Out at Night (18 page)

“Andrea’s a good friend. I could stay with her. I’m not due for a couple of weeks. You could go ahead and be back in time. That way, I don’t have to live with Mom and Dad but they could still—”

“You’re not staying with your folks. They have zero respect for us. Go on, tell her.”

“About the. . .”

“Yeah.”

Vonda raised her chin, angry and resigned, and when she spoke, it was as if the words were a set piece she’d committed to memory.

“I was repotting a bunch of stuff in the greenhouse and came home for some lemonade, and here’s my mom and dad, going through drawers in the kitchen. Mom said she was just going to make some iced tea and surprise me with it, but it freaked me out.”

She turned to Stuart.

“Happy?”

“Not particularly.”

“I don’t see why you don’t want me to stay with Andrea.” Vonda darted a glance at Stu, and this, too, was the Vonda that Grace remembered. Goading to get a response. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“Andrea’s got an entire room set up in her house for our baby, that’s the big deal.” His voice was low and thick with emotion. “She’s got more gear than we do. What do you think that means, Vonda?”

Vonda blinked rapidly. “She just wants me and Sam to be comfortable when we visit, that’s all. Why are you going off on her?”

“You mean, why in particular? Because I don’t trust those girls to give him back.”

Vonda sucked in a breath. “What are you talking about?”

“Think about it, Vonda. Your pals Andrea and Sarah have pushed hard to drive a wedge between us. And it’s working. I kept trying to figure out why, and then it came to me. They want that baby.”

Vonda’s hands instinctively flew to her belly. “No.”

Grace busied herself with the melons, putting the lid under the container as if she were an extra on Martha Stewart.

“They like our baby too much, Vonda. I think everything Andrea’s talked you into doing—all of it—and God, I don’t want to know what it is, only that you’ve stopped—is so that Andrea will have a shot at raising this kid.”

“What? You think I’m going to get arrested?”

“Are you?”

“For what? You mean, for his death? Bartholomew’s death?”

“Okay, there’s more yogurt, more melon, nobody’s touched the cinnamon rolls yet. . .” Grace surveyed the table.

Stuart’s eyes darkened. A look of fear crossed his face. “Tell me you haven’t done anything.”

“For God’s sake, Stu, that man was a hero.”

It was bad timing, but what the hell. “Were you ever in his house?”

“What?” Vonda snapped her head around and stared at Grace; her face was blank.

“His house,” Grace repeated. “Were you ever in Bartholomew’s house?”

Vonda frowned, her eyes back to Stuart. “No, he was a private guy, never wanted company, Stu, I can’t believe you’re saying all this stuff.”

“Well, somebody killed him,” Stuart snapped. “I’m sick of coming home, not knowing if I’ll find you here, not knowing if you’re all right. Not knowing squat. I want you safe. I want you mine. I want to start over with a baby and our life.”

Grace looked at them brightly. “Anybody have a knife? I’ll just cut these rolls.”

Vonda frowned and turned to look at her, as if seeing her for the first time. Stuart bent over a box. “There’s one in here somewhere.”

Three things happened at once. Vonda accidentally knocked over her coffee. Stuart came up with a carving knife.

And the kitchen door burst open and an armed federal agent crouched into position, weapon drawn, and screamed, “FBI. Drop the knife.”

Chapter 21

A Jack in the Box butted up against a welding shop called Hole in the Wall where a monster metal spider crouched in the dirt-packed yard. Crooked pieces of black pipe bunched like legs, welded onto a black VW body that hung as a fat midsection, so that the spider appeared to be poised to leap. Grace glanced at the scribbled directions from her uncle and took the frontage road at the 10.

The fields were on Bureau of Land Management land, on the outskirts of a neighborhood called Garnet. A forest of windmills stood near the road, the columns white and sculpted as pieces of art. The blades churned as wind gusted through them. Snarls of creosote bushes leaned sharply into the sun, a dark slash marking an ancient fault line.

Advancing up the ridges past the column of high-tech windmills stood regiments of heavy windmills—the old kind—with blades as big as the propellers on rusty ships. A wind popped through the canyons, banged into the blades, and they turned.

