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fading as they wound their way down the hill and into the night.
    He turned and looked at the dogs. Jesus. He had to think. He had to be clearheaded. He had to think things through all the way to their logical conclusions.
    After walking over to the first dog, he knelt and worked his hands underneath. He was warm and limp and bloodsoaked. Titus avoided looking at his head. When he picked him up he felt that odd density of death, a strange thing he had known before with animals, how they seemed so much heavier after they had died.
    He carried the dog through the courtyard, into the allée of mountain laurels and out into the darkness, where a broad, sloping path led down to the orchard. At the back of the orchard, where the only light was the reflected glow of the city lights haloed over the ridge of hills, he put the dog down on a flat plot of thick Bermuda grass. Then he returned for the second dog.
    With a pickax and shovel he got from the reservoir work site a hundred yards away, he began digging in the loam. It took him the better part of an hour to get the hole deep enough to discourage the coyotes and feral cats from digging them up, and then he laid the two dogs one on top of the other and filled in the hole.
    When he was finished he was soaked in sweat, his clothes ruined, smeared with dirt and dog’s blood that combined into a sad crust. He returned the pickax and shovel to the reservoir site and then walked back up to the house, where he got a hose and washed the pools of blackening blood from the veranda.
    He crossed the courtyard and went through to the walled enclosure surrounding the pool. Behind the poolhouse there were showers and dressing rooms and a large storage room where they kept the tables and chairs and other accessories they needed for entertaining.
    Outside the dressing rooms, he removed his clothes and mud-caked loafers and threw them into the trash cans. Naked, he went to the ice machine in the cabana beside the pool and filled a plastic bucket there with ice and threw the ice into the pool. He did this repeatedly until the ice machine was empty. And then he dove in. He swam four laps slowly, back and forth through the cold pockets of floating ice, trying to clear his head.
    Once out of the pool, he made his way to a deck chair and sat down. He started trying to work it out. For a moment his thoughts just wouldn’t gel. He couldn’t come up with anything at all. He just wanted to call Rita, hear her voice. But that was out of the question. He didn’t trust himself to hide his emotions, and to make her suspicious—maybe even frighten her— without having some kind of plan in place was simply irresponsible.
    If he was going to believe this guy’s threats, then there was nowhere to go. No options. But Titus found that inconceivable. There were always options, weren’t there?
    How would this guy know if he contacted someone? Obviously he had some kind of tactical team. How thorough were they? There were bound to be bugs in the house. The phones were probably tapped. And it didn’t take geniuses to pick up cell phone transmissions. Would he be followed, too?
    Still, doing nothing was out of the question. Alvaro had said: Even if you do contact law enforcement people and are able to hide it from me temporarily … So maybe his surveillance wasn’t as infallible as he would like Titus to think. Sure, he’d want Titus to believe that he, Alvaro, was all over him, that Titus couldn’t even have a change in his pulse rate without Alvaro knowing about it; but what if that wasn’t true? Was Titus just going to roll over and believe that? It’s a gamble, Alvaro had said.
    Titus sat up in his chair at the memory of that remark. A gamble. Well, where there’s a gamble, there’s also a chance, isn’t there?
    He stood up, his mind racing. No police. No FBI. No law enforcement agencies. But Titus remembered a guy. Four years ago, one of Titus’s female employees was abducted from the CaiText parking