Page 9 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)
Standing within a line of boxwood and topiary in Hollywood’s expansive Cedar Hills Cemetery, Damon Garr noticed a teenage girl. Damn if she didn’t look like his very first kill.
Eerie.
A sign, he would have thought, if Damon had believed in signs.
Which he did not.
Still, it was too curious a coincidence to pass by.
And, more important, the sight had ignited the urge to create a Tableau, his word for his masterpieces—scenarios that were horrific to ordinary people, but brilliant works of art to him. They were visual feasts designed to evoke powerful emotions, as all truly great things did.
He leaned forward, watching her closely as she stood beside a young man who appeared to be her brother due to the resemblance.
They were not particularly upset to be at the funeral and, judging by the ages of those present, Damon guessed it was a grandfather or great-uncle or the like who was no longer among the living.
She looked just like Sarah Anne Taylor.
The late Sarah Anne Taylor.
Damon glanced at his watch.
The Brock funeral party would soon arrive for Anthony’s memorial but until then he had some time to kill ... Yes, he actually thought the terrible play on words (Miss Spalding always said he had a wicked sense of humor).
He had parked a safe distance away from the cemetery, a half mile north on the far side of a city park, and had walked here via a camera-free jogging path, to the grounds’ utility entrance, where the staff came and went, as well as the heavy equipment and the occasional coffins that did not arrive via hearse through the front gate.
No cameras there either.
He studied the girl again. About thirteen, wearing a black short-hemmed dress and black tights, younger than Sarah, but the facial structure and hair and figure were similar.
Eerie . . .
From time to time she would step away from her brother and send a text or two, read the reply.
Each time she seemed to step farther away from the milling mourners, who were waiting for the others to assemble and a ringleader—priest or minister—to arrive.
She’d be completely isolated soon if she kept up her pattern.
Please ... just walk a little farther.
His heart thudded harder with anticipation.
A Tableau was in the offing.
This was, of course, Magic Day Four, and though he’d made specific plans for later, they did not preclude a little aperitivo.
With a lovely little thing like her.
Sometimes you just couldn’t pass up a chance opportunity.
What direction should it take? he wondered.
There was always the old standby.
Murder.
Damon Garr had known for a long time that he was born to kill.
Brilliant even in early teen years, he researched this proclivity (the very word he used, at thirteen, no less) to kill.
He learned of the Macdonald triad. This was a psychological profile used to identify potential serial killers, who often exhibited a cluster of three childhood behaviors: bed-wetting, committing arson and hurting animals.
The famed triad was not conclusive, of course, but Damon refrained from acting out on the latter two, concerned about drawing a counselor’s or doctor’s attention. As for the wet sheets, Miss Spalding took care of those and never told a soul.
There was also medical proof of his pathology.
This came out as a result of his extracurricular activities at school.
He was arrogant and impatient and tended to bait bullies.
He held back when fighting—his lust to kill might carry him away—but his size and ferocity resulted in some severely injured students.
Once, he put a boy in the hospital. (It didn’t help his situation to stand over the screaming boy with a smile of curiosity, marveling at the angle of the broken fingers.) School resource officers and counselors contacted his father, William—his mother, Sydney, having passed—and recommended tests.
His father had made millions as a ship charterer, leasing out huge vessels for transporting oil and containers.
He said to the school, “Yes, run the tests. All of them. A full battery. Whatever it costs.”
The stocky, chain-smoking man was otherwise utterly uninvolved in his son’s life, and young Damon thought it was moving that he’d been adamant about getting him help.
Only later did he come to understand his father’s true motive. William Garr wanted the tests in the hope that the results would mean he should be institutionalized, removing the last thread of parental responsibility.
The conclusions of the tests were supposed to be kept from the underage patient, but Damon, of course, broke into the doctor’s office and read them.
Quite intriguing.
Structural and functional MRIs revealed abnormalities—in the portion of the cortex that can cause the patient to act out aggressively.
The doctor reported he was surprised to find that, despite the patient’s sociopathic tendencies, a particular behavior remained solidly normal: impulse control. This observation was listed as “an interesting fluke.”
So, Damon was by nature a killer—and a particularly efficient one too, given that he was able to rein in the impulses that prompted others to kill without careful premeditation, making it more likely they’d get caught.
So much for the wiring. But as any shrink will tell you, that alone doesn’t make a serial killer.
Nurture plays a role too.
It certainly did in Damon’s life.
Enter Miss Spalding.
After his mother passed when he was eight, his father was not going to waste any time raising the boy, and rather than foist him off on his late wife’s sister, a loving woman with a family, in Portland, he hired a governess and walked away from the boy completely.
Wiry and severe looking, hair always scraped back into a tight platinum-blonde bun, Miss Spalding never married and, always hoping for a child, did all she could to glue the boy to her side and make sure he spent every waking minute—and more than a few nonwaking moments—with her.
This meant indulging him, particularly with those temptations that a doting older woman assumed a young boy would want: ultra-violent games, like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption , slasher movies and any damn thing he wanted to watch in the darkest corners of the internet.
The golden boy could do whatever he wanted. Discipline did not enter into his life once Dad was gone (except that other type of discipline, viewed with hungry pleasure on sites he logged on to by adding ten years to his age).
Nature, nurture and a dash of cool impulse control.
A perfect storm of murder, just waiting for a chance to get to work.
At eighteen, it happened. He knew it was time. Maybe like birds suddenly know it’s time to leave the nest.
The A-plus student put his calculated plan in motion.
Damon had taken pictures of Sarah with a digital camera using a cash-purchased chip, metadata disabled, in advance.
On a carefully chosen afternoon, he took surface roads to Thomas Jefferson High, didn’t buy gas and bought no food.
There would be no evidence of his presence anywhere in the vicinity.
Next, he followed a football player home from practice, collected a discarded McDonald’s wrapper and soda cup and straw from the boy’s parked car with latex gloves, then waited until the student had left his house again and was out driving by himself—so he would have no alibi.
He’d taken the time to memorize Sarah’s schedule and found her walking home alone from band practice as she always did on Wednesday evenings. She lived less than a mile from the school and had no car.
He came up behind her. Wearing leather gloves over latex, he pulled a thick plastic bag over her head and dragged her from the sidewalk into an adjacent wooded park. She kicked and thrashed, but he easily overpowered her.
He stabbed her in the chest several times, then enacted the second part of his plan.
To ensure DNA transfer, he rubbed the food wrapper and straw from the boy’s car over Sarah’s skin.
He drove away, constantly checking to be sure he wasn’t seen.
He waited an hour for the boy to come home, then hid the knife, leather gloves and SD card under the back floor mat of his car.
Finally, he called the local police precinct on his burner phone to give a partial license plate number for a car driven by a boy carrying a bloody knife near the park an hour earlier.
Just the right number of clues. Not wise, he decided, to draw too clear a line.
Drove home.
A month of planning. One dead, one serving thirty years.
More perfectly plotted and executed than anything Ted Bundy or BTK or the I-5 Killer had ever perpetrated.
Sarah . . .
Picturing her face, first horrified, then desperate, then forever still.
A face that so resembled the girl he was gazing at presently in a sparsely populated part of Cedar Hills Cemetery.
He was about to send a silent plea for her to step just a bit farther away from her family when she cooperated on her own.
She muttered something that appeared to be snide to her brother, who fired back a retort and joined the rest of the mourners, leaving his sister to step away from the party altogether.
Which placed her no more than thirty feet from Damon Garr’s eager eyes.