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let Mulch in. Where have you been? We’ve been trying to find you.”
    My expression and tone must have frightened her, because she took a step back. “I’m sorry. I was on vacation, I don’t—”
    “Thierry Mulch,” I shouted. “You let that sick fuck into Ali’s school. You let him near all those children!”
    “What?” she said, her hand going to her lips. “What’s he done?”
    “He kidnapped my family,” I said. “He may have killed my wife. He may be getting ready to kill Ali.”
    The principal was horrified. “My God, no!”
    I saw how strongly she reacted, and it shook me out of the fugue state where I’d been wandering.
    “We left messages for you all week here at the school,” I said. “The FBI. The police.”
    “I’m so sorry,” Dawson said, her voice quivering. “I was in Jamaica, visiting my cousins, and I only just got back. I was going to my office to get ready for next week when I saw you standing here. How can I help? Anything.”
    “Tell me about Thierry Mulch. Everything you know.”
    Dawson said that Mulch had contacted her out of the blue, first by e-mail, and then by phone. He said he was a web entrepreneur who had had several successful ventures but was looking for a different demographic and a bigger audience. His idea was to create a social-media platform for the six- to twelve-year-old crowd that could be accessed only by verified members of that crowd.
    “To keep out the perverts?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Not a bad business concept.”
    “That’s what I thought. So when he asked to come speak to the kids, I saw it as an opportunity. And he checked out completely. I mean, his company has a legitimate website. Here, come into my office, I’ll show you.”
    We went to the front doors of the school. She opened them and we went inside, turning on lights. The odors in the hallway were so familiar and so intertwined with memories of my children that I stopped breathing through my nose.
    In her office, Dawson got on her desktop computer, typed, and then frowned before typing again. With a sinking expression, she said, “Either I’ve got it wrong or the website’s gone offline.”
    The principal started rummaging in her desk, said, “But I’ve got his business card here some—here it is!”
    “Don’t touch it!” I yelled, coming around the desk quickly as she shrank back. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’ll want to fingerprint it.”
    In a thin voice, she said, “He wore thin white gloves.”
    “Of course he did,” I said, wanting to punch a wall. “But just the same. Do you have a plastic sandwich bag?”
    “Will an envelope do?”
    “Yes.”
    She got me an envelope and I used a pair of tweezers to pluck the business card from the drawer and place it on her desk.
    “I’ve got a photocopy of his driver’s license too,” she said.
    “We’ve already got one of those, but thanks,” I replied, studying the card and then taking a picture of it with my smartphone.
    Thierry Mulch, President, TMI Entertainment, Beverly Hills
. It gave a phone number in the 213 area code and an address on Wilshire Boulevard. It also had a web address— www.TMIE1.info —and an e-mail address, [email protected] .
    I was about to drop the card into the envelope and take it with me downtown for processing when something about the URL and the e-mail pinged deep in my recent memory.
    “Try www.TMIE.com on your computer.”
    Principal Dawson frowned, typed the URL in, and struck Return. The screen blinked, and up came the home page of TMI Enterprises, a multimedia and social-networking company.
    “This is it,” she said. “This is his website.”
    “Click on ‘Corporate Officers.’”
    She did and the screen jumped to another page that featured pictures and short bios of the people running the company. At the top of the heap was someone I’d seen when I’d visited the website two weeks before: a blond surfer-type guy in his late twenties wearing thick black glasses and