Out at Night (15 page)

“I’m Officer Stanger, and you can tell how glad I am to have to walk down here and pick you up.”

She thought of an old Mae West line about heavy breathing and thought better of it.

He handed her the goggles. “Put these on. It’ll save you from stepping in a shitload of cactus.”

“Don’t you mean cacti?”

“It’s the shitload part you have to worry about. It’s up this way.” He turned and headed up the hill.

She slipped the goggles over her face and adjusted the strap. Stanger’s back glowed in a nimbus of yellow and green light; climbing up the hill, he looked exactly like one of those dead guys walking toward the light.

He pointed at a clump of beavertail cacti rising at the edge of the trail, spiny pads yellow-green in her goggles. She moved carefully around it.

The sand and stony arroyos sparkled like pale crystals. A barrel cactus burst into view, sharp and spiny as a fish. A giant hairy scorpion five inches long skittered out from under a rock, clicking delicately across the path in front of her, ghostly green in the goggles.

An owl cruised overhead, its eye a coin winking in its body, circling lazily. A vole poked cautiously out of its hole and tracked a beetle, unaware that it, in turn, was being tracked.

It didn’t take long.

The owl dropped silently, claws wide, and snagged the vole in one clean movement. The vole squeaked and writhed as the owl carried it straight through the night sky, heading for the cliffs.

They hiked single file for five minutes. The night sounds took over, silky whisper of wind, owl hoots, the scrape of shoes on the ground. The creosote smelled like tar. A lizard scrambled over the trail and slithered away.

She saw in a thick creosote bush the trembling green outline of almost translucent ears. They twitched. Suddenly a jackrabbit thrashed out of creosote and sprang away.

At the top of the incline, the hill fell away in a series of gullies.

It was easy to see: lights, crime scene tape, techs, detectives crouching around a still form.

Stanger kept his rover tucked in his shirt pocket, the lapel mike coiled and clipped to his shirt pocket, so he could access it if he were running. He tucked his head to the side, pressed the button, spoke into it, and before long, a familiar bulky form detached from the group. By the time they’d slid the last few yards down the gully, Zsloski was ducking under the crime scene tape and coming to meet them.

Stanger seemed relieved to turn her over. He rejoined the group. Grace saw her uncle in the mix and Deputy Coroner Jeff Salzer and Thantos—whatever his first name was—the sheriff’s deputy with a work station in the FBI office.

“So the terrorism task force is involved.”

“Thantos? Yeah.” Zsloski pointed. “Before I take you in, what does that look like to you?”

She followed where he was pointing, and found tracks in the dirt glowing through the goggles, the distinctive marks leading through bent stems of sand grass.

It made her tired, looking at them.

“Footsteps. Somebody small. Moving fast. The distance growing bigger between sets, more erratic. Somebody scared. Running.” She hesitated. “Followed by somebody big.”

Zsloski nodded. “He hunted her, Grace. Like game. And left her there for the coyotes.”

He turned toward the body and lifted the crime scene tape and they went in. She could feel his anger and outrage in the tender way he squatted next to the body.

In the circle of light lay a girl, not more than a child, really. She’d been shot through the back and the force of the bolt had thrown her forward into the sand, her hands splayed wide, her legs bent. She was wearing a halter top and jean shorts. One sandal was missing. The blood pooled darkly in the white center of her back, under the shoulder blades, where the bolt had lodged.

There wasn’t as much of the heft exposed as she’d imagined. Most of the bolt was wedged into the girl. A tech squatted next to the body and rolled it gently and one of her legs came into view.

Grace’s ears hummed and she felt as if she were falling. Shock waves radiated into her hands and feet, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

“Grace?” Zsloski swiveled his massive head.

“Oh my God.” Her voice was thick.

He stared at her.

“I know her. I know that tattoo.”

The leg was thin and very white.

On the left calf bounded a unicorn.

Chapter 18

Another murder, and this one of a girl who looked barely out of high school.

Grace wondered who she was, and what her life had been like, if she’d had somebody who loved her and even now was expecting in a few hours to see her come through the door.

Grace took the 10 out of Palm Springs, driving toward Indio. The day had been long and it wasn’t over. She drank coffee. Through the passenger window, the Union Pacific train rolled on into the night, a dark wall of metal.

