Out at Night (37 page)

“Fuck him! He’s a nobody. A nothing! I’m fucking better than God! Smarter! Does God correct injustices? No! All the misery caused in the name of racial superiority. Entire peoples wiped out, or subjugated to unbelievable pain, and for what? I’m the one speaking for the voiceless, the lost. Me. Me.”

She banged her shin into the banded windmill blades and grabbed hold of them to get her bearings. She was going to have to climb them in the dark to get to the ladder. When he cracked open the roof, she needed to be there, waiting.

She dug a toe in between the blades and shifted her weight. She climbed.

Her thoughts were blank, focused on the climb, on trying to balance without falling and then the pieces shifted in her mind and she knew.

He’d packed doctored soy into a baggie and inserted it into the middle of the turbine, a small gel-filled baggie that would shred apart the instant the wind turned the blades. Turned the blades and carried the soy out across the air. Floating, sifting in the wind.

Alive.

All the soy needed was water and sun to take root. Growing like a weed. Exploding across the land. Little pockets of genetic death.

“The girl with the unicorn tattoo. Tammy.”

“You have to understand. Bartholomew—Daddy—had this little group of simpering sycophants—mostly women, of course. Trying to wreak havoc. It was all pretend. Nothing. They grabbed a cargo load of crossbows.”

“And you stole one and used it to kill him.”

“He was a nothing, Grace. A no one. I gave him chances, so many chances.”

“Did you kill Tammy, too?”

The sawing increased. “Hell, no.”

“Then who did?”

“Who the fuck cares?”

Her hands reached the top of the blades and she crawled up, stretching out her hands, trying to find the ladder. The motion of her hands weaving in wide erratic circles almost made her lose her balance and topple off and she put her hands down to brace herself and found the flat surface of the blade again. She stretched out her hand until she found the boxcar wall. Her knuckles banged into a rung and she carefully turned herself around and grabbed hold of the ladder.

A windmill to each state, each foreign country. Fifty states. Almost sixty foreign countries. Stuart Soderberg had taken the doctored soy and sent it out in the windmills across America, one per state, one for each foreign country, each destined for an organic farm where the soy would take root and flourish.

Each windmill carrying death. Fifty new patches of modified soy from sea to shining sea. America compromised and altered in one terrible instant. And what about the impact on other countries?

Out at night
.

Grace closed her eyes against a flash of images: a shivering American Indian reaching for a blanket infected with smallpox; a cattle car pulling to a stop at Auschwitz; Africans dying in chains; and closer in time: skulls piled in a Cambodian killing field; a clearing slippery with blood in the Sudan, a village razed to the ground in Bosnia. If Grace hated those things, then she must also hate this.

She climbed up the ladder. She pressed one hand against the ceiling and felt it give. She reached for the pepper spray. The sawing sound was loud and she yelled through the crack to be heard.

“No wonder he hated you, Stu. What a loser. A nutcase, a zero.”

“Fuck you!”

“I bet your father couldn’t stand the sight of you—”

“You don’t know shit. Fuck you. I’m done. You had your chance.”

The roof panel cracked off and a blinding light flooded her eyes.

Chapter 47

Not blinding. Only the night sky, bright compared to the pitch black of the boxcar. Stuart peered down wearing his goggles, crouched on all fours and Grace came up hard and fast the last two steps and launched herself at him. She slammed her shoulder into him coming up onto the roof, and it felt as if she’d hit the side of a house in a hang glider and she went down hard. She took a breath and sprayed and he jerked back in a boiling vent of pepper, screaming.

A searing pain shot through her eyes and tears streamed. Stuart was a blur, an insect on his back, feet and hands moving. He grunted and yanked off his mask so he could see her. She squirmed closer and sprayed the last of it straight into his face and he screamed and punched out a fist, trying to connect, and she slid back out of reach. Tears slicked his nostrils. Saliva roped from his mouth.

