Page 21 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

Her stomach in knots, Carmen held up her creds as she sprinted past the local PD officer posted at the perimeter of the park.

Please don’t let the wounds be fatal.

She had seen death while serving on the FBI’s Los Angeles field office SWAT team and now picked up the odor of blood in the air as she approached the paramedics hunched over the inert form lying on the grass near a statue of William Shakespeare.

The contrast between the three busy EMTs and the stillness of the body they worked feverishly to save struck at her very core.

The Honeymoon Killer had caught Heron from behind.

Please don’t let him die.

She pounded to a halt and sank to her knees beside one of the medics, a burly balding man in his twenties who was the definition of “unflappable.” Gasping, Carmen asked, “Have you got a pulse?”

No immediate response, which she took as a good sign. Experience had taught her that when an ambulance crew moved slowly, that meant the patient’s terminal outcome was a foregone conclusion. This team, however, was working feverishly.

She didn’t want to interfere with what she’d overheard EMTs refer to as “thumping and pumping,” which meant chest compressions and squeezing air into an oxygen mask over the patient’s face, but she was desperate for an assessment.

She looked at the closest paramedic and decided to try again. This time she restricted her question to one word. A word that should elicit a response as if a doctor or charge nurse had demanded an answer. “Status?”

“Attempting to stabilize for transport.”

That didn’t console her at all. The word “attempting” implied they weren’t having success, after all. Then again—

“No ...” A voice, laced with dismay, came from behind her.

She swiveled to the speaker.

It was Jake Heron.

Overwhelmed with shock and unable to form words, she stood and reached out to grasp his arm, assuring herself this was not an apparition.

Then she stepped to the side to peer around the paramedic and took a closer look at the victim’s face, which was still partially concealed by the oxygen mask.

What she saw sent alternating waves of relief and dread rushing through her.

Frank Tandy was the one who’d been stabbed.

Carmen had known the detective for years.

They had participated in joint federal-local training, served on a few multijurisdictional task forces and, after major incidents, had occasionally seen each other at one of the local watering holes favored by law enforcement, where beer selections were long and wine short.

“How is he?” Heron asked.

She shook her head.

He said in a strained voice, “That could have been me. Should have been me.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I started toward the cemetery to meet the teenage girl, then I got a phone call.” He hesitated. “Family matter. I couldn’t let it wait. I told Frank and he said he’d interview her, and I could take over on the canvass.”

“Family matter?”

Heron said nothing more about it. But simply stared at the medic hovering over Tandy’s form. He whispered, “Son of a bitch.” Then heaved a sigh.

“Heron.”

He slowly lifted his gaze to meet hers.

“What-if’s a game you can’t play in law enforcement,” she said. “You’ll learn that as you go along.”

“Did he have a vest?”

She nodded. “But ballistic armor doesn’t do much good against edged weapons. HK stabbed around and through it.”

The paramedics positioned Tandy on a board, lifted it to the gurney and ran a line. They wheeled him to the ambulance. An LAPD sergeant strode forward, and Carmen briefed him. He took custody of Tandy’s service weapon, asking Carmen, Heron and the medics, “He describe who attacked him?”

“No,” a woman EMT replied as they loaded Tandy into the ambulance. “Nonresponsive when we got here.”

Without another word, she slammed the rear doors, and soon the vehicle was gone. Carmen explained to the sergeant about the task-forced case, and suggested Tandy’s captain contact Williamson for next steps regarding liaison.

She then called Williamson to update him on the disturbing developments. He was out at a meeting with other DHS officials, but Destiny Baker, his assistant, promised to relay the information to her boss.

Carmen disconnected and turned to Heron. “That teenager. We need to talk to her.”

“Right,” he said firmly, his face grim. He seemed as deeply troubled by the attack as she was. Maybe he felt guilty, but Carmen thought it was more.

Battling together in the trenches does that, forging connections that might not otherwise exist. And forging them fast. She suspected this was what had happened between the two men.

Carmen called Liam Grange and found that when the teenager’s family learned of the attack, they immediately returned home to Brentwood, fearful for their safety.

Heron considered this news. “I know you like to interview wits in person, but we don’t have time to drive over to their house.”

She said absently, her mind still on Tandy and his condition, “‘Wit.’ Instead of ‘witnesses.’ You’re turning into a cop, Heron.”

He offered a wistful smile.

Carmen placed a call to the number Grange had given her. A woman’s smoky voice answered, and after a few minutes of setting the ground rules, which included the nonnegotiable condition that her daughter would never testify in court, the girl joined her mother on the line.

