David Wiltse - The Edge of Sleep

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.