Page 41 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

“How did you ...” Damon began, his heart slowing after the shock.

“Get in here?” Tristan Kane studied more prints.

“Like everybody else in the universe you believe what advertisers tell you. They’ve convinced you their product is easy to use, it’s technological, it’s digital .

.. and according to the commercials, you’re endangering your family if you don’t buy it. ”

“You mean my locks and security.”

“Hm.” Kane seemed pleased that Damon had understood. As if he’d been uncertain of his intelligence. “If you’d put a padlock on your front door, I’d still be sawing away. But you have an off-the-rack system that took me about ... six seconds to open.”

“But the camera—” Damon looked at a nearby monitor. The scene was still, despite the omnipresent breeze from the Pacific Ocean. A dead giveaway that he should have spotted. He tsked his tongue. “You loaded a screenshot, and waltzed right in, directly in front of the lens. Clever. You’re good.”

Kane shrugged as if bored with the praise.

He scanned the walls, where his eyes settled on the Goya, then the El Greco.

Trubert’s Weeping Madonna held his attention for a while.

He stepped close to a high-quality reproduction of Hopper’s Automat , which depicted a woman sitting alone at a table in one of the coin-operated restaurants that were all the rage when the artist painted the work in the 1920s.

It was described as embodying the essence of urban alienation.

Eyes still on the seated woman, he said softly, “I did some research. You teach art history. Yet you’ve never published.

That’s curious for an academic.” Then the man turned to him.

“I suppose you want to draw as little attention to yourself as possible.”

True enough, but rather than respond verbally, Damon walked to the filing cabinet. With deliberate casualness, he pulled open the top drawer and reached in as if retrieving a stack of bills that needed paying.

He lifted out the pistol he kept inside and pointed it at Kane. “We’re talking about security systems and my career, but not about who the fuck you are and what you’re doing here.”

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 the police .”

“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 if you did 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 know Moby-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.

A personal weakness. 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.”

He was intrigued. “What did you do?”

“Left evidence that points the dogs in a different direction. Sent them sniffing around Switzerland, a research facility. They have no idea that I’m in their backyard.”

Damon concluded that the gun was unnecessary after all. If Kane wanted to hurt him, that would have already happened. He returned it to the cabinet drawer.

“First name okay, Damon?” Kane waited for him to nod, then added, “Good.” He regarded Damon for a long moment, then said, “I don’t really get what you’re about.

Some kind of sociopathic fetish? There are so many, one loses track.

I don’t care. But, as I said, we have something in common.

Heron and Sanchez are rooting around like pigs after truffles, looking for you, looking for me. ”

“I have a plan,” Damon said, curious to hear Kane’s thoughts. “Kill one of them. Only one, which would sideline the other. A one-wheeled motorcycle.”

Kane, Damon guessed, did not smile much. But he seemed to come close to doing so, upon hearing this. He took this as approval.

“I can get into most security camera servers ever made.” Kane nodded to the monitor. “And make you disappear. I can break into a lot of email servers and phone switches. Find out what they’re up to.”

“I-squared? That place you mentioned where they work?”

“That’s sealed now, as I was saying. By Heron. Cracking would take weeks. And we don’t have that kind of time, do we?”

Damon shook his head.

“But I can break into their comm systems and regular police servers. I can find addresses they think are cloaked. I can find out what cars they drive, where those cars are going. Dozens of other things.”

“Fact is, I am having trouble locating them.”

“Figured as much. That’s why I’m giving you a present, as a show of good faith. To prove you can trust me. And give you a chance to have some fun.”

Damon took the folded sheet of paper Kane had held out with his long, pale fingers.

He read the name and address. “Selina Sanchez? Sister, I assume?”

Kane nodded.

Damon glanced at the purple-curtained room. Felt the weight of the razor blades.

Her . . .

The cutting could wait a bit longer.

He looked at Kane’s note and mentally called up a map of LA. He did the calculations. He could be in Fullerton in forty-five minutes.