his eyes.
Oh, how it pleases me.
“But don’t worry. I’m sure you were raped plenty of times in prison.” I shrug. “Statistics show that men like you were probably raped as children, too. Is that true? Did your daddy or an uncle, maybe a grandpa, rape you as a child? Is that what turned you into the disgusting perv you became?”
He looks away. In all the years we were together, he never spoke of the men in his family. There had to be men. He spoke only of his mother—the one who died of an overdose when he was just eight years old. Before he dies, I’m going to tell him about searching until I found where his mother was buried. I went to her grave in the middle of the night and shit on it. Probably wasn’t her fault he turned out the way he did since she died when he was so young, but she was the one who spit him out of her loins. For that, she deserved to be shit on, alive or dead.
“I’ll make this a lot easier on you if you just tell me the truth.”
After he was taken away to prison, I watched the news. I heard the armchair shrinks create scenarios based on his known history. His father had gotten himself murdered when Fanning was seventeen. His grandfather had been in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. When Fanning was nineteen, somehow his grandfather ended up dead in the shower at the care facility where he was a resident. Strange thing. The staff had no idea how he got out of bed and into the shower, much less fell and bashed his head on the tile. The shrinks speculated that the grandfather had molested Fanning as a child.
The monster remains silent, hovering in that corner like a trapped animal.
“We both know it was your grandfather. That’s why you killed him.” I experience much pleasure at saying these things to him. I want him to feel the way I felt. The worthlessness, the humiliation, the desolation. The utter uncertainty.
“Then why ask?” he snarls.
I smile. “I just want to hear you say the words, that’s all. I want to hear all the terrible things he did to you. Maybe see if you learned those nasty tricks of yours from him.”
“Shut up!”
The hoarse shriek gives me another shot of immense pleasure.
I really don’t need any answers from him, I know how the story likely went. Does his damaged childhood make me feel the least bit sorry for him?
No.
He chose to continue the vicious cycle of abuse. Since he didn’t have children of his own, he abused other people’s children.
That is never going to happen again.
Never, ever, ever.
Eleven
Detective Olivia Newhouse
Thursday, May 3
