Out at Night (13 page)

She opened her mouth and her uncle cut her off.

“I don’t need a lecture here, Grace, about women and blacks and Indians and how it’s time somebody stood up for them. All I’m saying is, Radical Damage could be trying to shatter public trust in government.”

“If you can’t trust the government to keep food safe.”

“Exactly. If you can affect the food supply, and it’s a big enough hit, it’s gold.”

“Do you think Bartholomew was involved in Radical Damage?”

“I’d bank money on it. The question is whether Vonda is.”

He took a savage bite, put the crust back into the carton and reclosed it.

“As of tonight, across the rest of California, plant pathologists are busy with spore traps. We can’t let this thing spread. And we still don’t have a handle on what’s planned for Monday night at the Convention Center.”

He tried to burp and failed. It came out a croak.

“Damn. The skills that fade as you grow old. It’s rock-and-roll time, Grace. If you’re planning on sleeping much, I’d give it up. This thing’s on the move. It’s getting worse. And we’re running out of time.”

He balled up the napkin and made a one-handed shot. It dropped with a soft thud.

Chapter 15

Every meeting was different, depending on the group and time of day, but the coffee was reliably weak and bad and the folding chairs hard. This group met downstairs in a rec room of a Methodist church off Alejo.

There were seven of them, Grace the only one from out of town. She didn’t feel like sharing and nobody pressed but it got her through an hour where the anger and tumult she was feeling surged under the surface and made her want to try reckless things.

She could handle the anger; what scared her was what was under it. Waiting in a bubbling stew of raw emotion was pain. Always pain. She sat and let it wash through her, head down, knees quaking, shuddering.

She held the Styrofoam cup in her hands and thought of Mac in Guatemala, his hands on her body, the way he’d worked next to her in the makeshift clinic. She flashed on women in China years ago who’d had their feet bound to keep them small, and how in a movie she’d seen once on late-night TV, a woman had died from the pain when the wrapping had been suddenly ripped off. The scream had seemed very real; a compelling life lesson about not unwrapping things, even if the binding left you crippled.

Forgiveness. How could she get that? She wasn’t ready to offer it to her uncle, she knew that. What she didn’t know was if those two things were inextricably linked.

Her uncle wanted her to say it was okay; his talking to Child Protective Services and not defending Lottie’s parenting, his attempt to break up her family, the years of snipping them out of family events. As if she could wave a wand over the past and have everything not hurt.

The idea that her father might still be alive, and that her uncle might have a piece that could lead her to him, stunned her and made her light-headed.

“Are you okay?”

Grace opened her eyes and realized the woman was speaking to her. She had gray eyes and yellow teeth. She wore her sandy-colored hair short and parted to the side, a gold band on her finger.

“I’m fine.” Grace drank coffee and pretended to listen. They were past the part where somebody talked about how bad things got before they got better and on to particulars of the week. Apparently the woman with the gray eyes had been speaking. She turned back to the group.

“Anyway, it’s creepy. I called and called. I was so afraid. Just stood there, screaming her name in the dark. We live close to the cliffs. It’s this wall of black rising up, this presence. Like it’s breathing, listening. And then the next morning, I go out for the paper, here she is, huddling on the step, shivering, this little ball of fur, bloody.”

The group shifted in the chairs and made appropriate noises.

“I scooped her up and took her right in and the vet said, and this is the weird thing, it looked almost like Peaches’ midsection had been nicked, and I said, nicked? And he said, yeah, by maybe an arrow.”

Grace shifted her cup, alert.

“You mean, somebody might have tried to hurt her?” It was a tanned elderly woman, wrinkled knuckles studded with rings.

The woman nodded. “Her paws were all messed up. He thought. . .” She shifted in her chair. “This is the truly awful part. He thought maybe somebody had tried using her for target practice.”

The room grew very still.

“Isn’t that a stretch?” It was a man with a rumbly voice and a gray ponytail, wearing board shorts and a tank top that revealed a mat of curly hair.

The woman wet her lip. “That’s what I said to him, Lou, and then he told me he thought it was a lot bigger than that. He said it was the third one he’s seen this week.”

