LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- The man who police say dressed as Santa Claus and killed nine people at a Christmas Eve party lived with guilt from an incident that left his son from a previous relationship a paraplegic, according to an attorney who once represented the woman in that relationship.

Prime suspect Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, who police said committed suicide hours after he went on a shooting rampage and started a raging house fire in the Los Angeles suburb of Covina, had a son who sustained severe brain damage several years ago in an apparent swimming pool accident while he was in Pardo's care, according to attorney Jeffrey Alvirez.

Police have said Pardo targeted his rampage at his former wife, Sylvia Ortega Pardo, and her family at the family's Christmas Eve party.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Pardo had kept his son's existence and condition a secret from his wife. When she found out, her anger over the situation and also finding out that Pardo had claimed the child as a tax dependent for several years became a major factor in divorce proceedings, the paper said, quoting an unidentified source close to the investigation.

Covina Police Chief Kim Raney said Friday that a divorce between the two was finalized in court December 18 in a "somewhat contentious proceeding."

On Saturday, Covina police released the names of the nine people unaccounted for since the shooting and fire. Nine bodies were recovered from the rubble of the house, but authorities said they are having to work with dental records to establish identities.

"The bodies were so badly burned they cannot be identified any other way," Covina police Lt. Pat Buchanan said.

The nine unaccounted for are Sylvia Pardo, her parents, her sister, her two brothers, both brothers' wives and a nephew. Ages of the nine range from 17 to 80, police said.

Police said Sunday a car believed to have been rented by Pardo on December 19, a gray Toyota RAV4, was found in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. Authorities had cautioned the missing car might be booby-trapped or contain explosives, but it was unclear whether any had been found.

Another rented car that Pardo used to flee the scene was found booby-trapped after the shooting, police said. That car burned as the Covina bomb squad was trying to disconnect an explosive device in it, police said.

In an interview Saturday with CNN, Alvirez -- who represented Pardo's former girlfriend Elena Lucano in a child support case against Pardo -- said that Pardo and Lucano were in an "off-and-on again relationship" in 2001 and that Pardo was watching their 13-month-old son, Matthew, one Saturday while Lucano went grocery shopping.

When Lucano returned a short time later, she found Pardo frantically holding the unconscious toddler, Alvirez said.

"The child did get away from him for a few minutes and managed to crawl out of a patio door and slip into the pool," Alvirez said.

The couple rushed the child to a nearby hospital, where paramedics resuscitated him. Later, the gravely traumatized child was airlifted to Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, a world-renowned trauma center that specializes in severe pediatric care, for specialized treatment, Alvirez said.

During the first week in the intensive care unit, Pardo never left his son's bedside, Alvirez said. But a few weeks after the child was stabilized, doctors concluded that severe brain damage would confine him to a wheelchair for life, Alvirez said.

Less than six months later, Pardo and Lucano ended their relationship, and Pardo stopped visiting his son. Pardo also neglected to contribute to Matthew's medical costs, which surged up to $340,000 within the first year, Alvirez said.

"We had to sue [Pardo] on his $100,000 homeowner's insurance policy, and I recommended that Elena sue Bruce beyond the policy," he said. "She was not a vindictive type, and she knew he was living with overwhelming guilt and wanted to only pursue his policy."

Alvirez said he never had any problems with Pardo and was able to collect the $100,000 policy to pay off medical bills and set up a special needs trust of $240 per month for the rest of Matthew's life. The boy is now 9 years old, Alvirez said.

"Once the settlement was reached in August 2002, Bruce stopped communicating completely and never saw Matthew or Elena again," Alvirez said.

He said Lucano had maintained occasional contact with Pardo's mother over the years but she was unaware that Pardo had remarried and never anticipated the violent path that ended his life and left nine other people dead.

"She is overwhelmed by all of this, but Elena has managed to provide for Matthew as a single parent with a part-time nurse and a full-time job," Alvirez said.

Lucano declined to be interviewed by CNN, Alvirez said.

Whether it's milking venomous spiders or picking up roadkill, the secret to career fulfillment is not to follow your passions, but to chase your opportunities.

A percentage of Google traffic is stripped of identifying information. Why?

Google likes to portray itself as a company that does everything in the open. But it appears that at least some of its employees are harboring a secret.

Web researcher Net Applications recently discovered that between 11% to 30% of traffic streaming out of Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) Mountain View, Calif., office is stripped clean of the usual identifying information that accompanies such traffic. That begs the question: What secret is it that Google doesn't want the rest of the Web to know?

The finding, first reported in InternetNews.com, quickly sparked online chatter about a Windows challenger in the works. "I'd be shocked if Google wasn't developing its own operating system," says Vince Vizzacarro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing. "They clearly want to ride online services without using Microsoft."

