The Blond Man

by LeRoy Boher

He was sitting on a park bench across the street from the children’s playground when the blond man, dressed in a black sweatshirt and black jeans, darted out from behind the hedges, grabbed the boy who had strayed too far from the other children, and disappeared into the trees.

He sat there for a moment, stunned by what he had witnessed. He wanted to cry out, to warn the parents or parent, and if he did so the man wouldn’t get far, but at the same time he didn’t want to get involved. He stood up and walked casually down the street as if nothing had happened. If he had cried out, and the police had come, they would have questioned him as to what he was doing so close to the children’s playground. Nathan Broderick was a convicted child molester.

He stopped in front of a one-story brick house, stood under a large maple tree, and glanced up and down the street. There was a cool north wind on that late November afternoon. He ran his hand through his neatly trimmed beard and walked to the front door of the house.

“Nathan,” his mother’s voice sounded from the kitchen. “The ladies’ bridge game lasted longer than usual. Dinner won’t be ready for an hour.”

“That’s fine, Mom,” Nathan responded. “I’ll be down in the basement.”

Mrs. Broderick came into the living room tying a blue apron around her waist. “What have you been doing?” she asked.

“Nathan jabbed his hands into his jeans pockets. “After I finished at the courthouse, I just killed some time looking around.”

Mrs. Broderick, a tall raw-boned woman with gray hair, looked him squarely in the eyes. “See anybody you know?”

Nathan adjusted his glasses and glanced down at the gray carpet. “I don’t know as many people as I used to.” Both of them knew that most people didn’t want anything to do with him. A child molester was considered by most people as the lowest of the low. “I think most people I know have moved away or something.”

“Or something.” Mrs. Broderick muttered and hurried out of the room.

Nathan sighed heavily. Whenever he returned home, his mother would question him as to what he had been doing. It was as if she feared that he had returned to his old ways.

Nathan walked down the basement steps to his room. He sat down at his computer and covered his face with his hands. Since he hadn’t cried out a warning, the blond man was somewhere in the city having his way with the body. When he finished with him, he would take the boy somewhere and release him. The boy would wander aimlessly around the city until an official found him.

Turning on the computer, Nathan checked the web site for the names of registered sex offenders in the area and saw that he was the only one listed. Of course, it was possible the blond man had come from outside the area. It was also possible that this had been his first offense. If he had never been caught, there wouldn’t be any information on him. Nathan switched the computer off knowing that sooner or later the police would come and question him. It was possible nobody had recognized him since he had grown a beard and wore glasses.

Nathan was thirty-one years old, of medium height, with a muscular build. In high school he had realized he had this fetish for children, and not in a fatherly way or as a big brother but in a sinister way. He would watch children and wonder what it would be like to have sex with them.

He never touched a child until his college years when he got a job as a part-time custodian at All Liberty Grade School. His first encounter was with an eight-year-old boy. He convinced the boy that he shouldn’t tell anyone, that it was their secret. There were several more encounters until he graduated from college and moved on.

Nathan knew it was a sickness, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. One day a boy told his parents, and when the news got out several other parents came forward. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and spent eight years in prison. He had been released two years earlier.

In prison he saw a psychiatrist on a regular basis. When he was released he felt sure that he was cured, and even if he had the urge he promised himself he would never violate another child for as long as he lived.

His father had blamed his mother for what happened. He accused her of pampering Nathan, and of not being strict enough. He was a heavy drinker, and after Nathan went to prison the drinking increased, along with the beating and other abuse toward his wife. One evening, after beating her, he got in his car and sped down the highway in a drunken rage and was killed when he collided head-on with a semi truck.

When Nathan was released from prison, he was required to give his name, age, and address to be posted on a web site. He was to stay away from children, and if he was seen near a school or a children’s playground he would be arrested. He no longer had the urge to violate children, but he liked to sit and watch them at play. That was how he had come to be across the street from the playground when the blond man abducted the boy.

Nathan recalled that while he sat on the bench, the blond man had walked past him. He hadn’t paid much attention to the man, but he did notice him cross the street and walk down the sidewalk next to the playground. He didn’t notice him again until the moment he leaped out from behind the shrubbery and grabbed the boy.

Nathan did odd jobs around the neighborhood. In the winter he would shovel snow off the walks, and during the spring and summer months he would rake leaves and mow lawns. In prison he learned how to design and write greeting cards. He enjoyed doing that, and when he had enough cards he would fax them off to the card company. Having been a child molester, it was difficult to walk into a business and apply for a job. First he would have to tell who he was, and after that any chance of getting a nine-to-five job with benefits was almost impossible.

