He’d kidded her about all of those things when she left for college. He’d threatened to redo the room into an exercise room.

“Like you’ll ever exercise,” she’d said.

He recalled how he patted his slightly doughy abdomen and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Next time you come home, I might have a hard body.”

“Ugh. That’s the last thing a daughter wants to hear about her dad,” she said.

They had both laughed. And he’d vowed right then not to change a thing.

She didn’t seem to see a need for it, either. It was a shrine to a time that had come and gone.

Cullen snapped his phone shut and sat at her desk. Her laptop was gone. There was nothing to rifle through. No papers in the trash. Skye had vanished.

Sydney Hornbeck Glyndon put down the phone and looked at the photo of her daughter staring from the art niche that she’d had specially created when she and her new husband, Brannon, built their Arizona dream house. Originally she had it in her mind as a place to spotlight one of her bronze sculptures of children. She’d always loved children, although she’d never quite been able to put aside her own needs for the one child who really mattered. She felt a chill in the air despite the heat that oppressed the valley that time of day. She knew that Cullen was more than concerned. He was scared. She could remember the last time she’d heard that in his voice.

“You’re leaving us forever,” he’d said when he saw her bags packed and lined up like a row of mismatched sentinels at the front door of their Vancouver home.

“I don’t know,” she’d answered, not looking at him.

“What am I supposed to tell Skye?”

Still refusing to meet his gaze, she replied, “Tell her what she should already know. I love her.”

“You have a great way of showing it.”

“She’ll understand someday. Sometimes a woman needs freedom. You’re a kind man, Cullen, but I need to be me. Not someone’s wife.”

“And not someone’s mother,” he’d said as the door shut.

September 26, 10:44 p.m.

Key Peninsula

There was something comforting about speaking to a machine, if comfort had ever really been a concern. Which, of course, it hadn’t. Sam Castile had never done a thing in his life other than find ways to feel good. Sometimes he wondered if his desires worked on some other plane, in a world far from those of other men. Other men seemed to strive. They seemed to seek to protect. It seemed that other men just wanted to ensure that they were always at the top of the heap, the winners of the competition. Control. What gave him a charge-both sexual and intellectual-were the hunt, the capture, the destruction of someone weaker than he was. It was primal. When he watched those other men with their pretty salon-cut hair and Macy’s clothes lament the challenges of their jobs, he wanted to laugh. They were playing a game that they could never really win. They’d been told by women how it was to be a man.

How they should be. Feel. Do.

By doing so they’d lost any real semblance of manhood. Sam saw the ruse for what it was and almost pitied those who didn’t understand that, in the case of domination and submission, there could only be one victor.

Sam loved the fight, the moment in which his prey acquiesced, fell limp, gave up. He loved the screams for mercy, the promises to do whatever he wanted, when he wanted.

Before he could tell her how dark his thoughts were, he talked into the machine. No judgments. No assessments about what he was doing. Just the cool sound of his voice as he recounted how things operated in his universe.

Where he was king.

“Me again,” he began, “I’ve been thinking about Number Three the past few days. How her skin felt, all wet, warm, soft. She was the prettiest one. She was the one teenage boys would dream about boning. Not all of them have been as hot, as weak. She was compliant. She did what I commanded. She was mine, like a pet. Like a toy.”

He could feel the bulge in his leather underwear grow with the recollection of what she’d been like. He slipped his right hand into his waistband, feeling the warmth of his own body. Liking what he felt. Rubbing his penis. The shaft, the head, his testicles.

All of it was feeling so good.

“She could have been my pet longer. She could have done what I wanted her to do. But no, she had to get some ideas of her own. Stupid bitch. She hurt me. She found a goddamn screwdriver and actually tried to kill me. Kill me! That stupid bitch!”

Sam opened his desk drawer and retrieved two black metal binder clips. He clamped one on his right nipple, the other on his left. He winced and gulped. The hurt was good, what he imagined it felt like for his victims when he brought them to the edge of passing out with pain.

He was nearing climax as the images of her surrender came faster and faster. He worked his right hand faster and faster, leaning back in his brown leather office chair. Thinking of how he had snuffed out her life, and the relief that came with it.

“Oh, you stupid bitch. You shouldn’t make me mad. I’ll goddamn slice you up like a deli sandwich.”

His mind conjured up the brutal images of his own hands, his hairy knuckles, white with tension as his fingers squeezed her slender neck. The struggle. The quiet, coughing scream that ended with her falling limp. He’d started to roll her over, determined to put himself inside her in a way that he was sure she’d like. If she were alive. To his disappointment, she’d soiled herself.

“Jesus,” he’d said, “you piss me off. You could have been such a good bitch. A clean bitch. I don’t like a dirty whore. You shouldn’t have tried to hurt me. I’m the boss. You belonged to me.”

As he remembered her, how she had been, he thought how much he might enjoy it if he could tell a living person what he’d done.

He spoke into his recorder.

“No one really knows what it takes to be me.”

Once he’d finished all he needed to do, he clicked on the Web site for the Lighthouse newspaper. How he loved seeing his work, reliving the glory of the last moments of another’s life. It excited him once more.

Here I go again, he thought, feeling another erection swell.

Kendall Stark tucked Cody into bed as Steven looked on. The nighttime ritual was as it had always been, quiet and peaceful. She kissed him on his forehead, still warm from his bath after dinner. Cody’s eyes fluttered, his lids heavy with sleep.

“Good night, my baby,” she said.

She imagined a smile, yet there really wasn’t one.

“He had a good day,” Steven said. “He seems happy in the new school.”

“He’s adjusting,” she said. “We all are.”

Steven put his arms around her waist as they left their son’s bedroom for their own.

Kendall looked at her husband and nodded, although she was unsure what he had said. She hated more than anything that she wasn’t living in the moment. She was far away on the shores of Little Clam Bay with a dead girl, a girl without a face.