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pity on some of the people whose houses he seized, particularly the wivesand mothers who had been abandoned and left holding a bad mortgage and a mailbox full of bills. He would help them pack up, take their possessions to storage and drive them wherever they needed to go—the one part of this thankless work Pat enjoyed. “It takes some of the sting out,” he’d say when a less charitable colleague would ask him why he bothered. Of course, not every soon-to-be-homeless person was so easily mollified, and some were unwilling to simply hand over their house keys to this bluff, big man with his sheaf of legal papers. But when trouble arose, Pat’s standing instruction to his crews was to avoid any altercation and simply call the police. “You can always depend on the man in blue,” Pat would preach. “He’s on our side.”
    Pat also worked on the side with the city and county fire departments, clearing overgrown lots that had become fire hazards. Altogether, this sort of slapdash work on houses and empty lots proved to be quite a lucrative business, and Pat began making more money than he had ever before known. The Bakersfield Californian even profiled him in an article that depicted him and his foreclosure work admiringly, even quoting his philosophical musings on why so many homeowners ran afoul of their mortgages: “Demon rum and failed marriages,” he said sagely.
    His observations, however facile, were bitterly applicable to his own life.
    Pat’s marriage to Nancy had deteriorated over the years as his drinking increased. His decline had started during his flap with the school board, a career change that he claimed to take in stride, never admitting even to himself that his abrupt departure from education left him disappointed and depressed. As his foreclosure businessexpanded, Pat let his crews do the field work while he conducted most of his business from home—making it easier to start drinking earlier and earlier in the day. His consumption became prodigious; he could gulp down a six-pack in one sitting with little effort. This reliance on booze only intensified when two of his three children began having problems of their own.
    His oldest, Patrick Jr., had always been an easy kid, a quiet and respectful young man who effortlessly earned A’s in school and gained admission to Stanford University. Jennifer and Danny, however, were quite the opposite, providing continual sources of heartbreak for the family. Jennifer not only became an unwed teenaged mother, but she lost her infant son, Jordan, to crib death. Despite his anger at Jennifer over the pregnancy, Pat had loved his little grandson dearly, and the baby’s death marked the only occasion Jennifer ever saw her father cry—until Sandy disappeared.
    Danny, the middle child, was another matter. As a teenager and young adult, he had constant scrapes with the law—drug problems, thievery—and he had a quick temper. Fed up, Pat finally ordered Danny out of the house, and they had a fistfight that night—the only time that Nancy and the two other children say they can remember him striking anyone, no matter how much he had to drink. Pat and Danny never spoke again after that night. “I have only one son now,” he would later tell Jennifer. Danny, it seemed, remained furious at his father, accusing him of all sorts of abusive behavior.
    By the mid-eighties, whenever Pat Dunn was at home, he had a can of Coors glued to his right hand, or a tall whiskey and soda in front of him. In the Dunn household, there was a standing, if unspoken, rule that no onegot in the car with Dad after three o’clock in the afternoon. Pat, however, stubbornly refused to acknowledge any problem and would grow irate at the mere suggestion that he drank too much, vociferously arguing that he never missed work or failed to provide for his family—all true, if beside the point. Pat’s model of manly virtue was drawn strictly from the Hollywood idols of his youth—the silent