Out at Night (30 page)

Denise looked at her soberly. “There’s been another killing. A sophomore girl. Tammy Hammond. The police aren’t saying how. They’re not saying much of anything. On top of Professor Bartholomew’s death. It’s scary here. Everybody wonders what’s next. Parents are packing up their kids, taking them home before finals.”

The scientist’s face grew soft with pain. “I feel so sad for her folks. I can’t imagine.”

The news must have come through when Grace had been asleep. It felt like a hard bad rain. Cold.

“Did you know her?”

Denise shook her head. “Never had her in class. She was a liberal arts major, from what I hear.”

“What else have you heard?”

Denise sighed. “Her folks reported her missing this morning. Some time over the weekend, she disappeared from Wenaka dorm and never came back.”

“Her roommate didn’t report her?”

“Tammy was a free spirit, from what they say. It wasn’t unusual for her to disappear. But this was over her mother’s birthday, and Tammy never would have
not
called. Her roommate didn’t want to get her in trouble, but the parents kept pressing, and finally Sandra gave it up.”

“Sandra who?”

“The roommate? I don’t know her last name.” She looked at Grace with a mixture of pain and hope. “Gordie tells me you’re bringing me something that might have relevance to what’s been happening here.”

“Soy fragments to test. Did he tell you where they came from?”

Denise shook her head.

“These were in Ted Bartholomew’s shoe when he died. If you test these fragments, are you prepared to be dragged into the middle of a murder investigation, perhaps be called to testify at some point?”

Denise wiped her mouth with a napkin and when she looked up, her gaze was steady. “His death’s affected all of us. Hell yes, I’m prepared.”

Grace took the second evidence packet out of her bag. “Dr. Turngood sequenced soy pod fragments and apparently, there’re some peaks that don’t match anything he’s seen. He thought you could run tests, figure out what’s going on.”

Grace handed the small evidence packet to the professor.

Denise handed it back. “I have to sign for it, right?”

Grace nodded.

“We’ll take this to the lab. You set?”

Grace nodded and helped her gather up the remnants of lunch. They were silent until they reached the stairs.

“Any ideas?” Denise’s voice rang in the stairwell.

“You mean, about what’s going on? Some.” She’d mulled it over during the drive. “We got a sequence in the crime lab once that didn’t make sense. Turns out it was a contaminated sample from a sloppy tech. They fired him before he could do any more damage.”

She kept her voice neutral, but she was thinking back to the explosion of debris in Gordie’s office, and wondering if he’d slopped the sample in the lab without realizing it.

Bustamonte shot her a look. “Gord’s the real deal, but we can recheck it anyway. The sample in the packet’s untouched by Gordie, right?”

Grace nodded.

“We’ll run this and compare it against what you have from him, but I think you’re going to find Gord’s test is clean.”

Denise opened the door. Outside, the sweet smell of fall grass washed over them. They walked toward a modern-looking gray building, three stories high. If Gordie hadn’t slopped the sample, then it had to be something else.

“Isn’t it possible,” Grace said slowly, thinking out loud, “what Gordie tagged as a wild card could just be some type of processed food? Maybe somebody’s doing work they haven’t made public yet.”

“Or maybe they’re doing work they don’t
want
to make public,” Dr. Bustamonte said. She opened the heavy door to the building.

An atrium flooded the entryway with soft autumn light. The floor was gray marble, the walls a soft matching fabric that absorbed the sound of their footsteps.

“Lab’s in the basement. Of course.”

When they were in the elevator, Denise said, “We spent thirty years living in Baltimore, raising our kids. Henry—that’s my husband—had some old football injuries kick into gear and translate into miserable tendonitis and deep socket problems. We needed a place where his bones weren’t chilled in his twilight years. We handpicked this place, mostly for me and the opportunities this school afforded. Maybe I’d been working with adults too long. The Beltsville team was amazing. Like working with the space program. Fascinating projects, brilliant minds, good rapport. At least I’ve got a good lab. There’s that.”

“You don’t get stimulated by the kids?”

“Sure, some have crack minds. And some are just
on
crack. God, what a world.”

The elevator opened and they moved into the basement hall. Their voices echoed.

