Out at Night (31 page)

“Best guess?”

“Virus, from the looks of it.”

“You must see a lot of that, though, right?” Grace thought back to an article she’d read once in a doctor’s waiting room when there was nothing left to read. “Bean pod mottle, isn’t that one of them? And there’s that mosaic one.”

Denise shook her head and moved her fingers over the keys. New letters spilled across the screen. She turned and stared at Grace, anxiety in her eyes.

“It’s not a soy virus that’s in here, Grace. There’s an overlap with some of the soybean genetic markers. BLAST is telling me the lower signature, that little squiggle on the bar code, is partly made out of a common-cold virus.”

“What does that mean?”

“The cold virus is one of the simplest delivery systems known to man. That
impacts
man. You get a cold virus, it replicates its DNA in human cells.”

“And it’s in there.”

“Along with something else I haven’t identified yet.” Denise kept working.

Katie had a Magic 8-Ball at home she’d gotten with her own allowance once. It was heavy as shot, hard gray plastic inset with green-colored windows. Katie would ask it a question, shake the ball, and the green answers inside the windows would dance, finally settling into one screen with a crawl of words: NOT LIKELY, or SURE THING, or NEXT TIME.

Grace waited as the words on the screen assembled: ANIMAL 1.7 %

Denise expelled a breath and shook her head. “I’m going to compare this sequence against other life-forms, starting with the simplest and working up to the more complex, to figure out what’s been incorporated. It could take a while, or we could get lucky right away.”

She took down a thick manual from a shelf over the sink and flipped it open. “Read me this while I code it in.”

Grace studied the page. “This is the genetic code for a simple bacteria?” It was short, less than a paragraph of numbers and letters.

Denise smiled briefly. “That’s the code to access the code. The genetic code for a prokaryotic cell is pages. We’d be here through Christmas trying to manually put that one in.”

“You’re saying that the cold virus is riding inside something else, and that both of those are inside the soy?” Grace was trying to keep up.

“That’s shorthand for it,” Denise said. She reached for the book and started clicking in the code herself. Absently, she added, “Something’s inside the soy, and until we figure out exactly what, we’re not going to know what we’re up against.”

“You’re going to ask BLAST to start with bacteria, and work its way up?”

“That’s too broad a focus. Its little brain would short out and then we’d have to stick it in rehab.” Denise finished and glanced at Grace. “What? You’re thinking of something.”

“I’m just trying to figure out if there’s a way to word it, so we could narrow it down,” Grace said. “That ‘higher-lower’ game on
The Price Is Right
.”

Denise cut her a look and turned back to the computer. Her fingers clicked. “You’ve been home way too long, girl, if you’re hooked on that stuff.”

“But you can do it, right?”

Denise kept clicking.

Grace sat silently, watching her work.

Denise straightened. “Okay, here it is. It’s starting.”

Rapid-fire shifts, with sparks of color. Occasionally the screen would slow and the letters would appear to crawl.

“It’s hunting for a match now, then moving on. Kind of like one of the extreme-dating shows,” Denise said drily. “And no, don’t ask me how I got hooked on that one.”

She shoved her chair away from the computer and stood. “Come on, I’ll make coffee while we wait.”

She locked the lab door and unlocked a door across the hall. It was the professors’ break room.

“Interesting times,” Grace said.

Denise poured water into the coffeemaker. “What?”

“The Chinese curse. ‘May you live in interesting times.’ That’s what we’re living in.”

Denise dumped coffee into a paper filter and started the machine. “Did you know scientists have found a soil bacterium that can actually jump kingdoms? It causes tumors in plants, and now it looks like it can do the same thing in humans. Reuters reported it.”

“You think that’s what happened here? Some sort of bacterium that attaches itself to the plant, inserts its DNA and replicates?”

“We’ll know soon.”

Ten minutes later, they were back in the lab, staring at the screen. A single word pulsed:
Higher
.

“Oh my God,” Denise said. She sat down. “That was the parameter for apes.”

They looked at each other. Denise moved her fingers heavily across the keyboard and put in the parameters for a human.

It came back almost immediately: 1.7% MATCH

Grace stared at the screen, disbelieving.

