Out at Night (16 page)

He took another drag on his smoke.

“And there, that open boxcar Johnstone’s coming out of with that woman—that’s the boss, by the way, Judith Woodruff—they’re checking contents against a bill of lading before the boxcar’s sealed and locked.”

Grace saw Johnstone clambering out of a boxcar and climbing down the rungs to the ground followed by a tall woman in jeans. Even from that distance, she looked tense. Johnstone nodded at something she said, turned and slammed shut the boxcar door. It sounded like a piece of gum popping. Grace could only imagine how loud it actually was, over the creaking, grinding noise of the boxcars backing up to join the existing train, and the grinding metallic roar coming from the factory.

“Okay, so follow that track down past Johnstone’s car at the perimeter by the rusted boxcars.”

Grace studied the edge of the yard where the darkness overtook it and made out the shadow of a car parked near a set of abandoned oil drums.

Stuart touched her arm and pointed.

“There. Where it disappears in the dark. If the moon were fuller, you’d be able to see it.”

“And?”

Stuart inhaled again. She let him take his time.

“The train’s gathering speed, as it pulls out. About three months ago, I saw a guy run alongside one of those boxcars with a pair of bolt cutters. Half a second later, he climbs on and I see this box bouncing down off the boxcar, followed by seven others. I just stood there, counting boxes. I couldn’t believe it. Sure enough, pretty soon, coming in the dark bumping over the ridge I see this truck. Pulls up against the track and picks up the boxes and the guy. Whole thing took maybe twenty seconds.”

“I don’t get it. This place has security. I met Johnstone and he carries.”

“He’s got a rifle in his car, too, locked in a rack inside on the ceiling. But the Union Pacific police aren’t here all the time. Right now we’re moving inventory onto boxcars. It’s intense, it lasts a couple of days and then it’s over, and when it’s over, he’ll be gone. He has an insane area to police—Pomona to Gila Bend to Utah.”

“Wait, you’re talking three states.”

“It’s not just him covering that area, but what I’m saying is, the railroad police guys are spread out. Anyway, three months or so back, like I said, I see this guy stealing stuff off a moving train. And I’ve seen it twice more since then.”

“You tell Johnstone that?”

“I’m telling you.”

“The anonymous tip?”

He shrugged.

The wind shifted and brought the metal clang of the switching yard with it.

“I gave notice. I don’t want to leave my boss stranded, though, so that’s why I’m pulling extra shifts. I’m the QA guy for the project.”

“Just to get it out of the way, where were you Wednesday night?”

He shot her a look. “So it’s like that.”

She was silent.

“Here.” His voice was toneless.

“You have witnesses?”

“I’ve been checked out. They’ve done everything but look up my ass, I’m clean. You see those pods in the warehouse? That’s my area. The gear shift boxes, the levels, magnets—everything has to be calibrated and checked. By me. I sign off on one and it’s time-stamped, the exact second I did it. I time-stamped all Wednesday night. I’m the only one with access, to protect the integrity of the project.”

“There has to be somebody else. What if you get sick?”

He smiled bitterly. “Like I said, I’m quitting. God, I’m going to be glad when this convention’s over.”

“It’s not always this busy?”

“Hell no. You see those big windmills as you come into Palm Springs? That’s not us. Our windmills are about half that big. Which makes them perfect for farms, or homes, or even dirt poor villages. Everybody’s going green now. Look at what that oil guy Pickens is doing. My boss got this brilliant idea to send a windmill home with every delegate. Put that windmill someplace where it can do some good, a small pocket of good in the world. That’s fifty states and about sixty foreign countries. Took over a year to put funding together. Grants from big chemical companies and state and federal money.”

Grace thought back to what ag chairman Frank Waggaman had told her about the world’s most expensive party favors.

“We started sending them out early this morning. The last one goes out—”

He rolled his wrist and peered at the luminescent numbers. “Hell, I’m too tired to know.”

“Going behind her back.”

“Say what?”

“Sounds like you and Vonda are going through a rough patch.”

“We buy organic soy seed from Frank Waggaman and then she’s part of the group that torches his GM sugar beets field. Yeah, I’d say we’re going through a bad patch.”

“What made her do it?”

