His purpose here was to eliminate anything that might, in the event of McCarthy’s disappearance, lead the police to Vanessa.

In the study and bedroom, he also searched for a diary. He did not expect to find one.

As with literature, authentic decor, ideal vacations, and so many things, Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.

Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I’ve-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn’t want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.

He did not find a diary in McCarthy’s apartment, but he did find scores of art-paper tablets full of sketches and detailed drawings, mostly portraits. This suggested that the architect secretly yearned to be not a designer of buildings but instead a fine artist.

Pencil drawings littered the kitchen table. One of them was a striking portrait of a golden retriever. Some were studies of the dog’s eyes in different light conditions. Others were abstract patterns of light and shadow.

Billy became at once fascinated by the drawings because he inferred that during their creation, the artist had been in emotional chaos. Billy was a connoisseur of chaos.

He stood at the table, sorting through the pictures, and after a while he found himself in a chair without remembering having sat down. The wall clock revealed that he had been with the drawings for more than fifteen minutes, when he would have sworn it had been two or three.

Later, still enthralled by the art, he was startled to feel blood trickle down his face.

In no pain, puzzled, Billy raised one hand and felt his cheeks, his brow, seeking the wound, which he could not find. When he looked at his fingertips, they glistened with a clear fluid.

He recognized this substance. These were tears. In his line of work, he sometimes reduced people to tears.

Billy had not wept in thirty-one years, since he had read a huge novel of such stunning brilliance that it had drained him of his last measures of sadness and sympathy for his fellow human beings. People were nothing but machines of meat. You couldn’t feel sorry for either machines or meat.

That same novel had made him guffaw so strenuously, for so long, at the folly and bottomless stupidity of humankind that he had also used up his lifetime allotment of tears of laughter.

These new tears perplexed Billy.

They amazed and astonished him.

They also alarmed him.

Dread made his palms clammy.

The nanopowder-coated latex gloves were slimy with sweat, which backed up to the cuffs and leaked out at his wrists, dampening his shirt sleeves.

If his tears were tears of laughter, a preparatory lubricant for gales of giggles, he might have been able to accept them. But he did not feel any laughter building inside him.

His contempt for humanity remained so pure that he knew these could not be tears inspired by the richly comic horror of the human condition.

Only one other possibility occurred to him-that these were tears shed for himself, for the life that he had made for himself.

His alarm escalated into fear.

Self-pity implied that you felt wronged, that life had not been fair to you. You could only have an expectation of fairness if the universe operated according to some set of principles, some tao, and was at its heart benign.

Such an idea was an intellectual whirlpool, a black hole that would suck him in and destroy him if he allowed its fearsome gravity to capture him for another moment.

Billy knew well the power of ideas. “You are what you eat,” the nutritionists endlessly hector fast-food addicts, and you are also what ideas you have consumed.

With the thirst of an insatiable swillpot, he had poured down the fiction of two generations of deep thinkers, and he was pickled in their ideas, comfortably pickled. At fifty-one, he was too old to be transformed from a dill into a gherkin; he would have been too old at twenty-five.

He did not know why the drawings had brought him to tears.

Heart racing, breathing like a man in panic, he resisted the desire to study them further to ascertain the reason for their extraordinary effect on him.

With his happiness and his future at stake, Billy at once gathered up the drawings, hurried with them into Brian McCarthy’s study, and fed them through a paper shredder that stood beside the desk.

Half convinced that they wriggled with life in his hands, he packed the tangled mass of quarter-inch ribbons of paper into a dark-green plastic garbage bag that he found in the kitchen. Later, in Santa Barbara, he would burn the shredded drawings.

By the time he carried the computer brain, the wastebasket full of e-mail files, and the bag of shredded drawings to the Cadillac, where he stowed them in the trunk, his heart rate had subsided almost to normal, and he had regained control of his breathing.

Behind the wheel of the car, he stripped off the disgustingly slimy latex gloves and tossed them into the backseat.

He blotted his hands on his slacks, on his sport coat, on his shirt, and then drove away from McCarthy’s den of perils.

By the time he found the freeway entrance, the flow of tears had stopped, and his cheeks had begun to dry.

He suspected that to blot from his mind the entire disturbing incident, the best thing that he could do would be to kill a total stranger selected on a whim.

Sometimes, however, even a random act of murder had to wait for a more propitious moment. Billy was already late setting out for Santa Barbara, and he had to make up for lost time.

At Amy’s house, Brian measured kibble and treats into plastic Ziploc bags, more than they would need, enough for three days. He packed them in a tote with a food dish, a water dish, and other dog gear, while Nickie politely and successfully begged for nibbles.

In her bedroom, Amy selected two days’ worth of clothes-jeans and sweaters-and packed them in a carryall with her SIG P245. She included a fully loaded spare magazine.

Since moving to California, she had not used the weapon.

She had no clear reason to suppose that she would need it on this trip. Vanessa was evidently a disturbed, petty, and vindictive woman-even cruel, judging by the evidence of her e-mails-but that did not make her homicidal.

In fact, she seemed too selfish to do anything that would put her liberty-and therefore her pleasures-at risk. To secure a life of luxury and privilege with the wealthy man who evidently thought more with his little head than with his big one, she had good reason to expedite this transferral of custody without a hitch.

Besides, although Vanessa might have been a bad mother, might have been resentful of and mean toward her daughter, she had neither abandoned the girl nor strangled her in infancy. Judging by the news these days, more babies than puppies ended up discarded in Dumpsters. A decade spent looking after the girl, no matter how reluctantly, seemed to argue that at least a faint flame of accountability still lit the final chamber in the otherwise dark nautilus of her heart.

Abandoned in a church at the age of two, with a name pinned to her shirt, Amy could never say for certain who she was or that her birth parents had found her any less repulsive than Vanessa found the girl whom she called Piggy.

By the age of three, she’d been adopted from Mater Misericordiæ Orphanage by a childless couple, Walter and Darlene Harkinson. She had legally taken their name.