Out at Night (32 page)

“I was a doctor.”

Elaine looked at her politely.

“You don’t want to be a doctor, do you?” Grace said gently.

Elaine shook her head. “I don’t have any choice.” She examined the french fries studiously and picked a new one, repeating the ritual: a delicate daubing, a small bite, putting it down.

“And Tammy shared your work ethic in the beginning?”

Elaine smiled sadly. “She was bouncy. My bouncy friend. Always encouraging me to take a study break. Go for a walk. Have an adventure. I felt like I was breaking out of prison, knowing her.”

“A friend like that, you probably’d want to room with.”

“My folks wouldn’t let me. They thought she was a bad influence. They were furious when they realized I was living right across the hall from her. Felt like I’d sneaked one past them.” Elaine slid her necklace free and gripped the locket in a small hand. She tugged it back and forth until the necklace stretched taut. She slipped it back under her sweater.

“‘Silent Voices’. A mime class.”

Elaine took a small bite of cheeseburger. “It was about legitimate rage, is the nearest I can describe it. A section on African-Americans and Asians, women and American Indians. Going through the beats of what the dominant culture here has done to hurt those groups and the duty we all had to stand up against it.”

“A class taken mostly by middle-class white kids. Bartholomew must have loved having you in class.”

“It was uncomfortable. He was asking me to relate to a discrimination I’d never experienced. After about the third week of prodding, he gave up on me.”

“And turned his attention to Tammy.”

“There were a pack of white kids who treated him like God. He folded Tammy in. The whole breaking-barriers theme ran parallel to his belief that ecologically, the world has been tipped into a crisis mode by the same white-dominance power groups and that it was our duty to strike a blow against them. He was counting down the days to the ag convention. And Tammy was gone almost all the time now. She’d be missing classes, living God knows where, and when I asked her about it, she told me not to worry. She was doing work that was going to change the world.”

Elaine moved the necklace again, back and forth, across her chin.

“Ever meet Nate, Professor Bartholomew’s teaching assistant?”

Elaine rolled her eyes. “He was always trying to get her to go to band practice, only she didn’t play anything.”

“What’s your necklace?”

“What?” Her hand clutched harder.

“Can I see it?”

She dropped the pendant inside her sweater. Elaine had a transparent face. Emotions roiled across her small features: alarm, panic, a desperate need to come up with something. She licked her thin lower lip.

“It’s from her, isn’t it?”

Her eyes filled.

“About a week before she died, she knocked on my door one night. It was late. She looked nervous, scared. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, just that they’d been practicing. That’s what she said. Practicing. And that soon they’d have to use what they’d learned. She talked about it as if—almost as if they were going to war.”

Elaine sighed. A tear rolled down her cheek and she took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

“I told her I was scared, and for an instant, she was the same old Tammy, a flash of laughter, and then her eyes dulled, as if a light had gone out. But in that instant, I could see that she was scared, too.”

“And that’s when she gave you the pendant.”

“She told me to tell no one. That somebody might come by, asking if I have anything of hers. That it was important to lie.”

“But nobody came by.”

Elaine ducked her head. Tears welled. She shook her head.

“Elaine, we haven’t found yet who killed your friend. Help us find who killed your friend.”

Grace reached across the table and held out her hand. Elaine reached behind her neck and undid the clasp. She lifted the necklace free.

It wasn’t a pendant.

It was a key.

Chapter 39

“Elaine, you’re going to have to come with me.” Grace slipped her cell phone out of her bag and punched in her uncle’s number as she stood up and slipped the key off the chain. She put it into her wallet.

“I can’t. I have to meet my lab partner for an engineering class. We’re constructing a bridge out of ball bearings and toothpicks that has to sustain over thirty pounds of weight. They’re graded at the end of the week.”

“People are going to die tonight, Elaine, unless you help.”

Her pale face flushed and she started talking more quickly. “Then I have choir practice. And a meeting for next year’s RAs. I’ve been picked to be an RA. I can’t just blow off that meeting. And then I have to crank out a five-page paper from Odette’s perspective on Swann in Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
. Wait. You said
die
?”