Indio wasn’t far from Palm Springs, about twenty minutes in the car, but it was another country when it came to personality.

Working in the police crime lab in San Diego, Grace had a view of Indio at odds with the image that came out of the glossy PR pamphlets—date farm capital of the world, center of a burgeoning country-western community, an agricultural mecca of opportunity and promise. The Indio Grace knew had youth gangs made up of homeless, abandoned, throwaway kids. Transient farm workers. Hispanic gangs at war with black gangs at war with Asian gangs at war with skinheads. Broken glass and graffiti.

She wondered which Indio she’d be seeing this night.

She took the off-ramp past a row of gas stations onto the frontage road. The area had built up since the last time she’d been there at night and it was bright with motels, a Denny’s, and a row of Mexican restaurants.

After the commercial area came houses, their lights softer and smaller. A crossing light stuttered in red and she heard the wail of an approaching train. She put up her window and locked her doors. The train roared past her.

She found Jackson Street and the bridge over the railroad tracks and made a right turn into the dirt driveway that led to the Union Pacific switching yard.

Her pulse was starting to trip. She’d seen the switching yard in daylight and it had unsettled her then. This was worse.

It had once been an active freight switching yard, but that was years ago. Ahead of her rose the tattered hulk of a roundhouse, a former diesel machine shop.

Concrete pillars rose like jagged stalactites, and in the wash of her headlights she caught a glimpse of glinting broken beer bottles, violent graffiti, drug paraphernalia, a half fallen ceiling of broken tile and asbestos.

Surrounding the roundhouse were smaller buildings, all abandoned: old crew shanties and field offices, moldy with ancient mattresses and broken doors. Shadows darted. A mangy dog slid out of a doorway, its eyes yellow in the sudden light, a blink of dog in the headlights, swallowed up by darkness.

Grace bumped her car over a set of tracks and kept going. A freight engine with three boxcars stood on a siding and workmen trotted in a tight group nearby, waving their arms and shouting instructions, and Grace felt immediately better. There was life here. Workers with jobs and responsibilities and flashlights. The train slowly eased backward onto an alternate siding that held four new boxcars.

A short set of tracks ran from the main yard a couple hundred feet into a building, and this building blazed in light. The name had been painted in bright blue letters above the door: WINDLIFT.

The tracks ended inside a hangar-sized garage, the space dominated by a boxcar and a man on a forklift swinging a crate into its interior. Grace drove around to the side of the building and found the parking area. In her rearview mirror, she caught a glimpse of a policeman dressed in black, and she locked up the car and waited.

A cold wind spatted gravel across the parking lot and dug into the back of her scalp. His ID badge read JOHNSTONE and the shoulder patches on his arms identified him as a Union Pacific policeman. His bulky Sam Browne belt was loaded with a Sig Sauer, radio, magazine pouch, and two handcuff cases.

“Cold night to be out.” He was all business, but there was warmth there, too. Sweat creased his face—cold sweat—in the wind, she thought, and she wondered how long he’d been working.

She nodded. “I’m here to see Stuart Soderberg. He expects me.”

She give him her FBI ID and he took a flashlight from his SAP pocket, on the back side of his thigh, and studied the ID a moment before handing it back.

“He should be inside. You can go anywhere except down by the tracks. Stay away from the loading area inside the factory. We’ve got a lot of freight we’re moving out tonight.”

She nodded and took a step backward and her ankle turned on a rock, just enough to let her know she had to be more careful.

“I’ve got an extra penlight on my keychain, you need it.” His voice was dry.

“I’m good.”

He nodded and stepped away, the light plowing a path toward the tracks. She made herself walk into the building without limping.

It was hot inside and the air rang with metal on metal, the scrape of machinery, the clang of steel. Under the lights, workmen glistened with sweat.

The ceiling was high and metal-beamed, with a row of small windows near the flat roof. A row of gleaming white egg pods stood on the floor. The center of each opened in the midsection revealing high-tech gears inside. A man in a blue uniform climbed out of one, a wrench in hand, and when he straightened and stood, Grace realized the egg was bigger than he was.

