Out at Night (9 page)

“She never told you? Aunt Chel and I tried to get you. Both of you. Fold you into our bunch. What’s a few more? Your mother wouldn’t hear of it.”

The blood drained from Grace’s face and her skin felt damp.

Her uncle stared at her wonderingly. “Jesus. She didn’t tell you.”

Her heart pulsed in her throat; she could taste the anger. She wondered if he’d told himself that lie so long that he believed it.

Grace scraped a hand through her hair. “We both know you’re lying.” Her voice was raw.

She shoved her chair back.

“I can’t do this. I absolutely can’t do this, so if this is what it is, I’m out of here.”

“You will sit.” His voice was low.

As a child he’d scared her. He scared her still. In her father’s eyes, she’d hung the moon, a bouncy, luminous pumpkin moon. In her uncle’s, that same moon withered and dried and blew away in a gust of stony fragments.

The silence stretched. Her uncle cleared his throat. She averted her eyes, hating him. She sat heavily back down in her chair and stared out the window. The field office wasn’t far from the Agua Caliente Indian reservation, and her uncle’s office looked out on a row of date palms and government buildings. The San Jacinto Mountains rose in a cliff of jagged granite.

“In your mind, this wasn’t my coming to brief you about my lecture.”

“What?”

“This was you, bringing me in for questioning.”

He looked away. She followed his gaze to a set of Callaway golf clubs leaning against the wall. Dusty.

“I talked to your supervisor.”

“Sid? That guy’s a joke.”

“That’s odd. Because he speaks so highly of you. And—”

“I can’t believe this—”

“And, Grace,” he continued calmly, “he’s gotten permission from San Diego Police brass that if you do this job—keeping in mind that you did shoot a schizophrenic which got you bounced right out of—”

“He had a butcher knife.”

“—providing you work with your own shrink, and as long as you don’t screw up and go Waco—”

“Waco?” she interrupted, outraged.

“You’re going to be able to go back to work, no harm, no foul. I assume you have your own shrink.”

“Waco’s not a good example to use, Uncle Pete, since as I recall, it was the FBI who shot up the place like a video game.”

“Are you in, or not?”

A silence.

He smoothed the front of his shirt with his hand.

You bolt at the first sign of trouble. That’s what Mac had said to her in the Bahamas. The fury she felt washed over her like an acid wave and with it the dull realization that Jeanne was right. In some way she couldn’t quite articulate, finding her way through this tangled maze of old anger she’d trapped herself in with Uncle Pete had everything to do with setting things straight between her and Katie and Mac. It was as if she’d spent five years in a holding pattern, waiting for the letter that had come for her in the Bahamas.

Waiting for a dead man to call her name.

Waiting to find her way home.

Did Grace believe in holy deaths? She wasn’t sure.

But Bartholomew’s was about as unholy as they came.

An image of his body, lying still in the morgue, flashed into her mind and receded. An outline lingered, as if burned into her retinas. Bartholomew had been a man not long ago, opinionated, angry. Alive. Suddenly it became even more important to her to find his killer.

“Monday night. When the convention closes, I get a free pass back to work at the San Diego Police crime lab. To my job.”

“You left out talking to your shrink, but yeah.” He opened a drawer, the movement random. He closed it.

“What do you see me doing here?”

He toyed with his pen. “Do you know what a coat-holder is, Grace?”

She waited.

“A guy who gets two other guys riled up enough to fight each other and then says, ‘Here, I’ll hold your coats.’ We think that’s what Bartholomew did. Stir up fights and stand on the sidelines, coat-holding.”

“But not this time.”

“Not this time. He was killed Wednesday night and the GM soy field burned.”

“Where is it?”

“Not too far from the Union Pacific railroad sidings as you leave town, if you’re taking the 10 toward Indio. You can’t miss it. It’s the blackened earth that looks like it’s been hit by a meteorite. Surrounded by cops now, so flash this from here on in.”

He opened the desk drawer again, and this time pulled out a laminated tag identifying her as an FBI consultant. Her driver’s license photo stared back, big dark eyes, black hair, pale skin. Next time she’d put on eyeliner and more mascara. Her eyelashes disappeared completely against the blue background. And blush. Always blush. Something nice and pink. She clipped the tag to her shirt collar.