Grace nodded. The cell phone stopped ringing and her uncle picked up.

“Descanso.” In the background was a cacophony of noises. “Got something?”

“Tammy’s best friend from college. And a key.”

“A key. Any idea what it opens?” He went on without waiting for an answer. “Where are you?”

“A Denny’s right outside Riverside U. I’ll drive her in.”

“No. Wait.” Elaine shot to her feet.

“The one in the twelve-hundred block of University Avenue?”

“That’s it.”

“I’ll have a Riverside unit there in five.”

Grace looked at Elaine gathering books together and quietly weeping. Her cheeseburger lay untouched.

“You’re going to need somebody to talk to her professors. She’s worried about assignments being due and missing deadlines.”

“I’m worried about the Convention Center going up in flames in an hour, unless we can figure out what’s here.”

“Where are you taking me?” Elaine’s voice was subdued.

“Somebody from the police is going to take you into Palm Springs, Elaine.”

“No, I mean
where
.”

“Tell her the Convention Center, Grace,” her uncle barked in her ear.

“Everybody’s at the Convention Center,” Grace said quietly. “That’s where they’ll interrogate you.” She immediately wished she hadn’t used that word.

Elaine paled. “Grace, I just remembered something else. Tammy told me she was working there. She had a job at the Convention Center.”

Grace looked at her steadily. “Uncle Pete, still there? Tammy was going to work the Convention Center.” She lowered her voice and turned so that Elaine couldn’t hear her. “Were the student volunteers at the ag convention all printed?”

“To work there, yeah. And we just came up with a match to prints for the housekeeper at Bartholomew’s. A student named Mindy Coresu.”

“Mindy.” Grace searched her memory and found it: a dewy, glossy-haired student with a name tag: HELLO! MY NAME IS MINDY! Manning the information kiosk inside the Convention Center. If she was inside, and part of Bartholomew’s group, then what they had planned for that night had made it inside.

Time was running out. The dances, the celebrations, the speeches, started at seven. It was almost six. If Radical Damage kept to its original threat, something horrific would happen in less than an hour. She shifted the phone. It felt damp in her hands.

Outside the window, a black-and-white pulled to a stop at the curb and an officer Grace didn’t recognize got out. Grace put cash down on the table.

“Ride’s here. I’ll send her on.”

“Where are you headed?”

Grace hesitated, looking at Elaine. She didn’t want to say anything in front of her. “I’ll call you back, fill you in.”

Grace closed up her cell phone and escorted Elaine out past the booths and smiling hostess at the door. Elaine stiffened when she saw the police car and Grace laid a reassuring hand on her back.

“Anything else about Tammy I should know? Anything strike you as strange?”

“When you said Mindy.” Elaine peered at Grace anxiously through her glasses. The red from the taillights on the unmarked washed Elaine’s face like a watercolor.

“You know Mindy?”

“She was part of Professor B’s group.”

“Wait just a sec, I’m going to give this key to the officer who’s driving you in.”

Grace darted over to the black-and-white and put the key into the officer’s hand. Elaine stood hunched in a tight ball of misery, waiting.

“This Mindy. Did she hang with Tammy?”

Elaine nodded. Her silky hair slanted across her face, obscuring her eyes. “On campus, we have a clinic. Our folks want us to use it when we get sore throats and stuff, but nobody does. The guys there just blow off things—even when they’re serious. You can be dying of pneumonia, and these guys won’t catch it.”

“You were talking about Mindy and her relationship to Tammy.”

“Friday, Mindy stops by, picks up Tammy. They were going to catch a ride in on the Scoot, that’s the free bus that takes you into town. Mindy said they were going to Target, but Tammy let it slip they were going to a clinic on Magnolia Avenue for shots.”

Chapter 40

Grace hurried across campus to the parking garage, passing a deserted fountain. The cement fish that normally spouted water was dry now, the trough surrounding the fish a slimy green, littered with leaves.

Small stamps of light from the lampposts cast a glow across the flagstone, but the campus felt deserted. A cold wind shook the leaves of an oak tree, and a shivering cascade of dry leaves lifted off the ground and resettled.

