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schools?
     Jerry had done the same thing already, of course—moving constantly up and down the West Coast when he was a child. If he had done it, he didn't see why Megan couldn't.
    In 1965 Jerry had a job at an electronics firm in West Salem, working as a technician. His employer found him a "Casper Milquetoast kind of guy." But he also recalls him as "the most brilliant electronically oriented mind I've ever seen. There wasn't anything he didn't know about electricity and circuitry."
    The boss liked him well enough, although he seemed a sissy and totally non aggressive. Brudos worked in the company for months, went fishing with the boss, and never, never showed any signs of temper. He was placid and amenable to suggestion. He just didn't apply himself, and that was the only explanation his employer could give for his being stuck in a technician's job. "With his First Class FCC license, he could have run any television or radio station in the country. But his only ambition was to read—read and study—and that was the end for him. He always carried a bound portfolio with him, filled with letters of recommendation. Each letter was encased in plastic, and he was really proud of those things. They were from college professors and electronics experts—character references. He must have shown them to me four or five times; he wanted people to think he was important."
    There was one thing Jerry Brudos never discussed with the men at the plant. That was women. He presented himself as a solid family man, and he never participated in the sometimes ribald conversations of his fellow workers. He didn't drink, and he didn't smoke, and his employer was sorry to lose him when he left.
     He came back to visit after a year or so. He still wasn't running a television or radio station, not even a small one.
     Brudos had an explanation for that, a story that was a total fabrication. He said he'd enlisted in the Navy and had been injured in the explosion of a shell aboard ship. He recalled that the accident had killed two of his buddies, and that he had spent a year in a naval hospital himself, his injuries so severe that he had become eligible for a service pension. It was a patent lie-all of it. Since he had been released from the Army for psychiatric reasons, the Navy would never have accepted him. His former boss didn't know that, of course, but the story sounded fishy.
     And yet even with Brudos' transparent attempt to make himself a hero, his ex-employer couldn't help liking the guy. He was pitiable, sitting there with his usual hangdog expression, his shoulders sloped forward as if he expected rejection. So, what the hell—he'd tried to make himself sound macho with some fairy tale. His old boss took Jerry home to meet the family, and didn't question him about what he'd really been up to while he was gone.
     Two events occurred in Jerry Brudos' life in 1967 that seemed to unleash the perverted obsessions that had lain smoldering inside him for so long. Given the extent of his aberration, some thing at some time would have triggered him. The monster within was growing restless. His migraines were accelerating both in number and in magnitude and he was experiencing what he called "blackouts."
    He had managed to alleviate his depressions—the terrible black, hopeless feelings that swept over him when he thought Darcie did not love him enough—with his nocturnal prowls to steal underwear and shoes. Each time, for a while, his stolen garments made him feel better. But his spells of feeling good lasted such a short time.
    When Darcie became pregnant again, Jerry was enthusiastic—far more than he had been over her pregnancy with Megan. It was almost as if he was going through the gestation right along with her. He wanted to do it all; he wanted to be right there in the delivery room when his son was born. He had no doubt at all, that it would be a son.
     His own father had not been very easy to reach, closed up, really, when he'd