Page 151 of The Grave Artist

Gripping at his clothes and his hair and tugging hard. Pulling him to the surface.

He emerged from his grave, pulled up by Carmen Sanchez and Jake Heron and the huge officer he remembered from the Brock funeral. They rolled him onto his side, where he spat the sand and pebbles and dirt from his mouth and coughed dust from his lungs.

He glanced around him.

There stood Lauren Brock—no longer Maddie Willis—her hands cuffed behind her. She stared down at him as if instead of his body, the officers had just unearthed some thousand-year-old bones from an ancient site of human sacrifice.

A minor curiosity.

And nothing more.

Chapter 74

Carmen decided that Damon Garr did not look like a man who had just been rescued from a shallow grave.

Oh, the clothes were torn and dusty, the face was streaked with mud from where sweat met dirt. But the eyes. There was something eerily—and troublingly—despondent about them. As if he hadn’t been rescued at all, but had died in the ground. And what they’d pulled out was simply a sorrowful ghost.

Human remains . . .

He was sitting in the back of Grange’s HSI truck. A medical team had checked him out, given him some oxygen and doused cuts on his arms and neck with antibiotics. In a half hour he’d be processed in Central Booking and begin his journey along the road of incarceration.

She heard his voice through the partly lowered window.

“Agent Sanchez?”

She stopped and walked over to him.

“Where is she?” He was looking around.

“Lauren?”

“Yes.”

The woman in question happened to be sitting in the back of a nearby cruiser, but Garr couldn’t see her. A fact that he clearly found extremely distressing.

Sensing an opportunity, Carmen said, “Does this mean you’re willing to waive your rights and talk to me, Damon?”

He seemed to debate whether he should give what would be an incriminating statement in exchange for one simple fact—how far away from him was the woman he’d grown obsessed with?

After a long moment, self-preservation won out. “No,” he whispered.

“Do you want more water?”

He shook his head and sorrow veiled his face once more.

Carmen left him and walked to the CHP vehicle where Lauren Brock sat. She was still cuffed, but the back door was open.

Heron stood beside her.

Carmen crouched down. “Hey.”

Lauren’s eyes were on the horizon.

“I’ll get you her number,” Carmen said quietly. “The therapist. I’ll make sure you can get access to her, okay?”

Lauren nodded. “She helped your sister?”

“After our father died, she took it hard. Real hard. I got her into grief counseling.”