This is the third and final part of our ongoing investigative series “Ex-Professor Exploits Big Data to Turn Crime into Profit Center.” If you missed the previous installments, these links will lead you to Part One and Part Two.

I was so close.

I knew where the answers were. I even had Google Maps-generated directions.

I knew I wanted those answers. But there’s the rub: I wanted.

Wanting. Wanting is the thing. Wanting is torture. Wanting is to make yourself without something you define as essential to your own wholeness. I wanted answers, other people want gleaming constructions of chrome, plastic, and microprocessors, or the succulence and flavor of an unconsumed meal, or the heat of the invisible flame in a beautiful partner’s haunches. The wanting makes us wanting and that can make us desperate and lead us wildly astray.

Ah, yes. My own wanting had become less pure, less disinterested. Here was this woman who now glowed in my heart, like a smooth icon painted on old cracked boards. Was it leading me astray? I don’t know. This wanting could feel so promising—almost like a transcendence of my grubby life—take for example this car, with stains on the dash and the seats and the ages-old litter on the floor and the whine when I turn right that I’ll have to have checked someday. Why not seek something better? I was driving now. Toward 14 Amber Point.

What could be more intimate than our wants? They are the images on our hearts. They are possibly the closest we can come to knowing ourselves. For someone to reach into our hearts, touch up the images there, brush over one thing, stencil something new, and then to pat us on the back and send us on our way, how could that not be considered a form of violence? Sutman claimed to control these images better than we could ourselves. His data proved him right. His data proved him guilty.

The properties along the road I drove were mostly shielded by white plank fences or carefully squared hedges. Gates provided a quick glimpse of undulating drives and large homes.

I got closer to the sea. The lots became smaller as the land became more precious. Soon I was driving along a lane with large, ornate houses packed close together, slashes of blue ocean visible between them. My phone told me I was there.

The house at 14 Amber Point looked like a Mediterranean villa drawn by an illustrator with a love of color. The front door had glass panes on either side, and I saw a figure walk by on the inside. I almost drove into a bush that projected out over the edge of the road.

The lane was a small residential road. There was nowhere I could park inconspicuously, and I couldn’t imagine walking around without drawing scrutiny. They didn’t welcome the hoi polloi here.

But the house right next to Sutman’s looked like it might be empty. It had a short drive leading to a garage attached to the house. I pulled in, parked, and got out. I felt like I was doing something dangerous. I peeked in the garage. No car there. These folks were probably out for a while. Who knew how long? I’d just try to look like I belonged here and hope they didn’t pop back.

I walked around the house on a narrow gravel path. I was now on the ocean side, where they had a large deck with chaise lounges and wicker chairs. I sat down to look like I was supposed to be there.

I could also see Sutman’s place pretty well. It was only separated from my yard by a waist-high post-and-rail fence. He had a surprisingly large lawn because of the way the shore jutted out. It was a brilliant, almost monochrome green. At the far side was a swimming pool with an infinite edge facing the sound. The lawn ended at a retaining wall and below that were fingers of rock dipping into the sea. He also had a dock, with a speedboat beside it, neatly covered and tied up.

The house itself had to be 8,000 square feet. Large windows and French doors to capture the view. I imagined rooms furnished with rarities from old Europe, the Far East, Persia. Knobs, faucets, hinges of polished and textured brass. Moldings, paint with careful edges, other flourishes. What would be some years of my cumulative wages for each rug.

He probably had an office somewhere with all the computers, screens, and other tools he’d need for his work. I was looking for where it might be, when one of the French doors cracked open, and in the next instant I saw the woman from the mail place. She was wearing a short robe that just dusted over her hips. Her legs were bare, tan, and more muscular than I expected. She held a towel under one arm, and she headed toward the pool.

If she had seemed like one sort of perfection before, she was now a new sort, which made her a double perfection. She laid the towel on a lounge and loosened the belt on her robe. She let it fall at her feet and exposed a black swimsuit that angled high above her hips, so that it looked fast, sharp, almost deadly. She lay down on the towel she had prepared for that purpose, and while I stared at her I could almost feel how the sunlight raised the temperature of her skin. I was sure not only that her skin was soft, but that if you traced your finger along a length of it, say her forearm, you would feel downy hairs that were also warm and soft.

I was almost ill with the conflict between the sense that I could have her, just as my imagination depicted it, and the sense that there was a barrier between us vastly stronger than the flimsy fence. She belonged to his world. She was on the side of the masters, the people who manipulated all us peons to their benefit and then laughed as they enjoyed exactly what they made us long for. Our wanting fueled them, delighted them, kept them elevated.

But I was here precisely because I couldn’t stand everything I’d learned about these masters. I was here to right things by upending comfortable injustices. I couldn’t give up and let them have everything good. I started toward her.

The immaculate lawn with its expansive vistas felt as dangerous as a battlefield. Eventually I made it across, and when my shadow fell on her, she opened her eyes.

I was thinking that she was as beautiful up close as I had imagined. I guess my point is that I wasn’t disappointed as I saw the reality up close. It still promised to exceed my dreams.

She was much less pleased. I thought she was scared at first. Then just surprised and displeased.

“Oh, the package,” she said.

“I rang but no one answered.”

She seemed to want to cover herself and sat up to point me where to go, when Sutman himself came up behind me.

“What’s this?” he asked. His voice was low and forceful.

“He has a delivery,” said my angel.

“Give it to me,” said Sutman.

“It’s out front,” I replied. My lie had me caught.

“Come on then,” Sutman pointed the way. My angel turned away, lay back down and closed her eyes in the exact posture she’d been in before my shadow touched her, as if asserting that nothing of any note had occurred since.

I started walking. Sutman walked with me, just a half step behind me.

My lie was about to come out. I didn’t know how he might react. But, at the same time, I had 20, maybe 30, seconds alone with him. This was what I had really wanted, right? I wanted to ask him something that would fill in my grasping reach at understanding, turn the moral tables, expose the grossness in his manipulations.

We climbed onto a flagstone walkway between the houses. My time was disappearing with each step.

I had to say something, but the question wouldn’t form itself. “I parked in the wrong driveway,” I said, pointing to where my car was.

“I own that, too,” he said.

“Oh.” I thought it would help to look at him, to try to scare out the personality in his eyes, to assess his tastes and choices in clothing, to see how he walked, but he stubbornly stayed behind me.

I got to the car. There was no package there, of course. All I could do was turn around and face him. I felt like if I had a gun, if I were standing on some vacated beach or stretch of desert, then I wouldn’t know what I’d do.

He stopped when I did, sensing something wasn’t right. We stared at each other hard. He seemed larger than I remembered, more a man in whole.

“Isn’t there anything…” I started. “I know about SKC. Isn’t there anything you’ll leave alone?” My anger made me shake.

His brow tightened. Either he was confused or this was just the expression for the kind of calculation he performed to mince human motivation into digestible components.

“Are you a journalist?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

“You’ve been following me.”

It wasn’t really a question, and I didn’t answer.

“This is your car,” he said. I nodded. He walked around it, surveying like a prospective buyer might. He leaned over and put his eyes to the window, shading them to really be able to see inside.

Knowing what I knew about his studies, I suddenly felt like he was reading my diary or turning my underwear inside out.

“Hmm,” he warmed up his voice. “You have strong moral convictions, bordering on self-righteousness. You have a disposition for action, but you’re too disorganized to finish much of what you start. Fortunately, you’re not dangerous in the least.”

Sutman simply walked away. He opened the door to his villa and returned to his world as surely as an angel slipping through the clouds.