Out at Night (14 page)

“It’s just that they have a good point. And once it’s out there, there’s no way of calling it back, and I don’t believe our government is leveling with us completely, telling us everything that’s—”

A sharp knock broke her thought.

“Come in.” His face had darkened.

The door opened and revealed a brunette in a plaid skirt wearing an intern tag identifying her as Rachel. She blinked when she saw Grace and ducked her head.

“Mr. Waggaman, oh! Sorry. Didn’t know you were busy. She’s here, sir.” She stood poised to run.

“Thanks, Rachel. Good job. I’ll meet you at the podium.”

She nodded and fled.

Grace picked up her leather satchel, looped it over her shoulder, and headed for the door. “This soybean rust. If a field’s infected, how long before that shows up?”

“You mean in the field? Two or three days.” He hesitated, as if chewing something in his mind. “Here’s the truth. I probably would have killed Ted Bartholomew, if I could have gotten away with it. He was an evil man and he was targeting me, and I was relieved when I heard he’d died. And pissed that he picked my soy field to do it in.”

He scraped his chair back and stood. “You need to leave now.”

It was a side of him she’d never seen. On the surface, his bony shoulders, the soft malleable face, the eyebrows ruffing in a semicircle around his eyes, he seemed harmless. Now she wasn’t sure.

“I’ll be back.” She smiled.

“I’ll be ready.”

She threaded her way out through the sales booths and into the lobby. In the next room over, a man in a powder blue Homeland Security jacket stood at a podium, his voice amplified by a microphone.

“American farms are under attack, or could be, and soon. And frankly, we’re almost powerless to stop that. This country has about two million farms. Farms that cover one one billion acres of land. Hard to patrol. Easy to sabotage. Mad cow, hoof-and-mouth, wheat smut fungi dropped from crop dusters, whiteflies engineered to carry a virus genetically modified to make botulinum toxin in maize. . .”

Grace walked outside. The air was cold. She counted back three days. Wednesday. The day Bartholomew was murdered.

The same day somebody dabbed soybean rust spores on healthy, genetically modified plants.

Were those linked? Was Bartholomew involved in sabotaging the fields with soybean rust? Was that why he was killed?

One thing was clear as she headed across the parking lot and unlocked her car. Frank Waggaman was more complex than he wanted her to believe. A man genetically modifying crops as part of his job with the state, who ran a business selling organic soy seed to the same people who later burned his GM fields to the ground.

She wondered what Frank was hiding. And why. She wanted for him to be the good guy. Jeanne deserved that.

But more than that, Jeanne deserved the truth. They all did.

All I want is the truth. Help me get the truth.

Grace checked her watch. After nine-thirty. Too late to go to Riverside U and get anything useful. Too late to do anything unless she pressed.

She shrugged and flipped open her cell phone.

Chapter 16

The Palm Springs Police property evidence room was downstairs off the break room, empty except for a beat cop hunched over a paper cup of coffee. She passed a tan row of evidence lockers. They had the same system for storing evidence where Grace worked: sealed evidence was placed in a locker, the handle twisted, a button secured; at that point the contents of the locker could only be removed and stored inside the property room.

The property room was the last defense against the darkness. The evidence there spoke for the dead. Grace wondered what she’d find.

A sign on the tan door said SAM’S CLUBHOUSE. Grace pushed the intercom and a woman’s voice answered.

“Sam?”

“On vacation.”

“Homicide Detective Mike Zsloski called ahead. I’m Grace Descanso.”

The door opened. “Evidence Tech Knudtson. Madge. This better be important.”

Madge was brisk, gum chewing, the kind of woman who looked like she once may have taught gym to incorrigible girls. She motioned Grace into the warehouse crammed with numbered evidence boxes and relocked the door. Grace caught the familiar mix of dust and chemicals. To her left was a small office and directly past that, a section of the warehouse that had been enclosed by blue mesh wire and secured by a lock.

Madge caught her looking. “That’s the blue cage, off-limits except to evidence techs.” In there lay homicide report murder books, closed cases, DNA refrigerators and homicide evidence in rows of 187 numbered cardboard boxes.

