How much time did he have? Sadie would have been groggy when they found her, most of her recent memory lost to a comatose haze. The name in her appointment book at the salon listed him as Kevin. If she didn’t connect him to the wedding, the police might never find him, but part of Gavin hoped they would. Chalk it up to hubris, or maybe boredom, but now that the worst had happened, he wanted a taste of the big leagues.

If she made the connection between Kevin at the salon and Gavin the Picture Boy, detectives would be at his door soon, but when? That was the question that gnawed at Gavin’s thoughts. Would they wait for toxicology reports to come back? Doubtful. They might hold out until they got a search warrant, and that would take time. Pass on the warrant, and they could be at his door as early as noon. Gavin figured that he had at least until then to finish his cleanup.

He had pulled his laptop and the bottle of GHB from beneath the lazy Susan, wiping his prints from both and tossing the bottle into the bin. As for the laptop, he’d had one last project to run on it. He’d exported the new pictures of Sadie from his camera to the computer before destroying the camera’s memory chip with fire and a toilet flush.

This part of the plan—saving pictures of his crime—was absolutely foolish, and he knew it, but he had no choice. His keepsakes were like oxygen for him. He couldn’t live without them. Besides, what was the point of all that planning and effort if he couldn’t relive the thrill through his small mementos?

Once he had secured his trophy—the memory of Sadie locked away on the server hidden in his mother’s garage attic—he went to work destroying his laptop.

Of course, simply deleting the data would not do; that was the digital equivalence of hiding behind a curtain. Gavin first used his evidence-erasing software to wipe the hard drive clean. A lesser mind, at that point, would have been satisfied, but not Gavin. He opened the laptop, removed the hard drive, and drilled holes through the memory platter. In order to get data from the platter, it needed to spin like a record album. He rendered the disc useless and unreadable.

Redundancy.

Finally, he smashed it all with a hammer and put the scraps into a plastic shopping bag, which he placed in the front seat of the Bronco.

He removed the privacy screens from his license plates and put those in the bin, too. Despite having laid plastic sheathing on the floor of his downstairs bedroom, he vacuumed the carpets and put the vacuum bag in the bin. Then he loaded the vacuum itself into the Bronco, on the near impossible chance that its beater-bar held a strand of hair or a few skin cells. He would donate the vacuum to a thrift store on his way to buy tires.