If there’d been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn’t known about them. He thought it was an L.A. thing. Sublett, who’d worked for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly on day patrol in Venice, had been the first person to even mention them to Rydell. When Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn’t believe the place; it just went down and down, dug in beneath something that looked almost, but not quite, like a bombed-out drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs inside, white plaster, Turkish carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like he’d never seen before. But it was some kind of tricky call; domestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the husband hit the wife, the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just a glitch. But it couldn’t really be a glitch, because someone had had to hit the button, and there hadn’t been any response to the password call that came back to them three-point-eight seconds later. She must’ve messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then hit the button. He’d been been riding with "Big George" Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) hadn’t liked it either. "You see these people, they’re subscribers, man; nobody bleeding, you get your ass out , okay?" Big George had said, after. But Rydell kept remembering a tension around the woman’s eyes, how she held the collar of the big white robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a matching robe but with thick hairy legs and expensive glasses. There’d been something wrong there but he’d never know what. Not any more than he’d ever understand how their lives really worked, lives that looked like what you saw on tv but weren’t.