Out at Night (29 page)

“Anything about microbiology.” Grace was riffing. “Forensics, maybe. Genealogy.”

Jeanne shook her head.

“Any reason he’d know Morse code.”

Down the corridor, a prisoner screamed curse words in Spanish. Jeanne’s face looked haggard. She’d slept in the orange uniform and it was wrinkled.

“He taught himself that at Redwood State. He and Tasha used it for—they’d scribble out a Morse code—time and place and leave it under a rock for their hookups.”

“What do you remember about Tasha?”

“Other than that she was a duplicitous, lying, avaricious, greedy little bitch?”

“Duplicitous means lying, Jeanne. Ditto avaricious and greedy.”

“So? Tasha McCollum was times-two everything. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. As long as it got her what she wanted and didn’t cost anything, she was in. And as far as how she looked—dark hair, I think. Can’t even be sure of that. You have to remember that was forty some years ago, Grace. Janis Joplin looked fat to me then; now when I see her on those album covers? She just looks young. Ditto Mama Cass.”

“Jeanne, when you went over to Bartholomew’s house, was anybody else there?”

“We were in his living room. I guess somebody else could have been in the house.”

“When you were arguing, were you doing it in the nice, polite way or the loud messy way?”

“The just-short-of-throwing-things-at-each-other way. I’d taken Helix out of the car because it was hot. Helix heard me arguing and started howling on the front porch, as if he were a canine neighborhood watch. That’s why Bartholomew let him in. To shush him up.”

“Did Helix try to go deeper into the house?”

“I was focused on holding his collar and negotiating with Bartholomew.” She shifted her gaze midrange to the enamel wall. “There was a sound in the house, now that I think about it.”

Grace shifted her legs. “A sound.”

“A clothes dryer maybe. In the back of the house.”

So it was possible housekeeper could have been there when Jeanne had surprised Bartholomew. “The girl who got the tatt of the unicorn.”

“Tammy.”

“What do you remember about her?”

Jeanne rotated on her haunches and massaged her bad leg and Grace wondered again what they’d done with her walking stick.

“She seemed reluctant. I always give this lecture to tatt virgins, tell them it’s not too late to back out. No harm, no foul. She kept looking out the window, as if she expected somebody. Finally she just said, do it, get it over with, put on the headphones and that was it. You banged open the door about twenty minutes later.”

“Did she come in a car or was she dropped off?”

“She was waiting for me when I got there, and afterwards, she walked off toward the beach. I had the feeling, frankly, she was one of these kids who just blew into town who has parents waiting somewhere, middle-class, middle-aged, and frantic.”

“Did she seem stressed about paying?”

“She counted her money out first, yeah, but that’s because I always give them the stink-eye so they know I’m serious. Nobody’s tried to walk on paying.”

Grace thought back to what the girl was wearing. She didn’t remember pockets.

“Backpack, right?”

Jeanne nodded. Her red hair frizzed around her face in a haphazard nest, and Grace resisted the urge to tidy it up. From down the hall came the sound of a metal cart. Grace knew she was running out of time. When the food cart came to pick up the breakfast trays, they’d be taking her out. That’s the agreement she’d cut with the COs.

“Did you leave her alone for any reason while she was there?”

Jeanne pulled her legs up so that her chin rested on her knees and clasped her hands together. Her soft orange nail polish was chipped.

“I went to the door once and shooed some girls away. They were playing bocci ball and smashing it against the window.”

Grace rolled cautiously to her knees. Her heart was starting to trip. “I passed them on the way in.”

Grace was usually good at calling up details, but not this time. She’d been distracted when she’d seen them and now she eased into the quiet place in her mind and focused. She found her thoughts right away: roiling, preoccupied, exhausted from the flight, worried. She’d passed them with hardly a glance. Skinny. Three teenage girls. Averting their eyes when they saw her. Wearing cutoffs. Too clean. Hair too clean. Nails too clean. No smell of the street. Something light and floral.

They weren’t panhandling. They were waiting.

Waiting for the right time to divert Jeanne’s attention.

Grace swung an arm around Jeanne’s shoulder and leaned her face close to Jeanne’s ear. “Did you go outside?”

Jeanne frowned, rocking quietly, rolling on her bad hip, and Grace wondered if the jailers would give Jeanne Tylenol if Grace insisted.