The sun beat down on the San Jacinto cliff faces that rose thirteen thousand feet straight up from the desert floor, the gray and chalky stones, purple crevices, orange scrub etched in brutal clarity. Cables looped across the sides of the mountain, suspended and fragile as webs. Grace saw a small ball of cable car slide across the face of a cliff and shoot out of view.

She turned onto a dirt road and drove past sharp spurs of acacia and three irrigated patches of crops—non-soy—bright green stamps against the alkaline sand, the only fields not at risk of infection of soybean rust or burned to the ground. She passed the GM sugar beets field that had been torched by protesters, and fields tinged in orange—the distinctive color of soybean rust. An army of workers moved through the fields, spraying.

The closer she drove to the field where Bartholomew had died, the heavier her chest felt, as if the heel of a hand pressed, just enough to be noticed. She took a dirt road that dead-ended in a parking lot.

Three cars were parked under the feathered shade of a tamarisk tree. Grace parked and walked across the sun-bleached dirt to the edge of the crime scene field, marked off with police tape.

An empty folding chair guarded the crime scene. Under the chair was an open box of water bottles and a trash bag, crumpled in a gelatinous ball, melting.

Grace immediately saw the gaping hole in the fence through which Bartholomew must have fled in his desperate attempt to escape his attacker. A sign identified the plot as USDA Experimental Soy Project 3627. She moved closer and peered into the field, careful not to touch anything.

“This is a crime scene investigation. No one’s allowed back here.”

She jerked her head around, startled. Instinctively her hands shot up, palms raised. She hadn’t heard anybody. He was dressed in a tan Riverside County sheriff’s uniform and wasn’t smiling. He had cropped brown hair and cold blue eyes, a Glock in the holster under his arm. There was a bulge toward his ankle, too. Hopefully he wouldn’t shoot something off. Like his mouth. Or a foot.

“Grace Descanso.” She put her hands down. “FBI.”

He came a step closer, studied the ID tag, adjusted an ear pod and stuck out his hand. “Rogener, deputy sheriff, Riverside County.”

They shook.

The sun bounced down his face and his cheeks shone. Sweat ringed his armpits and streaked the front of his shirt. “What do you need?”

“Meeting Homicide Detective Mike Zsloski here.”

“Wait a sec, I have to find my partner and then I’ll take you in.”

He pulled his handie talkie from his shirt pocket. A hot gust of air blasted over the parking lot; pebbles sifted and raked the dirt. The deputy’s hair riffled and his collar shot up and he turned away from the wind, speaking into his hand.

“He’ll be here soon. He’s walking the perimeter.”

“I got her.”

It was a familiar rumbly voice, and Grace turned back to the field. Palm Springs Police Homicide Detective Mike Zsloski ducked under the crime scene tape and lumbered over. His face was flushed a deep shade of red. His stomach tilted over his belt, shorts a size too small; his knees were scraped.

He was wearing knee-high dress stockings and Nikes, which made him look like an aging Swiss yodeler, the kind in a Prairie Home Companion skit advertising a fake brand of hot chocolate. He clamped his mouth shut, jerking his shaggy head from side to side, as if shaking off a bad smell.

“Nice knees.”

“Don’t give me hell. My wife’s visiting her sister in Milwaukee. I ran out of clean clothes two days ago. You’re late.”

“I got a little tied up.” She thought back to the last hour at Vonda and Stuart’s house. “Did you know my uncle was going to send the FBI to raid his own kid’s place?”

Zsloski shoved his hands into his pockets. “Everybody’s on the list, Grace. It would have been weird if she wasn’t. Think about it. She’s part of the protest group that torched the sugar beets. She gets herself arrested. She has the resources to grow this soybean rust crap. We’re trying to figure out where it comes from, that’s all. The plant pathologist I was going to have you meet, give the evidence to, he’s wandered off again. I swear to God that man’s driving me crazy.”

A fine sheen of sweat greased Zsloski’s face and the gray hair in his ears looked damp, but it was his color that concerned her. His face was the shade of old cheese.

“You’re taking water in with you, right?”

“What are you, my mother?”

“Yes.”

Zsloski hefted his bulk, reached under Rogener’s chair, and came back with two bottles. Grace cracked open the cap and drank. The water was warm.

Zsloski lifted the crime scene tape and she ducked under. The faint smell of gasoline still hung in the air, along with a sharp odor of soy.

“Did you sleep at all?” Grace was thinking of the body of the young girl they found last night.

