Page 17 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)
My goddesses . . .
Selina Sanchez could not get the two words out of her head.
They were what Carmen had pointed out in their father’s supposed suicide note from three years ago.
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 Com?neci—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 write numbers using 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.
Then he’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.
In seconds . . .
Could it be that simple?
What if reading every second word created a message?
Far-fetched, but give it a shot. She had no other ideas.
Her heart began to pound as she read over the entire note again.
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:
Please forgive me once I reveal my true guilt under oath.
I violated my clients’ trust by investing their savings in a risky fund, and I cannot go on in the knowledge of what I have done and the misery I have caused.
I now can admit to hoping that you, my goddesses, can ever live in peace, amen.
—Roberto Mateo Sanchez
Her gaze lingered on the signature. Why had her father underlined his middle name? She couldn’t recall him doing that before. With a resigned sigh, she decided to focus on the body of the message first and printed the words on the blank paper in her own neat writing.
priest give last before I about do this be final which will to in ...
Made no sense to her.
Okay, what if the second letter of every word spelled out a clue?
She scanned the note again.
Oretolgvmatiebfr . . .
Well, guess not.
Still, she felt like she was onto something. Her father had to quickly come up with something that would be easy to write but difficult to catch without the key. And she was convinced he’d explained the code in the first sentence.
The first sentence.
She figuratively smacked her forehead. Why hadn’t she seen it before? The clue would be given in every second sentence.
She copied the note, but this time she numbered each sentence, and underlined the second word in every second one.
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:
Please forgive me once I reveal my true guilt under oath.
I violated my clients’ trust by investing their savings in a risky fund, and I cannot go on in the knowledge of what I have done and the misery I have caused.
I now can admit to hoping that you , my goddesses , can ever live in peace, amen .
Still nothing. Not words. But what about first letters of the indicated words? She jotted.
Fortunahygeia
She actually let out a whoop.
Fortuna and Hygeia were goddesses.
They were who he was referring to!
This had to be it.
Given the family tradition of his reading to the girls from the Greek and Roman pantheon, Roberto had found a way to leave a clue that only they would understand.
She felt a twist in her belly, of love and pain. It was as if her father were here in the room, smiling and offering the clues, seeing if she could figure them out.
I will, Dad, she thought.
And suddenly another emotion flooded through her.
Anger. Pure raw anger.
She turned to her computer and with a heavy touch on the keyboard began a search.