Page 56 of Hard Heart

“I see it every time I close my eyes.” His voice cracked as he spoke. “Give me the pen.”

He turned to a fresh page in my legal pad, and I expected a simple 2D sketch. But Sykes was an artist. He drew in 3D, and he hadn’t been kidding about his memory. And Special Agent Rimer hadn’t been lying about the grisliness of the scene. Costello lay on the bed, her skin darkened from bruising and lividity, her expression one of agony. She’d found no peace in death. The bed was pushed against the wall, flanked by two nightstands, a closet to the left and a wall of windows to the right, the morning light spilling over her broken body. There’d been no way to look at the scene upside down. No way to see the pentagram and cross in their inverted form.

“It was staged,” I whispered.

Sykes paused mid-pen stroke. “What? How do you know?”

I explained about the symbolism. About Wicca versus Satanism. “And the pentacle comes in a circle. I think whoever posed her this way was going for dramatic effect, not any deeper meaning.”

He stared at the drawing for a long moment, taking in my words. “Why the hell would anybody do that?”

“Who knows? We have all these dots, and I can’t connect any of them at the moment. You say someone paid off Justin—what if they told him to make the scene look like an occult sacrifice, and he just…I don’t know, winged it?”

A long moment passed before Sykes spoke. “That’s crazy. And it also makes sense.”

“It’s the only thing that does. I mean, if you were a true Satanist, you’d know which way up to draw their star. Or maybe you’d have used the Sigil of Lucifer and the Leviathan Cross rather than sending these mixed messages.”

Jim showed up with coffee, and I turned to a new page on my legal pad in case he saw the drawing and got curious. I was ninety-five percent sure Bodhi and Bliss were on a hiding to nothing with their wild theories, but I couldn’t forget Bodhi’s comment about accidents in the prison system. Why give the staff more information than they needed?

“What do we do now?” Sykes asked once we were alone again. “What does any of this mean?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. It feels as if we’re getting closer to the ‘why,’ but we still have no way of proving the ‘who.’ I spoke with Save Our Planet about August Groveland this week, and they’re convinced on the Big Oil theory. Did you know a number of other scientists involved with water electrolysis suffered unusual fates?”

Sykes shook his head. “No, I didn’t know. Which scientists?”

“Julisa Denning, Winston Viggs, Tim Weston, Christine Yang.”

“I’ve never heard of Christine Yang. Tim was on staff at Stanford, and Winston was down in Florida—I’m familiar with them by reputation. The only one I met was Julisa. She was a former student of August’s, and she worked at the University of Coastal California.”

My heart sped up. “Were they still in touch?”

“They often spoke on the phone. What happened to her?”

“Nobody has a clue. She left work and disappeared.”

Sykes gave a heavy sigh. “I don’t like this. Me, August, Julisa… And you’re out there poking the hornets’ nest.”

“I’m just asking a few questions.”

“And I was just measuring reaction temperatures in a lab.”

“My roommate isn’t going to kill me. She’s helping with the research.”

“If this is as big as we think it might be, you’ll have to worry about more than just your roommate.”

I swallowed down the lump in my throat, and now I slipped off a shoe. Tucked my foot between Sykes’s. He squeezed with his ankles, and his gaze softened.

“I promise I’ll be careful.”

“I wish I’d never filled in that fucking form.”

“Well, you did. And now I’m here, and I’m not quitting. Next point on the agenda… Dawson Masters. The knife used belonged to him. He said you borrowed it; you said you gave it back.”

“I left it on the dresser in his room. Anyone could have taken it afterward. Apart from Nolan, I’d say Dawson was the least likely person in that house to be a killer.”

“And yet he did kill a person recently.”

Sykes visibly started. “What?”