Right now, he had trouble getting excited about anything. That was part of the reason he’d come here: the hope that being somewhere different, doing something different, would start him perking again.

He’d seen plenty of new stuff, all right. But none of it did much to distract him from the mess his family had turned into, or from the South Bay Strangler, the bastard who got his jollies raping and murdering little old ladies from Hawthorne down to Rolling Hills Estates. Over the past five years, he’d done in at least thirteen of them. Plenty of DNA evidence to put him away if he ever got caught, but no matches showed up with anybody who’d run afoul of the criminal-justice system.

“Probably a pillar of the fucking community-except when he goes hunting,” Colin snarled, there in the Ford where nobody could hear him. He’d voiced the idea before, whenever the South Bay police met to coordinate the hunt. Nobody’d wanted to listen to him. He snorted. As if that were anything new!

It started raining harder. Colin fiddled with the windshield wipers, trying to keep them going just fast enough to wipe away the drops before the windshield got too spattered to see through… and no faster. Such relentless precision was a habit of his. It had driven Louise crazy. Crazy enough to shack up with a guy ten years younger than she was, evidently.

What did they call women who did such things nowadays? There was a word for it. Not being on the front lines of American slang, Colin had to go fishing inside his head. He caught it, though: “Cougars!” He felt good about remembering, then not so good because it was something he needed to remember.

A squirrel darted across the highway. It was smaller and redder than the squirrels in San Atanasio, but just as stupid and suicidal. He slowed down enough to keep from squashing it.

“Cougars,” he repeated sadly. He wouldn’t have figured Louise for one, not till it happened. But then, he hadn’t realized his marriage was in trouble till it blew up in his face. Which proved… what, exactly?