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than I’d need.
    The school was closed for the summer. There was no security guard. The alarm system was probably older than me.
    The guidance counselor’s office wasn’t even locked.
    I could tell it was a woman’s office without turning on my shrouded fiber-optic pencil flash. Whoever she was, she kept her file cabinets locked. And the key in her desk.
    Jerrald had a thick file. He’d been evaluated a number of times. I kept seeing stuff like “attachment disorder.” I skipped over the flabby labels and went right to the stone foundation they built those on—the boy had been torturing animals since he was in the second grade, starting with his own puppy.
    The counselors wrote that Jerrald was “acting out.” Or “crying for help.” Some mentioned “conduct disorder.” Some talked about medications.
    To read what they wrote, you’d think they knew what they were talking about. Every one of his “misconducts” always had some explanation.
    But I’d known men who’d once been boys like Jerrald. So I knew what he’d really been doing.
    Practicing.
    T he counselors had done all kinds of things for Jerrald. Individual therapy. Group therapy. Pills that he probably never took.
    The most recent report said he had been making real progress. Jerrald had a Facebook page. I knew what that was from those kids Dolly always had around—a kind of diary they write on their computers. Some put up stuff they wanted to show off: paintings, poetry, photography, short stories.
    I read some of Jerrald’s stuff that the counselor had printed out. All torture-rape-murder stories. The counselor said that they were a good outlet for Jerrald—a “safe place for him to vent.”
    Even Jerrald’s English teacher said his writing showed real promise.
    I knew the only promise Jerrald was ever going to keep.
    I left the school the same way I’d left Alfred Hitchcock’s body in the woods—nobody would ever be able to tell I’d visited either place. Two rules: You enter without breaking. And you remember that nobody misses what you don’t take.
    T he best way to keep anger out of your blood is to go back to your training. Nothing personal. Always do it by the numbers.
    The anger was all mine, all against myself. I’d thought I’d already done my job by stopping the deer-killers. But keeping them at a safe distance didn’t matter when Dolly was letting even more dangerous people in the door. Just the
thought
of leaving my Dolly exposed dialed all the blood in my body to subzero. Blood doesn’t have to flow if there’s no heart for it to oxygenate—and if you do it “by the numbers,” like I’d been trained to, there’s no heart involved.
    By mid-May, I’d found out that Jerrald’s parents were going on vacation. To Hawaii. They were taking his little sister with them, but not Jerrald. He was eighteen, more than old enough to leave on his own for a couple of weeks.
    I don’t know whose idea that was. Or, I guess, whose idea they
thought
it was.
    T he newspapers speculated that Jerrald must have been building some kind of bomb in his room. One serious enough to blow out the whole back of his house, where his bedroom had been.
    Anytime a high school kid gets caught with heavy explosives, it’s a big deal, no matter where it is. The cops said the bomb was probably a crude, homemade device. “Very simplistic,” their expert said. “You can get instructions on how to build one on the Internet.”
    They printed parts of Jerrald’s Facebook page in the papers—he had more than nine hundred “friends,” especially fans of his writings. But he was obviously a very disturbed young man, all the experts agreed on that. Probably been bullied, too, they said.
    What they didn’t say out loud was how relieved they all were that he’d never had a chance to bring the bomb to school.
    T he town had a big funeral for him. A lot of kids were crying. Dolly went, too; some of those kids really wanted her there.
    I didn’t go. I was