Page 37 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

Doing the Garage one better, there was only a single decoration on the wall of Jake’s month-to-month rental in Venice Beach, south of downtown LA.

It was a poster of the movie The Matrix . Extremely faded. It had come with the place, ironically, given his career.

The movie, Jake maintained, had consummate style and great tension but a plot that not a soul on earth had adequately described to him.

But there the poster hung, slightly askew, on one of the yellow-painted walls in the eight-hundred-square-foot place.

He was presently at his impromptu desk—from IKEA and built with only three pieces of hardware left over. It was solid enough. Before him, on one of the laptops, was Sanchez’s after-action report. He added to it before firing it off to her, Williamson and Destiny Baker.

After what Sanchez had told him about their boss’s trip, he wasn’t surprised to get one of those out-of-office replies. The report had still gone to him, though, and he was sure Williamson would read it promptly.

He stood and stretched. Jake’s space was cluttered with clothes in gym bags, toiletries in boxes and shopping bags, Mountain Dew twelve-packs, chip bags.

And, as always, hovering around him like planets around a red star, computers and components and allied systems were present.

Cords too. Many, many cords in all different thickness, colors and lengths.

One would think he aspired like the rest of the world to go wireless, but that was not the case. Hacking airborne signals was infinitely easier than hacking copper wires, so Jake skewed to the early-twentieth-century technology in this one instance.

He glanced at his screen and noted the time. Midnight was creeping close. A long, exhausting day. He pulled his jacket off and tossed it on Pile Number Two, the Mount Everest of clothing.

Despite the clutter, or maybe because of it, his place had a certain appeal. It featured a small deck offering a pleasant view of the palms and the sand and the Pacific Ocean, which guests might enjoy.

If he were ever to entertain guests.

As for Jake himself, well, placid scenery appealed no more than the drama of Alcatraz and the turbulent San Francisco Bay outside his window at home.

More to his liking, this place was not far from I-squared.

Or from Carmen Sanchez’s house.

He showered and then collapsed in bed. Thinking yet again he had been meaning to get a new set of springs and mattress.

Jake also knew he would forget about that mission by the time he’d woken and then would have the thought again tomorrow night.

Anyone else might enjoy the sounds of lively inhabitants of Venice at midnight. And, later, when the town dozed at three or so, the sound of the ocean coaxed to gentle hushing with tides and a delicate wind.

Not him.

But there was a soundtrack looping through his mind. One as indelible as the sound of midnight waves to a surfer impatient for the first breaker in the morning.

A voice.

From more than twenty years ago.

Clear as could be.

The ethereal woman in yet another of those Amish teacher dresses flits about the bedroom, waking up a ten-year-old Jake and a twelve-year-old Rudy. “It’s a big day,” his mother says. “Come help me, gentlemen!”

And, after a high five between brothers, and morning bathroom visits, they walk from the room they share into the living room, where a wrapped present sits on the unsteady coffee table, and the aroma of cooking coming from the kitchen, where Lydia Heron is hard at work, fills the suburban split-level house.

Thin, a slip of a thing, her voice soft, she is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with in the kitchen. Jake wonders what the smells represent.

A birthday feast.

Jake turned two digits at midnight.

Unable to wait, Rudy gives him his present early. It’s a graphic novel Jake had mentioned he’d like. Money is tight in the Heron household. But Rudy has done some extra yardwork and saved up. Jake hugs him.

And he looks again at the present on the coffee table, wrapped in turquoise paper. A handwritten tag, a cheerful reindeer—left over from Christmas—reports, “ Happy birthday, Jacoby. From Mother and Father. ”

He caresses it.

Then he joins Rudy in the kitchen, where his brother is pouring cereal into bowls for both of them.

Their mother’s cooking is for later, a roast and some vegetables.

They’ve been asked to help out, and, after chowing down the Wheaties, they take to their task—scrubbing the dirty pots and utensils their mother has left in her wake. She’s a good cook, and a bad cleaner.

They then retire to the living room to do some gaming. Lanky Rudy is the athlete among the two—Jake is bored playing catch and, well, every other sport—but he excels with the joystick.

They laugh and shoot and speed their cars around the beautiful deadly landscape of Grand Theft Auto.

Their mother appears in the doorway and says she and their father are going out. They’ll be back later. She is soft-spoken but when she summons Gary from the den, he appears instantly, tugging on his brown sportscoat.

Then they’re gone.

A few minutes later, Rudy nudges him. “Open your present. Go on. What do you think it is?”

Jake would like to wait, but he really can’t. He walks to the table and picks it up and returns to the couch. It’s very light. What could it be?

Money, maybe—in a big box as a joke. Money would be good. There is so much he wants and so little they can afford. Enough to buy a secondhand laptop?

Even thirdhand?

That would be heaven.

He runs his hand over the sides.

He carefully unseals it, as if it would be disrespectful to tear the ribbon off, which he really, really wants to do.

Then he looks at the naked box and lifts the lid.

Inside is a card.

Not a birthday card, just a three-by-five index card.

A donation of $100 has been made in your name to the Family.

Happy Birthday, son!

Rudy says, “Fuck.”

Jake is silent and manages to control most of the tears. He doesn’t know why he bothers. He’s cried in front of his brother before, as Rudy has with him. And there is no one else to witness the emotion.

He can’t help himself. He rises and walks to the kitchen.

The savory aroma lingers but the food is gone, and he understands that what she cooked will be part of a potluck supper for new recruits they hope to bring into the same organization that is now $100 richer, thanks to young Jacoby Heron’s generous “gift.”

Lydia’s voice faded into the past.

Along with his brother’s sympathetic gaze.

And his own quiet tears.

Jake had returned to the present, once more in his small apartment overlooking Venice Beach.

The “nonprofit foundation” his niece, Julia, mentioned earlier was not that at all. It was very much for profit—as the IRS and tax court decided in the losing battle for tax-exempt status.

Nor was it a beneficent foundation, as Julia believed, “doing good.” The Family was a cult.

His parents had been seduced into joining the group by the founder, Bertram Stahl, a failed professor, failed entrepreneur, failed bartender, failed real estate investor and failed author .

.. and those were just the job descriptions that appeared on his résumé (minus the “failed,” of course).

But the ageless man had excelled at one thing: corralling those with the tiniest modicum of gullibility or insecurity into signing on to his group and forfeiting any shred of self-worth and dignity.

Along with most of their money.

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 capital F , 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 his Matrix room 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 were not asleep, 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.