Page 82 of The Grave Artist

The man gave no visible reaction. He glanced at the weapon and then continued to take in the paintings as he spoke. “Are you aware the authorities call you the Honeymoon Killer?”

This struck Damon like a fist. “How do you know that? There’s been no coverage in the media. Wait, you hacked thepolice.”

“I’m always monitoring your friends, Jake and Carmen.”

Damon’s heart gave another thud—this one of pleasure. Could these be the names of the pair who’d been thwarting him at every turn?

Kane continued, “A colleague of theirs, named Reynolds, sent some emails asking about two murders in Italy and one here. Killing newlyweds preparing to begin their honeymoon. He was careless about encryption and security. I got into the government’s servers. The door’s closed now. But the access was helpful while it lasted.”

He had to know. “The two you mentioned. Do you have pictures?”

“A few.” Kane pulled out his phone and scrolled. He held it up. The “few” was an entire album, which contained seemingly thousands of images of the two people who were Damon’s enemies.

“Who are they?”

“Jake Heron and Carmen Sanchez.” Kane explained briefly about HSI, and this outfit called I-squared.

Apparently Damon was considered a risk to national security. Seriously? He only wanted to practice the fine art of Serial Killing 2.0.

“You’re a micro threat,” Kane explained. “It’s not an insult. It’s just a classification. The sort usually back-burnered by the FBI, CIA and NSA. But you fall squarely within I-squared’s parameters.” He gave Damon an appraising look. “They’re good, Jake and Carmen. But your ID is safe.”

“Not from you. Obviously.”

“They have to play by the rules. I don’t.”

“Then tell me how you found me.”

Kane seemed proud to do so. “After I read Reynolds’s report and checked out popular news stories about the deaths overseas, I wrote some script that hacked every Italian traffic camera record in and near Verona and Florence around the time of those killings. I collected twelve million facial images, upscaled them from 512 to 1024 to improve quality and ran them through a comparator program I also wrote.”

Damon felt his jaw slacken. He’d heard students around campus talking about world-class hackers they referred to as “elite,” but had never met one. If Kane were one of those, he could break into nearly anything.

Kane was still in full flow about his exploits. “Yours was one of 853 that were statistically similar. They went into a face rec farm I use. Based in eastern Europe. They have four trillion facial images ... nearly everybody on earth who’s ever walked near a camera. It could identify most of those images, but only one lived in Southern California, near where the third killing took place.”

That was downright alarming. “But ifyoudid it, then—”

“Jake and Carmen could never get warrants to pull that off. And even if they did? I paid the farm to wipe every image of you. And I scrubbed the traffic cam archives in Italy. You no longer exist, my friend.”

Damon shivered with anger. “They stopped me. Yesterday. And it was the Fourth Day. Doesn’t mean anything to you, but it’s significant to me. Now my ... schedule is off. That’s not good.”

“No, I imagine upsetting you would not have felicitous consequences. But I can help.”

“And now we’ve come full circle back to why.”

Kane seemed amused. “You really don’t need that.” A glance at the gun. “May I sit?”

Damon nodded to a couch. Still holding the pistol, he resumed his seat in the rolling chair beside his worktable and waited for Kane to continue.

“We have a mutual goal. You knowMoby-Dick?”

The epic novel written by Herman Melville in the 1800s, about a captain obsessed with killing a white whale that was as massive as the book. Damon did not know anyone who had finished the story. He, on the other hand, had. The combined themes of obsession and loss resonated.

He nodded.

“I’m Jake Heron’s white whale. I exploited a weakness of his a few years ago. Not a weakness in his coding. You’ll never find that. Apersonalweakness. Ego. People died. And now, he’s teamed up with Carmen Sanchez. They stopped a project I was working on recently. My clients were arrested. It ... damaged my reputation.”

So he wasn’t the only one at odds with this Carmen and Jake team. If this conversation went the way he thought it was headed, his situation might improve dramatically.

“Destroying me is their mission,” Kane went on. “They pulled a scam on another client of mine recently and got access to my main banking accounts. Drained them in seconds. And they’re searching for me. I have various emergency plans and already put one in play.”