__

The lines to get into the Convention Center stretched almost to the street. It was dark and cool outside. Under the swooping cement archway, recessed lighting cast a bronze glow over the delegates and volunteers waiting to clear security.

Grace inched her way past a cascade of boulders, palms punctuated by gravel and a bronze sculpture of a cougar on high alert.

The cougar made her think of her mother. Midfifties, Lottie had never met a vinyl miniskirt that wasn’t calling her name.

The Oasis ballroom swarmed with conventioneers wearing name tags, some in burkas, and salesmen in booths shilling everything from crop dusters to fertilizer and irrigation systems. The energy level was high and manic; everyone aware of the ramped-up security, jumping at sounds of farm machinery roaring to life in showcase booths, jerking away from contact as shoulders accidentally bumped. A roiling stew of smells greeted her: perfume and sweat and popping corn and motor oil.

Grace pressed through a crush of people and found an information booth. A bright-faced young woman wearing a red-white-and-blue name tag with HELLO! MY NAME IS MINDY! directed Grace toward a door on the far side of the room.

Mindy looked familiar. They all looked familiar. Shiny straight hair, glowing eyes, skinny. Grace showed her FBI ID to an armed guard who rapped on Waggaman’s door and stood aside as Frank motioned her in.

Frank Waggaman’s office had been set up in a small, cramped space sectioned off the ballroom. The cacophony of noise wasn’t blocked when he closed the door behind them. He looked more drawn than she remembered, but the geek factor was still high.

He wore sturdy shoes over work pants and a wrinkled shirt. He had egg yolk on his lapel, and his hair along his jawline was coming in a bristly gray. He looked as if he hadn’t slept since Bartholomew’s body had been discovered Wednesday in his burned crop of soy.

He gave her a rough hug. He smelled of the woods and fresh soap.

“This place is jammed.”

“We’ve got thirteen thousand industry execs and sixty agriculture and environment delegates here from all over the world. Sorry for the mess.”

He raised his voice to be heard as he led her around a column of bubble-wrapped boxes stacked against a wall.

“I need to warn you, we’re going to be interrupted. Secretary of agriculture’s due to show up and I’ll have to break away.”

Bags of seed lined the wall, along with a half-empty bag of dirt, fertilizer and a coiled rubber hose and sprinkler. On the makeshift wall was a taped poster of what looked like a hairy pod of peas. The caption read: GOT SOY?

The room smelled like mulch and old tires, as if moldering tennis shoes had been left out in the rain. “Where are your linen pants?”

“What? Oh. Over here.” He made his way to a metal locker. He had a comb-over in the back, his bald spot pink.

“And a shirt. Bet Jeanne helped you buy one of those, too, right?”

He cracked open the locker as if he were seeing the shirt and pants hanging inside for the first time. “Forgot about these.”

He motioned distractedly to a platter perched on his desk amid a stack of bulletins. Butter-crusted potato wedges.

“Hungry? These are really good. They’ve been GM’d with cholera and hepatitis B vaccines.”

“No, thanks,” Grace said hastily. “Just ate. Hand me your clothes.”

He looked alarmed and clutched at his shirt.

“Not the ones you’re wearing, Frank, the ones in the locker. I’ll clip tags. Where are the scissors?”

He patted the desk and moved on to the bookshelf behind him, searching under a stack of binders.

“Monday night. Closing. Anything special planned?”

“Nobody throws a party like they do in Palm Springs. Skits, kids drumming and party favors like you wouldn’t believe. Seven sharp.” Selling it, but distracted, still looking for the scissors.

“Party favors. You mean gift bags?”

“Little bigger than that. World’s most expensive party favors. A free windmill to each foreign delegate and the delegates from each of the states.”

He found the scissors under a coiled garden hose and gave them to her.

“What’s freaking everybody out is that letter to Channel Three from Radical Damage, threatening something bad happening. Do you think it’s going to happen, Grace?”

He looked at her anxiously. Grace clipped the tags from his pants and hung them on a hanger on the doorknob, a visual reminder to him that he needed to change. She reached for the shirt.

“I’m going to ask you some stuff that’s off the wall. You know my uncle, Special Agent Pete Descanso.”

“He’s your uncle?”

“Yeah. The thing I need to know is if you’ve ever met my cousin Vonda.”