“Most of them don’t know how to
work
. They don’t have any
staying power
. And scholarship, truly original work, forget about it.”

Dr. Bustamonte stopped at the door and unlocked it.

“Boy, I sound like a grumpy old woman. Another year of listening to myself, and I’ll be ready to call it quits. Grab Henry and hang out in the south of France.”

She pushed open the door. It was a southern exposure, and watery light from high windows slanted over the DNA thermocyclers, the autoclaves and incubators, the sparkling rows of pipettes and immaculate sinks. It was the kind of lab that Grace envisioned having in her garage. Some people had grunge bands or pottery wheels. Grace could see herself eighty years old and drying down DNA.

She missed the crime lab and what it offered; missed the way things had been the last day she’d awakened in her small bed in the Guatemalan highlands next to Mac, awakened to see him quietly packing, getting ready to leave. The moment right before the world changed.

Denise lifted a white lab coat off a hook and put it on, her hem an orange slash along the bottom. She signed for the baggie of soy, snapped on a pair of gloves, and dumped the contents out on a marble grinding pad.

“So what’s the plan?” Grace leaned against the counter.

“I’ll extract the DNA from the plant cells, do a PCR amplification, sequence some regions of the genome, and then feed what I find into BLAST.”

Grace had heard of it. “Basic Alignment Search Tool. Soy’s on the Web, even though it’s not all sequenced?”

Denise nodded, intent on the soy. “What they have is there for scientists to use.” She picked up tweezers and examined a small whiskery strand of plant material. “BLAST has the map for everything that’s been decoded so far. Hopefully, we’ll find no surprises in this puppy.”

“Hopefully, we won’t find a puppy.”

Denise shot her a swift look. “Not out of the question. Those squiggles on the bar code that looked weird? What I do here is going to tell us if anything’s been added to the soy.”

“Added.” Grace shifted. “What do you mean, added?”

“That’s what I have to find out.”

Chapter 36

Grace stood in the lab, watching Denise’s familiar movements and feeling like the kid dying to get asked to the big dance.

Denise turned. “Oh. That’s right. You’re on leave from the crime lab.” She added more gently, “Sorry. Scientists gossip.”

“Police, too.”

She motioned a hand toward the back of the door. “There’s an extra jacket on the hook.”

“Thanks.” Grace slipped the lab coat on and snapped on a pair of gloves. “What do you want me to do?”

“You can get this ready while I program the computer to synthesize the primer. I’m going to try some microsatellite marker screening.”

“What enzyme are we using?” Grace took over the pestle and ground the soy into a fine dust.

“TAQ. Thermus aquaticus, same as for humans. The recipe’s over there.” Denise pointed to a lab notebook open on the counter.

They worked in silence, mixing the soy DNA with the material that would replicate it, and transferring it into the automated thermocyler.

Denise clamped the lid in place, ripped off her gloves, and hit a few keystrokes on her computer. She nodded.

“Good to go. This will give us a chance to call up what we know on BLAST, so we’ll be set. Pull up a chair if you like; this shouldn’t be long.”

Grace took off her gloves and positioned a chair next to Denise, silent as the scientist’s fingers flew over the keyboard and the commands led to more intricate paths.

“Gordie said the soy strain—or at least the primary one—came from China.”

Denise nodded, not surprised. “We actually use a strain from there in our work here in the labs. A couple more from Australia and nine from the States.”

“Where are you going?”

“Into the soybean genome that’s been sequenced. Once we get our sample ready, I’ll be looking for specific markers I know are on the Chinese strain we use here, to see if it’s ours. Ah, here we go.”

A long, blurred set of letters—the soybean genetic code—scrolled past.

“How you doin’, baby.” Denise breathed. She half-laughed. “I’ve been staring at this stuff for so long, fascinated with its mysteries, it feels like another kid to me.”

She pointed at the screen. “The secrets to flowering, pod development, plant growth—all right there. You can do the paperwork while we wait, if you like.”

Grace nodded and busied herself for the next twenty minutes, meticulously recording in Denise’s lab journal everything they’d done and intended to do.

The PCR dinged softly and Grace looked up and frowned. “Do you have a warning bell on your PCR?”

