Page 129 of The Grave Artist
“We have the thermal readings,” came Grange’s deep voice.
“K.” Carmen spoke the law enforcement word of acknowledgment into her earpiece.
“No living entity profiles.”
Shit.
Her palms were damp, and her heart would not stop pounding. This was the only hope of finding her, and that hope dangled from a gossamer thread.
“Orders, Carmen?”
“Maintain position.”
“Copy that.”
“Thermals?” Heron asked.
Absently, her mind mostly on her sister, she explained, “Nothing comes in registering a human body temp.”
“So, it’s empty.”
Carmen was vaguely aware of Mouse answering, “Not necessarily. Liam had a zero-temperature reading once and went in with the team. One of the operators got bit by a rattlesnake. Only the boot, but scared the crapola out of her. Snakes—cold-blooded, you know.”
They looked over the screens displaying images of Garr’s house from several angles. Of necessity, it was tac team lite. Garr lived in a lush area of Malibu, with plenty of trees, but not so many streets. It was impossible to hide a full contingent of SWAT personnel. And they were afraid if Garr was paranoid he might flee or shoot Selina at the first sign he had been made.
There was also the electronic security issue. Heron had run a signal scan, and the house was bristling with protection devices. They wouldinstantly let Garr know his home had been breached. He probably had a go bag in his car, and at any indication of a threat he’d simply not return home and scoot to Mexico.
The thirty-year-old Garr didn’t make a lot of money professionally. He was a lecturer in art history at a local university, but his father had been a successful ship charter broker and had been worth tens of millions. Garr, they speculated, would have inherited a fortune. He was also an art collector, though he did not apparently make much money that way. If you never sell the pieces you’ve acquired, your bottom line for that business is constantly in the red.
This echoed Heron’s deductions about his resources—and about his independence in employment. A professor maybe has certain academic standards to follow but doesn’t really have bosses in the corporate sense.
In the brief time since they’d known his name, they could not pull together a complete profile, but they had learned that he had been a troubled youth and had been flagged by several counselors as potentially a risk for dangerous adult behavior. His bride had died on their wedding day—ruled an accidental death.
Perhaps such a horrific loss had been the trigger that made him snap—and re-create the death now, acting it out with other victims, so that their friends and family members would experience the same sorrow he had.
A profile that had, in fact, led them to identify him at the Uffizi.
There was no criminal file on the man, not even in the Traffic Bureau. Officers and campus police had raided his office at the school, but found no leads. Then they receded from view, in case he returned to the school.
Typical of a dedicated serial killer, he had a minimal social media presence and was not active in any of the college’s extracurricular activities. There was no evidence he had acted inappropriately with any of his students, though the majority were young women.
A shake of the head. “And how the hell is Garr involved with Sweeney and Fisher?”
Mouse offered, “There’s no way he could have been connected to your father’s death. Too much of a coincidence.”
Heron said, “But we know he’s targeted us—and that means he’d go after Selina. He must’ve followed her to Fisher’s.”
“Maybe, but I’ve taught her situational awareness. She’s always checking for tails.”
Tandy, from his monitor perch, nodded. “Right. Unlikely she was followed. Damon’s car showed up twenty, thirty minutes after she drove to Fisher’s. No, he found her some other way ...”
Mouse said, “Maybe Garr’s hacker accomplice had access to the cameras too? And tracked her that way? How many cameras are there in Los Angeles County, Frank?”
Tandy said, “More than forty thousand sending feeds to the police.”
It was a good suggestion but Carmen said, “I don’t know. That’s one of the most cyber-secure systems in the state. They’re worried an assassin might hack it to find a motorcade route to kill some official.”
Then she noticed that Jake Heron’s eyes were doing that thing they sometimes did that was both intriguing and scary. They went someplace else. Like he was peering into a different dimension. Carmen sometimes imagined that he was looking at a massive computer, one so big it incorporated the entire universe.
