Seeds of Evidence (9781426770838) (17 page)

“Look, thanks,” he said. “You've done enough. Go ahead and go.”

“How will you get your car?”

“I'll call a cab.”

“That's unnecessary. I'll take you.”

“No.”

“David, look . . .”

“Kit,” he said, sitting up abruptly, “I'm sorry to drag you into this. I appreciate you rescuing me. Honest. I would have drowned. So thank you. I guess I did need that lifeguard. That was incredibly courageous of you.” He rubbed his left shoulder.

“Why were you out there in that storm?” The aggression in her voice surprised even her.

“I don't know . . .”

“What's wrong with you? Do you have a death wish or something?” The minute she said it, she regretted it.

“Of course not.” David stood up and paced away. He turned around. “All right. I've been frustrated.”

“About what?”

“At you. At the situation.”

“What situation? What are you talking about?”

David ran his hand over his head. “I'd like to see you. Get to know you better. You seemed to shut the door on that.”

“I can't get involved with you.”

“Why?”

“It violates a promise I made.” She felt a rush of emotion.

“What promise?”

“I don't want to marry a non-Christian, so I'm not dating one.”

“So, we can't even be friends?”

“No!”

“And you think you can tell in advance how things are going to play out?”

“Well, yes!”

“How well did that work with Eric?” he said, his eyes flashing.

His rejoinder took her aback. Kit stared at him.

“Honestly, Kit, I'd like to be able to talk to you.” David dropped down on the couch and put his head in his hands. “I'm trying so hard to sort things out. Today, I went out kayaking just so I could think. I got out in the middle of the channel. The clouds began building, but I kept going.

“When the thunder got loud, I turned around, and began heading west, toward where my car is parked. But the storm
came in quicker than I figured it would. I could barely make any headway. I got frustrated. I couldn't make headway with this woman I like and I couldn't make headway in the storm. And then, I got so angry, angry at myself, angry with God. I yelled at him,” he said, ducking his head sheepishly, “and I challenged him to show up.

“That was stupid. That was so stupid. The wind was so strong and the waves got choppy. Then the rain came down so hard and I couldn't see the shore. I couldn't tell where I was, and I was getting swept away. I was paddling like mad. My shoulder was killing me and then . . . and then, it gave out.”

Kit's anger was draining out of her. David looked up into her eyes. “I have never, ever been so scared. Even when I was being shot at. Never. Then, in a flash of lightning I saw a white cross.”

“What white cross? There's no white cross!”

“I saw a white cross, and I headed for it. And then I saw you.” He rubbed his hands on his pants legs. “I realized out there in that channel that I am not ready to die. I'm not. God is way bigger than I am. He is . . .” David stopped, and shivered. “Kit, you understand this stuff. I don't.”

“How do you know that?”

“I listened to your podcasts while you were asleep in the car.”

Kit closed her eyes and turned away, her heart pounding. On the one hand, she had a responsibility to share her faith.
What faith
, a voice inside her head screamed.

On the other hand, she felt so attracted to him! Right this moment she could take him in her arms! And that terrified her. Oh, God, she thought. What am I supposed to do?

“You're afraid, aren't you?”

Her eyes widened in surprise. She turned around.

“I don't blame you, after what Eric did.” David's eyes were soft. “Anyone would feel that way.”

“It's not that!”

David raised his eyebrows. Clearly, he didn't believe her.

Kit tried to regroup. “What happened to your first marriage?”

She saw the surprise register in his face. “I was twenty, she was eighteen. Too young, too stupid, and too selfish. It didn't last a year.”

Kit paced. “If my brother knew you, what would he warn me about?”

“Is he a good brother?”

“Yes. And smart.”

“He would tell you I don't drink, smoke, use drugs, or womanize. But he would say I'm impulsive and hyperactive. And, I watch too much football.”

“Redskins?”

“Anything.” David took a deep breath. “Is that it?”

Kit crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Why haven't you remarried?”

“I was saving myself for you.” David grinned.

“Straight answer!”

“Good grief, I'll bet you aced interrogation techniques . . . OK, here's the straight answer. After I became a cop, I dated other women. Most of them were too much bother. They wanted to settle down and I didn't or they came with a boatload of problems from prior relationships, or they had a list of demands I just didn't want to meet. Then I met this beautiful woman on the beach, standing over a dead body . . . now there's a story we could tell our kids.”

Kit had to work hard to suppress her smile.

“Am I doing all right?” David asked.

She paced around the living room again, her arms folded. She shook her head, then looked at him. “Who left?”

David's eyes widened.

“Who left the marriage?”

He looked down and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I did.”

Kit bristled. “Why?” She knew her face was red. She glared at him.

Eventually, he looked up. “It wasn't working. It just wasn't working, Kit.” His voice was quiet.

She calculated his answer. “You didn't love her anymore.”

He took a deep breath. “Right.”

“Of course. That's exactly what Eric said.” Looking around she spotted a scrap of paper. “Here,” she said, scrawling a name and phone number on it and shoving it at David. “You say you've got questions about God? Ben Heitzler is an agent in the Washington Field Office. He's a strong Christian. He'll answer any questions you have.”