Comprehension flooded Jeanne’s face. She shot a look at Grace, and then glanced at the camera. She swiveled her head down so that Grace had to lean forward to catch the words.

“Yeah, now that I think of it. They moved, but not off the window, just far enough away so I’d actually have to put down the needle and go after them. Tammy could have hidden the soybean rust spores then.”

“The kids who were outside. Are they regulars in Ocean Beach?”

Jeanne shook her head. “I never saw them before.”

“Remember what they look like?”

Jeanne gnawed on her fist. She shook her head. “They were clean canvases.” She glanced at Grace apologetically. “I always look for canvases.”

Grace could feel the moist heat of her cheek, almost as if a spark of current shot through it. “This is really important, Jeanne. I’m switching gears and we have to be fast. Did Frank ever give off weird vibes?”

Jeanne laughed. “All the time. What do you mean?”

The cart stopped at the cell next to Jeanne’s. Metal scraped. The food slot clanged. The inmate next to Jeanne was shoving his tray through the slot.

“Did you ever catch him in a lie, or did he ever pretend to be something he wasn’t?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Just think about it.”

Jeanne exhaled, her cheek still close to Grace. She leaned her head into Grace’s, her voice barely a whisper.

“He talked about the end of the world sometimes. Said it wasn’t going to end in flames. Said we’d invite it into our homes. Serve it on a plate.”

__

“I can’t arrest Frank Waggaman based on some half-assed remark by a woman who’s spent the last forty-odd years lying about her identity, Grace. Of course she’s going to throw him under the bus. She wants out of jail. Most cons do. Besides, he hasn’t done anything.”

“At least check him out, Uncle Pete.” Grace shifted the phone. She could hear metallic screeching and the grinding of a train backing up.

“Go to sleep, Grace.”

“But—”

“Go to sleep.” He hung up.

Grace stared at the phone. She put her head down and curled into a ball. She couldn’t think anymore. She’d hardly slept on the plane, when she’d taken the red-eye home. And the night before had been a constant stream of interruptions. Can interruptions stream? She wasn’t sure anymore. Time was malleable, a Mr. Bill clay body that could be re-formed into a lump of planets, a loopy grin, a springy bouncy ball. Re-formed and tossed off a building with a springy splat. Small fireflies of light exploded behind her lids.

A phone jangled her out of sleep and sent her rearing up in bed, disoriented.

“Grace?” It was a guarded male voice, one she didn’t recognize.

“Yes.” Grace turned the clock radio around. Eight minutes to twelve. That couldn’t be right. Checkout was noon. She looked around the room. At the explosion of clothes. She patted her way into a crouch, into standing up.

“This is Dr. Gordie Turngood. You left the soybean fragments with me? You need to get in right away.”

She frowned, trying to pull herself together. “It’s going to be a while. I have to pack and check out.”

“Push it.”

Grace scraped back her curtains and blinked in the sudden glare. Light poured in.

“You found something?”

“Oh, yes.”

Chapter 35

“I’ll get right to it.”

Dr. Gordie Turngood locked the door securely and led Grace back through the ruin of his office to the lab. He was wearing maroon bell-bottoms and a hot pink turtleneck, with Teva sandals and white socks. His white curly hair stood straight up in springy curls, and his blue eyes were red-rimmed and bleary. He smelled of Old Spice, her dad’s cologne.

The lab was strikingly clean. None of the chaos of his paperwork and personal life spilled back into this pristine space, lit by two wide windows. Light touched a spectrophotometer, turning the gray edges gold. A centrifuge vibrated on the counter, drying down whatever sample it held locked inside.

He found a graph paper on his desk and handed it to her. Two bar codes banded across the page. They didn’t match.

“I’m not. . .”

“Here.” He pointed at the first bar code. “This is the barcode for Frank Waggaman’s soybean crop, the one that burned. The field where Bartholomew was murdered. And this,” he pointed to the second one, “is the one from the soybean fragments taken from the grooves in Bartholomew’s shoes.”

Grace studied them. The bar code for Frank Waggaman’s experimental soybean crop marched across the page in a series of randomly spaced peaks. The other one seemed denser, messier, somehow.

