"Right, right." Meg looked out the window at the strip malls and fast-food joints. "It's weird."

"What is?"

"The stuff he did."

"Murdering girls? I'd say that qualifies as more than weird."

"The way he did it. Kidnapping them at random. And he didn't rape them or anything."

Robin wondered where Meg had picked up that detail. She had never been interested in following the news. "True."

"So if he didn't have anything personal against them, and he wasn't in it for sex, why'd he do it at all?"

"What's with this sudden interest in Justin Gray?"

"I was just wondering if you had any, you know, theory about it. Unless you're not up for the Grand Guignol stuff right now."

"I'm up for it, I guess. It's not Grand Guignol, anyway. It's sort of Freudian. Or Jungian. I don't know. Symbolic."

"I'm going to regret asking, aren't I?"

"Too late now." Robin composed her thoughts while the Saab idled at a stoplight. "The fact that he didn't know the girls personally was part of their appeal. It made it easier for him to objectify them, depersonalize them. He didn't want to see them as individual human beings. He wanted to see them as generic females. As femininity in the abstract. You with me?"

"I'm hanging on every word."

The light cycled to green. Robin glided through the intersection. "By killing them, he was finishing the job of dehumanization. He was"

Meg finished. "Making them nonpersons."

"Yes. Exactly."

"Nonpersonslike him."

Robin was pleased. "You could end up as a shrink yourself, you know that?"

"No way. For me, it's either supermodel or research bio-chemist." She thought for a moment. "There's another way he's like the girls he killed. They were teenagers. So's he."

"He's twenty-eight."

"Not inside. Inside, he's still fifteen and probably all covered with pimples. That's why he's so obsessed with high school girls. He's still in high school. Emotionally, I mean. And I bet he always will be."

Robin felt a flush of painful pride. "Sometimes you're so smart, it's scary."

"I have a genius for a mother. Some of it had to rub off."

"I think you'll outgenius me by a long way before long."

"And Dan, too?"

"He's only a genius at selling himself."

"You believe that?"

"When it comes to your father, I don't know what to believe."

They reached Jamie's house on the outskirts of Westwood. Robin actually did pull up alongside a tree to hide the car.

"Ten o'clock," she reminded Meg.

"I got it. Jeez, you've got to get this car fixed tomorrow. It'll be, like, a total humiliation if anybody sees me in this thing."

"You'll survive."

"I'll never live it down. Make an appointment with a body shop, please?"

"I aim to serve."

"Cross your heart?"

"You only get one of those per day."

Meg nodded good-bye, then left the car and hurried up the walk to the bungalow's front door. Robin watched until she was safely inside, then pulled away, shaking her head.

Total humiliation, Meg had said. And she'd meant it, too. To be embarrassed in front of her peers was the worst fate she could imagine.

Nothing unusual about that. Her daughter had reached the stage of adolescence when the world centered on her.

Every problem was a crisis. Every decision was a turning point. Image was all-important. Her personal life was cosmic in scope and significance, and the rest of the world had shriveled to an afterthought.

This much was clear to Robin, not because she was a shrink, but because she had been fifteen herself not so very long agowell, on second thought, it had been twenty-four years, more than a lifetime in Meg's eyes. Still, she remembered. Remembered the clash of fear and excitement whenever she contemplated the future, guessing at the path she would take, the obstacles she would face, wondering if she had the courage to run the race, or if she would stumble and fall like most of the adults around her. Remembered the moods that came and went like flashes of summer lightning, fluctuations of emotional voltage she herself couldn't explain. Remembered how much everything matteredthe right hairstyle, right clothes, right friendsand how she'd hated herself for caring so deeply about things that were so shallow. There was a painful immediacy to every momentary feeling. Any ripple of disappointment or pleasure became a surge of grief or joy.

Hormones explained some of it, but there was also the vertigo-inducing task of forming one's own character, the scary thrill of knowing that choices made now might echo down decades of regret.

And yet, nearly all of it was unnecessary. That was the secret Robin wished she could impart to her daughter. But it was not a secret to be shared. It was a lesson to be learned.

She wished she could hug Meg and say to her, Life is not so hard. It's usually about as hard as we make it. We can't plan it out. We have much less control than we think. Mostly, things just happen, and if there's a reason, we don't know it at the time. But we don't have to know. It's not our job to do more than we can do. Life doesn't give us more than we can handle.

But if she said all that, Meg wouldn't hear. She wasn't ready to hear. She was fifteen.

Brand lived in a bungalow in Hollywood. There were some nice parts of Hollywood that the tourists never saw, but his neighborhood wasn't one of them. The bungalow dated back to the 1920s and was said to be in the Craftsman style, whatever the hell that meant. When he'd bought it, the porch had been festooned with hanging plants that blossomed garishly in the spring. The plants were all dead now, killed by neglect, but he'd left them in their hanging baskets anyway.

He had made a few improvements to the place, but they were not of an aesthetic nature. He'd encircled the property with a perimeter fence, put bars on the windows, installed strong locks on the doors, and paid a monthly fee to a burglar alarm company. He would have liked to replace the carport with a garagehe didn't like leaving his car in plain sight, even if it was protected by the fence, and he especially didn't like leaving the carport empty, an advertisement that no one was home. But the expense was prohibitive. Anyway, in the ten years he'd lived here, he'd never been robbed, though most of his neighbors had.

Inside, he had made a halfhearted try at decorating, but had given up when the house was only partially furnished.

His rare visitors wrinkled their noses in a way indicative of a pervasive odor. If there was one, he was used to it.

His fridge was empty. His music collection was a decade out of date. There weren't many books on his shelveshe was more of a magazine reader. Lately he was inclined to sit and watch TV, the volume turned up loud enough to almost drown out the low boom of rap music from next door. That was what he'd been doing for most of the night. Funny thinghe couldn't even remember what he had watched.

At ten o'clock, impelled by a need to urinate, he wandered into the master bath. When he was done, he cranked the handle of the low-flow toilet and watched as it reluctantly emptied itself. He went on staring into the swirling water until the bowl had refilled. Finally he broke away, shaking his head.

Things like that had been happening to him lately. He would be mesmerized by the sound of static on the radio or the repetitive trill of a bird. Once, someone's car alarm had gone off down the street and he had listened for what must have been fifteen minutes, fascinated by its steady monotonous clangor.

What he needed was a drink. But he wasn't drinking, because he suspected that if he started to medicate himself with scotch, he would slide effortlessly into alcoholism. He didn't need that. He'd arrested enough boozehounds on the street. He was damned if he would become one of them.