Kit walked out before David could say anything else.

Later she realized she hadn't taken him to get his car. Later she wondered if she'd been too harsh. Later she shed tears on her pillow, wondering if she would ever be able to love again.

W
HEN
D
R
. H
ILL, THE BOTANIST, CALLED THE NEXT DAY
, K
IT IMMEDIATELY
latched on to the excitement in his voice and let it lift her up. “You are a lucky young woman,” he said.

Lucky. Sure. Kit closed her eyes. “Why is that?”

“I thought you were going to have to go out in the field again. Many times, in fact. You got a match on your first try.”

Kit pressed the phone to her ear. “What did you find?”

“Sample number D6 matches the DNA of five of the six acorns in the boy's pockets.”

Kit was booting up her computer as he spoke. She wrote down D6 as she waited for the program to load. “How sure are you?”

“I'd say 95 percent.”

“And you could testify to that in court?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you have any kind of graph or readings you could print out?”

“Yes. You want me to email them to you?”

“I'd like that.”

Kit hung up and checked her notes. Sample number D6 came from a farm near Glebe Hill in Accomack County. She'd found two live oak trees flanking the lane leading to an abandoned old house. In her mind's eye she could see it: a weathered gray, two-story farmhouse with broken-out windows on the edge of a tomato field. There were boxwoods around the place. Someone who cared about plantings had once lived there.

She wanted to call David. Instead she called Chris. Then, throwing a few things, including a digital camera, into a backpack, she got into her car and headed for Glebe Hill, nearly an hour southwest of Chincoteague.

Parking up in an old churchyard on a hill near the farm, Kit slung on her backpack, threw on a UVA cap, and rehearsed her story: she was a grad student in botany in search of remarkable trees for a project. She'd heard a rumor that a particularly old oak was the area and that's why she was tromping around the woods.

Her backpack held a tree book, binoculars, her camera, and a notepad. She clipped a water bottle on the carabiner that hung from the pack, and fastened on her fanny pack, which carried her gun. On the drive over she had stopped at Walmart and bought a hand-held GPS. They'd used David's when they'd collected the samples. Now, she stared at the device in her hand. She wondered how it worked and wished she had asked him.

“I'm smart. I can figure it out,” she told herself, and she plunged ahead. She found the right screen on the GPS, entered the latitude and longitude of the farm field from her notes, faltered with the GPS menu, tried again, and finally found the screen with the arrow indicating the direction she should walk. She pressed a button to mark her current location and
she trudged off into the woods, brushing away a spider web as she did.

About half a mile in, she arrived at a spot which overlooked the farm she was interested in. Staying well back in the treeline, she lifted her binoculars to her eyes. Below her stretched the tomato fields, neat green rows crosshatched about one-third of the way from each end. A dozen workers were there, picking the fruit—eight men and four women.

The old house stood across the field from Kit. Two live oaks stood on the lane leading up to it. Assuming her notes were accurate—and she was sure they were—the tree on the left was the mother of the acorns in the little boy's pocket. It stood seventy, maybe eighty feet high by her calculations. It had a huge trunk, and its limbs spread out at least forty feet. She could imagine a little boy playing in the shade of the tree, swinging from its branches . . . and collecting its acorns. But how did he get from here out onto the ocean? Was he being taken back to Mexico?

Dr. Hill had asked her for a picture of the oak. She hoped she could get close enough to do it justice. For now, she had to be content with standing beneath the poplars, oaks, and dogwoods on the hill and observing the field below. She took pictures with her camera, using a long lens, and wrote down everything she saw.

As Kit watched, a beat-up white truck approached the field. Immediately the pickers began streaming toward it, carrying boxes she could see were full of tomatoes. They put the boxes in the truck, which then took off, a cloud of dust streaming behind. The pickers sat down at the edge of the field, and after a while, another vehicle, a van, came and picked them up. Lunchtime? Or were they moving on to another field?

Kit put down her binoculars, made some notes, and made her way back to her Subaru. Then she drove down the road that
went past the field. Because the house stood abandoned, there was no mailbox at the end of the lane, no way of knowing a street address to find the farm on the property maps. So she passed the place by, and grabbed the numbers off of the mailbox for the next house down. Then she turned a corner and was nearly hit head-on by a white Mercedes Benz.

No centerline divided this little country road and the driver of the Benz was apparently used to having it to himself. He blasted his horn. Adrenaline coursed through Kit. She swerved to the right. Her tires hit the rough shoulder. “Watch it!” she said angrily.

The Benz sped off and Kit shook her head. “What a jerk.”

Down the road she saw a small, private lane leading back through a stand of tall pine trees. On the other side of the road was a large, white, cinderblock building. Outside of it was the battered van Kit had seen before. Was this the tomato processing plant? She grabbed the GPS and marked the location.

She had so many questions. Where did the workers go? Where were they staying? Who was their crew chief? What about their families? And most of all, was her little boy connected with this crew?