Denise took an unsteady breath. “Okay. Here’s what’s happening. I’m not sure why. But this soy has been encoded with certain human snips. Little pieces of DNA.”

Grace stared at her, stunned. Someone had encoded human DNA into a soybean plant, altering it in some way they couldn’t imagine. Dark and violent images skittered through her mind.

“They used a simple cold virus as the transfer.” Denise’s fingers clicked across the keys.

“I’m just wondering
why
. Why would a soy genome be modified so that a human cold virus could be used to transfer something to humans? What’s been encoded?”

Denise shook her head. “It’s going to take time to pin it down. I’ll have to feed the genes into a BLAST program and see where I find matching sites. Could take hours.”

“Call me when you get something.” Grace scribbled out her cell phone number and waited as Denise did the same thing. “Did you work with Stuart Soderberg?”

“One of the brightest doc candidates I’ve ever worked with. Didn’t surprise me when he left the program, though. He was passionate about his wife and I guess she had personal troubles. One day he came in, said he had to quit. Just like that, he left.”

“Did you ever surprise him doing something that—”

“You mean like this? Never. Stu Soderberg was a law-and-order guy. Meticulous with his research. His specialized area was working with a soil bacteria that inserts itself into a wide variety of plants—all kinds of fruit trees, grape vines, almonds—even rhubarb—and kills it. He was trying to find the off-switch when he left.”

“Did you work with Frank Waggaman?”

“I gave him lab space, yeah.” Her voice was subdued. “He did most of his genetic modifications on crops in my lab.”

Grace pulled a chair close and took a notebook out of her bag. “You’re going to have to tell me everything you know about him.”

“I need to keep working this, Grace. As it is, it’s going to take hours.”

“Short version, then. Did he strike you as angry?”

Denise paused. “Yes.”

“About what?”

“Everything. He’d go off on rants that had nothing to do with him. At first, I thought, what a lovely man. Say, raving about how—despite generations of struggle, women are still only paid seventy-seven cents to the dollar, and how it’s even worse for women of color. But it was a dark, uncontrollable rage, coupled with trying to get kids a half his age interested in vicious protests.”

Grace wondered if Jeanne had ever seen this side of Frank. She thought of the tree-spiking Jeanne had done as a kid, and wondered again how well she knew Jeanne. If she knew Jeanne. Was Jeanne trying to get kids to protest in violent ways even now? And if Frank was trying to inspire kids to protest violently, did it mean that he, too, was involved in Radical Damage? If so, he’d positioned himself beautifully for whatever evil had been planned for that night at the convention center. He was on the inside of the convention center. Ready.

“That’s what Bartholomew was doing, the call to action part with the kids.”

Denise nodded. “But Bartholomew had a following. Frank Waggaman was out there by himself. And jealous. Wildly jealous of Ted Bartholomew’s gift. He’d actually audit classes from him, so he could disrupt the lectures. He started wearing those little chains around his neck, doing comb-overs on his bald spot. Standing up, yelling in the middle of lectures. Ted finally had to call security, have him removed. Even that didn’t stop Frank. He’d pretend Bartholomew was out to get him. Nobody believed it. It was odd and weird and it never stopped.”

She turned and looked right at Grace.

“And then Ted died. And it stopped.”

Chapter 37

It was dark outside, a cold November night. She crossed the quad and got back into her car. The Wanaka dormitory was in the row of dorms Grace had driven past the night before, brick and ivy-covered building with small windows, set around an open space.

She tried the front door. Locked. She’d promised Zsloski he’d be first to know if she found anything in the soy. She dialed his cell number, remembering his frustration when she explained racial profiling, how the DNA worked, his plea to make it simple. But there was nothing simple yet about what was happening. Only the press of time.

But it explained why Bartholomew had reached out to her as he lay dying. The lecture she’d given to the police nonsworns—the lecture Bartholomew had crashed—was all about DNA. Bartholomew must have believed that Grace knew something that was going to help point to the killer.

“Zslosky.” His voice was abrupt. In the background a bullhorn blared, the words unintelligible but the menace real, cut short by a swelling roar from the crowd.

“Yeah, it’s Grace Descanso.”

“Where are you?”

“In Riverside. Over at the school. I’m working with a scientist named Denise Bustamonte. That soy in Bartholomew’s shoes, it’s been genetically modified.”

