A Time of Predators

It was a one-story, garage-attached house, merely a permutation on the others he had visited. Frightening how many people did live in ticky-tacky boxes on uniformly curving streets. A new Olds was parked in the driveway; the lawn reflected pride of ownership. A man’s home is his castle. The door was answered by a blond girl about seven, with straight-cut bangs and the hands of a mud-pie chef.

“Hello there. Is your mother home?”

“Mom ’n’ Dad,” she assured him seriously.

Curt waited until she returned with a small woman whose permanent frown suggested the need of new glasses.

“My name is Curt Halstead. I was wondering if you have a son about ten years old. I—”

“Why... yes, we do. Is... something the matter?”

“No, ma’am. I’d just like to talk to him for a minute or two.”

“Kenny’s around somewhere. I suppose it’d be all right it—”

“Talk to him about what?”

A short, pugnacious man had appeared behind her, wearing rumpled khakis, a white T-shirt, no shoes, and a two-day beard. He pushed his wife aside, roughly, and thrust his face into Curt’s with all the belligerence so often displayed by a certain type of short man. “I don’t like your looks, buddy. You tryna mix my kid up in a lawsuit or something? C wan, get to hell outta here.”

“Now, Kent...” his wife began as if it were a familiar scene.

“You, shut up. I know how to handle guys like this.” He swung back to Curt with a semi-leer. “You still here? G’wan. Blow.”

Anger boiled up sourly inside him, but Curt merely nodded grimly and turned away. It was the man’s house, alter all. Return the next day, or the one after, or whenever Mr. Kent Anderson might be gone, leaving only his gentle-faced wife to man the battlements.

Anderson, sensing victory, made a barefooted sortie down the walk behind him. “I gotta good mind to take a poke at you. I gotta good mind—”

“I doubt that,” said Curt. On public property, he turned back in the slight defensive crouch made automatic by the months of training with Preston.

Curt’s stance stopped Anderson’s advance like a wall. “Yeah, well, you come around bothering my family when I ain’t home,” he muttered, “I’ll have the sheriff on you.”

“Ask for Sergeant Worden,” Curt snapped without forethought.

The change in Anderson was remarkable. “You mean... well now, look, Sergeant, I didn’t realize. I thought...”

So. Anderson hadn’t heard Curt give his name. Was afraid of the cops, perhaps had a reputation as a troublemaker. Curt took advantage. “I want to know if your boy was riding his bike from Sears Lake past the university golf course on Friday evening, April twenty-third, at eight o’clock. Also, did your wife call the sheriff’s office—”

“Wasn’t Kenny,” Anderson cut in eagerly. “Hell, I can’t hardly get that kid offa his butt, let alone riding his bike all the hell way over to Sears Lake. Electronics, with him. Workshop’s so damned full of wires and tubes and old radios...”

Curt thanked him and drove swiftly away, before Kent Anderson might begin wondering what a deputy sheriff was doing on a field call in a powder-blue VW sedan, sun-roof model.

Stopping a block away to draw a line through Anderson, Kent, Curt reflected again on the rather frightening isolation his profession had given him from what educators delighted in calling the total community. His social contacts over the years, by choice, had been limited mainly to those associated with the intellectual community; his vocational contacts, by necessity, had been limited almost totally to highly intelligent, well-motivated youth. Only now, ringing doorbells of a random sampling of people, did he begin to comprehend the staggering complexity of what was lumped together as The American Way of Life.

Anderson, Barbara, 1791 Edgewood.

Pulled over on a side street inside the university grounds, Curt consulted his map again. Edgewood was in a pocket of county land between El Camino and Linda Vista Road near the university Medical Center. In direct distance it was the address closest to Curt’s house, separated only by the woods and San Luisa Creek; but the nearest access was all the way down University Way to the Medical Center, then cutting through from the rear of that facility to the subdivision. Almost beyond Curt’s arbitrary five-mile limit.

It was a curving blacktop street lined with middle-income homes and littered with children’s playthings. Down on El Camino the rush hour would be snarling like caged lions, but here the pre-supper hush of busy stoves and televisioned news prevailed. Curt rang the bell at 1791, looked about. Garage windows painted over, living-room drapes drawn; he could see nothing to indicate a child lived there. He rang again, was just turning away when a chain lock was withdrawn, a bolt was snapped, and the door was opened.