Page 55 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

As Mouse walked into the Garage, Carmen asked, “Are they on her?”

She could only hope Lauren hadn’t stormed out of the building too quickly for the SHIT detail to get a bead on her.

“They scrambled three chasers in three minutes.” Lifting a blonde eyebrow, Mouse added, “They’re good.”

“They are,” Carmen agreed.

To follow a car in an urban environment, a minimum of two vehicles was required to avoid detection.

Their team had been known to use as many as six in rotation, making them invisible to all but the sharpest drivers.

Add the ability to coordinate the use of traffic cams and the occasional drone, and no one could figure out they were being followed.

Heron was staring at the murder board.

“What’s that look, Heron?” she asked.

“I get it. Streets are considered ‘public areas,’ but it still feels intrusive to me. I just break out in a sweat when I see ‘Big Brother Is Watching You.’”

Mouse asked, “What’s that mean?”

Heron said, “From George Orwell’s novel 1984 —which was the future when it was written more than three decades earlier.

Dystopia. Big Brother was the government and he, well, it, watched everything every citizen did.

Everywhere. Gave me nightmares as a kid.

Gives me nightmares now. But”—he held up a hand—“we’ve got to do it. ”

Carmen nearly laughed. Their roles in pushing the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment had been swapping back and forth all day. She said to Mouse, “And Declan?”

She leaned toward one of the computers at a nearby workstation and typed. The image of a budding flower on the screen dissolved to reveal a map. “He’s monitoring all the communication from the SHIT detail and rendering it into a real-time display of the target vehicle’s movements.”

They all followed a red dot going through the city on a virtual map.

Then Heron took a phone call. She noted surprise on his face, but she paid no more attention and returned to the map.

“We’ve got some incoming assistance,” he said. He tapped keys. “I’m putting him on your screen, Sanchez.”

“Hey there, everyone,” came a voice from the unit.

Carmen turned and, despite everything, felt a genuine smile tug at the corners of her mouth. She was looking at Frank Tandy on Heron’s monitor. He was still in the hospital but propped on pillows in his bed, tubed up, but not looking too bad.

“Frank!”

“I’m out of StaleState,” he said. “Ready to help.”

No idea what the word meant but it brought a smile to Heron’s face.

She would have expected Tandy to be slurring his words, but no. He sounded alert, though his face tightened into a wince when he moved. “Detective work while lying on my ass. Kind of like self-driving cars and artificial intelligence. New state of the art.”

Carmen recalled the most recent conversation she’d had with Tandy when she’d visited him in the hospital.

He’d taken her hand and in unsteady words said, “Hey, Carmen, probably not a good time for this, but what the hell. Near death and all that ... How about you and me having dinner sometime? Only rule is—no talk about cases.”

“You mean not a business dinner.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”

Her response had been ambiguous. A smile and a squeeze of his hand. Largely because she didn’t know what the answer might be.

One thing she did know for certain: there had been two responses in her gut to the thought. One, it would undoubtedly be a fun dinner. The second reaction had nothing to do with Tandy. It was the unexpected memory of the near kiss by Jake Heron as they sat on the deck of the honeymoon suite.

Dispose of that, she instructed. Now.

And Carmen was then focusing once more on the case. She spent some moments bringing Tandy up to speed on the investigation.

She’d just finished when Heron’s monitor came to life yet again.

He frowned.

“What?” Carmen had noted the expression.

“My scan of the comm systems after Reynolds screwed up and sent that unencrypted email? The bot found a packet kicker.”

Mouse offered, “Not good.”

Carmen asked, “How not good?”

Heron said, “Very not good. It identified any email or trunk line calls from Europol and the Italian police coming into our office and routed them to an anonymous server. Anybody who called got a response telling them to leave a message. Anybody who emailed got a return that said, ‘Thank you. Somebody will be in touch as soon as possible.’”

“When did this start?”

“Two days after Brock’s murder.”

“How would HK know how to do that?”

“He wouldn’t. There are only a few people in the world who could run a kick like that. It’s brilliant. It lies dormant until it reads an IP or a phone call from selected sources—like any Italian law enforcement agency—and then it grabs the message and reroutes it.”

“Maybe the Italians have been trying to reach us all along.”

Heron’s eyes were on his screen. “Yep. Any communications from here to Italy or Belgium—Europol headquarters—got hijacked too.”

“So if HK isn’t a world-class elite hacker,” Mouse said, “that means he’s got a partner.”