He shook his head. “You?”

“Some. Not really. Do you know who she is yet?”

“Her name’s Tammy, at least that’s what was on the fake ID she showed your pal, Jeanne Bigelow. She paid cash for the tattoo, made the appointment the day before by phone. Everything on the waiver she signed was shit so the name could be bogus, too. The San Diego Police are flashing her picture around Ocean Beach but so far haven’t come up with any hits. We’re going through the Missing Persons CLETS backlog right now, see what we can find, but it’s a crapshoot.”

“Another crossbow. Is it related to Bartholomew’s death?”

“Too soon to say. The markings that get made when a bolt starts to fly are slightly different. A cargo shipment of crossbows and goggles was stolen off a Union Pacific train car a couple months’ back.”

“Which means a killer with access to a lot of crossbows.”

“Or a group.”

“So they could use crossbows at the convention center.”

“They could.”

They took a breath, almost in unison, inhaling the deep mulchy flavor of soy. The gasoline aftertaste came into Grace’s mouth and she took a long drink of water. A group of killers. Hunting.

“They were practicing with animals.”

He turned. His energy grew still. “And you know this because?”

She had a hard time feeling good about herself, but she’d learned that the less she betrayed others, the easier it was to salvage something decent at the end of the day. Telling Zsloski she’d heard it in AA fell into that category. “I can’t tell you.”

“Of course not.”

“Check the vet hospitals, Mike. Dogs. They’ve been hunting family pets. How much are you telling the media?”

“We’re keeping a lid on the method of death, but we’ll see how long that lasts.”

“Bartholomew carried a photo of Frank Waggaman in his wallet with a red line through it.”

Zsloski frowned. “You find that last night in the evidence room?”

She nodded. “Monday night, if there’s a group, he could be targeted.”

Grace glanced back to the parking lot where, the deputy was sitting on the chair, eyes closed, legs stretched out, face to the sun.

“Nice to see all I had to do was flash the FBI tag.”

“It’s not like TV, Grace. We all play pretty well in this sandbox. Any ego clashes come farther up the food chain. Not us in Palm Springs. We rely on each other too much. Anyway, we asked the FBI in. That’s the way it works here.”

She nodded. “That’s how it works where I come from, too. Bartholomew’s phone. I take it, it hasn’t been used since he sent the Morse code.”

Zsloski shook his head. “He had an old cell phone, apparently prided himself on not upgrading it. Didn’t have a GPS embedded.”

Zsloski wiped his forehead and smoothed his hand on his shorts. Light sifted over the stalks of soy, and a fine mist of dust swirled in the air, creating a soft nimbus of light around the face of the aging detective.

“The UNSUB took the phone with him when he left.”

“On foot.”

“Only way he could have gone.”

“No footprints?”

He shook his head. “High-wind area, and looks like he went to the trouble of scraping the prints with a branch. No good tracks except the girl’s up on the ridge, either.”

“You think he was picked up on the highway?”

“So far, we haven’t found evidence of either a hitchhiker in the vicinity or a car parked along the side of the road waiting. It’s possible the perp cut through the desert.”

The sharp cry of a train whistle bit through the wind. “I saw a depot off on Indian Canyon.” Grace said.

Zsloski rubbed the back of his sunburned neck and the thumbprint left a white mark on skin that flooded immediately to pink. “He could have caught the Sunset Limited, heavy on the limited; it slows at the crossing by the depot and nobody’s on duty unless there’s a scheduled passenger.”

Grace nodded.

Zsloski tilted back his head and swigged water; somehow, he’d managed to sunburn the underside of his chin; it was an angry orange-red. “It’s a mile and a half of boulders and sand wash and barrel cactus across to the depot. We fanned out in a ninety-degree radius from the kill site for a mile into the wash, and didn’t find anything human.”

Grace swiveled and studied the cut barbwire. “Here’s where he caught his tweed jacket?”

Zsloski nodded. “What do you think?”

“Couple of things,” she said finally. “The perp probably cut the wire in advance. It would have been tricky cutting wire and holding a weapon on the vic at the same time.”

“That makes sense.”

“It means he picked this site on purpose. The area was familiar. If he cut the wire, he probably pretested going under the wire himself. You don’t want to get your own shirt caught as you go in. The barbwire’s been tested for fibers, right?”