Free The Edge of Sleep by David Wiltse Page A

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