Page 76 of The Grave Artist

His parents were recruiters—a vital function—and they would prowl the streets looking for easy marks, the lonely, the confused, the damaged, both physically or psychically.

It was the irony that his parents had abandoned their own family for a cult that called itself a Family, with a capitalF, that taught Jake the evil of intrusion and started him on a route to study the phenomenon in all its incarnations. And fight it.

From what he’d studied about the dangers of cults he’d learned that with very few exceptions, one did not step away voluntarily. You might be kidnapped by a relative and deprogrammed.

But leaving of your own accord, rarely.

And so now—lying in hisMatrixroom on Venice Beach—Jake could only wonder what his mother was doing tracking down his apartment and making a heartfelt plea, a woman in midlife crisis wearing a hat that put him in mind of the revolutionaries in eighteenth-century Paris, herding Robespierre and Marie Antoinette and Louis to the guillotine.

Then he chided himself for the diversion.

More important matters existed than the disaster that was his family.

Tristan Kane was still at large, playing a dangerous game of internet—and possibly nuclear—roulette in Switzerland.

And the Honeymoon Killer was in the wind too, probably targeting other couples on the verge of embarking on a life together now that Jake and Sanchez had thwarted tonight’s attack.

And they knew he had a different couple in his crosshairs. Jake and Sanchez themselves.

He was compelled to act, and that meant he would be compelled to stop those dedicated to preventing him from acting.

He debated rising and sending her a text reminding her to be careful. He was sure it would be redundant, though. He had been to her house and knew the address was as secret as addresses could be nowadays and the security system was sound.

Besides, she surely was fast asleep by now.

Then he speculated—and if she werenotasleep, was she thinking of something else that was going through his mind too?—that if the Chinampas Grand Resort employee hadn’t decided to make his midnight run at the moment he had, what would have happened next between Jake and Sanchez?

He knew what his answer was.

Hers?

Did she believe that “newlywed behavior” and “kiss” were in fact merely part of the undercover set in the plan he himself had written?

Or was she thinking of that moment too—if sleep were eluding her, as well?

Of course not, he chided himself. Her mind would be on more important things, like catching the Honeymoon Killer.

And, likely, on Frank Tandy.

Finally, sleep approached, slowed by only two things. One was his wrestling with a strategy to find their prey tomorrow.

The other was the persistent scent of lavender, though this, Jake later decided, was probably his imagination.

Chapter 37

Something was wrong.

Sitting at her kitchen table desk in her tiny rental in Fullerton, Selina Sanchez stared at her laptop screen.

It wasn’t anything specific, not like an imbalance in some combination of the four key aspects of organic chemistry: carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids. An anomaly easily isolated and dealt with.

This was more of a feeling.

Which had no place in her discipline.

Her main discipline, that was. College studies.

But her other avocation? Oh, yeah, feelings played an important role, a vital role.