Yet despite his careful study and redundant cover-ups, Gavin understood that he had one essential weakness—an absolute violation of all his rules.

Before launching into his search for Sadie Vauk, Gavin took a moment to visit his trophy room, a collection of protected files on a private server, one that he had installed in his mother’s garage attic back when he still lived with her. It was the perfect place to store his keepsakes should the police ever come to tear his house apart.

He had taken great care to devise a system of online traps and hidden passages to keep his virtual trophy room hidden from prying eyes, precautions that mollified his unease over having a trophy room in the first place.

There were four files on the server, and each held pictures of what he had done, and to whom. He would visit his trophy room on special occasions, the images taking him back in time so vividly that he could again smell their perfumed bodies and feel the softness of their skin against his fingers.

Sometimes, he let his mind wander into the future, to a time when his bones would rest beneath a marble headstone, put there by nothing more exceptional than old age. In that daydream, he pictured some clueless bastard stumbling upon his trophy room. He hoped that the guy would have the good sense to take the computer and its files to the police. Gavin imagined their faces as they came to understand his skill. It sometimes bothered him that his artistry might go unappreciated, that his secret might follow him to the grave. His magnum opus deserved to be acknowledged—but not until after he was dead and gone.

He closed the connection to his private server, letting his pulse return to normal before typing Sadie Vauk’s name into his search engine.

She had already posted thirty-six pictures from the wedding to her Facebook page, godawful shots, like someone had handed a camera to a baboon.

Gavin had taken up photography when he got his first camera on his twelfth birthday, a gift that his mother could afford only because she married that man who had handled her like Play-Doh. He was an ugly man, a shaved llama with too many teeth, but he was also a man who lived in a big house with a swimming pool. Gavin called the man Dad, not because his mother hit him when he called him Mr. Balentine, but because Richard Balentine bought nice things for Gavin—things like a camera.

That birthday was the last one that Gavin would spend with Richard Balentine. A few months later, Richard would be dead, and his beautiful house with the big swimming pool would become the property of Gavin’s mother.

In the comments section below the Facebook pictures, Gavin read a message from the bride, Janelle Rice-Halloway, thanking Sadie for doing her hair. Sadie was a hairdresser? Gavin opened a second search, adding the word salon after Sadie’s name, and found a link for Queen Bebe’s Hair Salon. He clicked on it.