The Edge of Sleep

Chapter 5

Becker’s home in Connecticut was forty-five minutes from the Town Center mall in Stamford. He drove there on the Merritt Parkway and studied the center divider. It was as he had remembered it when talking to Karen. A low guard rail made it impossible to pull a car onto the center strip without severe damage to both the railing and the automobile. There were occasional flower beds on the divider and so many trees there as well as on both sides of the road that the experience was one of driving at high speed through the deciduous forest that still held New England in its grasp. In summer, the parkway was a blur of green, and in autumn it blazed with fall colors, providing sudden vistas that made the road known for its uncommon beauty. As a highway for commuter traffic to New York, it served, although just barely, with four lanes and merely adequate engineering. But as an avenue through the forest, it was Connecticut’s pride and joy, and the state devoted a good deal of effort to keeping the divider well trimmed and clean.

It was no place for pedestrians, however. Anyone walking there would be seen by dozens, if not hundreds, of drivers per minute. Becker made a note to investigate the state employees who tended the strip. Their uniforms would not make them invisible but somewhat less noteworthy.

Becker pulled into the passing lane and rolled down his window. On the passenger seat next to him lay a brown leaf bag that he had purchased that morning. Inside the bag, taped together, were three twenty-five-pound sacks of cat litter. First he tried to lift the dead weight from the seat and across his body with his right hand while steering with his left. He made five attempts, stopping midway each time when it was apparent he was about to lose control of the car.

Next he tried to steer with his knees while handling the heavy bag with both hands. He lost control almost immediately with the exertion necessary for the lift. Finally Becker dragged the litter-filled bag onto his lap and lifted it from there to the open window. Opening the door was out of the question; it would require him to be too far from the divider. After several failed attempts. Becker managed to get the bag balanced on the window opening. The blast of a horn brought him back to the realization of his position. He was swerving dangerously and his speed had dropped to less than forty miles an hour. Angry motorists were passing him on the inside and gesturing as they went past.

And I haven’t even gotten the thing out the window yet, he thought. Nine times out of ten he would have swerved into the guard rail or another car if he’d made the final effort of throwing the bag onto the divider. He knew that throwing was the wrong idea. There was no way he could throw anything this heavy and unwieldy from a sitting position behind a steering wheel, never mind the demands of driving a car at the same time. It would be all he could do to push it far enough away from the car not to fall under the wheels. Becker eased into the right-hand lane, still balancing the bag on the open window, until the line of cars that had built up behind him had passed. Middle-of-the-night reduced traffic would make things somewhat easier, but not enough.

When the road was clearer. Becker pulled into the passing lane once more. Steadying the car with his knees, he pushed the bag as hard as he could with both hands, grabbing the wheel again immediately to avoid a crash. The bag hit the guard rail and split in two. The sacks of litter hit the highway and spilled onto the pavement. He looked at the mess behind him in his rearview mirror. The first car had already reached the mess and was warily swinging wide to avoid the torn sacks and flapping plastic. Any worse push and he would have caused a traffic hazard within minutes. As it was, there would probably be a slowdown for several minutes until the wind of passing cars pulled the plastic free of the litter and sent it winging crazily away from the road. And that was the best I could do, Becker thought. He knew he was stronger than most men because of a lifetime of staying in shape. His arms were conditioned by the rigors of pulling himself up rock faces on a rope. If he had been higher and had more of an arc for the push, the bag might have cleared the rail. From the cab of a diesel semitrailer truck, for instance. But this was the Merritt Parkway and commercial vehicles were prohibited. Driving such a truck here was an open invitation for arrest by the state police. Either the man who had successfully put the Shapiro boy’s body on the divider had carried it across two lanes of traffic and dropped it there, or he was possessed of great strength. Becker wondered if he were chasing a man who was a monster in more than one sense.

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.

He stared at the photographs for a long time, forcing himself to see every detail, to let the pain the boys had felt reach out and engulf him. Then, forcing himself to move against his own dread, he crossed the room and one by one turned out the lights.

