Page 31 of The Grave Artist

Seemingly innocuous. The kind of endearment any father might use when referring to his girls—the sort that Roberto Sanchez had used frequently.

But he had never used this particular phrase.

And so it wasn’t too far-fetched to wonder if maybe, as she’d told her sister, the words were a signal of some kind. A code. A message. She considered the symbols scrawled at the bottom corner of the note. Maybe they would lead her to more direct answers.

Δ:ΙΘ

Selina was in her temporary digs, an okay rental she’d taken for her summer job between college terms. It was in an LA suburb she called Functional Fullerton, northeast of downtown. The decor was simple: schoolbooks, a plastic ficus, a long-abandoned Christmas wreath, a medium-size TV monitor, a poster of Simone Biles and one of Nadia Comaneci—gymnasts she worshipped.

Those idols were hardly surprising. Slim, strong and with raven hair often bunned up atop her head, as now, Selina was a competitive gymnast herself, the floor routine her specialty. Presently she was sitting cross-legged in a chair before the kitchen table, perfectly upright—natural athletes like Selina do posture like no one else.

Her Dell was open and her long fingers tapped assuredly on the keys. She did a quick online search to see what the characters meant. Yes, as she’d thought, they were Greek—but there was a twist. Professor Google informed her this was part of the Milesian system—a way to writenumbersusing the Greek alphabet.

“What were you trying to tell us, Dad?” she murmured.

She looked up the symbols and came up with 4:19. She left the colon in place, because it was not part of ancient Greek lexicon, but was clearly inserted for a reason.

She leaned back, perplexed. Was he killed at 4:19 p.m.? Did she need to look at the videos to see what happened at 4:19?

Stop.

She forced her racing thoughts to calm down. Think logically. Her father would not have known the precise time of his demise, or the moment the killer would have been caught on some camera. The numbers must mean something else.

Her eyes were drawn back to the sentence with the word that had grabbed Carmen’s attention.

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

She supposed he was referring to her and Carmen, but, again, he’d never called them his goddesses, so why would he do it in his final communication?

She paced and let her mind wander. She’d heard Carmen talk about how she investigated. Often, viewing a situation from the perspective of the suspect, victim or witness helped her gain clarity about what happened.

What if Selina tried to put herself in the mind of her father?

A highly intelligent man, Roberto would know that writing the note would be the last thing he did. Selina crossed the room and dug a pen and notebook from her backpack, then sat down at the unsteady table once more.

“Someone’s forcing me to write a note,” she muttered. “And they’re watching me do it. This is my only chance to communicate, so I have to do it on two levels. How?”

She tapped the pen against the page that was as blank as her mind, whispering, “If I’m going to hide a message, it’s got to be complex enough so whoever’s watching won’t catch on, but simple enough that I can create it on the fly—while I’m under extreme stress.”

She’d put down the strange wording of the message to that very stress, but what if the odd expressions were due to a hidden meaning?

Goddesses.

The word stuck out like the frayed end of a thread. A thread she would pull until the entire secret unraveled.

What kind of code would be so simple anyone could do it without having to perform complicated calculations?

An anagram?

She ran the word “goddesses” through an anagram generator online but didn’t come up with anything meaningful. Then “my goddesses.” Nothing. What else?

Putting herself back into her father’s mind, she thought aloud, “I have to leave the key to the puzzle, but where?”

Arriving at the most logical conclusion, she referred back to the first sentence.

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:

Roberto Sanchez, a man of faith, referred to a holy sacrament he would not receive, since his death would appear to be a suicide. Thenhe’d mentioned having only seconds to make his confession. That was because someone was holding a gun on him. But it was still an odd way to put it. She knew how her dad talked, and he would have said he had only a minute, or that he had to hurry. Not that he had to give his confession in seconds. It was too specific.