Page 6 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

The digital file Carmen had received didn’t involve Tristan Kane or the Honeymoon Killer.

Or anything else I-squared was investigating.

Though it did relate to a homicide.

Her own father’s murder.

Three years ago, Roberto Sanchez, a widower, had devastated Carmen and her younger sister, Selina, when he took his own life. Or so it seemed. But, thanks to Heron, she’d learned the death had merely been staged to appear like a suicide.

She had then asked for a copy of the investigative file from the police.

She’d been forced to dance around some awkward questions when she made the request. The lead indicating foul play was not obtained through official channels, and she wouldn’t have been permitted to investigate a family member’s death anyway.

And there was the embarrassing fact that the police had come to the wrong conclusion, not something she wanted to share with them without solid proof.

So she’d told them she simply wanted to review the case “for closure.” Some would call it a lie by omission, but Carmen preferred to think of it as a “strategic deployment of the truth.”

Either way, she now was in possession of scanned documents that could provide answers to the mystery.

She tapped the file icon and began to scroll through the contents.

A financial adviser, Roberto Sanchez had made some bad decisions while investing clients’ money. Some had lost their life savings. Unable to handle the shame, he’d flung himself from his office window in Whittier, a suburb of LA.

Or so went the official account.

Carmen had always thought it strange that Roberto, otherwise healthy and not prone to depression, would take such an extreme measure.

But all the facts pointed to suicide, and Carmen, suddenly forced to play the role of parent in her sister’s upbringing, and executor of their father’s will, accepted the facts laid out before her at the time.

Then to her astonishment, Heron found some anomalies about Roberto’s death that piqued his curiosity.

He had enlisted Aruba’s aid to dig further.

Carmen might have ribbed Heron about her, but she respected Aruba—who could penetrate systems to her heart’s delight as long as official investigations weren’t compromised.

She truly appreciated the elite hacker’s efforts and teased Heron about his relationship with her only as a joke (at least, she thought it was a joke).

Together Heron and Aruba found truly shocking news: evidence that someone had hired a contract killer to murder her father.

This was a game changer in many ways, not the least because it would go a long way toward healing a rift between Carmen and her younger sister.

Roberto had died just before Selina’s seventeenth birthday, emotionally scarring her at a vulnerable moment in her life.

Carmen had, over time, forgiven him. Selina had not.

Nor did she forgive her older, and more worldly, sister for reconciling herself with the suicide.

Carmen was thrown into turmoil when Heron told her what they’d uncovered. Her father murdered by a hit man? That fact begged her to go into action and track down the killer. But it was a crime over which she had no jurisdiction.

Jake Heron—the man for whom lines existed to be crossed—had considered this. In one of those rare moments when they spoke frankly about personal matters he’d said, “Sanchez, you’re a cop. Go do cop stuff and find the son of a bitch.”

She had decided to do just that, under the radar of her superiors in HSI.

Now she had the file, which would be the starting point for the clandestine investigation.

Was there something in the matter-of-fact cop-speak that offered up insights into the murder?

As she scrolled, the curt phrases she was all too familiar with—and that she had mastered as well—slid past.

Decedent . . . cause of death . . . velocity of impact . . . responding medical personnel . . .

She stared at her screen as if she could make answers materialize by sheer force of will. But nothing more revealing came forward.

Then she scrolled to the next page and came to an abrupt stop.

Before her was the suicide note. Her hands began to shake as she read her father’s familiar scrawl, bringing a lump to her throat.

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

“Hard to look at.”

She started at the voice, not having noticed Heron slip behind her to read over her shoulder.

He continued, “I mean, hard under any circumstances, but particularly now—that you know he was forced to write it.”

While he was facing his own death.

Yes, it was hard.

No denying that. Carmen Sanchez was a human being and moved by loss like anyone else.

But she was also a law enforcement officer, and it was impossible for her to shut out completely doing the “cop stuff” coldly and objectively.

In an instant, with the abruptness of a finger snap, a thought struck her.

Heron noticed. “What, Sanchez? You’re onto something.”

Maybe . . .

She moved slightly to give Heron a better view of the screen. “Those goddesses, that reference? Our dad read Greek and Roman myths to Selina and me a lot, but he never called us his goddesses. Why say that?”

“And why underline his middle name?” Heron asked. “Is that something he usually did?”

She found it odd that he noticed something that had made her wonder as well. “No. It’s a strange thing for him to do, but then again, I’m sure he was under an incredible amount of pressure.”

The kind of pressure few people would ever know.

Heron tapped the lower-right corner of the screen with a pen. “What’s that?”

She squinted at the area and saw some nearly indistinguishable marks. “Looks like the crime scene tech cut off a fraction of the bottom edge of the note.”

The original had been collected by forensic techs, so the detectives had shown Carmen only a copy when they interviewed her shortly after her father’s death. She had never seen the entire page before.

“Is there another image?”

Of course there was. CSI took a hundred photos when ten would do. She scrolled through the other images until she found one that included the tiny writing scrawled at the bottom corner. “Can you zoom in?” Heron asked.

She used her index finger and thumb to expand the view.

Δ:ΙΘ

“I would say it’s Greek to me,” Heron said, “but I think it really is.”

He was right. Her father hadn’t only read them mythology but taught his daughters a bit of Greek history, including some of the language.

“It is. Ancient. But I don’t know what it means.”

She maximized the image until it pixelated but saw nothing that would explain the strange characters. She thought for a moment and then typed some keystrokes. “I’m sending it to my sister. See if she has any ideas.”

Selina called back almost immediately and said, “You got the file?” Her voice was filled with excitement.

“Yes, everything. You’re on speaker with Heron.”

