That might actually be another reason why he did, Gus realized. Maybe he’d met someone and didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

But if that thought occurred to Shawn, he didn’t share it with Brenda Varda. Instead he promised they would find Tanner.

The only trouble was that there were no clues. Or, worse, there were clues, but they all pointed to the same conclusion the police had already reached. A couple of Tanner’s suitcases were missing, his favorite of his eight cars-a restored candy apple red 1964 Impala-was gone from his garage, and his closets had gaps where a couple weeks’ worth of resort wear might have hung.

With no physical evidence to follow and no real reason to believe anything had happened to Tanner, Gus suggested they check air- and cruise-line manifests to see which exotic vacation he’d chosen. Shawn had a different idea: They should hunt for Tanner in the game itself.

“Maybe we should start our search in 1995,” Gus had said. “That’s the last time anyone thought the idea of a guy being sucked into a computer game was halfway interesting. And that was only because no one knew enough about Russell Crowe to be annoyed by him yet.”

“No one got sucked into a game in Virtuosity,” Shawn said. “In fact, it was just the opposite. The killer escaped from the game to stalk the mean streets of reality. Which would be an interesting twist if we could prove it happened here.”

“Yes, searching for a character from a computer game set loose in real-life Santa Barbara sounds like a much better use of our time than trying to figure out where Tanner actually went,” Gus said.

“I’m not the one who brought up the idea,” Shawn said. “I said I thought we should look for clues inside the game.”

“Why would there be clues inside the game?” Gus said.

“It’s called Criminal Genius,” Shawn said.