“You mean who? Here’s the irony, Grace. In Washington state, I taught a bunch of classes to kids just like Andrea and Nate, classes on how to survive in the wilderness. Grow your own food, purify water. That’s one of the things I love about Vonda. Her connection to the land.”

Grace looked out over the buildings. “You ever teach kids how to use a crossbow?”

He shot her a swift look. “Come on, Grace. You can’t think I killed him. Sure, I taught kids that, a long time ago, not now.” He shoved his right hand up so that it stood illuminated in moonlight. The joints on the two middle fingers were thick, the fingers tilting.

“Pretty, huh. It’s the beginning of rheumatoid arthritis. Another reason I’m quitting. Quitting the job, quitting smoking. I’m getting all my smokes in now. The baby comes, I’m done, that’s what I told Vonda, but the truth is, it’s getting harder to do certain things. Even hold a smoke. And it hurts like hell to climb around in that building there and do my job. So if you think I killed Bartholomew, think again.”

He inhaled, let it out. The smoke drifted in a lazy curl toward the warehouse below them.

“Any way you cut it, Grace, everything that’s going on today—gasoline prices out of sight, the ice pack breaking up, the subprime fiasco—the scariest to me is what’s happening with food. My area’s microbiology. I know what’s possible. There could be things that have been put into our food supply that we’re eating right now we don’t even know about, because nobody’s telling us. So I get what all the protests are about.”

“But you don’t want your wife on the front line.”

“I think the protests are lame. These guys are going about it the wrong way. Dressing up as vegetables? Give me a break. They get themselves arrested, earn their fifteen minutes, and then what? Nothing’s changed. That’s one of the reasons why I came to Riverside U to work on my doctorate in microbiology. I want to be a watchdog, Grace. For the little guy, for all of us. And it’s bigger than our country. It’s the world.”

His energy was all male, a coiled exhaustion. In his Windlift uniform, standing in the dark, his shoulders looked strong. She wondered what Mac was doing. Thought about his shoulders. The rest of him.

“I came to Palm Springs four years ago. Vonda worked the houseplants aisle at a nursery where I went to buy some yarrow, and then I ran into her on campus.”

“And ran off with her.”

“Chel—your aunt Chel—was pissed. What she never got was that I was following Vonda’s lead. There’s something crazy wild in Vonda. She wants what she wants, that’s it. And she didn’t want her folks throwing a wrench in it.”

“Coming up with a nice Portuguese boy as a consolation prize.”

“They’d have found one, believe me. Especially when she dropped out of school right away, senior year. I was against it, but have you ever tried reasoning with her?”

Grace was silent.

“She wanted to be a mother, that’s all. And right away, she gets pregnant.”

“And loses the baby,” Grace finished quietly.

Stuart ducked his head, blinked.

“Her doctor said she was priming the pump, as if she were a piece of machinery. We changed doctors. We were thrilled and scared when she got pregnant a second time. Andrea got pregnant around then, too, and I was relieved Vonda had a friend to go through it with. She cut back her hours. She was lifting fertilizer bags at work. There were things she couldn’t do anymore. I ramped up my program, tried to wrap things up faster, but with research and lab work—some things you can’t push.”

The cigarette was almost to the nub now and he pinched it carefully, painfully, and inhaled. He exhaled for a long time, as if breathing out the story he was about to tell; it’s sadness.

“She loses number two. Andrea loses hers, too.” His voice was quiet.

“Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“You mean that they both miscarried? Not as weird as you’d think. The doctor said some women miscarry without even realizing they’re pregnant.”

“When did you start working here?”

“That was when. After my wife lost number two. They’re trying to bring industry back to the switching yard. I’ve been here since the beginning. I dropped out of school.”

“Penance?”

He shot her a swift, evaluating look. “Yeah,” he said simply. “And good medical. I hadn’t been taking care of her.”

“You’re saying losing the babies was your fault.”

Stuart grew silent. “You have no idea how helpless it made me feel. And then when she lost number three. . .”

She could see his throat move.

“It was this nightmare we couldn’t climb out of. Vonda was spiraling into depression. We both decided to eat organic. Organic everything. Doctors couldn’t tell us shit. She was losing her mind. We’d saved money to put down on a house, and I took all of it, and used it to lease the greenhouse. We were already growing soy and making organic bread for friends, but now I figured she’d have a chance to build a business. And eating fresh. That was a main thing.”

