Senior Special Agent Joel Kohout handed me a manila file with the suspect’s name - ‘Fred Jones’.
“Here is the correspondence between the perv and our CI,” she said.
“What’s a CI?” I asked.
“Confidential Informant.”
I opened the file and started reading the first email. It was a Hotmail account from a boy named Kyle to Fred Jones.
“Whose Kyle?” I asked.
“You’re Kyle,” she sat down and rolled her chair up close, “you see, our CI is a pedophile. He goes out to chat rooms pretending to be a curious minor and when he finds a predator he turns him over to us.”
I kept reading the emails, they went back and forth. Fred loved to take videos and he described how he sneaks into locker rooms with a duffel bag and a hidden camera to get nude pictures. Kyle admits he thinks it is cool and is interested in Fred’s spy duffel bag. Kyle goes on to explain how curious he is about sex and the feeling he get’s when he sees the other boys naked in the locker room at Swimming practice.
They continue to exchange emails about swim class, boners, and a photo shoot. Finally, the emails come to a head when Fred asks Kyle to meet him and maybe he could take some pictures. At this point the guy has crossed the line. It’s one thing to talk abut dirty stuff, it’s another to have the intent to do dirty things with a minor.
“So what do you want me to do exactly?” I asked.
“We want you to call him on the phone and get him setting up a date, we need it on tape.”
Fear suffused my body, adrenaline surged like a garden hose.
“Look, you can pretend to do a young voice better than anyone else here, it won’t matter if you don’t sound 15 the guy will be bouncing off the walls if you even call.” This was her persuasive technique, it worked but I had my doubts.
“The CI wants to talk with before you make the call. He thinks he should debrief you on what kind of perp we are dealing with.”
“Okay, he’ll call me then?”
“Yeah, or you can call him,” she turned back to her desk to grab her address book. She wrote the number on the back of her business card and handed it to me. The rabbit hole I’d fallen into was getting larger and there was no climbing out. I was afraid, no question about it, but what could I do now? This was a bad dude and if I could help get him arrested then I felt like I had to do it, plus I didn’t want to look like a coward. I went back to the manila file and read the background check on Fred. He was a 32 year old Junior High School Bus driver that lived at home with his mom. He had no prior convictions.
“You should know, the CI is a pedophile, fully confessed. He does this to keep himself out of trouble. I’m sure the fantasy of pretending to be a little freshman somehow convinces his broken brain and this helps him, you know?” Joel didn’t or couldn’t finish her sentence.
Later that evening I called the informant. He was expecting my call and was friendly on the phone. He explained what he was doing and why he was doing it. He became very serious about my role and wanted me to practice ahead of time.
He continued and went into a diatribe about child molesters, “pedophiles lust after a very specific age and physical description. Some like seven year olds, other like 12 year olds. They work together, when one has one that is too young, he hands them off to someone else, when they get too old, they trade them back or to another. Mind you they don’t like working with each other, but they see it as a means to an end.”
I was silent and disgusted. I just listened to him describe these victims like they were cattle or objects at a thrift market.
He continued, “pedophiles don’t get cured. This is a critical distinction for you to understand, they fantasize about it whether they are offending or not, they only choose not to act on the lust, that’s the difference. For me, I find them and Agent Kohout pays me if they get caught.”
This felt like a game. It felt dirty and too much like he enjoyed what he was doing. I could hear his excitement over the phone. This guy knew what was going on for sure, but I wondered if he knew how fucked up the whole situation was.
When I got back to the office I asked Joel what she thought about the CI.
“He’s a perv. Takes one to catch one,” she replied, “did he give you the full speech?”
“I think so.”
“Yeah, guy does this so he doesn’t go back to jail.”
I just nodded as if I understood but I really couldn’t. The victimization of kids was creepy and I thought rarer, but Joel and the Informant made it sound like it was common in every neighborhood in every town in America. That was the straw for me, there was no turning back.
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