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Green, a suavely tough little septuagenarian, has an imposing reputation among his peers, who admire his stagecraft--a repertoire of actorish gifts that includes a sense of timing acute as a night-club comedian's.

Wearing an open-necked shirt (borrowed from Mr. Meier) and blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs, he looked as lonely and inappropriate as a seagull in a wheat field.

"I lay awake wondering if either one was bothered by it--the thought of those four graves."

Dick trotted down to the ocean's edge. . . here and there stopping to collect a seashell. As a boy he'd so envied the son of a neighbor who had gone to the Gulf Coast. . . and returned with a box full of shells--so hated him--that he'd stolen the shells and one by one crushed them with a hammer. Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

. . . she looked again at the faces on the kitchen table. "Think of him," she said, placing a finger against the front-view portrait of the blond young man. "Think of those eyes. Coming toward you." Then she pushed the pictures back into their envelope. "I wish you hadn't shown me."

". . . that family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them--well, it's like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless. I don't think people are so much frightened as they are deeply depressed."

"I've seen some bad things, I sure as hell have. But nothing so vicious as this. However long it takes, it may be the rest of my life, I'm going to know what happened in that house: the why and the who."

But who hated the Clutters? I never heard a word against them; they were about as popular as a family can be, and if something like this could happen to them, then who's safe, I ask you?

Several murderers, or men who boasted of murder or their willingness to commit it, circulated inside Lansing; but Dick became convinced that Perry was that rarity, "a natural killer"--absolutely sane, but conscienceless and capable of dealing, with or without a motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows. It was Dick's theory that such a gift could, under his supervision, be profitably exploited.

". . . nothing scares you," she said, commenting upon a generally recognized quality of Mr. Clutter's: a fearless self-assurance that set him apart, and while it created respect, also limited the affections of others a little. "I can't imagine you afraid. No matter what happened, you'd talk your way out of it."