Authors: David Wiltse
The Town Center was five vertical layers of shops surrounding a center well with a courtyard, a fountain, and tiers of steps for sitting. Both elevators and escalators gave access from the ground floor to the higher levels. There were exits on every floor to the parking garage, which ascended parallel to the central shopping core, as well as three ground-level pedestrian entrances from the street. Security guards sat in glass booths at the parking lot exits but, as Becker noted upon entering, they paid only intermittent attention to the flow of people. If someone tried to drive a minivan through the exit and onto the elevator, they might notice that, Becker thought. Otherwise, their value as witnesses was limited. The guards had been positioned where they were for three reasons. One, the glass offices were out of the way of the shopping flow and would not be bothering customers with unpleasant thoughts of security. Two, their position next to the exits just might give shoplifters second thoughts—although experience had shown this was a very questionable premise. And three, the nook behind the elevators was a relatively secluded spot where trouble might be expected to spring up were it not for the proximity of the security guards.
Becker, knew, however, that the occurrence he was most concerned with had taken place somewhere else. The man known as Lamont Cranston had snatched his quarry somewhere in the body of the building. By the time he passed through an exit, he already had the boy completely under his control. Anything else would have been far too risky. The boy could have shouted to the security guards, fallen to the floor and made a scene, anything to attract attention. Lamont had done it successfully six times, four times from places such as this. Whatever his method, it was not haphazard. It was effective, and for the moment it had Becker baffled.
On the fourth level where he had entered from the garage, Becker stood at the railing and looked down at the activity below him. It was a Saturday and the mall was crowded with customers, a chamber of commerce dream of joy. Exhausted husbands with low-shopping tolerance, eyes glazed, grim expressions on their faces, stretched out on the seating areas around the fountain as if their feet were killing them. A few teenagers congregated there, too, but only briefly as they made their plans before sallying forth again. Otherwise the activity was in the shops and the food halls. From a distance, Becker thought it looked rather like the apparently chaotic motions of a hill of ants that managed to get things done in such an efficient way. Becker’s sympathies were with the groggy husbands, but then Becker was no shopper.
He was a hunter. He found his quarry on the second level, inside the video arcade where dozens of children ranging in age from six or seven to late teens stood mesmerized by the flashing images of dragons and heroes and karate choppers. It was a kindergarten of treasures for the predatory or perverted. While parents shopped, their children milled and mingled, waiting for their favorite game or moving to the next like Las Vegas patrons at the slot machines. It would be impossible for any but the most diligent and paranoid of observers to keep track constantly of any individual for long. It was like keeping one’s eye on a single specimen among a shifting school of fish.
Lamont had not been distracted by the motions or the numbers, however, but then Lamont was very single-minded. He could look at such a group, make his pick, await his moment, then strike with the swiftness of a shark. What was it that set the victim apart? Did he fill a type the killer preferred? Did one seem more vulnerable than the others? More appealing to Lamont’s peculiar aesthetic taste? Could Lamont tell at a glance that one of the many was more apt to lend himself to capture? Or simply better designed to slake his thirst? And was it at a glance, or did Lamont study his quarry at length? And how would he do that without drawing attention to himself?
Becker felt conspicuous even now, standing apart from the arcade and watching the children. He looked around him to see if he was being observed. Lamont would look like a shopper, of course. He would carry a shopping bag or packages. As Becker watched, a man walked into the arcade. He had the haircut and shoes of the wealthy middle class although his jeans and T-shirt were part of the nation’s universal weekend uniform. The man approached one of the teenage boys and spoke his name aloud. After waiting long enough to assert his independence, the boy turned and glared at the man with the sullenness reserved at that age for one’s own family. As they left together the man tried to put a paternal hand on the boy’s shoulder but the boy dipped, slid away, and walked in front of the man as if he were not really his father.
