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upright, instinctually grabbing the throat of the man shaking his shoulder. Watson choked and looked down at him bug-eyed.
    “No, Mr. Cobb!” Kelleher yelled, grabbing his wrist. “It’s a good thing.”
    Cobb came free of the dream, fully awake, and slowly let go of Watson’s throat.
    “We’ve gone viral,” Kelleher said as Watson choked and coughed.
    “Already?” Cobb said, sitting up, shedding the grogginess. Johnson and Nickerson were standing there too.
    Watson crowed in a hoarse voice, “One hour twenty in, we’ve got seventy-five hundred hits on YouTube.”
    Kelleher grinned. “And two thousand thumbs down on Facebook.”
    “Those numbers will grow,” Cobb remarked.
    “Definitely,” Hernandez said behind him. “Frickin’ exponential.”
    Cobb twisted to see not bald Hernandez but blond-locked and bearded No Prisoners slipping the mirror sunglasses on to complete his disguise.
    Cobb smiled, said, “Outstanding in every goddamned way, Mr. Hernandez.”

Chapter 13
    “PUT THAT THING away,” Sanders snapped, reddening after the initial shock of seeing the dildo in Mo-bot’s hand. “Jennifer Harlow’s private, uh, needs are not at issue here.”
    “Maybe, maybe not,” Mo-bot shot back. “There are drawers full of sex toys and gear in her closet. His too.”
    Camilla Bronson blanched. “You cannot mention this to anyone!”
    She must have said that six times over the next fifteen minutes as we discovered all manner and size of dildo, butt plug, suction tube, cock ring, and artificial vagina in the Harlows’ closets. There was also a sex swing and a device that resembled a gymnast’s vaulting horse equipped with a powerful motor inside and a mechanical penis jutting out of the top.
    “Never seen one of those before,” I commented.
    “It’s called a Sybian,” said Sci, who’d just come in. “The penis attachment not only goes up and down, it can be set to rotate or corkscrew.”
    “And you know that how?” Terry Graves asked.
    “Kit-Kat’s got one,” Kloppenberg replied matter-of-factly.
    Sanders frowned. “Who the hell is Kit-Kat?”
    “Sci’s virtual girlfriend,” Mo-bot said.
    Not really wanting it discussed that my chief criminologist’s private life consisted of online video sex with a woman in our Stockholm office, I quickly changed the subject, asked, “Find anything in the kitchen, Seymour?”
    Sci nodded. “Enough mold and bacteria to say those dishes and glasses are from thirty-six to forty hours ago at the outside. I’ll be able to give you a more definitive answer once we get back to the lab.”
    Thirty-six to forty hours. Which meant the Harlows had left the house voluntarily or involuntarily roughly two days after they returned home from Vietnam. What had happened in those two days?
    I left the others and again walked around the house, trying to see something I’d missed on the first pass, trying to imagine the things that might have unfolded in the time before the family disappeared. Had they left on their own, or at gunpoint? In what vehicle? And what about the caretaker, and the personal assistant, Cynthia Maines?
    I had more questions than answers, and the growing feeling that I was indeed missing something, something that was staring me right in the face. Then again, little of the scene made sense to me. There were no signs of violence that I could find, no indication that they’d been forcibly taken, no blood, no broken furniture, certainly no ransom note or demand of any kind.
    So what had happened here?
    I discovered an editing room in the basement below the east wing of the house, with five big screens all linked to a mainframe server and a state-of-the-art editing and mixing console. I tried a door beyond the console. It was locked.
    I turned, my eyes drifting across the electronics in the editing room, and it hit me. There were no computers anywhere. No desktops. No laptops. No tablets. No handhelds except for the dead iPhone in Malia’s room.
    This