“Hello, Sylvie. You’re on speaker. I’m here with my associate.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You can call me Carmen.”

A pause. “Okay. How’s that guy? You know, the one who got stabbed?”

“He’s alive. In the hospital and they’re operating on him now.”

“Okay. Good. Cool.”

“Now, we’re ninety percent sure the man you saw was the one who stabbed him.”

“Shit.”

“Syl.” From the mother.

No response from the daughter. She had been tangentially involved in a knife attack. Carmen guessed the teen would have no time for parental corrections.

“Can you describe him, Sylvie?”

“He was White and old —maybe, like, thirties.”

Despite everything, Heron and Carmen shared a brief smile at this.

“But he was still kinda hot.”

“Syl!”

Everyone ignored the mother. Carmen continued, “What was his hair color?”

“Dark, I think. And he was big but not fat. He wore a suit, like all the men. My dad calls it charcoal gray. And his tie, I kept looking at his tie. It was purple. Like the wizards wore in Harry Potter . You know, to signal each other they were wizards.”

“What happened when he talked to you?”

“He saw me and walked up, all friendly. And I thought it was weird because, you know, my grandpa—it was his funeral—he was really old, and we knew he was going to die. But everybody was still real sad looking. Kind of like what you do, you know. At a funeral you’re supposed to look all sad, even if you don’t really care.

But he wasn’t sad at all. He looked happy. ”

Carmen had her tablet out and made a note. “And what did he say?”

“Just a couple words. Like, ‘Hey there. How you doing?’ That kind of thing. Then he freaked. I think because those cop cars, I mean police cars, showed up and he just turned around and walked away. Fast.”

“You remember anything else about him? Jewelry, scars, tattoos, cell phone?”

A pause. “No. Definitely no tats. I always notice body art.”

“Did you see him with anyone else?” Heron asked.

He’d be thinking of Ms. POI.

Who was maybe a wit.

Maybe something more.

Sylvie seemed to think it over before responding, “No.”

“Did you see him later?” Carmen asked. “After he walked away.”

“No, ma’am. I didn’t.”

“What did his voice sound like?”

“A man’s voice. I don’t know. No accent or anything if that’s what you mean.”

“Exactly.”

Heron asked, “You saw the hearse that started driving by itself?”

“Yeah, totally fu—totally friggin’ weird.”

“When he left you, did he walk in the direction of the hearse?”

“I ... geez. I don’t know.”

“Hey, listen, Sylvie. You’re being super helpful.”

Heron posed a question. “Did you see a woman in black heels with a red stripe down the back?”

“No.” The girl’s voice brightened. “But I would’ve remembered those.”

Carmen then asked the ever-important final question in an interview. “Anything else?”

A pause, then: “Yeah. It was funny.”

“Go on.”

“Yeah. He wasn’t a perv.”

“Honey!” her mother said.

“Mom,” she said, sighing. “Come on.”

Heron was about to ask her to explain but stopped when Carmen lifted a hand. He understood. This topic was a topic discussed among women.

“Okay, I’m, like, a teenager, right?” Sylvie said. “And we get ... girls, mostly, we get guys coming up to us—sometimes older dudes like this guy’s age—and they act all nice and smiley and chatty, you know. But we just totally know they’re pervs. You can tell. We call it our pedar.”

Carmen thought she understood but got clarification anyway. “Pedar?”

“Pedophile radar,” Sylvie said. “Like a built-in perv detector. Only this dude wasn’t that way at all. Which I thought was funny, because why come up to me , some stranger at a funeral and just go ‘Hey there.’ I was thinking he wanted something. But not that . You know what I mean?”

Carmen jotted this down too. Was it significant? She had a feeling it was, but nothing immediately came to mind.

After a few more questions, they said goodbye and Carmen disconnected.

“‘Pedar,’” she said to Heron. “Clever. But also sad kids have a word for it.”

“Don’t get me started on the subject of sexual intrusion. We’d be here all day.”

“Well, what do you think, Heron? What the hell was he interested in? He approached her for some reason.”

“Agree it’s significant but, as my colleagues in academia would say, I’m lacking sufficient data to form a hypothesis.”

She knew Heron was avowedly anti-speculation. He never made a decision or offered an opinion without a basket full of data points.

As they walked back to the cemetery, Carmen frowned. “Heron?”

“What’s that?”

“How the hell did he know you or Frank were coming here to interview that girl? Only one answer.”

And Heron provided it: “He’s been watching us. It’s not just honeymooners he’s after. We’ve made it onto his hit list too.”