Wind turbine towers lay in pieces like a giant Erector set, their size clear only in comparison to the men crawling over the parts. Lilliputians. Young and solidly built, climbing over the metal scaffolding.

Through a wide door, she saw in an adjoining room windmill blades stacked in neat piles, tagged and wrapped in steel bands for shipment. A compact interior crane hoisted a heavy gearbox into a crate as workmen steadied it and lowered it into the straw-filled crate.

Metal ladders led to a second level of work stations along a narrow platform. A man in a protective mask bent over a piece of steel tubing, sparks of fire scattering from the end of a welding torch.

She walked the length of the room, through canyons where windmill blades hummed on vibrating machines, glancing at the men pushing pallets on wheeled wagons over to the garage bay, their muscles tanned and glistening and ropey.

She felt someone’s eyes on her and looked up. A man with biceps the size of hockey pucks stared down at her. A tool kit poked from his belt.

She motioned to him, mimed asking him a question. He climbed down, his boots grating on the rungs, and swung a massive studded boot within inches of her face. She flinched and took an instinctive step back and caught him smiling.

“Need something?” His eyes slid to her ID.

“Stuart Soderberg. You see him?”

He scanned the room, the spitting fire torches, the glistening men. His eyes shifted as if he were considering the best way to answer that.

“Try down at the tracks.”

He reached a hand up and grabbed the lattice and lifted himself one-armed up to the first rung.

__

The temperature was dropping when she stepped outside. Over by the tracks, workmen were standing clear as the main line was switched.

Maybe that’s where Stuart was. It was worth a shot. Johnstone had told her to stay clear; she’d stay clear of him, that was all. She wished she’d said yes to the penlight.

She hiked past the spur track and the box cars, careful with her feet. That close, the boxcars rose like blank-faced buildings.

“Grace,” Stuart shouted. He ran after her, out of the warehouse. His studded boots crunched the gravel and a tool kit banged at his waist.

“I was inside, up on level two. It took a while to come down.”

“How much time do you have?”

“It’s my dinner break but I’m not hungry. We could walk if you’re up for it.”

She nodded. He carried himself with a relaxed watchful energy that reminded her of her younger brother, Andy. She wondered when she’d called Andy last. She couldn’t remember.

“There’s a crack of moon out tonight. You have walking shoes on?”

“You’ve been married a long time.”

“How’s that?”

“To immediately think about what kind of shoes a woman is wearing.”

He half smiled. “We won’t go far. Enough away so they can’t hear us.”

He followed an invisible path that cut into a low rise of hill. They walked in silence. Loose gravel skittered and slid as they dislodged it.

Something small and wild thrashed ahead of them and Grace caught a glimpse of white before it burrowed out of sight. About fifty yards up the path Stuart stopped. Grace turned and looked down at Windlift and the abandoned buildings. From that perspective, the building and activity in the freight switching yard was a small stamp of light in a vast, unsettling wilderness of decay.

“Come here a lot?”

“Every chance I get. It helps put the crap into perspective.” He pointed at the sky. It was jet black pricked with a canopy of sparkling lights. The lights didn’t seem to go up far enough to affect the great stillness above them.

“You can see the Milky Way. There it is. That band.” He showed her.

It looked like a sparkling bracelet.

Standing in the darkness next to Stuart, studying the sky, was an utterly different experience than the darkness she had just inhabited looking down at the girl’s broken body in the desert. She didn’t trust it.

“I invited myself to your place tomorrow for breakfast.”

“You didn’t tell Vonda you’d be coming here, did you?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t. I don’t want her thinking I’m going behind her back.”

“You didn’t bring me up here to study stars.”

Stuart tamped a cigarette out of a pack, cupped a lighter in his palm, dipped his head and when he came back up he was inhaling. He choked and coughed and inhaled.

“I see stuff when people don’t know I’m up here. I pull double shifts right now, lot of them nights.”

He pointed with his free hand at the switching yard. “What’s happening right now is a yard locomotive is pushing that load of boxcars up the hump—hill,” he translated. “And as the freight cars go down the hill they’re disconnected and roll to a stop in the switching yard. They throw retarders—brakes—so they don’t smash into anything and then they’re reconnected to the line they need to go out on.”