“I’m missing Law and Order. Speed it up.” Madge unlocked the office and waved Grace in.

Tan file cabinets stood along the back wall next to a safe. The evidence lockers, secured by keys, opened into this room, the evidence rechecked and entered into a computer and stored.

An island table extended out from a pair of workstations. Grace recognized Bartholomew’s homicide case number on two evidence boxes Madge had already placed on the counter, next to a box of nitrile throwaways.

“I’ll get the stuff out of the safe.”

Grace slipped on gloves, signed and dated the chain of custody log on top of the first box.

There was always a moment when her stomach fluttered. Viewing the physical links between a victim’s last breath and whatever evil took him, did that to her.

But this time, layered on top of that, was the sharp memory of Bartholomew’s madness, the blinding specificity of photo after photo, teeth and eyes and cheeks.

She braced herself and opened the first box. It was long and narrow. Inside lay a bolt, smaller in circumference than a man’s finger and over a foot long, ruffed on one end with molded plastic feathers, bright orange and yellow. The other end was stained the color of rust, but of course it wasn’t rust. Grace felt a squeezing pressure in her chest that tightened and receded. The tip was sharp metal that flared out so that it resembled a fighter plane, its wings wide. She thought of the hole in Bartholomew’s chest, and how it had gotten there.

She put the lid back on and gave the box to Madge, who signed in the evidence and restowed it as Grace moved on to the second box. Inside were his shoes, socks, wallet and briefcase. The briefcase was brown, old leather, with buckles. She undid the buckles. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until the moment she let it out.

Pencils and highlighter. Tums, Blistex, a linen hankerchief and a black comb. She unzipped the back panel and pulled out three books: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, the United States Constitution, and a well-marked slim volume of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. The book fell open to a yellow highlighted sentence: In conflict, straightforward actions generally lead to engagement, surprising actions generally lead to victory.

What had Bartholomew planned? What war was he in, and who would win?

There was no DayTimer, papers to grade, flashdrive, disc, CD, or computer. Either the killer had left with those things, or Bartholomew traveled light. She thought of his home, the typewriter in the room of decaying photos. Maybe he didn’t use a computer; it would make his assistant Nate Malosky even more valuable to him and Nate’s rage, a possibility.

Madge put down a baggie holding a gold wedding band and what looked like an expensive watch. Grace knew that anything that came in contact with a dead body was labeled Hazardous Waste, but it was unsettling to see a wedding ring tagged that way. Grace held the baggie up to her eyes and rolled the ring. The inside of the band was etched in script: TED AND LIZZIE LOVE ALWAYS.

“I’m good,” Grace said. “I don’t need to open this.”

Madge nodded and relocked the jewelry baggie in the safe.

Grace emptied Bartholomew’s wallet and sifted through stray bits of paper. She pulled out her notebook, and copied down the homely beats of a frugal man living alone: coupons for free coffee with any Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s, 10 percent off at IHOP for pancakes, an extra drink with a meal at Arby’s.

A solitary man; places he frequented. Or maybe the killer worked at one of them.

Or maybe a very large dirigible was going to float down from heaven and bump her on the head and bestow the smart gene.

She sorted the receipts and found one from an ATM for two hundred dollars, dated the day he died, and one for a belt purchased at the store where he’d bumped into Jeanne and Frank Waggaman.

“You don’t need to see the money or credit cards, do you?” Madge stole a look at her watch.

It was right on the edge of sarcasm and Grace let it go. The evidence log said there was close to two hundred dollars in the wallet when it was found, money now in the safe along with five credit cards, his driver’s license, parking validation, and university ID.

She shook her head.

There were three photos and she spread them out, photos of a woman growing older. The last photo revealed a still-beautiful woman, her hair a white cloud around a face ravaged by illness. She was staring steadily into the camera, a look of intense love and quiet certitude on her face. She was seated in a rocking chair that Grace recognized from Bartholomew’s living room.

The light had caught her face in deep angled shadows, as if the eyes were glowing in a darkness, that, bit by bit, was extinguishing them. Grace wondered if she’d have that, at the end. Somebody who cared enough to be there. To record. She thought of the photos on the walls. Lizzie must have known about Bartholomew’s secret obsession with faces and names. Grace didn’t see any fear or tension on Lizzie’s face, only love.

