by Ryan Green
I get in my car and drive home.
The whole way I am comparing the memories of the man in the office to the man from last night. It was dark out and I couldn't get a perfect look at him but I am positive that was him.
I thought I was positive anyway but I really began to question my memories. That is a huge accusation to place on somebody when you aren’t 100% sure what you saw.
There's no way that's the same guy. It has to be the same guy. There's hundreds of guys who could look like that. I pulled into my driveway and parked my car.
I take the keys out of the ignition and look around.
"That was not the man from last night, you're crazy, it is just your mind playing tricks on you. Should I call Mark and apologize for storming out like that? There’s no way Mark knew that guy he didn’t say a single word to him. Is Mark involved too? My own fucking boss is part of a pedophile cult?!”
I get out of my car and take one more look around.
I take a deep breath.
“I need to calm down. It's all in my head. It's all just one big coincidence.”
I take out my phone and I text Mark.
Me: Sorry Mark, had a panic attack, had to get out.
Mark: What the hell was that about? You kept staring at the CFO.
Me: The fat guy in the gray suit is the CFO?
Mark: Yeah, you don’t remember meeting him before? I specifically requested that you handle that project, that’s why he was there, to meet you. There was gonna be a big promotion in it for you if you did well.
Me: Thanks Mark, I ’m sorry, I'll make it up to you.
"See, everything is fine, everything is just the way that it's supposed to be. I knew it was all in my head. I have seen that guy before at work, there’s no way that was the pizza guy.."
I unlock the door to my house.
I take my shoes off at the door and I go to throw my keys onto the coffee table.
The keys hit something and fall to the ground.
I look over at the keys on the ground and I look up and it’s the computer, it’s now sitting back on my coffee table.
"I thought I threw that fucking thing in the trash" I think to myself.
Chapter Eleven
Blaine reaches over to Megan and he dabs a napkin to the side of her mouth to wipe away bits of dressing that found its way off of a stray piece of lettuce and onto her mouth.
Megan looks up at Blaine and smiles “Thank you very much.”
“So that elevator really told you that you couldn’t run forever? Or do you think that you just maybe let everything get to you and you made that little part up in your mind after all of this time?” Megan asks Blaine.
“No, no, no I definitely heard that elevator say that to me on the way out of the building. I know it’s crazy but think about it, there has to be someone inside of a security office monitoring all of the movement within the building. Maybe they just got over the speaker in the elevator and have been narrating it this whole time when they see me.”
“That is crazy, but when you put it that way it does seem fairly plausible, I’m sure there are speakers all over those buildings that people can make announcements over for emergencies and stuff like that. So you get home and the computer is back on your coffee table that you thought you threw in the trash?”
“No. I KNOW I threw it in the trash, Megan”
I can’t believe my eyes, I sit on my couch and my instant messenger screen is already loaded. I look closely at the screen and I have a message from SoccerDude2k1 waiting for my arrival back home. That is another thing that just couldn’t be some fabricated thing in my memory.
SoccerDude2k1: You need to message me as soon as you read this. Now that you know how many people we have working together, surely you now know that we are serious. By the way Don says your presentation went well ...except for the parts where you kept stuttering and looking at him while you pissed your pants like a scared child.
“So the man named Don was not the mastermind behind all of this?” Megan asks.
“I wasn’t sure at that point I was just wondering if he was just trying to mess with my head even more. I keep talking about how there are tons of them but I ’ve only ever seen him. The pizza guy and now the CFO of my job was the only face I could put to this group and to that symbol so I had to assume he was behind it all and this was just some ploy to keep me afraid of finding him.”
I take a moment to think through my decision and decide if I really want to keep going through with all of this. If I message him back, I'm certain there’s no going back. But is there really any turning back at the point anyway?
So I decided to message him back.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: What are you trying to accomplish?
SoccerDude2k1: We invested a lot of time in you Blaine, and that is time that we want back. We are absolutely going to get back one way or another, we hold all of the cards here Blaine.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: I have no idea what you are talking about.
SoccerDude2k1: Don’t you play stupid with me. You know exactly what I am talking about. The only reason you aren’t in prison right now is because of us.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: Prison? What do you mean Prison? You are the ones following me. You are the ones breaking into my house, stalking me at my job, sending me threats and lewd pictures.
