By day it was committee meetings, paperwork, trying to quell petty staff bickering and more paperwork. By night it was facing the tide of parental complaints that the child therapist grows accustomed to, and providing comfort and support to the young ones caught in the crossfire.

In my spare time I received tenants’ gripes, scanned the Wall Street Journal to measure my gains and losses, and sorted through mountains of mail, most of it, it seemed, from white-collared, white-toothed smoothies who had ways of making me instantly rich. I was nominated as an Outstanding Young Man by an outfit hoping to sell me their hundred-dollar, leather-bound directory of similarly-honored individuals. In the middle of the day, there were times, suddenly, when I found it hard to breathe, but I brushed it off, too busy for introspection.

Into this maelstrom stepped Stuart Hickle.

Hickle was a quite man, a retired lab technician. He looked the part of the kindly neighbor on a situation comedy—tall, stooped, fiftyish, fond of cardigans and old briar pipes. His tortoise-shell horn-rims perched atop a thin, pinched nose shielding kindly eyes the color of dishwater. He had a benign smile and avuncular mannerisms.

He also had an unhealthy appetite for fondling little children’s privates.

When the police finally got him, they confiscated over five hundred color photographs of Hickle having his way with scores of two-, three-, four- and five-year-olds—boys and girls, white, black, Hispanic. In matters of gender and race he wasn’t picky. Only age and helplessness concerned him.

When I saw the photos it wasn’t the graphic starkness that got to me, though that was repulsive in its own right. It was the look in the kids’ eyes—a terrified yet knowing vulnerability. It was a look that said I know this is wrong. Why is this happening to me? The look was in every snapshot, on the face of the youngest victim.

It personified violation.

It gave me nightmares.

Hickle had unique access to little children. His wife, a Korean orphan whom he’d met as a GI in Seoul, ran a successful day-care center in affluent Brentwood.

Kim’s Korner had a solid reputation as one of the best places to leave your children when you had to work or play or just be alone. It had been in business for a decade when the scandal broke, and despite the evidence there were plenty of people who refused to believe that the school had served as a haven for one man’s pedophilic rituals.

The school had been a cheerful-looking place, occupying a large, two-story house on a quiet residential street not far from UCLA. In its last year, it had cared for over forty children, most of them from affluent families. A large proportion of Kim Hickle’s charges had been very young because she was one of the few day-care operators to accept children not yet toilet-trained.