The man glanced at Becker and offered a fading smile as if knowing that any male of a certain age could sympathize. A transaction as common as humanity itself, Becker thought, repeated endlessly in all the malls and public places of the country. And yet a few weeks ago something similar had happened here that ended in a child’s death. Becker had noticed this meeting of father and son, but would anyone else have had any reason to note an occurrence so mundane? But if the man was not the father, if the boy was a little younger, at an age when parents still warned their children not to talk to strangers, what would the meeting have looked like then? And how would the man have convinced the child to accompany him?
Perhaps it was not that sort of selection process, Becker thought. What if Lamont went after a target of opportunity, the one of the group that distinguished itself in some way, not by appearance but by movement? The first to move away from the crowd, perhaps.
Was Lamont that hungry? Would just any victim do? Did the man come to the mall, cruise until he saw one of the boys alone or in the position Lamont required, and then strike? It was possible, but the idea didn’t sit well with Becker. For one thing, it was much too dangerous. It discounted the fact that so far no one had noticed anything unusual. If Lamont was making it up as he went along, if he was grabbing at the first opportunity, he would have been hurried, he would have made a mistake. And more important was the desire. Lamont kept the boys for a couple of months before he killed them. That implied care, lodging, food, a major investment of time and caution. The victim had to be watched over during that time, probably guarded. Certainly obsessed over. Lamont was no mad-dog sex fiend who dragged the boys into a dark corner and had his way. For two months at a time he lived with them. It made no sense—not even the twisted sense of a serial killer—to devote that much to a random choice.
And finally, Becker knew it just didn’t work that way. Serial killing, like any passion, was a matter of the heart. Men do not fall in love randomly; they respond again and again to a template implanted early in life, perhaps by the mother, perhaps the first love, the nanny, the nurse. The objects of their passion could appear very different to others, but all shared some elements of the original intaglio. Often a mystery to the world, the traces of the pattern still shone brightly in the lover’s heart.
However tortured and buckled the original template, or however tormented and bizarre life had made the killer’s perception of it, the process was the same. Like any man in the throes of passion, the killer responded to those messages of the old pattern.
Becker rode the escalator to the ground floor, letting his eyes play over the youth around him. So many of them, so free, wandering alone and with others of their age, money in their pockets, no fear in their heads. Kids who once hung out on street corners or played kick the can on deserted evening suburban streets now congregated in the malls. It was not a new phenomenon, but one that Becker had heretofore paid no attention to.
Some of the children were with their parents, but even they drifted apart as each followed his own interests. Do you know where your children are? he thought. Precisely where they are? In the other end of the store? Just around the corner looking in the window of the neighboring shop? How far away do you think danger lies? How long do you think it takes? He wanted to scream at them, protect your children, for God’s sake! There are monsters loose!
Becker stopped beside a boy peering wide-eyed through plate glass at a display of telescopes. Come with me, he thought. How do I get you to come with me?
Could he drug the boy? A swift but guarded jab with a hypodermic needle to send sodium pentothal pulsing through his veins, loosening his brain to a hyper-sensitive jelly. And the crucial seconds until the drug took effect? And the long walk out of the mall with a boy whose legs were as wobbly as his brain?
Becker rejected the idea. The killer Roger Dyce had drugged his victims, but always alone and late at night. He had missed Becker himself with the needle by the thickness of the cloth on his shirt before Becker had captured him. The method would never work in daylight in public.
Becker peered down at the boy. It had been so long since he had talked to children. What could he possibly say to induce the kid to walk away with him? What fantasy, what Pied Piper tune would tempt a boy to step into danger? And if the man next to him was the giant with enough strength to toss the boy’s frame across his body while driving a car? How luring a melody would he have to pipe then?
The boy noticed Becker looking at him and eased away, sensing something creepy. Becker walked away. I hate this fucking job, he thought.
The men’s room was on the ground floor around a corner from the third ice cream/frozen yogurt stand that Becker had noticed in the building. There was a brief hallway, then the tiled foyer, then the rest room itself. The cookie boutique that Steinholz had managed was two floors away. If Steinholz had worked at the ice-cream stand he might conceivably have seen the boy of his preference enter the bathroom and then reacted instinctively. But not from two floors away. If he took them from bathrooms, he would have to do as Becker was doing, enter and loiter and wait.