Two days later Nathan went out to get the paper. There on the front page, beneath bold black headlines, was a photograph of the boy who had been kidnapped. The boy had been found in the tall grass along the river bank. He had been raped and strangled. The blond man was a killer, and he would kill again.

Nathan considered calling the police and telling them what he had observed. He wouldn’t have to give them his name, but he didn’t want to make the call from the house in the event the police were able to trace the call. If the police knew who he was, they would think he was somehow involved.

The day of the boy’s funeral, Nathan drove to the large limestone Methodist church with its towering steeples, in hopes that the blond man might be there to view the aftermath of his handiwork. He didn’t see him around the church, and when the service was concluded he followed the procession to the cemetery. After the burial, with no sign of the man, Nathan went home.

Three days later he was sitting at his computer working on a greeting card. His mother had gone to get the mail. When she returned she came down to the basement.

“I don’t know what the world’s coming to,” she said. “A little girl was abducted from the schoolyard.”
Nathan swallowed hard as his mother laid the paper on the bottom step and went to a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner and began to rummage through them.

“What are you looking for, Mom?”

“The girls are getting ready for a rummage sale,” his mother explained. “I’m just checking to see what I can contribute.”

Nathan chuckled. “You could probably get rid of what is in most of those boxes.”

Mrs. Broderick gave him a scathing glance. “I may need some of this someday.” She straightened up and walked over beside Nathan. “We got a crazy man in this part of town.”

Nathan nodded. “That’s for sure.”

Just as Nathan feared, the body of the little girl was found three days later in a clump of trees on the outskirts of the city. She, like the boy, had been raped and strangled.

For the next two days, Nathan filled in for the regular custodian at the courthouse. On the second day, after he had finished the job, he went to a pay phone and called the police, then drove around the area checking out the playgrounds and the parks, but he failed to see any sign of the blond man.

Days passed. No more children were abducted. Nathan wondered if he was lying low, or had left town. Of course it was possible he was canvasing another part of the city. The man was probably very confident that nobody had seen him or could identify him.

It was mid-December, and there had been a heavy snowfall. After clearing his own walks and driveway, he went and cleared some of the neighbors’. He scopped now for two days, and at the end of each day his energy was spent. He would return to the house, take a shower, have dinner with his mother, then go down to the basement to work on the last of the cards he planned to fax to the card company.

Christmas came and went. The snow melted and still there was no sign of the blond man, and neither had there been any more abductions.

It was late January when a little girl was taken from her bed. When Nathan heard the news, he thought it strange that the blond man would change his tactics, but it was disclosed that a husband and wife were going through a nasty divorce and custody battle, and that it had been the father who took the child. Hours after the kidnapping, experiencing a change of heart, he turned himself into the police.

The day after Valentine’s Day, a girl who lives eight blocks from Nathan was abducted. She was found in a vacant lot a mile away. Parents were told not to let their children walk home from school, and also that at the playgrounds and parks adults should always be present to supervise and watch.

A few days later, two police officers recognized Nathan and stopped and questioned him. He assured them that he no longer preyed on young children, and that he certainly wouldn’t kill anybody. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the officers that it was he who had called them about the blond man.

When school was let out each day, Nathan would drive to the playground and the park looking for the man. In the park, on a warm windy day, he was about to give up and go home when he observed a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. He had been looking for a man with blond hair dressed in black, but this man was wearing gray sweats and a blue stocking cap pulled down over his ears. The blond locks sticking out from under the stocking cap seemed unmistakable. Nearby, children were playing under the supervision of their parents.

Nathan sat down on a tree stump some two hundred feet from where the man was sitting. The man was tall, with a muscular build. From the distance he appeared to be a handsome man, the type who would be a heartthrob with the women, not a child murderer. Nathan had no idea what motivated the man, but one thing seemed certain: he was looking for his next victim, and if he was ready to move he would have his car parked close to the spot of his planned abduction.

A half hour before sunset, the children’s parents took them to their vehicles. The blond man laid his paper on the bench and went to the parking lot where he got into a power-blue Ford Taurus and drove away before Nathan was able to get his tag number.

The following afternoon the blond man was at the park bench with his newspaper. It was a raw windy day with occasional mist and there were few children there, while those who were there left early. The blond man laid his paper on the bench and retraced his steps of the previous day to his vehicle. Once again, Nathan failed to get his tag number.

“What have you been doing out in this chilly, rainy weather?” Mrs. Broderick asked.

Nathan shrugged. “Just driving around,” he replied. “I get bored sitting around the house all day, even though I have work to do.”

His mother gave him a hard look. “I hope you haven’t fallen back into your old ways,” she hissed.

