Page 139 of The Grave Artist

Jake was tempted to wipe the smirk off Kane’s face by bantering in return, but he avoided that game. What’s the point of one-upping the banteree? And if the lines were clunkers, the banterer himself ended up embarrassed.

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do. This whole project works only if you and Garr are in regular contact. I looked at your phones and saw they’re on self-wipe. It’ll take me a day to get into them.”

“I doubt that.”

“You’re right,” Jake said, pretending to misconstrue him. “I could crack them in four or five hours.” Which probablywasa form of banter, but he couldn’t help himself, and the dent in Tristan Kane’s smugness made him glad to have done it. “But even that’s too long. I’m feeling impatient today.”

“I’m not saying a word.”

“Where?”

Kane merely shook his head.

Jake gave it a moment, pushed away from the counter and paced slowly. He said in a cheerful voice, “UID.”

Kane frowned. “User interface device. Mouses, trackballs, keyboards. What about them?”

“You hear the latest? Implanting wires in your brain, so you canthinkthe cursor around the screen.”

“I ... I have. Yes. They don’t work that well.”

“Not yet, no. And then there’s the system where your eyes control the cursor and the keys.”

A slow nod. Kane looked around again, apparently growing more and more troubled about what Jake was up to, given there wasn’t a single police officer present, and his nemesis was discussing computer science rather than reading him his rights.

“But the best way to talk to machines is the keyboard, don’t you think? Good oldQwerty.”

Referring to the first six letter keys in the alphabet lines of a keyboard.

Still keeping him off-balance, Jake asked, “How fast do you type?”

“Where’s this going, Heron?”

“I myself am a solid hundred twenty words a minute, error rate of two words per hundred. And that’s usually just a transposed letter ortwo. I’m not being modest, but when you keyboard twelve hours a day, your skill leveldoescreep up, right? Come on, Kane. You’ve been doing this as long as I have. How fast?”

“Same, I guess, why?”

“Because I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for someone to relearn how to keyboard after losing fingers.”

And he lifted from his inside jacket the carving knife he’d borrowed from HSI’s cafeteria.

“You fucking wouldn’t.”

“That was a waste of breath, Kane,” Jake said. “Nobody knows I traced your signals here. Even Carmen Sanchez. I’ve zip-tied your arms so you can’t move your hands more than a millimeter in either direction. I’m holding a knife that will cut through your fingertips with relatively little effort on my part. Something I will thoroughly enjoy doing. So in answer to your comment, yeah, I fucking would.”

Kane scoffed. “They’ll arrest you. You’ll spend years in jail. Assault with a deadly weapon.”

“Oh, forgot something.” He looked around the room, noting a wrought iron desk lamp. He picked it up and, as Kane blinked in shock, flung it through the sliding-glass door opening onto a deck. Shards flew.

“What a terrible accident,” Jake said, shaking his head. “I had a lead to you. I found you. But you fled and, tragically, tripped and fell into the door, shattering it. You lost two fingers. Or depending on your lack of cooperation with me, maybe three or four.”

“Nobody’s gonna believe that.”

“There’ll be so much blood, it’ll seem credible enough. And besides, with your record, when it comes to whining about fairness in legal proceedings, not a soul in the world is going to care one bit about what you have to say, Kane.”