SoccerDude2k1: Quit playing stupid kid. We protected you during that investigation and you disappeared on us. You are just as guilty as us and you never showed us the respect and appreciation that we deserved.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: What investigation are you talking about!? Quit playing these games with me, I have no idea who you are.
I start receiving another picture file from this man and it's even more screenshots.
SoccerDude2k1: Is any of this familiar?
I looked closely at the screenshots and it is exactly what I remembered from my dream.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: I did not get pictures of naked children for anybody. You are fucking with me, you have to have the wrong person.
SoccerDude2k1: You did it Blaine. You loved doing it, you wanted to be a part of the group so bad you were willing to do anything for us.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: I would never do anything like that. That is disgusting, you are disgusting.
SoccerDude2k1: If I am disgusting, then what are you? You are the disgusting kid who would do absolutely anything in the world to be a part of this group.
I started receiving another picture file, only this time it is a picture of a child. I started receiving picture after picture from him. Every single picture he sends is worse than the last. Every picture is more disgusting, more indecent, more horrific. Every picture I receive is more and more vile until I can't take it anymore.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: I really did that to these children? There is no way I could have done that. I am a good person, I would never do that.
SoccerDude2k1: You did, and you loved doing it. You made a lot of money for us . There are a lot of people out there who pay big money for that kind of stuff. It is not about good and evil or being bad or decent Blaine, this goes much deeper than that. We are powerful, you are powerful, we are rich and we are untouchable. We don’t do these things for pleasure, we do them because we can and because people want it. If this is a demand for a certain product we will provide it and that product comes with a steep price.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: That is disgusting.
SoccerDude2k1: Is it more disgusting that they receive pleasure by looking at those images or is it more disgusting that you received money for selling those images that you obtained? You exploited all of your little friends Blaine and you did it for years.
I have to step away from my computer and recompose myself. There is absolutely no way that I could have done that. I am not the type of person who would do something like that. There is no way I could do that.
“Could I really do that? Am I really capable of being that kind of monster? If I did I was just a kid myself ... I d
idn’t know any better.” I ask myself.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: What did you mean that I could be in prison and you protected me?
SoccerDude2k1: I will show you.
He sends me a link to a website.
It redirects me to a news article about a government bust of a child pornography ring. I skimmed through the article looking for any names that I might recognize. Mick Merino, Pat Lichot, Mike Szolnok, none of those sound familiar.
I keep skimming through the article looking for any mention of my name.
I finally came across the section that I had been looking for.
“One minor child's computer was confiscated in the raid but due to the age of the suspected offender their name cannot be released. Hundreds of pictures and videos were found to be distributed between the users over the course of several months. Each person found guilty can face up to forty years in prison for their crimes.”
I message the man back.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: If all of this is true then why are you coming after me now?
SoccerDude2k1: You logged onto the program Blaine. You know what we used this for. Why else would you log in after all of these years? We thought you wanted back in.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: I just found the computer in my parent's garage, I don’t even remember any of it.
SoccerDude2k1: Your parents took you away from us Blaine. We groomed you, we made you into the man that you are today. You spent eleven years with them and you were never happy. You spent one year with us and you loved your life. You belong with us Blaine.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: I need time to think about this. I just need some time to process everything.
SoccerDude2k1: We will be watching you Blaine to make sure you don’t do anything you might regret.
xXBlaineDamage88Xx: I won’t, I just need to piece all of this together.
I sign off of Instant Messenger and there is a knock on my door.
I stand up quickly and rush to the door. I open the door and look outside but I don't see anybody. There is a box sitting on my porch.
“Should I really open the thing?” I think to myself.
I brought the box inside of the house and I opened the box. Inside of the box is a brand new laptop with a note attached to it that reads: “We’ve been waiting for you to come back.” I put the laptop back in the box and walked it outside and threw it in my trash can.
I hoped that there was someone out on the street watching me. I want them to see me throw it away.
“I know you can see me, fuck you and fuck your pervert cult.” I shout out into the street as I storm back inside of the house and slam the door behind me.
I know that there is no chance in hell that I am going to join the cult of pedophiles. I need to figure out a way to find out who some of them are so I can locate them and turn them over to the FBI or the local police department or dateline NBC. I had to expose them to someone.
I open up my laptop and enter the names of the men from the online article in a search engine.
All of the men that were involved are still in prison. All of their mugshots are found online with descriptions of the crimes they committed:
Manufacturing Child Pornography.
