“I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s not your fault. You totally stopped in time. I’m such an idiot. I’m so sorry. Thank you. We were just . . . my husband and I, we were fighting, you see, and I got distracted because he was being such a huge dick.”

The driver stares at her in a daze, whispering words under his breath, too quietly for her to make them out, but she’s willing to bet every other one is profane. Hands braced on his knees, he bends forward, mouth agape. His baseball cap falls to the sidewalk, revealing his sweat-soaked rat’s nest of wiry black hair.

She bends down and picks up Luke’s cell phone, slides it into her pocket with a sliver of the force she’d normally use for such a task.

Luke hasn’t moved, but his heaving chest makes it clear he’s still breathing. She’s about to wrap one arm around his waist before she realizes it’s the bruised and bleeding one, the one that should be broken, if not torn from her body entirely, and isn’t. She goes to wrap her good arm around his waist and remembers that if she pulls too hard she might detach his torso from his hips.

“Thank you, sir,” she tells the driver.

The driver just stares after her. Still bent over in a crouch. “Thank you,” she says. “I owe you my life. Honey, we should go. We’ll be late to get the baby.”

“What fucking baby?” Luke whispers.

“Now, sweetheart,” she hisses.

He takes a step, then another and another. He lags behind, his expression making him look like he’s the one who just stopped a speeding truck with one arm. He’s swallowing over and over again, sucking in half breaths through his nostrils, staring dead ahead as if he’s being marched toward the gallows. But they’re making decent enough time. Within a minute or two, they round the corner, putting the still stunned driver out of sight.

“You OK?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” he croaks; then he stumbles a few steps to his right, grabs a public trash can by the rim, and empties the contents of his stomach into it.

III

26

The woman he might kill next is doing a lousy job of stretching her quads. She’s bracing herself against the cargo door of her RAV4 with one hand, but her form’s still off. And when she pulls back on the ankle of her bent left leg with her other hand, her hips wobble and she bites her lower lip.

So she’s an inexperienced jogger. That’s good. She’s also doing her stretches out here in the parking lot on Portola Parkway and not closer to the trailhead, where there’s more space, which says she doesn’t have much experience with Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park, either. Another very good sign. When she does take to the trail, she’ll be self-conscious and insecure, preoccupied with how she looks to the other hikers and bicyclists and, more important, not very aware of her woodsy surroundings.

He’s made it a point to get to the park an hour before dusk. If everything goes well, he’ll need the cover of night to work under. But he figured the late hour would also introduce him to a woman so eager to get a run in before the park closes she’ll be too distracted to notice she’s being stalked. Self-conscious and insecure are even better than rushed, however, and it’s a great sign, he thinks, that he’s stumbled across such a promising target within minutes of his arrival.

Changing his method of abduction with each new patient hasn’t been easy, but it’s been an essential component of his success so far. Otherwise, the cops might have linked the first and second disappearances before he managed to complete his work. Before the masks were placed. And the masks are key. They’re the only reason he does this. No matter what becomes of him, no matter who eventually steps up and tries to tell his story, it’s all about the masks. If they get that part wrong, then it means even his biographers haven’t taken the time to get to know him, and that means no one ever will.

This is the first time he’s tried to claim a patient out in the wild—or a contained and lightly trafficked version of the wild. If tonight goes well, it will be as a result of all the extra steps he added to his process: an interim hiding space for the patient, a judicious use of the thick brush that lines the lower section of the Borrego Canyon Trail, a ball gag to quiet her in those brief moments before the sedatives take effect, or in the event that they somehow manage to wear off before he gets her in his trunk. So, yes, insecure and nervous are great signs in a potential new patient, but with this particular patient, the key factor is really weight. A few extra pounds means no core strength to fight him off. Too many and he won’t be able to drag her off the trail undetected in whatever time fate gives him to do the job.

He studies the woman’s meaty thighs, notes the slight roll poking over the waistband of her bike shorts. Soft and thick. Not bulky and bottom heavy. Perfect.

He imagines her enjoying fruity tropical drinks with a group of her girlfriends at some noxious chain restaurant, the kind that serves desserts the size of babies.

He imagines her swirling her straw as she listens to one of her prettier, slimmer friends go on and on about the trendy new fitness class she’s taking and how it’s supposedly changing her life.

Imagines her pacing her apartment later that night, listening to Taylor Swift but hearing only her pretty friend’s boasts, knowing she’ll never have the confidence to walk into a gym or some new class full of glistening little Southern California fitness nuts, but realizing that she has to do something, has to make some attempt to lose the weight that’s probably dogged her since her teens, even if it’s the last-minute, hastily planned run she’s preparing for now, in a pair of New Balance shoes that aren’t right for this or any trail.

In about ten years, if somehow she’d managed to marry well, she could become the type of woman who ends up in his office, expecting his scalpel to add ten more honeymoons to her failing marriage. There’s no ring on her finger now, and come sunset, if he does his job right, she’ll never marry. But when he’s finally done with her, her life will have meant something. Or her face will have meant something, at least, once he’s separated it from her pettiness, from her weakness.

First she has to fail his test.

Slowly, he starts to approach her, forcing himself to take short steps, which isn’t easy given he’s six foot three. But the short steps make his running pants whisk together, a repetitive sound that alerts her to his approach at just the right moment.

She’s down on one knee, double-knotting her right shoe, when she notices him. At first she seems stricken by the sight of his legs. They’re muscled tree trunks that make formidable impressions even inside his baggy pants, and they encourage her to glance up at his torso. Later he’ll don his black windbreaker, but for now it’s tied around his waist, so his tank top can offer her an expansive view of his bulging shoulders, his biceps like goose eggs, the Michelangelo-carved veins along his powerful forearms. Something like desire and hope lights up her expression, as if, for an instant, she thinks he might be the one. And then she gets a good look at his face. The light goes out of her eyes almost instantly.

There’s no telling which feature of his she focuses on first, but whichever one it is, it repels her. Maybe it’s his offensively long mouth, which despite its size still doesn’t manage to close entirely over his fat tongue. Together these attributes conspire to make him always look slightly winded, a cruel injustice given that he’s spent his entire adult life in peak physical condition. Maybe it’s his forehead, which rises like a wall toward the sudden flat top of his skull, too flat for his latest hair implants to distract from its startling angularity. And then there are his eyes. They crowd the bridge of his nose so closely, there’s no making them look evenly spaced, no matter how much he has his nose sanded down. And it’s been sanded down plenty, to the point that it now looks both perfect and perfectly out of place, like a piece of statue designed to plug a congenital hole in the center of his face. Maybe she sees only one or two of these things. Maybe she notices all of them at once. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she gives him the brusque, dismissive smile he’s come to expect from women all his life, then returns her attention to her shoe.

She’s failed the test.

She’s his now.