Mr. Murder

that's the key.
        To its original engineered condition. It can't start to remake itself on any fundamental level, can't mutate, for God's sake."
        "We're sure of that, are we?"
        "Yes!"
        "Why?"
        "Well… because… otherwise… it's unthinkable."
        "Imagine," Waxhill said, "if Alfie is potent. And interested in sex.
        The boy's been engineered to have a tremendous potential for violence, a biological killing machine, without compunctions or remorse, capable of any savagery. Imagine that bestiality coupled with a sex drive, and consider how sexual compulsions and violent impulses can feed on each other and amplify each other when they're not tempered by a civilized and moral spirit."
        Oslett pushed his plate aside. The sight of food was beginning to sicken him. "It has been considered. That's why so damned many precautions were taken."
        "As with the Hindenburg." As with the Titanic, Oslett thought grimly.
        Waxhill pushed his plate aside, too, and folded his hands around his coffee cup. "So now Alfie has found Stillwater, and he wants the writer's family. He's a complete man now, at least physically, and thoughts of sex lead eventually to thoughts of procreation. A wife.
        Children. God knows what strange, twisted understanding he has of the meaning and purpose of a family. But here's a ready-made family.
        He wants it. Wants it badly. Evidently he feels it belongs to him."
        The bank offered extensive hours as part of its competitive edge.
        Marty and Paige intended to be at the doors, with Charlotte and Emily, when the manager unlocked for business at eight o'clock Tuesday morning.
        He disliked returning to Mission Viejo, but he felt they would be able to effect their transactions with the least difficulty at the particular branch where they maintained their accounts. It was only eight or nine blocks from their house. Many of the tellers would recognize him and Paige.
        The bank was in a free-standing brick building in the northwest corner of a shopping-center parking lot, nicely landscaped and shaded by pine trees, flanked on two sides by streets and on the other two sides by acres of blacktop. At the far end of the parking lot, to the south and east, was an L-shaped series of connected buildings that housed thirty to forty businesses, including a supermarket.
        Marty parked on the south side. The short walk from the BMW to the bank door, with the kids between him and Paige, was unnerving because they had to leave their guns in the car. He felt vulnerable.
        He could imagine no way in which they might secretly bring a shotgun inside with them, even a compact pistol-grip model like the Mossberg.
        He didn't want to risk carrying the Beretta under his ski jacket because he wasn't sure whether some bank-security systems included the ability to detect a hidden handgun on anyone who walked through the door. If a bank employee mistook him for a holdup man and the police were summoned by a silent alarm, the cops would never give him the benefit of the doubt-not considering the reputation he had with them after last night.
        While Marty went directly to one of the teller's windows, Paige took Charlotte and Emily to an arrangement of two short sofas and two armchairs at one end of the long room, where patrons waited when they had appointments with loan officers. The bank was not a cavernous marble-lined monument to money with massive Doric columns and vaulted ceiling, but a comparatively small place with an acoustic-tile ceiling and all-weather green carpet. Though Paige and the kids were only sixty feet from him, clearly visible any time he chose to glance their way, he didn't like being separated from them by even that much distance.
        The teller was a young woman-Lorraine Arakadian, according to the nameplate at her window-whose round tortoise-shell glasses gave her an owlish look. When Marty told her that he wanted to make a withdrawal of seventy thousand dollars from their savings account-which had a balance of more than seventy-four-she misunderstood, thinking he meant to transfer that amount to checking.
        When she put the applicable form in front of him to effect the transaction, he corrected her misapprehension and asked for the entire amount in hundred-dollar bills if possible.
        She said, "Oh. I see. Well… that's a larger transaction than I can make on