“Sure. I see her every couple of months or so. Her and Stu both.”

She looked up. It wasn’t what she expected. “How’s that?”

“I have a side business. Selling organic soy seed. Greenhouses. Small farms. Takes me all over California.”

“They grow soy?”

“Good Farms. It’s a greenhouse. Vonda makes bread from the organic seed and sells the bread at the farmers’ market on Thursdays. For being her cousin, you don’t know much about her.”

That rankled. She snapped the shirt to get out the store wrinkles. “Isn’t that some kind of major conflict of interest?”

“You mean my selling this organic seed when my job for the state of California is promoting genetically modified crops? It’s okay with my boss. Nobody’s complained. I started growing organic seed back in 4-H. I’m not against organic. Far from it.”

He was pacing, exhausted, speaking rapidly, jumping topics, as if preparing for the speech of his life. Maybe he was.

“Here’s the thing. Cheese. You eat it, right? That’s genetically modified food. They’ve even found pottery stained with fermented beer—so old it dates back to the cavemen. Beer, that’s a GM product, right there. Do you know what the average temperature is in Africa near Mauritania?”

Grace shook her head and hung the shirt on the doorknob next to the pants.

“They have five months of temperatures over ninety degrees. Everybody’s seen those pictures of cracked dirt where nothing grows. That picture’s haunted me since I was a kid. It’s one of the reasons I got into GM’ing in the first place, trying to figure out a way to bring what we have—this abundance—to people who need it most.”

He stopped at the potato platter and scooped one up, tossing it down and chewing. His hands were crusted with orange. Grace pulled a Kleenex from her bag and stuffed it into his hand. He looked at it blankly, nodded his thanks, and rubbed it into his palm.

“You grow soy, you live. It’s that simple. Soy likes heat. But it needs water, and that’s one thing it doesn’t always get in Third World countries. We spent three years working this problem. And now it’s literally gone up in smoke.”

“Sounds like a compelling reason to kill somebody, in my opinion.”

She’d needed to surprise him and she had. He locked eyes with her, confusion followed by a click of understanding. He balled up the Kleenex and dropped in the trash.

“You mean me. You mean, I might have killed him.”

She shrugged.

Something furious crackled under the surface. Something close to hatred.

“You done? Because I’ve got work to do.”

“Where’d you GM the seeds for the fields, Frank?” She stood in front of the door, her voice quiet.

He blinked rapidly as if he were about to tell an elaborate lie. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Mostly out of high-tech labs at UC-Davis.” He hesitated. “And Riverside U.”

“Ever run into Bartholomew there?”

He didn’t answer. He dropped into his chair.

“Frank?”

He tried smiling, It looked forced. “I can’t remember every single person I’ve ever met.”

She didn’t respond.

“Grace, I was training a bunch of convention volunteers, the night he was killed. Don’t believe me, ask your uncle.”

“Doesn’t it fry you that a field you worked hard to create—the GM sugar beets crop—Vonda worked hard to burn up?”

His face convulsed. “They can’t even identify most of those kids, they were wearing costumes with masks, but Vonda. Yeah, it pisses me off. I’m not selling to them anymore. I don’t care where the hell they get their organic seed from now on.” His voice was hard and angry.

“These GM fields that you created. You could plant again. You’re talking about solving world hunger.” She was the good cop, bad cop, hoping he’d keep playing.

Frank smiled with bitterness. “It’s not just the planting part. We’ve got serious perception problems here, and with good reason. How many people believe the American government’s the good guy? All you have to do is look at Hollywood movies to get the answer to that one. We’ve had over forty countries unilaterally ban the import of U.S. genetically modified crops, and more are joining in every day, and meanwhile, a third of the world’s kids go to bed hungry every night.”

Her gaze drifted to the potato wedges. “I’ve got to be honest with you, Frank, and I’m a scientist. I understand why European countries are holding the line, trying to stop the influx of GM products. I don’t want to eat that stuff, either. It—feels weird. All we need is one thing to go wrong. We don’t know the long-term effects of any of it. And all this mixing. I think we’ve got a powder keg on our hands and—”

He looked horrified; close to tears. Under that, she could feel a growing swell of rage.