“What?”

“It didn’t come from the soy field where he was killed.”

“Wait, I’m writing this down.” He cleared his throat and she could hear a siren whine, growing higher-pitched and closer. “Just a sec, until it passes.”

The sound grew and on top of it, the sudden cacophony of voices, shouting, and the shocking crack of gunfire. “Got to go.”

“But—”

“Call me later.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful.”

A cold wind slivered across the back of her neck. She stamped her feet, waiting.

The door burst open and two students spilled out, wearing short skirts, black tights and scarves, hands stuffed into the pockets of their fleece jackets.

Grace raced up the steps and grabbed the heavy door seconds before it locked. Inside, the hallway rang with the sounds of showers, stereos, and laughter. Somebody was playing a drum. She walked the length of the first floor and took the ornate stairs to the second. A girl toweling dry her hair stopped in the hall.

“Can I help you?”

Grace scanned the hall, looking for a spontaneous memorial. She didn’t find one.

“Tammy’s room is where, upstairs?”

The girl’s eyes flooded. She nodded, glanced down at her flip-flops and fled. Grace climbed the stairs to the third floor. Five doors down from the unisex bathroom, she found it.

The door was closed. A message board hung on the door, covered in scribbled heartfelt messages. A papier-mâché wreath adorned the wall, with a photo of Tammy in the center. She had her head back, laughing, eyes crinkled shut. She looked nothing like the fragile girl in the earmuff headphones dozing in Jeanne’s chair.

Grace knocked on the door. Nobody answered. She leaned her ear against the door. She didn’t hear anything on the other side.

“She’s gone.”

Grace jerked her head up.

It was an Asian student, thin to the point of anorexia, wearing a knit miniskirt with tights and ballet slippers. She clutched a set of textbooks to her chest. Her glasses looked smudged and her eyes swollen. At her neck she wore a thin gold chain.

She’d come out of the room across the hall. A message board hanging on her door was bare except for information about a memorial service for Tammy scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving break. The grease pencil handwriting was small, precise.

“Who’s gone?”

The student chewed her lip. Her mouth worked. “If you’re looking for Tammy’s roommate, she split a couple of hours ago. She couldn’t take all the press. Her profs are letting her have compassionate leave. She’ll do make-up exams after Thanksgiving.”

Grace nodded and waited.

“So if you’re somebody from the press, none of us is talking.” She cleared her throat. She darted a look at Tammy’s photo on the opposite wall, as if she still had trouble believing it.

Grace shook her head. “No, no. I’m not from the press. I’m from the FBI.”

The student hunched her narrow shoulders. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“You don’t, or you’re too sad or scared or stunned to say it.”

The woman’s face convulsed and she ducked her head into her books and fled. “I’m late. I can’t. I won’t.” The last was a cry.

Grace caught up to her halfway down the hall. “Can I buy you a hot meal?”

“Who are you?” She was exhausted, but she still managed to make it sound withering.

Grace pulled out the ID badge. “I’m Grace. And you’re Elaine Choo.”

Elaine raised her eyes cautiously. She blinked. “How did you know my name?”

Chapter 38

“I guess I should have figured it out.” Elaine Choo wiped her fingers delicately on the paper napkin and left red blotches of catsup. “We used to leave messages on each other’s boards. So after she died, I kept doing it. I added a message to her board every time I left my room. It makes me feel less alone.”

Elaine blinked behind the glasses and shoved them up her nose. She detached a french fry and daubed it in catsup before nibbling the end.

“The handwriting on your message board about Tammy’s service matched the messages Elaine Choo left on Tammy’s door. It was pretty easy to guess that was you, when you came out of your room. How well did you know Tammy?”

“We were best friends since we met in Professor Bartholomew’s class.” Elaine stopped eating the fry and put it down.

“When was that?”

“Last year, spring quarter. We were freshmen, but we got to take a two hundred-level lecture class. Silent Voices. We had the same class after it, a Russian lit class, and we started walking together between classes. Then we realized we were in the same dorm, a couple of floors apart. I was raised in a traditional Chinese family in San Francisco. My folks own a grocery store in Chinatown. My job was studying, no boyfriends ever, studying from early in the morning until late so I could get into med school.”