Nathan put his hands on his mother’s shoulders and looked her squarely in the eyes. “I will never fall into my old ways, I promise.”

His mother stared at him for a moment, then smiled. “I believe you, Nathan.” She kissed him on the cheek and scurried off to the next room on one of her many errands.

Nathan stood there staring blankly into space. He could have told his mother what he had seen and what he was doing, but she probably wouldn’t understand. She might call the police. It was hard enough to explain to himself the cat-and-mouse game he was playing with the blond man.

The next day was warm and sunny. The blond man was wearing a red baseball cap, was seated at the park bench with his newspaper. There were several children playing in the area. Nathan watched from the trees as the man would occasionally glance up from his paper to watch the children.

Just before sunset the parents gathered their children together and left the park. A few minutes later the blond man laid his paper on the bench, stood up, and walked off in the opposite direction from what he had done on the two previous days. Nathan, unprepared for the sudden change, lost sight of him in the trees.

After a diligent search he found a small secluded parking lot at the far end of the trees. Nathan knew the man was ready for his next abduction. Now that he had calculated the man’s next move, what was he going to do?

After serious thought, Nathan decided he would call the police. He didn’t tell them who he was, or how he knew about the man. He just informed them that a child was going to be abducted somewhere in Browning Park.

The following afternoon Nathan parked in the secluded parking lot. To his dismay there was no blue Chevy Taurus parked there. The only vehicle there was a late-model lime-green Dodge pickup. Nathan felt deflated, thinking the man had given up on that place.

Nathan walked across the park. The blond man wasn’t seated at his usual spot. Parents were keeping a watchful eye on their children. There didn’t seem to be many people there. He decided that if the police had taken his call seriously (and he felt sure they had) they would be scattered around the park in plain clothes so as not to alarm their subject.

Nathan made his way casually back and forth across the park, careful not to draw any undue attention to himself. It would soon be approaching dusk. The children and their parents would be leaving the park soon. Feeling like a fool, Nathan started back through the trees to where his car was parked. He hadn’t gone far when he caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye.

He ducked behind a tall cottonwood tree and watched intently. He spotted the blond man making his way along a row of evergreen trees in the direction of where the children were playing. He was in the park after all, and the green Dodge pickup truck must belong to him.

Nathan wanted to cry out a warning to the parents and the police as to the man’s whereabouts, but he didn’t. If he were to do so, the blond man would come up with some incredible story about what he was doing. Who would people believe, a man without a record or a registered sex offender? He had to be caught in the act. Nathan wasn’t sure as to what he was going to do. He would watch and wait, and see if the man was able to abduct a child.

“Damn,” he muttered aloud.

A soccer ball had gotten away from the children and a boy ran after it. They were moving in the direction of the evergreens. Nathan darted off to his right, putting himself between the blond man and his pickup. “It’s a damn dumb thing I’m doing,” he thought. He didn’t consider himself a hero.

The boy caught up with the soccer ball a few feet from the evergreens. As he was bent over to pick it up, the blond man dashed from his hiding place and grabbed him. With one arm around the boy’s midsection, his hand covering his mouth, the man raced through the trees toward Nathan.

As the blond man approached, Nathan stepped out from behind the cottonwood tree. “He’s got the boy,” he shouted, his voice echoing through the park.

The blond man stopped dead in his tracks and stared at Nathan in disbelief. His dark eyes were piercing. His handsome features became contorted into a mask of hatred. He slammed the boy head frist upon the ground and out of his pocket pulled a hunting knife with an eight-inch blade, waving it menacingly. Nathan had envisioned that when he confronted the man, he would release the boy and run to his vehicle. He hadn’t anticipated his having a weapon.

Nathan threw his weight into the man’s arm in an attempt to dislodge the knife from his hand. His quick action pushed the man’s arm backward, cutting him across the ribcage. With his free arm the blond man struck him in the face with his fist, and that was enough to gain control. He rammed his knife into Nathan’s groin. Nathan felt the knife blade rip into his stomach, and as he went down the man kicked him in the ribs and ran away, his hand clutching his side.

As Nathan lay on the cold ground, his body wracked with pain, he stared up at the naked canopy of the cottonwood trees and the azure sky above. He was aware of people’s excited shouts in the distance. He heard someone issue a warning to stop, which was followed by a gunshot, and he knew the bold man had been captured. Then he was aware of people gathering around him.

“This must be the guy who called the police,” one voice said.

“The boy is all right,” another voice said.

Nathan was aware that somebody was attending to him. He had saved the boy’s life, and he was responsible for the capture of the blond man. That might prove to people that, if not quite a hero, he was no longer the person who a decade earlier had gone to prison for those misdeeds.