Becker stood in front of a sink, using the mirror to study those who entered the men’s room. It was here that the victims could select themselves for Lamont. Unlike girls, boys did not necessarily go to the bathroom in groups.
Some would come in singly, separating themselves from the crowd, and Lamont would have them alone to himself for however long he needed. There had been cases of professionals kidnapping babies and infants who had acted in this way. Working in teams, they had wheeled away strollers from behind the backs of distracted mothers, dyed the children’s hair in the sink, and changed their clothes in less than a minute while a confederate kept people out of the rest room. When the kidnappers and their victim emerged into the mall proper minutes later, security guards—if they had even been alerted yet—were looking for a different-colored snowsuit, long blonde curls now shorn and blackened.
But that was with children too young to cry for help, children small enough to wheel or carry and to quiet with a rubber pacifier. It wouldn’t work with ten-year-old boys. Becker stood at the sink, washing his hands again and again, trying to time the effort. If he took the boy next to him right now, slapped a sign on the door saying “Closed,” how long would it be before a hurried stranger pushed his way into the room, ignoring the sign? How long before an employee came in to see what was wrong? It was impossible to predict, but he knew it wouldn’t be long. Certainly not dependably long enough. And what would he be doing to the boys in the meantime? How did you get a ten-year-old to shut up and not call for help? Put a gun to his head? Maybe, it was possible, but seemed unlikely to Becker.
Lamont knew something about children he himself did not, Becker concluded. He left the mall feeling slightly soiled and seamy after the day’s work. It seemed that he had accomplished little other than to make a good case that what had been done was not doable.
Sitting behind the wheel of his car in the parking lot, he looked over the cement ramparts at the city below. Dusk was settling; he had been in the mall for hours, avoiding the real work he would have to do now. He had tried the easy way first because the hard way was so painful.
Becker rested his head against the steering wheel, his eyes fixed sightlessly on the control panel of the car. There was no escaping it. If he was to help beyond the marginal assistance he had already given, he would have to step into the problem completely. He could no longer feel it around the edges, trying to gauge its size and shape and substance from the fringe, like the blind man limning the elephant from the heft of its tail or trunk alone. He must embrace the problem, fully. Worse, he must step inside it and learn how its heart beat. It was a task he dreaded, a task he knew Karen Crist fully expected him to take on. He was good at the other process, the basic police work that solved most cases. He was as good at it as anyone, better than most. But it was not his genius.
If Becker was to help, if he was to have any chance of stopping Lamont before he killed another boy, he would have to live with the photographs of the dead victims. Becker quailed at the prospect. The price was always too damned high.
The photographs of the dead boys were spread across the floor like so many miniature corpses, as if Becker’s living room had become the scene of a slaughter. Before laying out the pictures, Becker had turned on every light in the room and positioned his favorite chair so his back was against the wall. He was used to fear, but he did not welcome it. It had become a frequent visitor, but never a friend and, when possible, he did all he could to diminish its effects. Horror films caused him to react with the fright of a young child, and he restricted his reading to the nonviolent safety of nonfiction and history. Becker needed no goads to his imagination; it was already filled with real-life horrors. Where others delighted in the vicarious theater thrills of being safely terrified by madmen with axes stalking baby-sitters. Becker winced and looked away. He knew it was all too true and possible.
With the room brilliantly lighted, the colors of the wounds stood out starkly against the pallor of the boys’ bodies. The original lividity of the contusions had waned after death, but the difference in color that remained was enough to show the relative age of the bruises. The older ones had begun to fade; the latest, the ones caused by blows administered on the day of death, were still intense against the surrounding flesh. The boys had been beaten over a period of time. The scientifically dry forensic report had estimated the floggings took place over a relatively short period of time, perhaps three weeks. A short period of time, Becker thought derisively. Twenty-one days of torment were a lifetime in themselves.