It had been two years since he last performed this task, and that two-year hiatus had not been by accident. Police looked for patterns, their eyes and ears perked by those deaths most recently discovered. But police were human, apt to forget details as time went by. It only made sense that a connection would be harder to make over a span of years. Gavin had chosen a two-year break at random, but over the course of eight years—and four victims—it had seemed to work. And now the time had come to add to his collection.

He began his routine by spending five minutes staring at the wall to clear his mind of prurient thoughts. He had learned that passion and emotion were venoms that needed to be sucked out and spat to the ground. Rule number one—keep your head. Be patient, look for flaws in the plan, and above all else, be prepared to abort if the risk ever outweighs the reward.

He put Sadie Vauk’s place card on the desk and, right away, the face of the woman at the wedding came back to him. The bleached teeth, the bottle tan, the contempt in her eyes when she called him Picture Boy. She had invited what was to come.

Gavin started to feel anger build in his chest, so he turned the card facedown and took a deep breath to expel the agitation.

When he felt calm again, he went to his kitchen, knelt on the floor in front of his lazy Susan, and reached for the toe kick. His fingers found the loop of fishing line, the handle that opened his hiding spot. One small tug and the cupboard’s kick plate came free. He retrieved a small laptop, one he used for his most secret of tasks.

As a student of the craft, he understood that computer forensics could find items buried on a hard drive, bits of data that lay entombed but intact, even after deletion. This was just the first of the many mistakes made by lesser men, troglodytes who blundered their way toward awaiting jail cells. Gavin, however, planned multiple options for every contingency. Redundancy was his mantra.

For example, he would do his internet searches for Sadie Vauk on his special laptop, never on his home computer. And when he finished his research, deleting the search would not be enough. Hiding the computer under the lazy Susan would not be enough. He would also run an evidence-erasing program. And once he executed his plan, he would render the hard drive useless and dispose of the computer. It made for extra work, and extra cost, but such were the travails of a craftsman.

Sometimes Gavin entertained himself by watching true crime shows on television, where purportedly brilliant investigators pursued what passed for master criminals. Gavin giggled at the buffoonery—the sheer slapstick comedy of it all. People left bloody footprints behind and kept the shoes. They gave no thought to tire tracks in mud or to DNA sloshed around like party confetti. He lived in a world full of amateurs and idiots.