“This, too, if you need to show it around.” He pulled out a copy of the DMV photo of Bartholomew that Grace had seen stapled to the cover sheet of the coroner’s report.

She folded it and put it in the back of a notebook she’d bought at a Qwik Stop in Escondido on the way there.

“I heard Bartholomew had a running conflict with Frank Waggaman over genetically modified crops. And that he attacked Frank in a clothing store the day he died.”

“You mean, could Frank be good for it? Think about it, Grace. If Waggaman shot Bartholomew, he would have let us know. He would have spelled out Waggaman’s name in Morse code, or enough for us to get it. God knows, the man knew how to spell.”

“You’ve got a list.”

“Suspects? Yeah. We’re working some.”

Annoyance flared. His inability to open up mirrored his lack of generosity when she was a child. Everything had a cost. He seemed to sense her thoughts.

“Last night, a second field was torched, also a GM crop—sugar beets this time. Twelve arrests, misdemeanor vandalism and destruction of property. The thing we don’t know is if the murder and fire in the soy field is more than superficially connected to the second torching.”

“Same accelerant?”

“Different. Car gasoline, unleaded, burning Bartholomew’s body in the soy crop. Diesel fuel in the sugar beets.”

“Anybody taking credit?”

“You mean for the second one? It started as an opportunistic student call to arms against Bartholomew’s murder, organized on Facebook. It morphed into something else.”

“Opportunistic?”

“Finals start next week at Riverside U.” His voice was dry. “What better reason for not studying than honoring a dead professor by taking over a genetically modified crop in his name. There were about a thousand kids. It was a candlelight vigil that turned into a swarm. The ag convention head, Frank Waggaman, was giving a tour to delegates in the sugar beets field when it happened.”

She digested that. Jeanne’s boyfriend, Frank Waggaman, in the mix again.

“A lot of it’s caught on tape.”

“They must love that over at Channel Two.”

“It’s Three, here in the Valley, but yes.”

He leaned on an elbow, pressed a finger to his temple, massaged his forehead.

“I love this place, Grace. The Palm Springs Film Fest and the White Party and the Coachella Stagecoach and the tennis matches at the Grand Champions and the Bob Hope Golf Tournament. I love the little stuff, too. I love the statue of Sonny Bono and the horses carrying tourists and lovers. How people can walk down the street here safely holding hands, no matter if they’re green, purple, or polka-dotted, and trust me, I’ve seen them in all those combinations. This is a place with a huge heart, Grace, and it’s my job to protect it.”

He lapsed into silence.

“So you want me to do what, again?” Grace asked.

“Oh, yeah. Lost my train of thought; too busy listening to the ‘Marine’s Hymn’ in my head.”

She half smiled. She didn’t want to like him.

“Grace, you didn’t know Vonda very well.”

She remembered a tea party she’d orchestrated; her younger cousin’s shy delight at the way Grace had placed teddy bears and dollies in a circle, a toy plate holding a crumb of doughnut in front of each. Downstairs, the voices of the adults had been soft and relaxed, mingled with the cries of the boys, playing a raucous game of tag in the backyard.

One of her few undiluted, golden memories of a time where things were easy.

Interrupted by other memories—Vonda teetering blindfolded on the edge of the pier, screaming on the handlebars of an older brother’s bike, running into traffic for the sheer rush of seeing terrified drivers slam on their brakes.

Grace remembered Vonda well enough to be afraid of her. For her.

Her uncle rubbed a finger into his eye, exhaled. “She’s our youngest, our only girl. I guess we always babied her. She’s—how old are you again?”

“Thirty-two.”

He nodded. “She’s twenty-six.”

He glanced behind him and Grace saw a frame of Popsicle sticks painted in blue poster paint and decorated with sparkly buttons. In the photo, a young Vonda stood smiling in a party hat, eyes shiny as black buttons.

“Married. We thought that would settle her down. She lives here now. That was one of the reasons I requested a transfer to this field office. I’ve been here six months.”

“Just? Explains the holes in the wall.”

His gaze went to the wall.

“The guy before you had pictures.”

Pete picked up a crystal paperweight embedded with a gold FBI seal and put it down gently. “Vonda might be involved in Bartholomew’s murder.”

Outside, the silence was cut by the faint drone of a jet.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what I need you to find out. Report to me. You won’t attend briefings. I want an outsider’s perspective. See if there’s anything I missed. I’ll make everything available. Whatever you need, ask. Here are contact numbers and directions to the murder site.”

