filled with squalling children and harried mothers, to pass police cruisers and businessmen along the way, to offer his toll money to oblivious state workers—all with his victims bound and displayed a few feet behind him. He wanted his victims to know that he was so very much in control that he was willing to flaunt his act before others.
It was an evil so finely honed that I knew a girl as young as the one who sat writing in her journal would never have a chance. Not for a moment, not for a second. She was ripe fruit for his picking and would fall, sweet and heavy, into his palm if he so much as brushed the branch.
I was overcome with a panic so intense I was paralyzed. What could I do? How could I stop him? I had nothing to fight him with.
His breathing had slowed and his body seemed little more than a statue as he sat, posture perfect, behind the wheel of his car, waiting for the right moment to begin. He was dressed, as earlier, in impeccable charcoal gray trousers, a black golf shirt, and shiny black loafers on his feet. His face, almost dreamy as he savored his anticipation, was utterly benign. And yet, beneath all that seeming respectability, a lust to annihilate innocence simmered.
He was ready.
He slid from the car as lightly as a shadow, glanced around to satisfy himself that he was alone, then stepped quickly down the alleyway to where the girl’s back fence began. He found a slender opening where the neighbor’s fence ended and a perpendicular hedge that demarcated the side boundaries between the two backyards began. He groped his way through a few bushes, then pushed past them into a shaded corner of the girl’s yard, where the landscaping was thick enough to conceal him from the girl’s view should she happen to look up from her writing. From there, he slipped from tree to tree, making his way closer to the house, his grace marred by the terrible certainty of what he hoped to do.
He reached the base of the deck, stooped, and crept below its perimeter until he was once again in his favorite hiding place at the corner of the house near the side driveway. There, he could wait in the shadows between the evergreen cedar bushes and see into the back room through its sliding glass doors.
The young girl had let her journal and pen slip onto the floor and was leaning back against the cushions of the couch, her eyes drooping drowsily. She yawned and lay down, her head on a pillow, her face relaxing into sleep.
To wake up to someone like Hayes standing over her was an unimaginable horror. I did not let myself think of it.
Hayes was thinking the same thing. He began to breathe more heavily but forced his mind inward until he was once more under control. I followed him around the corner of the house to a side door that led into the kitchen. He tried the door. It was locked. He crept toward the corner that led to the front of the house, but the traffic on the street out front had started to pick up. Families were returning from church. He would not risk being seen entering that way.
He returned to the kitchen door. He gripped the handle and turned it one way and then the other, putting his whole weight on it as he pushed inward. The door gave lightly everywhere but near the doorknob itself: the young girl had locked it, but failed to turn the deadbolt as well.
Hayes smiled to himself and went to work. He knew where she kept her spare key, but a lock this flimsy did not require one. He put on a pair of thin latex gloves and pulled a strip of gray metal from his back pocket, gently easing it into the opening between the door and its frame. He jiggled the doorknob as he felt his way along the edge of the pressure lock. His tongue slipped out in concentration and gently stroked his lips, and his hips thrust unconsciously to the right and then upward as he felt his way around the lock. There was something sexual in his movements, as if, in penetrating her house, he was penetrating her.
The door slid open with a click. Hayes had to lean backward to keep from falling into the kitchen. He slipped inside, then carefully pushed the door