“Hey, Jake.”

“Hi, Selina.”

Carmen asked, “Do you know what the reference to goddesses is about? I don’t remember him ever calling us that.”

A pause. “No. He never did.”

“What about the tiny letters in the lower-right corner?”

“They’re Greek. But they don’t mean anything to me.”

“Me either.”

Selina sucked in a breath. “It sounds crazy, but could he have been giving us a message?”

“About his death, a clue?”

“Yes.”

“It’s possible,” Carmen said, reading the note again. “I was hoping you and Dad might have had some conversations that’d shed light on it.”

“No,” Selina said. “But you’ll find out. Where are you going to start?”

Carmen was silent for a moment. “I will, honey, of course. But I can’t do anything now.”

Silence pulsed from the other end of the line. “What do you mean?”

“Lina, I’m working a big case.” She added “Homicide” and felt bad about including the troubling detail. She realized she’d done it to justify her decision not to drop everything to follow up immediately on Roberto’s murder.

“What’re you talking about? This is our father!”

“Lina, we’ve got an active serial killer in LA. We have to stop him. Dad’s is what we call a cold case.”

“Did you really fucking say that?”

Carmen was taken aback. “It’s just a term we use.”

“I know what it means. I watch TV. A cold case is still a case. And you’re saying you don’t care enough to look into it.”

Now Carmen was angry. “Of course I do. And I’ll make sure it gets investigated, but I have to be careful. I don’t have jurisdiction, the state-federal thing.”

“That hasn’t stopped you before.”

Heron and Carmen first combined their efforts while she undertook a case that did not technically fall within the boundaries of DHS’s remit. Some even thought it was wrong for them to handle the investigation.

Deputy Director Stan Reynolds, for instance.

“I’ll call some people.”

“When you find the time.”

“Lina, you don’t under—”

“I can call people too. Just as easily. Like Ryan.”

Ryan Hall was a detective both sisters had met on that recent case. Carmen found him a competent investigator, if young.

Selina had found him considerably more.

And the feelings were mutual.

But Carmen pointed out, “He’s Riverside County. The murder was in Orange. He doesn’t have jurisdiction either.”

“Another excuse ... Is there some reason you don’t want to get to the bottom of it?”

“ What? ” Carmen sputtered. “It’s about priorities.”

The Honeymoon Killer could be targeting another victim even as they spoke.

“Look, Carm. You’ve made yourself perfectly clear. You have more important things to do.”

“That’s not fair.”

The ground felt like it had shifted beneath her feet. For the past few years, Selina had been furious with her for forgiving their father and moving on. Now, she was angry that Carmen wouldn’t drop everything to vindicate him.

“I’ll do what I can when I have the time,” she said. “And listen to me, Selina. You are not to do any investigating on your own. You want to figure out what Dad meant by ‘my goddesses’ and check out those symbols, okay. But that’s it. Understood?”

Selina was a student in Perris, California, about ninety minutes from downtown LA. On summer break at the moment, though, she was in a temporary apartment in Fullerton, smack in the middle of Orange County—exactly the spot where she would be able to play amateur detective to investigate the murder.

And that was not going to happen.

“Whatever,” her sister said, flinging the word out like the verbal slap it was.

“Listen to me, Selina. He was murdered . And whoever did it isn’t going to appreciate somebody—”

The line went dead.

Carmen let out a few choice words in Spanish, then tapped the screen to close the digital file.

Frank Tandy disconnected from his phone call with his team at Robbery Homicide and glanced over at her. “You all right, Carmen?”

She cleared her throat. “Fine. Just some personal stuff.”

“I heard ‘Selina.’ Problem with your sister?”

Tandy had met her several times.

“It’ll get worked out.”

She hoped.

She glanced at the virtual murder board on the wall near the workstations, headed HK . The completed fields were pitifully sparse.

Eyes on the board, Tandy asked, “Where’d the software for that come from? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Filling in some information on his tablet, which immediately appeared on the wall, Heron said, “I wrote the script.”

“Where can we buy it?”

“Buy? I don’t charge. Give me your email. I’ll send you a copy.”

Tandy gave a disbelieving laugh. “You could make loads selling it.”

“I don’t sell software or code. I give it away.”

“Why?”

Carmen noted Heron blinking, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

“Don’t know,” he said. “I just do. Better to send it to your personal account. The LAPD firewall would probably stop script attachments.”

Carmen said, “I have Frank’s address.”

Heron glanced at her and nodded.

Then her thoughts returned to the prickly conversation she’d just had with her sister. “Hey, Heron. Didn’t you say that the worst kinds of intrusion happen within families?”

“Not necessarily the worst, but, sure, families come with built-in PPIs. Because that’s where we lower our defenses time after time. And, what’s more, loving somebody gives us inside information about the best way of getting under each other’s skin.”

She felt a gravitational tug toward following Selina’s suggestion to pursue her father’s murderer.

Reflecting that she might even find some basis for federal jurisdiction once she started digging.

Title 18—the federal criminal code—was as complicated as the myths about ancient labyrinths Roberto had read to his daughters in their youth.

But determining that would take time.

And time was precious at the moment—now that they were operating on the assumption that the Honeymoon Killer was a serial perpetrator and could be poised to strike again.

She said to both men, “Let’s get started on that canvass. Where’s the widow?”

Tandy said, “At the Hollywood Crest.”

She rose and started for the door.

Pausing only once.

Her eyes were drawn back to the computer that contained the police investigation into her father’s death—a murder disguised as suicide.

Her gaze met Heron’s.

It was as if he were asking, Are you sure you don’t want to look into it?

Her response was: “HK’s out there somewhere, Heron. I want to find him. Now.”