Denise grinned and stood up. “A year ago, this company working on a faster prototype sent a flyer around. Somehow, it wound up in my
in
basket—I’m sure whoever dropped it there didn’t understand its significance. I snapped it up. I’ve got one of the only working PCR and sequencing machines that pops this stuff out. I only have to write up reports every once in a while and rave about its beauty and versatility, easy to do under the circumstances.”

“It’s half a day for PCR and sequencing, minimum, where I come from.” Grace’s voice held admiration and a little wistfulness.

“And where you’re going back to. Don’t tell them. I’d hate to have it come up missing in the middle of the night.”

Denise used a pipette to extract a small amount of the DNA and inserted it into sterilized tubes for sequencing. Grace helped her load the rack into the sequencer.

It didn’t take long before DNA was translated onto the computer screen in a long, steady stream of data. It was close to five and the light through the windows was a soft gray against the darkening sky.

“You have the flash drive with Gordie’s results?” Denise inserted it and the screen split.

Two bar codes, side by side. They matched.

Denise flicked a glance at Grace, consternation on her face. “So much for the good news. Gordie didn’t screw up. There was no contamination in his test.”

Grace studied the bar code. There were peaks on the page, the kind of scribble marks a toddler makes. And underneath, hugging the sequence, was a second set of peaks, jagged and irregular.

“I’m going to check first and make sure the dominant sequence,” Denise pointed to the heavier set of peaks on the screen, “is our Chinese strain.”

She clicked a few keys and new letters spilled across the screen. She studied them. “Well, the primary sequence did come from the strain we use here at Riverside.”

“How many schools use it?”

“Lots, so just knowing that isn’t telling us much. It’s a teaching tool in universities across America, but what it’s telling me is that it’s a mixed sample. Hard to understand.” Denise frowned. Her body language changed. She straightened in her chair, alert, serious.

“What is it?”

“We’re getting into the area of the code that’s been tweaked.”

“Is it bad?”

Denise studied the screen. She shook her head. She rolled her chair away from the screen and pointed. “Just odd. Take a look.”

Grace saw a tumble of green letters spilling across the screen.

“It’s not adding up. The codes aren’t matching. Aren’t even coming close in this section. I’m going to ask it how much of the soybean fragment we tested is the soybean genome.”

She rolled her chair closer and her fingers clicked over the keyboard, her face tense. The lines around her mouth deepened. She stared at the screen. She pushed her chair away and rubbed her eyes.

“This is not good,” she said.

On the screen were the words: SOYBEAN GENETIC CODE 98.3 %.

Grace studied the words. “Wait a minute. So the underlying signature—that second squiggle on the page that’s right under the bigger set of peaks—that’s not soybean.”

Denise nodded.

“Maybe it’s just part of the soybean genome that hasn’t been decoded yet.”

“No.” Denise Bustamonte shook her head. Her gold hoop earrings moved heavily. “The system accounts for that. That’s factored in to this program. No, what this is telling us is that this soy fragment has been altered with something nonsoy. Something else.”

Grace felt a knot twist in her stomach. Where had Ted Bartholomew been, that he’d picked up a soy fragment that had been genetically altered so that it wasn’t even completely soy? Had he stumbled into something he wasn’t supposed to find? Had that discovery led to his death?

There had to be a reasonable explanation for the information on the screen.

SOYBEAN GENETIC CODE 98.3%

“Nonsoy. You mean like wheat? Or corn?” A note of desperation had crept in, but she couldn’t contain it. “Maybe whoever tried this was working on a hybrid. It would make sense. There’s the International Ag Convention going on right now. Wraps up tonight. Somebody easily could have been working on something under the radar.”

“It’s completely against the rules, messing with stuff that way.” Denise turned back to her computer and fed it new commands.

“But it’s done all the time, isn’t it?” Grace pressed. “I mean, there’s that new fruit, that cross between a plum and an apricot, right? And tangerines and oranges. Tangelos.”

Denise was silent, fingers clicking.

Grace inched her chair closer.

“Okay, boys and girls.” Denise stared at the screen. “We got trouble. This is telling me it’s not plant material. Whatever’s been added to the soy was taken from someplace else.”