Relentless

set loose in a new place.
    The residence spanned two lots, and the side facing the harbor featured floor-to-ceiling glass. A private pier led to a boat slip that would accommodate at least a sixty-foot craft.
    The view enchanted. Pleasure boats of all sizes plied the near and farther channels, though not as many as on a summer day.
    A sleek white yacht motoring out to the Pacific, perhaps a 120-footer, filled me with envy, not of the owners’ fortune, but of their carefree existence and of the freedom that the open sea offered them. Impossible to imagine that they would ever be stalked by a bow-tied psychopath or in fact by a lunatic favoring another kind of neckwear.
    Because empty rooms are off-putting, the sinkhole had been professionally staged. This hadn’t lured a buyer, but the furnishings made the house almost as cozy as our own.
    While Penny, Milo, and Lassie settled in, I went out to cash a check for living money and to buy a disposable cell phone. We also needed sandwich fixings, snacks, and sodas to last a couple of days.
    I was loath to leave them alone. But Penny insisted that Waxx had no way of knowing where we had gone.
    A baseball cap made an adequate disguise for a quick shopping trip. Bestselling writers are not as widely recognized as actors. My hair is my most memorable feature. In articles about me, it has been described as “unruly” by the kinder journalists, although the cheap-shot artists have called it a “weird thatch” and a “convincing argument for shaved heads.” A simple cap rendered me anonymous.
    I drove one of Marty’s classic trucks: a 1933 Ford V8, turquoise with bright yellow wire wheels. If I had not been worried about my wife and son being murdered, I would have felt so cool.
    Midmorning, when I returned to our plush hideout, I found Penny in the huge kitchen, at the secretary, online with her laptop.
    Because the house offered a few dazzling entertainment centers, including a home theater, cable service was maintained to allow the best possible demonstration of those features to potential buyers. Consequently, we had quick Internet access by cable.
    In the vast family room to which the kitchen opened, Milo sat onthe floor at a half-acre coffee table on which he had established
his
laptop and had linked it to an array of other devices, some of which he had designed and constructed from items I had purchased for him. A spiderweb of extension cords radiated to a series of wall plugs.
    He looked like an elf who had forsaken his traditional magic spells and charms for techno wizardry. I trusted that he would not turn out to be a pint-size Frankenstein.
    Earlier, Penny turned on one of three Sub-Zero refrigerators, in which I now stowed most of the food and beverages I had bought.
    Focused on her computer, Penny said, “Did you know Shearman Waxx is an enema?”
    “Yes. Milo informed me of that the day before yesterday.”
    “Same source says he was born in 1868.”
    “Wow, almost a decade before Edison invented the light bulb.”
    She said, “All his reviews from the past ten years are archived. Forcing terrorist suspects to read them aloud would be a form of torture more cruel than applying pliers to their genitals.”
    “It’s the bad syntax,” I said, pulling up a dinette chair to the secretary and sitting beside her.
    “Partly. But it’s also two other things. The butt-kissing factor is so high, when you’re reading, you can hear his lips smacking.”
    “Whose butt is he kissing?”
    “The literary Brahmins and whatever writer is the darling of the hour. The other thing is his seething hatred, which he disguises as a concern for quote ‘cultural truths and societal evolution.’”
    “What does he hate?”
    “Everything before the twentieth century and most of everything thereafter. I’m still getting a handle on him.”
    Swiveling her chair toward me, taking her hands, lowering my voice to spare Milo from the story, I told Penny about my phone conversation with John Clitherow.
    Her beautiful blue eyes, which were of a shade for which I had never found an adequate adjective, did not cloud or darken, or do any of the things that eyes are sometimes said to do in works of fiction. When I told her that Clitherow’s parents had been murdered, however, I saw in the directness of her gaze, in the stopped-time steadiness of it, a solemnity more profound than I had ever seen before.
    Upon hearing that Margaret Clitherow and her two daughters were likewise