Page 12 of The Grave Artist

Or anything else I-squared was investigating.

Though it did relate to a homicide.

Her own father’s murder.

Three years ago, Roberto Sanchez, a widower, had devastated Carmen and her younger sister, Selina, when he took his own life. Or so it seemed. But, thanks to Heron, she’d learned the death had merely been staged to appear like a suicide.

She had then asked for a copy of the investigative file from the police. She’d been forced to dance around some awkward questions when she made the request. The lead indicating foul play was not obtained through official channels, and she wouldn’t have been permitted to investigate a family member’s death anyway. And there was the embarrassing fact that the police had come to the wrong conclusion, not something she wanted to share with them without solid proof.

So she’d told them she simply wanted to review the case “for closure.” Some would call it a lie by omission, but Carmen preferred to think of it as a “strategic deployment of the truth.”

Either way, she now was in possession of scanned documents that could provide answers to the mystery.

She tapped the file icon and began to scroll through the contents.

A financial adviser, Roberto Sanchez had made some bad decisions while investing clients’ money. Some had lost their life savings. Unable to handle the shame, he’d flung himself from his office window in Whittier, a suburb of LA.

Or so went the official account.

Carmen had always thought it strange that Roberto, otherwise healthy and not prone to depression, would take such an extreme measure. But all the facts pointed to suicide, and Carmen, suddenly forced to play the role of parent in her sister’s upbringing, and executor of their father’s will, accepted the facts laid out before her at the time.

Then to her astonishment, Heron found some anomalies about Roberto’s death that piqued his curiosity. He had enlisted Aruba’s aid to dig further. Carmen might have ribbed Heron about her, but she respected Aruba—who could penetrate systems to her heart’s delight as long as official investigations weren’t compromised. She truly appreciated the elite hacker’s efforts and teased Heron about his relationship with her only as a joke (at least, shethoughtit was a joke).

Together Heron and Aruba found truly shocking news: evidence that someone had hired a contract killer to murder her father.

This was a game changer in many ways, not the least because it would go a long way toward healing a rift between Carmen and her younger sister. Roberto had died just before Selina’s seventeenth birthday, emotionally scarring her at a vulnerable moment in her life. Carmen had, over time, forgiven him. Selina had not. Nor did she forgive her older, and more worldly, sister for reconciling herself with the suicide.

Carmen was thrown into turmoil when Heron told her what they’d uncovered. Her father murdered by a hit man? That fact begged her to go into action and track down the killer. But it was a crime over which she had no jurisdiction.

Jake Heron—the man for whom lines existed to be crossed—had considered this. In one of those rare moments when they spoke franklyabout personal matters he’d said, “Sanchez, you’re a cop. Go do cop stuff and find the son of a bitch.”

She had decided to do just that, under the radar of her superiors in HSI.

Now she had the file, which would be the starting point for the clandestine investigation.

Was there something in the matter-of-fact cop-speak that offered up insights into the murder?

As she scrolled, the curt phrases she was all too familiar with—and that she had mastered as well—slid past.

Decedent . . . cause of death . . . velocity of impact . . . responding medical personnel . . .

She stared at her screen as if she could make answers materialize by sheer force of will. But nothing more revealing came forward.

Then she scrolled to the next page and came to an abrupt stop.

Before her was the suicide note. Her hands began to shake as she read her father’s familiar scrawl, bringing a lump to her throat.

No priest would give me last rites before what I am about to do, so this will be my final confession, which I will have to give in seconds:

Please forgive me once I reveal my true guilt under oath.

I violated my clients’ trust by investing their savings in a risky fund, and I cannot go on in the knowledge of what I have done and the misery I have caused.

I now can admit to hoping that you, my goddesses, can ever live in peace, amen.

—RobertoMateoSanchez

“Hard to look at.”