“You’re a lucky man. Organic bread.”

“Actually, it tastes terrible.” It slipped out and he laughed. “Lord, never tell her I said that.”

Grace grinned. Her shoe had come untied and she bent and retied it and by the time she stood up, she wasn’t grinning anymore. “Did you know Bartholomew?”

“We all did.”

“Friend, foe?” She stared out across the warehouse.

“Vonda took classes from him a few years back. That’s where she met Andrea. You met Andrea in jail, right?”

“Creamy skin, blond hair, wearing a banana suit.”

“A banana suit. Great. Yeah, that’s her. The pitbull. Bartholomew was Andrea’s advisor in school and now he’s a—was—a silent partner in her business.”

Grace’s antennae tweaked. “What business?”

“A nonprofit that’s supposed to help women in Third World countries sell their products in the U.S. Square Pegs. She’s the one who got Vonda all riled up about GM crops. Vonda was always green, but her pal Andrea carries it to a whole new level. Her company’s a cover for something. I’d bet money on it.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“If I knew that, you could canonize me. Everything she’s done, Vonda’s followed her like a lemming. I’d come home, working sixteen-hour days, Vonda’s off protesting for gnatcatcher habitats or fairy shrimp. What in the hell’s a fairy shrimp anyway?”

He exhaled, patted his pocket absently with his free hand, pulled his hand away.

“And now we’ve finally got a child with a shot at making it into this world. She promised me she wouldn’t do this anymore—step back, that was the deal, step back. Instead, I come home, find a message on the machine that she’s gone off with Andrea and chances are, she’s in jail. Vonda’s not capable of doing harm, that’s the one thing I need to stress. I believe that with everything in me.”

“But Andrea is.”

“Absolutely.”

A bright red car rolled into the parking lot and stopped next to the factory door, its motor running. Stuart squared his shoulders.

“The irony is, I’m the one who suggested Vonda form a grief group. I thought talking through it might help. If not her, me. Sounds cold, but it’s the truth. I’m a guy. I don’t want to hear that shit. I want to fix it and there was no fixing miscarriages and it was making me nuts.”

The driver’s door opened. A woman climbed out with a paper bag and jounced into the building. Under the light, her auburn hair spilled in a ratty mass over a comb. She’d changed out of her apple costume into jeans and a shirt. Still an apple shape.

In the incremental seconds it took to register, Grace went from staring at the woman, recognizing her shape, sketching in details, to filling in the beats of when she’d seen her last and then the shock of realizing she was here, at Windlift, in the middle of the night. Sarah Conroy, the third person in the cell with Andrea and Vonda.

“What’s Sarah doing here?”

Stuart scowled and took a last drag on the cigarette. He let out smoke in a sharp gust. “She’s married to one of the welders, Tony. Brings him dinner.”

“You don’t like Tony?”

He tossed the butt down and ground it into the gravel. “We don’t share the same political agenda.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“People I disagree with, I like to leave alive.”

The wind snapped against Grace’s neck, cold and grainy. “He kills people?”

“The owner hires people with records, that’s all I know.”

“Sarah’s husband served time.”

“Murder two. Did twelve in San Quentin. Killed his first wife. Threw her out of a moving car and then ran her over.”

In the crime lab, Grace was used to dealing with the aftermath of blind rage or blind drunkenness or blind stupidity. When she rolled semen, swabbed saliva, studied spatter patterns, spun DNA into pellets, always the word blind seemed to be in there somewhere. Six degrees over from the word evil.

“Show him to me.”

Stuart shook his head. “Can’t tonight. I’m backed up. I think you met him.”

“Guy in the red tank top, bandanna, black boots, pocket ripped.”

“Man, you’re good. Yeah, that’s him. Okay. Well.”

“Think he might be involved in the cargo theft or Bartholomew’s murder?”

Stuart shrugged.

“Anything else you want to say?”

“Vonda’s folks. Pete and Chel have made a career of holding on to Vonda. And now that we have a baby coming. . .” He stopped.

“Say it.”

“Pete did a background check on me, we first got married.” Stu’s voice rang with contempt. “One early arrest for possession of grass. Not for sale, even. A joint in my pocket. That was it. It was like Pete was pissed he couldn’t find more.”