The red crossing lights blinked and a train whistle shrilled, the sound loud and close. Yellow headlights splashed across the roof. Stuart grunted and rolled to his feet and Grace feverishly dug into her pocket, but her hands shook and nails burst into the sky and scattered, clattering onto the roof. She had a nail in her hand now and she lunged at him and they grappled. He twisted his body and slammed her down. It happened so quickly it took the air out of her, both of them slippery. He yanked her close, his arm gripping her chest, her back to him, and he was twisting her over to the side, Grace kicking her feet out uselessly, banging her heels on the roof as he dragged her, making inexorable progress.

The Union Pacific train roared past them, a massive wall of metal and he jerked a look in the direction of the sound and in that instant, she banged her head up into his chin and his head snapped back and she twisted and found his face as if he were a lover.

For a single moment she could feel his heart beating in his neck. She slammed in the nail and raked it down. Blood spurted. She’d been a doctor; she knew exactly where to find the carotid artery. She didn’t need sight, only touch. She shoved the nail back the way it had come and he loosened his grip and she rolled away as he staggered to his feet, swinging hard out into space, trying to find her, his blood spraying a fine red mist into the night sky.

Screaming. There must have been screaming. The train reversed itself and gently bumped into the line of boxcars. The motion upset his balance and he lost his footing and backpedaled down the long narrow spine of the boxcar.

The whistle shrilled and the boxcar seemed to come alive in that instant and jerked forward and she slid toward the gaping hole in the roof, hooked a foot in the top of the ladder and held on.

The movement upset Stuart’s equilibrium and he took an unsteady step back. His arms flailed.

He teetered, a dark angel.

With a howl of anguish, he fell.

__

The area around the train was roped off with yellow tape and Grace sat in a folding chair as Deputy Coroner Jeff Salzer and his team tidied things up. Jeff zipped up the body in a bag, tagged it with pertinent information, and loaded it into the white coroner’s van.

Her eyes were still streaming. She didn’t know how much of that was pepper spray and how much was relief at still being alive.

Stuart Soderberg had slipped off the back of the freight car as it started to move. The movement had sheared off his legs and snapped his neck. Along with the injury she’d inflicted, it had been fast, but ugly. She’d held on to the roof and listened grimly as his moans lapsed into silence.

The boxcars were being linked to the incoming train mechanically, operated from a computer bay inside the engine. It took time before the engineer realized all was not well. Time before the heavy steel and iron freight cars ground to a stop.

The siding was covered with blood and shredded bone.

Stuart had never spoken another word.

She sat trembling and shaky, telling the same story to a blur of detectives, haz-mat crews, the FBI and Homeland Security. California state ag advisor Frank Waggaman showed up looking strained as he listened to what Grace had to say about what was grown in Vonda and Stuart’s greenhouse, and about the wind turbines being sent across the nation and into other countries, each packed with a violent dose of genetic death. Grace told the same story to a new blue-jacketed Homeland Security man. She left out the part about suspecting Frank.

At some point she heard sobbing, and realized that Judith Woodruff, president of Windlift, was standing on the periphery, her face in her hands.

The wind turbines for the ag convention were being tracked, and each would be met with the same kind of haz-mat team, removing the hidden soy packet and cleaning up the damage. But even if they ultimately weren’t destroyed, they’d be held for evidence. All Judith’s work, for nothing. A crew had also been dispatched to the greenhouse to tent and contain it.

The boxcar was tented in a heavy haz-mat covering. A team of Homeland Security men hoisted a cannon connected to a rubber hosing and pump.

“They’re foaming it,” her uncle explained as he settled on his haunches next to Grace and handed her a cup of coffee. “They’re going to shoot a biofoam up into that tent.”

“Who killed Tammy?”

“Someone in Radical Damage. We’re not sure. After she’d planted the soybean rust at Jeanne’s tattoo shop, she started to panic. Feel she was in over her head. But the group wouldn’t let her go.”

“What was the key to?”

“A locker at the women’s gym at school. Tammy kept her diary there. She’d written everything down. How Nate lured her into the group. The target practice in the desert. Tony ran that part of it. Nate worked on the kids who’d perform during the convention. And Andrea imported the natural skin drums laced with anthrax. Sarah was the tag-along. Whatever fell off the desk, she’d catch.”

Grace took a swallow of coffee. For some reason, her uncle had put sugar in it.

