The Darkest Evening of the Year

is just to make him cooperative. Then comes the neutering.”

 
    Chapter
18
    T he living room yielded nothing of interest to Vernon Lesley, but in the back of the bedroom closet, he found two shoe boxes full of photographs.
    His client had provided a list of items related to Amy Redwing’s other life that she might not have destroyed when she shed her past, changed her name, and relocated to southern California. Photographs were at the top of that list.
    The box contained primarily snapshots and the digital-camera memory cards from which some of them had been printed. The most recent were almost nine years old.
    Vern sat on the edge of Redwing’s bed and patiently pored through numerous envelopes of photos to see if they contained any pornographic material. His client hadn’t asked him to conduct such a meticulous inspection; but Amy Redwing happened to be an attractive woman, and Vern happened to be curious.
    Unfortunately, not one picture proved to be erotic or even exotic. He had never seen a more mundane collection of snapshots.
    Although he didn’t know Redwing’s story, to Vern it seemed that her current life and her former one had been equally boring.
    In Vern’s other life, as Von Longwood, he tooled around on a radically customized motorcycle, a real hog, and he was a master of tae kwon do with the costumes to prove it, and in general he lived large. He didn’t understand why anyone would want another life that was as drab as the first.
    In this life, Redwing even looked similar to how she had looked in her prior life. Her hair was long now, short then; she had done some things with makeup then that she didn’t do now; she had dressed more stylishly in those days. That was the extent of her makeover.
    She had remained a brunette even though she might have looked hotter as a blonde. And judging by what evidence Vern possessed, she hadn’t undergone breast enlargement, which maybe she should have.
    Whereas Vernon Lesley stood five eight, Von Longwood towered an awesome six feet six. Vern slouched through life with round shoulders and a potbelly, but Von had biceps to rival those of Schwarzenegger when he had been a great action-movie star instead of a governor.
    Von had tattoos, an earring with a tiny skull dangling from it, a muscular chest instead of man boobs, and wings . They were huge, soft, feathery wings, but so strong, and when Von wanted to fly, no one could keep him grounded.
    Vernon Lesley’s other life unfolded in Second Life, the Internet site that offered a vivid virtual world populated by avatars like Von Longwood.
    Some people mocked this kind of role-playing, but they were ignorant. Virtual worlds were more imaginative than the real world, more exotic, more colorful, yet they were becoming more convincingly detailed by the week. They were the future.
    Vern had more fun in his other life than in this one, more and better friends, and more memorable experiences. He was freer as Von Longwood than he could ever be as Vernon Lesley. He had never been creative in his first life, but in his second, he had designed and built a nightclub, and he had even bought an island that he intended to populate with fantastic creatures of his own invention.
    Any of that, any moment of it, beat sitting in a stranger’s bedroom, poring through boxes of boring photographs, hoping to find a nude shot.
    From an inner pocket of his sport coat, he withdrew a white plastic trash bag and unfolded it. He put all the photos in the bag, and then he returned the empty shoe boxes to the back of the closet, leaving them exactly where he had discovered them.
    As far as he could tell, the only significant difference between Redwing’s two lives was the addition of dogs to this one. He saw no mutts in the photographs.
    In one of her nightstands, he found a SIG P245 pistol loaded with +P .45 ACPs. This struck him as a perfectly manageable weapon for a woman who did not have the balance benefit of surgically enlarged breasts. He returned the gun to the drawer.
    He was not surprised to find a loaded pistol. These days, if Vern had been a woman living alone, he would have slept with a shotgun.
    From the bedroom, he proceeded to her study. Eventually he discovered a manila envelope taped to the underside of a desk drawer.
    Carefully, he peeled off the Scotch tape with which the envelope had been sealed, pried up the clasp. His expired hope of discovering some homemade pornography had been resuscitated.
    Instead, he found