The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based firm made the discovery after adding a new feature to its analytics software that pinpoints the source of Internet traffic down to a specific company. The technology, which tracks various trends in Internet usage by analyzing traffic to more than 40,000 Web sites around the world, can also detect a computer's browser, IP address, referring search engine or search term, default language and screen resolution.

The new data showed that a percentage of Internet users in Google's offices (principally based in the company's Mountain View headquarters) are using an operating system that essentially shields itself from detection by stripping traffic of identifying information. Vizzacarro describes this data, known as a user agent, as a string of information that a computer uses to identify itself. Removing it (possibly via a proxy server) means that outsiders like Net Applications can't tell which operating system a particular Web user is using. (Net Applications uses other methods, like a Web site's JavaScript to detect other information about a user and determine that the traffic is coming from Google.) About 11% of Google's Web traffic currently shows up like this. The level fluctuates daily, Vizzacarro says. A few days ago it was around 30%.

Traffic from Microsoft employees, in contrast, can be parsed in detail, leading some to wonder why Google is taking pains to cover its tracks. "It's not a natural process.

Google is the only company we've seen that does this," Vizzacarro says. Google employees not using the secret OS are employing various versions of Unix, such as Linux or Ubuntu, and some older operating systems, like X11, he says.

'That's Why God Invented Gravy'

By now your turkey is probably in the oven, unless you number among the 3 percent of Americans who will eat something else today.

There is a very good chance it will be bland.

And you will enjoy it anyway.

The most common compliment bestowed on the person who has sweated over the turkey since before sunrise is this:

"It's so moist!"

The second most popular:

"I love your gravy!"

And the third?

"The stuffing is scrumptious!"

But the meat itself?

"A lot of people want bland, soft, wet meat. That's what they grew up on," said Christopher Kimball, publisher and editor of Cook's Illustrated and host of "America's Test Kitchen" on PBS.

Everyone who cooks turkey -- and one survey found that 97 percent of Americans will today -- seems to have something up his or her sleeve to battle blandness.

"The secret is stuffing," said Camille Klinker of Gambrills, who was picking up a matched pair of organic birds at the Whole Foods in Annapolis yesterday.

"And cooking slowly so there's moisture still left," added her husband, Richard. "If it's too dry, you let it go too long."

Terry Phillips-Seitz of Crownsville is a turkey connoisseur who confesses to trying a Caribbean turkey recipe that he found in The Washington Post a few years ago. Now he's convinced that a deep-fried bird is the best bet.

"It's juicier," he said. "Now, two days later, it doesn't taste a bit different, but when you serve it on Thanksgiving, everybody loves it."

The man standing at Phillips-Seitz's elbow as he perused the Whole Foods turkeys yesterday probably knew more about the birds, and what makes them bland, than anybody in town.

"It's bland if it was frozen six months ago and given the industrial treatment," said Mike Cleary, mid-Atlantic research and development chef for Whole Foods. By coincidence, Cleary was in the store shopping for Thanksgiving dinner.

"A turkey that never walks on land and lives in a building with 10,000 other turkeys and never sees the light of day and always eats the cheapest feed, it's going to be bland," Cleary said. "If it walks on land and mimics the diet it would eat in the wild and more or less has a life before you slaughter it, it's going to have flavor."

It is commonly held that a fresh turkey is going to be better than a frozen bird, but it's equally common to find that people who share that turkey tip have no idea why. Cleary can explain.

"When a turkey is slow-frozen, and most of them are, tiny little icicles form in the meat," he said. "And as you thaw it, the icicles have expanded the meat to form pathways for moisture to escape. That doesn't kill the bird, but if you brine it, that adds some aromatics back into the meat."

You don't need to brine a fresh bird, Cleary said. And if you've got a formerly frozen bird that wasn't brined in the oven, not to worry, Kimball said. You will succeed as a turkey chef if you follow his simple formula.

"Buy a frozen Butterball and roast it at 325 [degrees], just like it says on the package," Kimball said. "Butterballs are injected with brine. If you want a bland moist bird, the Butterball is for you.

"Anyway, that's why God invented gravy."

Kimball says slathering the bird in salt pork will give it flavor because salt pork actually has flavor, while turkey, the breast in particular, has little more appeal than, say, warm cardboard.

Although Kimball does not applaud bland turkey, and says his will not be bland, he invokes the iconic French chef to argue that a bland meat is not necessarily a bad meat.

"A classic French chef would say that some foods are there for the texture, as a base for the sauce or the gravy," he said.

He points to beef tenderloin for illustration.

"The real grain-fed stuff has no flavor," he said. "But most people don't like grass-fed beef because it's chewy and it's very tangy. Americans don't want chewy. They want tender and moist."

And that will be the standard of success at many a Thanksgiving table today: "Moist."