There was a stone bench outside the parking garage and Grace sat in the light and called her uncle.

His voice vibrated across the line, crackling with focused energy. The noise behind him made it hard to distinguish his words. “Give it to me.”

“Frank Waggaman used to audit Bartholomew’s classes. He baited him in class until Bartholomew had him thrown out. He was wildly jealous of Bartholomew’s hold on the kids.”

“What else?”

“How are things there?”

“Busy, Grace, what else?”

“The soy I took from Bartholomew’s shoes. It’s been contaminated—altered—with something.”

“Altered. What do you mean?”

“That’s what I need to find out.”

“
Bring me something solid, Grace
.
Otherwise, stay off the line
.”

“Tammy, the murdered girl with the tattoo, was part of Bartholomew’s gang. She went with Mindy into town last Friday. To get shots.”

“Shit. What kind of shots?”

“No idea. From a free clinic on Magnolia Avenue in Riverside. That’s from Elaine Choo, the student who’s coming in, with Tammy’s key.”

His phone dropped out. “Hang on. I’ve got a call coming in.”

Grace stared up at the parking garage. Light flooded the stairwells. A golf cart putted around parked cars on the first floor, carrying a security guard.

“Fuck.” Her uncle was back.

“What is it?”

“I have to go.”

“What?”

“Goddamn it.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“Jewel Malosky, Nate’s mother. Admitted this morning at Desert Regional. Tests just came back. She has anthrax inhalation. Those fuckers are going to release anthrax inside the Convention Center.”

__

Grace sat in her car with the windows up, doors locked. She had the motor running and the lights on so she could see better, but even with the heater on, she was cold. On her cell phone, she pulled up everything she could find on anthrax inhalation. The way it worked was, information floated in sometimes and jelled if she kept her mind still, but her mind was skittering, darting, and then a small piece of random information tapped into her mind, as if it were a chord in a song she’d heard before, or a Morse code. Delicate, urgent.

Grace’s eyes widened. She stared through the windshield at the cement wall. “Oh, my God.”

Bring me something solid, Grace.

The car beams revealed ghostly pinwheels of turbines as she kept her foot on the gas, radio tuned to a local news station, her car rocketing toward Palm Springs in the wind tunnel created by a truck.

Otherwise, stay off the line.

__

A reporter was broadcasting live from the Convention Center. He interviewed Frank Waggaman, who kept trying to turn the interview away from the fields going up in smoke and Bartholomew’s murder, back to the good that they were doing creating soy resistant to drought, but the reporter would not be deterred and Waggaman abruptly broke off the interview, screamed an epithet and strode off into the crowd.

Even better, from the reporter’s perspective. Now he had something to talk about that was new: the rigid tilt of Waggaman’s shoulders, the rage in his voice. The clip played twice in the time it took for Grace to get to onto Palm Canyon Drive. Stalled traffic again, with a patrolman on foot traffic.

Grace slid down her window and offered her FBI ID. “Accident?”

“All hell’s broken loose at the Convention Center.” He waved her on.

Anxiety roiled through her. She pulled into the parking lot at Desert Regional Medical Center and darted through the lobby to the elevator. It stalled on the second floor. She punched the button again and heard the elevator settle on the ground floor with a crunch.

Intensive Care was on the third floor through a swinging door expressly forbidding any unauthorized entrance. She pushed through the door, shoved her badge at a nurse and kept running. “Grace Descanso. FBI. Here to see him.” She pointed.

Sheriff’s Deputy Rogener, the same deputy who had guarded the crime scene soy field where Bartholomew had been killed, shot out of his seat. He looked grim and jumpy.

“How’s she doing?”

“No way of knowing.”

“Is she conscious?”

“I think she’s in and out.”

“Can you get a note in there? It’s important.” Grace scribbled a question in block letters.

He got a nurse to carry it in. She came back almost right away, eyes wide.

“I gave her the one blink for yes, two blinks for no. She blinked once. I tried a second time. Got the same thing.”

Grace trotted down the hall as she stabbed numbers into her cell. She felt a sense of lightness, a surreal quality. Her uncle picked up.