“I’ll start reboxing.” Madge reached for the empty wallet.

“Wait a sec. Let me see that again.”

Madge put down the wallet on the counter and went back to refiling evidence.

A prick of white—the barest scrap of a corner of a photo—curled in the crease of the wallet where it folded. Grace flipped it open again, wormed in a finger and worked free a photo, wedged deep.

From somewhere far above at street level, a siren screamed and died away.

It was a picture of Frank Waggaman, Jeanne’s boyfriend and director of the ag convention. He was standing in a crop field, and his Adam’s apple caught the light like a small tulip bulb. His fuzzy eyebrows rounded over deep eye sockets, like small tilted exclamation points.

There was a red slash through his chest, made by red ink. It was a thin line, but delivered with great pressure, so that part of Frank’s chest appeared to have opened.

“Have you seen this?” Grace put it on the counter.

Madge frowned and checked the sheet. “Not listed. Where’d you find it?”

“This pocket in here.” Grace showed her.

She gave the wallet and photos to Madge and picked up a sock and inspected it and set it aside, repeating the inspection with the second sock. The shoes were tan loafers with ridged soles. She checked the inside of the shoes; nothing caught under the pad or in the seams between the soles and the leather body of the shoes. She turned them over.

Pale plant material winked in the grooves of one of the soles. She pointed to the sole. “What do you think? Soy?”

“Not my area,” Madge said. “Have to ask the lab and they’re not in until tomorrow.”

“Mind if I take it?”

“Have to check with Detective Zsloski.” Madge flipped open her cell. She blinked in time to her gum chewing, a diminutive female Jabba the Hut, muttering into the phone. She thrust the cell phone at Grace. “Wants to talk to you.”

“You do know that Bartholomew died in a field of soy, right?” Zsloski’s voice rumbled.

“I do.”

“We left the soy in his shoe because it has nothing to do with the way he died.”

“Makes sense.”

A pause. “You know this is pissing off Madge. She’s going to have to re-document since you’re splitting up evidence.”

Grace was silent.

“Whatever the hell you find, you give it to me first. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

Longer pause. “Why exactly are you doing this?”

“I work with DNA where I come from, so I gravitate toward doing any kind of test I can think of. Maybe I can find something that will point us toward where he was earlier in the night. Who he was with.” She paused. “It’s a long shot.”

“No kidding. Let me talk to Madge.”

“Wait, now that I got you on my side, you know of a lab in the Coachella Valley that handles plant DNA?”

“Jeez, I got to do everything, don’t I? Meet me at Bartholomew’s murder site tomorrow morning, nine a.m. sharp.”

Grace handed the phone back. Madge chewed vigorously, grunted twice, eyes on Grace. She folded closed the phone and tucked it back into her pocket. “He says take it.”

Grace bent over the shoe, studying the plant material. It looked thready, fibrous. She heard Madge rooting in a cupboard and sensed her presence and without thinking, held out her palm. Madge placed a pair of tweezers into her hand.

For a dislocating moment, it felt exactly like a surgical OR and nausea rushed up her body in a trembling gust. She tasted the sour flood of acid heaving from her stomach and fought to steady herself.

“You okay?”

Grace didn’t answer.

“Want water or something?”

“I’m going to need two evidence envelopes.”

She tweezed out the material, dropping thin threads into two separate envelopes. She sealed each into a larger EDP envelope. Her mouth was beginning to taste a little less like the inside of a rancid seat cushion.

She was just clearing the office and heading to the double-locked exit door when her cell rang.

“Zsloski here. Fuck it, Grace. There’s something you need to see.”

Chapter 17

Grace parked at the hiking area pull-off in Andreas Canyon and waited. The city wasn’t far but it was already out of sight, and the sky glittered with stars. She thought of other nights. Other stars. A light bobbed down the canyon path and a stocky man came into view. In his flashlight beam, his Palm Springs police shoulder tags glowed like epaulets. A set of goggles dangled in his other hand and as he got closer, she saw he was wearing a pair, face blank.