Page 21 of The Grave Artist

Once, he put a boy in the hospital. (It didn’t help his situation to stand over the screaming boy with a smile of curiosity, marveling at the angle of the broken fingers.) School resource officers and counselors contacted his father, William—his mother, Sydney, having passed—and recommended tests. His father had made millions as a ship charterer, leasing out huge vessels for transporting oil and containers. He said to the school, “Yes, run the tests. All of them. A full battery. Whatever it costs.”

The stocky, chain-smoking man was otherwise utterly uninvolved in his son’s life, and young Damon thought it was moving that he’d been adamant about getting him help.

Only later did he come to understand his father’s true motive. William Garr wanted the tests in the hope that the results would mean he should be institutionalized, removing the last thread of parental responsibility.

The conclusions of the tests were supposed to be kept from the underage patient, but Damon, of course, broke into the doctor’s office and read them.

Quite intriguing.

Structural and functional MRIs revealed abnormalities—in the portion of the cortex that can cause the patient to act out aggressively.

The doctor reported he was surprised to find that, despite the patient’s sociopathic tendencies, a particular behavior remained solidly normal: impulse control. This observation was listed as “an interesting fluke.”

So, Damon was by nature a killer—and a particularly efficient one too, given that he was able to rein in the impulses that prompted others to kill without careful premeditation, making it more likely they’d get caught.

So much for the wiring. But as any shrink will tell you, that alone doesn’t make a serial killer.

Nurture plays a role too.

It certainly did in Damon’s life.

Enter Miss Spalding.

After his mother passed when he was eight, his father was not going to waste any time raising the boy, and rather than foist him off on his late wife’s sister, a loving woman with a family, in Portland, he hired a governess and walked away from the boy completely.

Wiry and severe looking, hair always scraped back into a tight platinum-blonde bun, Miss Spalding never married and, always hoping for a child, did all she could to glue the boy to her side and make sure he spent every waking minute—and more than a few nonwaking moments—with her. This meant indulging him, particularly with those temptations that a doting older woman assumed a young boy would want: ultra-violent games, likeGrand Theft AutoandRed Dead Redemption, slasher movies and any damn thing he wanted to watch in the darkest corners of the internet.

The golden boy could do whatever he wanted. Discipline did not enter into his life once Dad was gone (except thatothertype of discipline, viewed with hungry pleasure on sites he logged on to by adding ten years to his age).

Nature, nurture and a dash of cool impulse control.

A perfect storm of murder, just waiting for a chance to get to work.

At eighteen, it happened. He knew it was time. Maybe like birds suddenly know it’s time to leave the nest.

The A-plus student put his calculated plan in motion.

Damon had taken pictures of Sarah with a digital camera using a cash-purchased chip, metadata disabled, in advance. On a carefully chosen afternoon, he took surface roads to Thomas Jefferson High, didn’t buy gas and bought no food. There would be no evidence of his presence anywhere in the vicinity.

Next, he followed a football player home from practice, collected a discarded McDonald’s wrapper and soda cup and straw from the boy’s parked car with latex gloves, then waited until the student had left his house again and was out driving by himself—so he would have no alibi.

He’d taken the time to memorize Sarah’s schedule and found her walking home alone from band practice as she always did on Wednesday evenings. She lived less than a mile from the school and had no car.

He came up behind her. Wearing leather gloves over latex, he pulled a thick plastic bag over her head and dragged her from the sidewalk into an adjacent wooded park. She kicked and thrashed, but he easily overpowered her.

He stabbed her in the chest several times, then enacted the second part of his plan. To ensure DNA transfer, he rubbed the food wrapper and straw from the boy’s car over Sarah’s skin. He drove away, constantly checking to be sure he wasn’t seen. He waited an hour for the boy to come home, then hid the knife, leather gloves and SD card under the back floor mat of his car.

Finally, he called the local police precinct on his burner phone to give a partial license plate number for a car driven by a boy carrying a bloody knife near the park an hour earlier.

Just the right number of clues. Not wise, he decided, to draw too clear a line.

Drove home.

A month of planning. One dead, one serving thirty years.

More perfectly plotted and executed than anything Ted Bundy or BTK or the I-5 Killer had ever perpetrated.

Sarah . . .