“So I’ll find out pretty soon, what Vonda did or didn’t do.” He looked at the ground. “Tammy even has in there how they lied to get their anthrax vaccines. They told the clinic they needed them for work—jobs at the post office. Now, that right there should have been a flag. There haven’t been jobs available at the post office for three years.”

“Good to know if I ever decide to jump ship. Does it look at all like Frank had a hand in bringing the anthrax drums in, or the murders?”

Her uncle shrugged. “He’s clean, at least that’s the way it looks. The kids and Bartholomew used him. We haven’t found yet the transient they killed, but Andrea and Nate and their pals are turning on each other like a pack of jackals. We’ll know more soon. They were getting ready to leave—all of them—go someplace else.”

“If Andrea and Nate hadn’t been arrested in the cargo theft, does that mean they would have tried taking your grandson Sam with them?”

“It occurred to me, too. Turns out that in the group, Andrea’s name was Artemis. That’s why when Frank Waggaman was dropping off seed in the greenhouse for Vonda and Stuart, he overheard Bartholomew calling Andrea Miss and somebody else call her R-T. It was short for Artemis.”

“Greek goddess of the hunt.”

“Another part too. I looked it up. Artemis was also the goddess of childbirth.” He shifted uneasily in his seat. “Of painless deaths in childbirth.”

Grace stared at him.

“I think if you hadn’t answered that text message that Vonda sent when she was starting labor, there’s a good chance Andrea could have tried to take the baby and run with him, right there.”

Grace remembered the frantic attempt by Andrea and Sarah to maneuver Vonda into their car. Grace wondered if she even would have made it to the hospital.

“Sam’s beautiful.”

“Yeah.”

“And family’s come all sorts of ways.”

“Yeah. It was the lie. That’s what’s hard.”

Her heart seized. “Yeah. The lie. Is she doing okay?”

“It’ll take time. It’s hard to bounce back from finding out that your husband isn’t who he said he was. That he orchestrated your infertility, that he made it forever impossible to have children with another man, if he happens to be white. Race is a weird thing. And every single one of us on the planet bears the imprint of the wars that have been fought over it, the lives lost. But when it comes right down to it, we all want to be able to live our lives, choose for ourselves.”

“Can’t wait to tell Father McDougal you’re spouting choice.”

He smiled wearily.

“How extensive was it? The soy damage?”

“He had soy starter kits, Grace, all set to send out. He was targeting private schools, high-end spas. All neatly stacked in the U-Haul with addresses on them. As they went north, he was going to send Vonda into post offices to mail them. That way, if he was caught, she’d be part of it.”

Grace looked away so she wouldn’t have to see the rage in her uncle’s eyes.

“I have to hand it to Vonda. She kept records of everything. She’d just started selling the bread at the farmer’s market and she kept a list of everybody she sold to, so they’ll be hearing from us. She was going to expand things after Sam was born. She used the soy for bread she made for her and Stu and their friends.”

“He must have loved it when their friends started miscarrying.”

Her uncle nodded. “He wrote about it. We found a journal in the van. Dark stuff. Vonda says he’s been journaling for years. It probably will give us a beat-by-beat description of how he planned it out.”

He nodded as a haz-mat crew dragged the hose out of the tent. “The foam kills particular matter.”

She wondered if particulate matter meant doctored soy, wondering if she’d inhaled some. Didn’t seem likely. The baggie in the windmill had been sealed.

But she’d ground up a fragment in the lab when she’d worked with Denise Bustamonte. She must have inhaled some then. Impossible not to. Pete was looking at her as if he could read her mind.

“Too soon to say, of course, what the individual impact is on people who may or may not have been exposed, but it seems from a quick look at his journal that it was continued exposure that did the trick. Eating it, not inhaling. And not a one-time thing. And of course, every scientist in the plant bio realm will be working on a way to neutralize what Stuart’s done.”

“So you think for now, the threat’s not that great.”

“I’m not a scientist, Grace, I don’t know what’s down the road. I saw in the paper the FDA’s thinking about okaying the modification of actual animals. You could eat a hamburger someday with part of a mouse in it.”

“Lovely. And not even have the restaurant close down.”

He shifted on his haunches and readjusted his weight. The silence grew. “Aunt Chel’s back. She’s with Vonda in the hospital.”