Becker sat on the floor, surrounded by the pictures, and let the demons come. He was at home, but he was no longer in the safety of his own living room. His mind was once more in the pitch-black cellar of his youth.

He felt again the density of the darkness, an envelope heavy with menace that moved across his shoulders and down his back like a malevolent, living thing. It seemed to ripple over him like a giant serpent, and even though the muscles in his back twitched with warning for him to move he knew that to turn was worse, for he might have to see the creature face to face, its eyes glowing like fire in the dark.

He did not know how long he had been banished to the cellar; there was no time there, no way to mark the minutes except to count the terrified throbbing of the blood in his veins. Nor did he understand what he had done to deserve the punishment of which the cellar was only the prelude. He thought wildly, trying to remember what childish indiscretion had doomed him, what offense had merited this retribution. It was only much later in life that he would realize it was his punishment that mattered, not the crime.

They always left him alone in the dark so very long. Shivering with fright, fearing abandonment as much as he feared the creatures that peopled his imagination in the blackness, he would be almost relieved to hear the door open at last. So alone and so scared that he almost welcomed the appearance of his tormentor.

And finally there he stood, the object of Becker’s love and loathing all at once. The heavy tread upon the stairs. The sour smell of beer on his breath. The matter-of-fact tone that only gradually rose to anger.

The beatings often began as nothing more than a chore, dutifully but wearily tended to.

“I hope you’ve had a chance to think about your behavior,” he would say.

Or, “Your mother tells me you were a bad boy.”

Or, “Anything to say for yourself?” in a voice of such reason, as if there was room for discussion, a chance for repeal or pardon. It was often the cruelest hoax, giving young Becker the flash of hope, as if a chance to explain himself or plead for mercy would lessen his sentence by as much as a single blow.

Only later would the voice drop its veil of civilization. Then it would be “bastard” and “little son of a bitch” as the rain of blows grew into a torrent.

The boy Becker would cry, of course, and clutch his father’s legs and promise to be good and promise to try harder and promise and promise and promise. As if anyone was listening. As if there were some way to avoid punishment at the hands of parents who took their delight from it. As if there was any offense so vile that a child would warrant such beatings at the hands of his loved ones.

Over time it was the “loved ones” part of the equation that injured him the most. The body could recover and grow strong. But the shock, the continually stunning revelation that his abusers, the ones to whose whim his body was held constant hostage, were the people he loved most in the world, was the part that hurt most of all and did the deepest damage.

For it was not always this way. There were times, many times, when they seemed to love him. There were times when his father would ruffle his hair with the same huge hand that delivered the blows, when the voice that growled abuse would cheer him for his athletic skills. Moments when they would laugh at the dinner table at young Becker’s antics or congratulate him on his academic grades. There were times when his mother would caress him with her warm and gentle hands, soothe him with her smile, whisper in her urgent voice to “never tell.” Never. Anyone. To tell was to risk the loss of his family’s love. To risk the loss of the very family itself. Young Becker learned the value of secrets and the deeper truth that everyone possessed them.

There were also other moments when his father’s furies would overtake him so swiftly that he would send the boy sprawling across the floor with a cuff or a kick. But these impromptu beatings were rare and quickly over. They seemed to frighten both his mother and father with their volatility and caprice.

His father, Becker knew, prided himself on being a rational man, a reasonable man, a man in control of himself. Spontaneous violence was contrary to his self-image. Both parents preferred ordered, predetermined, “rational” justice. They liked to have him beaten in a way that was in keeping with their middle-class persona.

Now in the darkness of his living room the adult Becker shrunk once more from the abrupt and shocking sting of the blows, clutched his father’s leg, whined and moaned and cried and promised-and divined his own version of the truth of human nature-and his own. As he had over the years several decades earlier, Becker formed his own template of a starkly different kind than most. But not all.

He knew he was not alone in his vision of the world, or in the bent and ugly pattern of passion that had gouged a space in his heart. There were others out there. He could recognize them. He wondered if they could recognize him before it was too late.

Wiltse, David

The Edge of Sleep