and haggard. The fear was etched in painfully obvious lines at the
corners of his bloodless mouth and all around his eyes. He did not like
what he saw, and he could barely meet his own gaze.
Christ, he thought, doesn’t the frightened little boy ever fade away and
let the man come through? Won’t you ever outgrow it, Alex?
Are you going to be so easily terrified all the rest of your life? Now
that you have a wife to protect? Do you think that maybe Colin will
grow up fast enough so that he will be able to look after both you and
Courtney?
Angry with himself, half ashamed, but still undeniably frightened, he
turned away from the mirror and his own accusing countenance, and went
back into the main room.
i i Colin had not moved from the bed or dropped the blanket from his
shoulders. He looked at Doyle, his large eyes magnified by the
eyeglasses, the speck of fear magnified as well.
“What would he have done if he’d been able to pick the lock without
waking us?”
Doyle stood there in the middle of the room, unable to answer.
“When he got in here with us,” the boy said, “what would he have done?
Like you said when all this started-we don’t have anything worth
stealing.”
Doyle nodded stupidly.
“I think he’s just what you said,” Colin went on. “I think he’s like
one of those people you read about in the papers. I think he’s a
maniac.” His voice had become almost inaudible.
Though he knew that it was no real answer and was probably even untrue,
Alex said, “Well . . . he’s gone now.”
Colin just looked at him.
The boy’s expression might have meant anything, or nothing at all.
But Alex saw in it the beginnings of doubt and a subtle shift of
judgment. The boy, he felt certain, was reevaluating him just as surely
as the rain pattered on the roof overhead. And although Colin was far
too intelligent to sum up anyone in an absolute term or category, too
clever to think in blacks and whites, his opinion of Doyle was this
minute changing for the worse, no matter how minimally.
But, Doyle asked himself, did one child’s opinion mean all that much to
him? And he knew immediately that when it was this child, the answer
was yes. All of his life Doyle had been afraid of people, too timid to
let himself be close to anyone. He had been too unsure of himself to
risk loving. Until he had met Courtney. And Colin. And now their
opinions of him were more important than anything else in the world.
He heard his own voice as if it had come from someone else. “I guess I
better go outside and have a look around. If I can get a glimpse of
him, see what he looks like, get the license number for that van of his
. . . Then we’ll at least know something about our enemy.
He won’t be such a cipher-and he’ll seem less frightening.”
“And if he does try anything serious,” Colin said, “we’ll have a
description to give the cops.”
Doyle nodded numbly, then went to the closet and took out the rumpled,
soiled clothes he had worn the day before. He got dressed.
At the door a few minutes later, he looked back at Colin. “Will you be
all right here by yourself?”
The boy nodded and drew the blanket tightly around himself.
“I’ll lock the door when I go out-and I won’t take a key. Don’t open up
for anyone but me. And don’t even open for me until you’re certain that
you recognize my voice.”
“Okay. ”
“I won’t be long.”
Colin nodded again. Then, as frightened as he was for himself and Alex,
he managed a bit of gallows humor. “You better be careful.
it would be utterly tasteless for an artist to let himself be killed in
a cheap, dismal place like this.”
Doyle smiled grimly. “No chance.” Then he went outside, making sure
the door had locked behind him.
Earlier in the evening and fifteen hundred miles to the east, Detective