Page 8 of The Grave Artist

But now was not the moment. There wasn’t time to do a proper job on Her.

Damon had someplace to be.

A glance at his watch, elevating his heart rate still higher. Anticipatory joy filled him.

He walked into his bedroom and showered quickly, giving an approving glance at his washboard abs. He dressed in a dark-gray Canali suit, which had cost $2,000, and a perfectly smooth starched white shirt. From the small shopping bag he’d brought in earlier he extracted a box and, opening it, drew aside tissue paper like a theater curtain parting at the start of the first act. Inside was a supple silk tie.

The rich violet shade of the accessory, Damon had heard, had become associated with mourning because it’s the color of the Catholic church’s vestments and coverings during Lent. Or that was one theory. Damon liked his own better: it was the hue of death because the shade resembled the color of lividity, caused by settling blood in a corpse. Although he also entertained the possibility that it signified asphyxiation.

A final look in the mirror.

Good.

With a glance toward the German razor blades on the kitchen counter, then the secret door to the den, he whispered to Her, “I’ll be back soon ...”

After setting the alarm, he walked outside to his car and pulled onto the sandy road in front of his house.

No cars nearby. Definitely no one was following now, if indeed someone had been following before.

Still, he took his time as he wound out of the canyon to the highway and remained vigilant.

A more cautious man might have called off the events planned for today, after having seen the quasi-suspicious vehicle earlier.

But not Damon.

A good start.

Yes. And now more victims awaited. His addiction was such that nothing would stop him from what lay ahead: putting into practice what had taken him years to perfect.

Damon Garr was the man who had invented Serial Killing 2.0.

Chapter 5

Carmen Sanchez wasn’t accustomed to her boss making leaps in logic, and this was a doozy.

Nobody’s ever seen anything like it before ...

Mouse’s words rang true.

Carmen glanced from Heron to Supervisory Special Agent Eric Williamson. “An international serial murderer called ‘the Honeymoon Killer’?”

She and Heron were seated at a small conference table in Williamson’s office, which offered a stellar view of the Long Beach docks, among the busiest in the world. You could see a hundred or a thousand or a million of those massive cranes that the longshoremen deftly manipulated to move containers between trucks and ships.

“Apparently so,” said Williamson, a massive man who had the same physique now that he’d had as a star football player in college. Always in a suit and tie, he’d allowed himself a slight indulgence given the anemic government-issue air-conditioning on this hot June day and rolled up the sleeves of his baby-blue shirt and told his tie knot: At ease.

With a frown, Heron said, “And we’re running it?”

Williamson grunted. “What, you wanted our first assignment to be an enemy-state-actor conspiracy to take over the White House withspace lasers and paratroopers? A terrorist cell pumping cyanide into the LA drinking water?”

Carmen didn’t expectthatexactly. Newly minted I-squared was meant to investigate alternative threats to national security. Williamson had developed the pilot program for situations that required some creative thinking to unearth them. But a homicidal wedding crasher?

“It was a coin toss, frankly. There’s another situation we’re keeping an eye on, but for now, our mission is HK.”

Carmen got it. “Honeymoon Killer. You come up with the name?”

“That was Declan.”

Figured. Declan could be creative in addition to analytical.