Real Murders

"My baseball!" shrieked Phillip suddenly.

He had my full attention. The shriek, which had sprung with no warning from his throat while he was telling me what the principal had done to the playground combatants, had scared the whosis out of me.

"But Phillip, it's dark," I protested, as he catapulted out of his chair and dashed to the back door. I tried to remember if I'd ever seen him walk, and decided that I had, once, when he was about twelve-months-old. "Here, at least take my flashlight!"

I managed to stuff it in his hand only because he was so partial to flashlights that he slowed down long enough for me to pull it from the kitchen cabinet. "And try to remember where you last saw the ball!" I bellowed after him. I'd finished my meal while Phillip was relating his long story, so I scraped my plate and put it in the dishwasher (Robin was due in a few minutes, and I wanted the place to look neat). The dessert plates were out, everything else was ready, so while I waited for a triumphant Phillip to return with his baseball, I idly looked at my shelves, putting a few books back in place that were out of order. I stared at the titles of all those books about bad or crazy or crazed people, men and women whose lives had crossed the faint line that demarks those who could but haven't from those who can and have.

Phillip had been gone a long time; I couldn't hear him out in the parking lot.

The phone rang.

"Yes?" I said abruptly into the receiver.

"Roe, it's Sally Allison."

"What..."

"Have you seen Perry?"

"What? No!"

"Has he been... following you anymore?"

"No ... at least, I haven't noticed if he has."

"He ..." Sally trailed off.

"Come on, Sally! What's the matter?" I asked roughly. I stared out through the kitchen window, hoping to see the beam of the flashlight bobbing around through the slats in the patio fence. I remembered the night Perry'd been across the street in the dark waiting for Robin to bring me home. I was terrified. "He didn't take his medicine today. He didn't go to work. I don't know where he is. Maybe he took some more pills."

"Call the police, then. Get them looking for him, Sally! What if he's here? My little brother's out alone in the dark!" I hung up the phone with a hysterical bang. I grabbed up my huge key ring, with some idea of taking my car around the block for a search, and I pulled out the second flashlight I kept ready. It was my fault. The thing in the dark had gotten my little brother, a six-year-old child, and it was my fault. Oh Lord God, heavenly King, protect the child.

I left the back door wide open, the welcome light spilling into the deep dusk. The patio gate was already open, Phillip never remembered to close it. His bat was propped beside it as he'd left it coming in to supper. "Phillip!" I screamed. Then I thought, Maybe I should be quiet and creep. In a frenzy of indecision, I swung the flashlight to and fro. A few yards away, a car started up and pulled out of its space. As it went by, I saw it was Melanie in Bankston's car. She smiled and waved. I gaped after her. How could she not have heard me yell?

But I couldn't reason, I just kept walking and sweeping the ground with that beam of light, seeing nothing, nothing.

"Roe, what's wrong? I was just on my way over to your place!" Robin loomed above me in the dark.

"Phillip's gone, someone's got him! He left to get his baseball, he ran out the back door, he didn't come back!"

"I'll get a flashlight," Robin said instantly. He turned to go to his telephone. "Listen—" he half-turned back but kept moving, "he wouldn't think it was fu

"I don't think so," I said. I would have loved to have thought Phillip was giggling behind a bush somewhere, but I knew he wasn't. He couldn't have stayed hidden this long in the dark. He'd have jumped out long before, screaming "boo," his grin of triumph making his face shine. "Listen, Robin, go ask the Crandalls if they've seen Phillip, and call the police. Perry Allison's mom just called and he's loose somewhere. She may not call the police. I'm going to work my way around to search the front yard."

"Right," Robin said briefly, and vanished into his place. I walked quickly through the dark (and it was full dark now), the beam of the flashlight on the sidewalk before me. I'd pause, and swing the flashlight, and step on. I passed the Crandalls' gate, and had found nothing. I opened Bankston's gate. The flashlight beam caught something on Bankston's patio. Phillip's baseball.

Oh, God, it had been here all the time, no wonder Phillip couldn't find it. Bankston had probably picked it up out of the parking lot to keep it to give Phillip tomorrow morning.

I lifted my hand to knock on Bankston's back door and my hand froze in midair. I thought about Melanie pulling out of the parking lot so strangely—she must have heard me scream.

And I'd told Phillip to think of where he'd seen it last. He'd seen it last in Bankston's hands.

Had Bankston been lying down in that car? Had he been lying on top of Phillip, to keep him quiet?

A long brown hair had been found in the Buckleys' house. Benjamin didn't have long brown hair. He had thi

Had Phillip been in Bankston's townhouse? I turned my flashlight on my key ring. You couldn't call it breaking and entering, I told myself hysterically. I had a key. I was the landlady. I turned it in the keyhole, opened the door as quietly as I could, and stepped inside.

I didn't call out. I left the back door open.

The kitchen light was on, and the kitchen/living room was a mess, but an ordinary mess. A library book was lying open on the counter, a book I had in my own personal library, Ernlyn Williams' Beyond Belief. I felt sick, and had to bend over.

This time they were patterning themselves after Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the "Moors Murderers." They were going to kill a child. They were going to kill my brother. The monster was not sitting in a jail cell in the Lawrenceton City Jail. The monsters lived here.

Hindley and Brady had tortured the children for a few hours first, so Phillip might be alive. If he'd been in the car, if they'd taken him to Melanie's place, wherever that was— right, the same street where Jane Engle lived—he might have left some trace.

Abandoning silence, I raced up the stairs. No one. In the larger bedroom there was a king-sized bed with a coil of rope beside it, and a camera was on the dresser.

Hindley and Brady, two low-level office workers who'd met on the job, had tape-recorded and photographed their victims.

The extra bedroom was full of exercise equipment: the source of Bankston's newly bulging muscles. There was a file box with its lid hanging back, key still in the lock. Anything he locked up, I wanted to see. I knocked it over and the magazines inside spilled out like a trail of slime. I looked at an open one in horror. I did not know it was possible to buy pictures of women being treated like that. When I had heard of the anti-pornography movement, I'd thought of the usual pictures of women who at least were apparently willing, being paid, and still healthy when the photo session was over.