He scribbled on a pad, tore it off as if it were a prescription, and passed it over to her.

“Should have been a doctor, Uncle Pete.”

“What?” His face was shot with worry and blank love.

“Got the handwriting down.” She stuck the paper in her bag. “I take it her alibi’s checked out for Wednesday night.”

“Her husband’s. Hers, not so much.” He opened his mouth as if there was more, closed it, and rocked back on his chair.

“You’re not telling me what those alibis are?” She kept her voice pleasant, but inside, she was fuming. It felt like a clumsy version of “I’m not telling until you guess,” a game Katie was brutally good at.

“It would be more helpful if you did your own investigation, came back with what you find.”

“If you think Vonda’s involved, how can you work this case?”

“Conflict of interest, you mean. Columbine settled that one for the agency.”

“How so?”

“One of the lead agents, Dwayne Fuselier, had a son who went to Columbine, graduated a few years before the massacre. While he was there, he’d helped edit a video. Of a massacre. Taking place in Columbine. With kids in trench coats.”

“Wow.”

“Exactly. But Fuselier’s son had nothing to do with Klebold and Harris gunning down defenseless students and teachers.”

“You’re hoping I’ll find the same thing with Vonda.”

He was silent. His eyebrows had started turning gray and his hair was combed straight back. He dug his finger into his temple again, as if trying to extricate a piece of shrapnel without anesthetic.

“I can’t lie. If I find something—”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Find something, or lie?”

He pushed his chair back, stood and walked to the window. Across the balcony, the San Gorgonio Mountains glowed in the distance. Snow feathered the peaks.

“Either one. I’m counting on you to do the right thing, the professional thing, Grace. Hell, you probably have authority issues that would keep a trainload of shrinks busy. Your dad left—”

Heat flushed her face. “He fell overboard.”

“He was my brother, I knew him better than you did, but yeah, okay, have it your way, overboard, you did an end-run around the cops when Katie was snatched, speaking of which, why in the hell didn’t you call me? Never mind. It’s going to be some bullshit reason anyway and the point about Vonda is—”

“I had just over twenty-four hours.” Her voice was tight. She scooped up her bag as he went to the door. “I called somebody I trusted in my lab to help me. He’d tapped the line; he knew. Told me he’d send me Katie’s finger in a box, I tried it again. Or worse. He was going to kill her. Right there on the spot, kill her.”

Uncle Pete frowned. He had two sets of grooves in his forehead and they moved in unison, like synchronized swimmers.

“Oh, hell, Grace, they all say that. That’s right out of the bad guy handbook.”

He walked to the door and she followed him out. He moved fast. She trotted to catch up. She raised her voice.

“And you’re right, the biggest bullshit reason I never called, is because we’ve been so estranged, I forgot I even had an uncle Pete, let alone an uncle Pete in the fucking FBI.”

In unison the two terrorism task force reps raised their heads over their cubicle walls. She recognized one from the briefing, the sheriff’s investigator. The other guy was balding and wore brown-rimmed glasses that matched his eyes.

“We’re fine,” Uncle Pete said. “Just a friendly family squabble, nothing to worry about. Go back to checking for lead in underpants or whatever the hell you’re doing.”

A distracted wave and the heads disappeared.

“Lead?”

“You’d be amazed and appalled at what’s smuggled into this country on a daily basis, Grace, the point being, maybe Vonda will tell you things—things she doesn’t even know are important—that can help us stop whatever bad thing’s coming.”

An assistant went past in the other direction and handed Pete a stack of messages. He sorted them moving. In front of them was the bank of video screens and the Plexiglas barrier.

“Where is she?”

“Jail.” His jaw bunched. “She won’t let Stu—that’s her husband—spring her out.”

“Making her own point. The daughter of an FBI agent won’t be treated differently.”

“Embarrass me is more her style.” He talked quietly without moving his lips, like a scarred, lumpy ventriloquist. “And it’s not differently. It’s more severely. The tapes we have don’t give any indication she was responsible for the GM sugar beet crop burning. But she stood there, wrists out, waiting to be cuffed, daring them to arrest her. Most everybody’s out by now. This is vintage Vonda, digging in her heels. Aunt Chel’s a wreck over this.”