Page 22 of The Grave Artist
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.
Chapter 10
“Sit.”
Jake took the chair at the small conference table in Eric Williamson’s office. Sanchez sat beside him. They had just returned from the Hollywood Crest Inn and had been interrupted by a summons from Mouse once again as they’d been entering information on the digital murder board.
The supervisory special agent flipped through papers and set them down in an orderly pack, like a huge deck of cards. “You two ready to brief me?”
Sanchez paused. “Ready as we can be. On a case that’s about three hours old.”
Implying that they were being interrupted from an important task for one far less so.
A cool glance in return, as if he’d caught the tacit criticism.
Very little got past Eric Williamson.
“Where’s Detective Tandy?”
“Frank’s back in his office,” Sanchez said, “at Robbery Homicide.”
Suddenly the monitor on Williamson’s wall brightened to life, at the same time that a blue light on a camera above it began to glow.
Did Williamson sigh?
To Jake’s surprise—and dismay—filling the screen was the clean-shaven, narrow face of Stan Reynolds.
Hewas the one they were to brief.
A word, if itwerea word, came to mind:Ugh.
The deputy secretary of Homeland Security was bathed in light, then not, then bathed again, and Jake realized he was on an airplane. A government one, of course. Reynolds would not demean himself with public transport, even in first class.
“Eric,” he said, eyes swiveling to Williamson. Then: “Agent Sanchez. And Professor Heron. Our intrusionist. That isquitea job description. Could one major in it? Ha.”
Jake gave a polite—and completely inauthentic—smile.
While someone else might have doffed their suit jacket on a flight, Reynolds still wore his. And a white shirt and dark, unstylishly narrow tie, maroon, which was held in place with an accessory you never saw anymore either: a bar, clasping it to the shirt. The getup was, if nothing else, unique, which meant it was a display of power—that elusive magical substance Reynolds had surely been obsessed with collecting throughout his career, all the more so since being passed over for permanent director of DHS.
Williamson voiced the question on Jake’s mind: “Where are you, Stan?”
“Jetting to, jetting fro. I actuallywastaking some hard-earned time off when I got a call from the director. Apparently a Senate subcommittee wants a little explanation about our doings.”
I-squared had been approved at high levels—the White House was Jake’s guess. Since Congress had not been involved in its creation, there were some grumblings that the executive branch had usurped the legislative by whipping up yet another outfit that would be standing in line, cup in hand, for limited tax dollars at budget time.
Reynolds sipped coffee from a china cup. Was he not worried about the combination of brown liquid, white shirt and turbulence?
“I’ll do an admirable job defending the team, though. I’ve got my cheerleading moves down. Not. To. Worry.” He suddenly dropped the smarmy attitude that was his trademark. “I’m serious, Eric. I’ve been prepping all night.”
Since they were on a secure video call, with high-def cameras going both ways, Williamson did not cut a glance toward Sanchez and Jake, though it felt like one was almost forthcoming. This was curious news. Reynolds was going to bat for I-squared? He had opposed it from the moment Williamson had drafted his white paper for the Department of Justice, proposing an operation like it—then dubbed Project X—to take on just the sort of enemies that the Honeymoon Killer represented. After all, organized terror attacks in the country ranged from 9/11’s more than three thousand fatalities to a few dozen every year. On the other hand, twenty-five thousand people were murdered annually in America by solitary or small groups of actors.
Did his willingness to uphold I-squared under a barrage of queries at a congressional hearing suggest a change of heart?
