A handwritten letter which had worried her particularly, coming as it had from an official in the California Youth Authority, someone who had taken an interest in Eddie, caught her eye just as she set a match to it. The words were distinct on the white page.

. . . your son, I feel, is in danger of becoming a type of person called, in modern parlance, a socio-path. In other words, someone without moral sense in whom all ethical feelings are stunted. A man without compassion or conscience . . .

The flame crept upward. She felt the heat in her fingers. She dropped the sheet into the sink, and it became crackling ash.

“Not my Eddie,” she said, looking down at the blackened, curling remains. “I know better.”

The page gave a final pop. She turned to the next item in the box.

On the morning of the third day the patrolman on guard at the rear of the Havermann house took notice at last of the anxious dog. He went to the rear door of the house and rapped, and Stolz interrupted his breakfast in the kitchen to answer. “This dog’s hungry or something,” said the cop. He was a young husky cop with alert eyes and a square, businesslike chin. “You got anything to feed him?”

“I’ve been feeding him well,” Stolz answered, regarding the dog with indifference. “He’s just restless, I suppose, since his mistress is dead.” Stolz wore crimson pajamas and a light silk dressing gown, oriental straw mules. He hadn’t been up long. He was eating scrambled eggs with yogurt and stone-ground whole-wheat toast. He had made Marvitch hunt up a healthfood store. In the store Marvitch had tried to become acquainted with the eighteen-year-old brunette clerk. “Perhaps you’d better tie him out beside his doghouse,” Stolz offered. “Then he won’t be in anyone’s way.”

The cop took the patient, anxious collie out to his doghouse beyond the garage, squatted inside the heavy blue uniform, reached for the chain attached to the side of the opening. Then he got lower on his haunches, actually put one neat blue knee on the dirt, and peered hard inside. “Well, I’ll be switched,” the patrolman said to the dog. “No wonder you were worried. There isn’t enough room in there for your fleas.” He wooled the dog’s head with his hand, and the big collie jumped around, overjoyed at this show of friendliness. “What is all this stuff?”

The cop reached inside and pulled out a plastic pillowcase, zippered shut, which through its pink color seemed marked faintly green and white. The cop unzipped the opening and stared in upon what he had found.

He tried to say something, but his tongue froze.