Possession and Distribution of Child Pornography.
Coercion or enticement of a minor via the internet.
A few of them even have Criminal Sexual Misconduct charges from then, I guess that they decided that just trading videos wasn’t enough for them anymore.
Trying to find one of these guys isn’t going to be any help while they’re sitting in prison, hopefully getting beaten and raped every single day of their lives.
I get an idea on how to start finding all of these sick perverts and I know exactly who to start with.
I remotely log onto the computer system at work and get into the camera system. I rewind footage from earlier in the day to find the guy from the presentation room. What did Soccer dude call him? That can’t be a real name? Don? I find the guy and I track my movement from the presentation room to the elevator to the front door of the building moving in reverse.
I switch the cameras from the inside of the building to the outside of the building. I watch the man walk down the street several blocks and he is coming from a parking structure, it’s the same parking structure I was in.
I rewind further and further back to when I pulled out of the parking structure and drove towards the building and started going in circles to lose whoever was following me. There was a blue sedan that was following close behind me the whole time. I was relieved to reaffirm that I wasn’t crazy, I knew I was being followed in that parking structure and I knew I was being followed while I was driving.
I zoom in on the car and I can sort of make out the driver of the car. It looks like me but I can't be 100% sure.
But on the front of the car clear as day is a license plate number.
ADK7823.
I knew that I had him now.
Chapter Twelve
Megan and Blaine have both finished their salads and they have their plates set off to the side to be picked up by the waiter. They are both finishing off their glasses of wine the waiter had brought out earlier.
“Is it really that easy to just look people up on the internet?” Megan asks Blaine. “Like to just get someone's license plate number then track where they live and all of that information about them?”
“Absolutely, all you really need is a little bit of information on someone and you can find pretty much anything about them if you really want to. It is truly kind of scary that someone can find out about you with just something small like your name if they know what they are doing. When you have something even more specific like a license plate number, there is absolutely no hiding from that. All of your information is entered into government databases which are pretty easy to access. Even more so beyond that, all of the privacy agreements you enter into on social media or YouTube gather all of that private information too and compile it together.”
“And you were the kid whose computer was taken during this raid of this child sex and pornography ring? What exactly did you do?”
“I’m getting all of that babe, this is where you really just need to have an open mind and hear me out because it gets extremely fucked up. But you will hopefully see that I was just some dumb a naive kid who was being taken advantage of.”
“I will try to just listen and understand but where this seems to be heading, I can’t make any promises, this all seems just like extremely, EXTREMELY messed up.”
ADK7823 is his license plate number. You never really think that people like him live normal lives. They go grocery shopping, they pay the bills, they pay taxes, they have to go sit in the DMV to get their license plate numbers assigned to them.
It's sort of like when you are a kid and you see a teacher outside of school for the first time, I guess.
ADK7823, that should be easy enough to find.
Luckily the state we lived in had an online database registry of every license plate number. You can look it up and find the name, address and date of birth of anyone.
Our society is making it nearly impossible to have any anonymity. But what can you expect when everyone has ten social media accounts, each with their face uploaded onto it dozens of times over.
Donald Mabury, 6754 Elm Buffalo Grove IL.
I entered it into my phone and it was only a 15 mile drive away from him. I made the drive from my house to Buffalo Grove via Lake Cook Road, not that you really know any of that but it was really just one straight shot for me to get there.
I was not sure what to expect when I got there, I'm not even sure what my plan is when I do get there or what I'm going to need so I stopped at a hardware store on the way to hopefully give me some ideas.
I spent about a half hour walking back and forth through the aisles looking at everything. I was trying to remember what I had seen on T.V in crime shows.
I grab rope, duct tape, a razor knife, a plunger and
plastic drop cloth.
I look in my cart and I think it looks suspiciously like what someone who is about to kidnap and torture would buy. Is that what I plan on doing? Kidnap and torture? Either way if it is I can't be so obvious.
I grabbed a bucket of paint, some brushes and some caulk just to complete the look of someone who is remodeling. I throw them all in my cart and take them to the checkout line.
I looked around nervously hoping that I hadn’t been followed since I left my house. I had spent the last hour trying to formulate a plan that I had completely forgotten that I had been followed every second for the last day of my life.
If anyone has seen me buying the stuff they would have to know that I was up to something. If they saw me they would have alerted everyone of my whereabouts and everyone would be cautious of him.
