oversell. He noted the misplaced apostrophe, so characteristic of the North. (Location 767)
Note: ?
At night he lay under his blankets listening to Radio Luxembourg on a cheap transistor with an earplug. Station interference made him feel like he was beaming into a forbidden world of American songs that conjured up an infinity of space to set against the confinement of his room. He dreamed of riding the railroads. They would move to Arizona where his stetsoned father, marshalling freight in Santa Fe, would become a source of pride. (Location 873)
At the scene of his first murder he learnt something about himself. A woman had been brutally knifed to death by her drunken boyfriend in a house in a street that Cross had walked down every day on his way to school. He expected to be horrified by what he saw but found himself quite calm. The sad messiness of an interrupted life, the graphic evacuation of violent death, the aftermath of murder, all drew him until the scene stuck to his mind like glue, as though he had been waiting all his life to find himself in a room like this and for the discovery of such naked emotion. He needed passionately to know what could have caused this dark spill of violence, in such contrast to the bloodlessness of his own existence. He wanted to understand. He wanted to know the man who had done it and, above all, why. (Location 885)
Army training, combined with his canny feel for the lie of the land, honed his lethal skills. (Location 902)