“The second one’s. . .
thicker
.” She couldn’t think of a better word.

Gordie nodded, his white curls bouncing. “Exactly. See that?” He stabbed a finger along the second bar code, tracing a jagged set of peaks. “There are extra peaks that aren’t supposed to be there.”

“You mean those lines.” It looked like a scribble under a taller set of peaks.

He nodded. “They don’t match,” Turngood said. “That means the soy seeds in Professor Bartholomew’s shoes could not have come from the soy field where he was killed. He was someplace earlier, someplace with soy.”

“And it doesn’t match anything you’ve got.”

He shook his head. “It’s not from a registered sample, nothing I have on file.”

“What do the marks mean?”

He shook his head. “Not sure. I’ve never seen peaks in this location on a soy code before, Grace. It may be that two soybean signatures are intermingled, but I can’t find the mystery peaks in any registered signature. The dominant signature came from a strain in China, by the way. Deciphering this is completely out of my league, but I work with a colleague at Riverside University who retired early from Beltsville.”

“Beltsville?”

“Maryland. It’s the crack USDA facility for soybean research. She just left there a couple years back. She also runs a state-of-the-art lab.”

“What’s her name?”

“Nobody you know. A woman. Dr. Denise Bustamonte. She’s expecting you. Give her this. It has everything on it.”

___

Grace parked in the garage closest to the liberal arts complex. It was almost two-thirty and the sky was a pale drift of blue and white. A bell shrilled. Doors burst open and students blinked in the sunlight, gripping binders and scuffing through fall leaves. Even in daylight, they stared cautiously at her as they bolted down paths to their next classes. Even in daylight, they looked afraid.

Grace found the arts and sciences building, a brick and ivy edifice trimmed in fresh white paint, and took the stairs to the second floor past the steady murmur of voices coming from open classrooms. On Dr. Denise Bustamonte’s office door was a yellowed “Far Side” cartoon, and a more recent one from “Dilbert.” Both dealing with recombinant DNA.

Nobody answered her knock. Footsteps pattered up the staircase.

“Oh, sorry. I thought I could run over and make it back in time. I’m always trying to cram three bushels into a quart container. Professor Bustamonte. Denise. You must be Grace.”

Grace nodded. “Thanks for meeting me.”

Denise Bustamonte was a black woman in her early sixties, wearing an orange silk caftan, sandals, and heavy gold hoop earrings. A brightly woven satchel hung from her shoulder. Her hair was short and gray, tight curls accenting a beautifully shaped head and dark expressive eyes. Dimples on both cheeks. She wore orange polish on her toes that matched the skirt and she carried a cardboard carton with two carefully wrapped and cut sandwiches and two cartons of coffee.

The sharp odor of food made Grace feel faint. Denise handed her the carton as she rummaged in her bag for her keys.

“Didn’t know if you were vegan.”

Grace checked out the sandwiches. “I can do vegan. Cheese. Cheese is good.”

“Gordie thought you’d be hungry.”

“You have no idea.”

Denise found the key and unlocked the office. A hardwood Grace didn’t recognize covered the floor, a rich golden red carefully crafted tongue-in-groove. French curtains on the windows, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves holding science books, hand-made baskets and early primitive art. A photo of Denise and a man with white skin and soft gray hair smiled out from its frame on her mahogany desk. A group photo sat next to it, taken at a picnic. Four relaxed-looking adult children in various hues of light and copper and dark brown stood next to Denise and their dad and smiled.

“Our rainbow family.”

Denise sat, motioned toward the desk, and Grace put the carton down.

She waved a hand toward a brocade chair. “Please. Sit. Eat. There’s cream and sugar for the coffee, if you need it. I’m going to dig in.”

“Thanks. I will try not to make little noises while I inhale this.” Grace reached for the sandwich.

They both ate for a few minutes, Grace believing in her heart she’d never tasted a better combination: the nutty flavor of whole wheat, the cheddar biting against the sprouts, the avocado ripe but not mushy. She was making little sounds. She stopped and wiped her mouth, and cracked open the coffee.

“I always think a good meal helps calm the heart.”

Grace looked at her more closely and could see that she’d been crying.

“We just got the news. It raced through campus like it was—well, a virus. That’s all anybody’s been talking about.”

“What news?”