Out at Night (33 page)

“This better be important.”

“Jewel. Nate’s mother. The woman with anthrax.”

“Right.”

“Tonight, are there drummers, African drummers?”

“Grace, I don’t have time to figure out the social calendar of—”

“She unwrapped an African drum. Nate and Andrea had them shipped into the country for their Square Pegs business. Probably the craftsmen didn’t even know the skins carried anthrax. But Nate and Andrea did. Uncured goat hides, that’s my guess.”

A nurse hurried by in the hallway, pushing a crash cart.

“The skins are hard-dried. That means they crack apart when they’re hit. They only release the spores when they’re banged.”

A silence. “It’s not an African tribe performing tonight for a bunch of chemists and GM scientists. It’s a skit. The volunteers here. Mindy and—I gotta go.”

“Check out who’s had an anthrax vaccine recently.”

He was gone.

Chapter 41

Radical Damage had smuggled goat-hide drums contaminated with anthrax spores into the Convention Center, benign and harmless until the spores were dislodged by hitting the drums, and then the anthrax would have become a lethal weapon.

Inhalation anthrax. A simple plan. By the time symptoms would manifest themselves, the members of Radical Damage would have picked up stakes, moved on. They had money from the cargo thefts, and even though Bartholomew had been murdered, and Andrea and Nate and a core group arrested during the cargo theft bust, there was still enough of a plan in place that the rest of the group would be able to move forward.

Grace thought about that. The seductive pull of terrorism. The winging-it thrill of living on the edge, breathing danger. Did Frank Waggaman kill Bartholomew so he could take over the group? The new king.

Bring me something solid.

She took the elevator to the maternity ward. The waiting room was empty except for a father snuffling in his sleep into his hand as he slept on a laminated chair. Above him, a TV was tuned to a woman with green hair, swallowing a bug.

An admissions desk was unoccupied between two closed doors. A sign read: NEW VISITORS. SIGN IN FOR ASSISTANCE AND/OR ADMISSION PLEASE PU THE PHONE AT THE NICU ENTRANCE.

She pushed open a door. A nurse reading a chart into a phone glanced up.

“Vonda Soderberg.” Grace hesitated. “I’m family.” The words held power.
She said them again, more softly.

The nurse pointed and went back to the chart.

Grace found Vonda’s door and knocked.

“Come in,” Vonda sang out.

She sat against pillows. Her face was pale, the nostrils pink and chapped, but her eyes burned with calm clarity. Grace remembered that feeling. When she’d delivered Katie, for a moment she’d felt invincible. That was how Vonda looked. She wore her hair loosely, glossy curves framing her strong dark eyes and soft mouth.

She cradled at her breast a small bundle covered in the blue hospital flannel warming blanket. Dark silky hair fluffed over the blanket. A distinctive
thwup thwup
emanated from the blanket.

The blinds were tilted, letting in a crack of dark sky. A dog-eared paperback
Making Organic Baby Food
, lay on the portable nightstand.

“Hey,” Vonda said softly.

Stacks of bread lay against the wall.
Handmade with love
! The tag said in a circular handwriting around the Good Farms label.
Wholesome soy in every bite
!

“I’m giving them out to the nurses here. They’ve all been great. You never got your loaf.”

“That’s right.” Grace went to the stack and squatted down. “How about cranberry. That okay?”

“Whatever. Want to see him?”

“Love to. But let him nurse. Let’s talk a while.”

At Vonda’s breast, the tiny silky head, covered in a fine fluff of black hair, moved rhythmically under the blanket.

“Vonda, the soy seeds that Frank Waggaman sold you. You ever have that stuff tested?”

Vonda frowned. “It’s organic.”

Grace nodded. She reached out and stroked Sam’s hair.

“Why would we test it, Grace? What’s wrong with it?

“What needs to be tested?”

Grace looked up. Stuart lounged in the doorway. He looked tousled and sleepy and hard-bodied. He was wearing a dark gray T-shirt and a soft pair of jeans. He smiled at Vonda and she beamed and he came over to her and touched his son’s cheek softly. “Hey, guy. Hey, big guy.”

“You look good for having just been the coach.”

“I’m running on fumes, Grace. So what needs to be tested?”

“Maybe nothing,” Grace said. “I’m just curious about the organic seeds that were used to grow your bread.”

“Frank Waggaman’s.”

“Does he sell the seed to other growers?”

Stuart nodded, his eyes on his son. “As far as I know. He had it enriched with a bunch of nutrients—it’s all good.”

“I’d like to test it.”

His eyes shot up warily. “Is there a problem?”

“I’d just like to get it tested, that’s all. Do you still have a seed bag at the greenhouse? And am I going to need keys to get in there?”

“Wow. That sounds serious.” Stuart looked at her. His gaze was direct and penetrating. He had a fine nose, strong chin, good mouth. But his eyes knocked her sideways. They were gray and alert. He wasn’t going to let her skate on this one. She could feel it. He was a father now. Every instinct in him was to protect his son.

“We got some in the van, remember?” Vonda shifted the baby to a spit cloth on her shoulder, smoothing his small back. “Kind of like Johnny Appleseed. So we can get started at our new place with planting right away.”

“You’re not leaving right away, are you? Not anymore.” A hard knot balled in her stomach, formed out of a raw welter of frayed relationships, angry words. Could people do that? Abandon their parents. Their family. Would Katie?

“Of course we are. A couple of days and we’ll be set. The van’s almost loaded.” She lifted her chin.

“What about your folks? Your mom. She’s going to want to see the baby. You can’t leave before she comes home.”

“She’s flying up to see us. It’s all arranged.”

“You can’t leave your dad like this.”

Vonda frowned. “Grace, stop trying to fix this. Some things, they get broken enough, they can’t be fixed.”

Grace went to the window and stared out. “I can’t hear that one. Not now.”

“Grace, you don’t have any idea what it’s been like.” Vonda’s voice cracked and the baby stiffened under the blanket in a startle reflex and mewled.

Vonda stroked the top of his head and he rooted blindly for her nipple and latched on.

“This beautiful little baby. This healthy, beautiful little guy. Dad sees him and goes ballistic.”

“Ballistic. I don’t understand.” The words made no sense. She only knew her head hurt. Her heart.

“I’ll go with you, Grace,” Stu said. “The van’s crammed. You’ll never find it.”

“Wait. She has to see him first.”

Grace came over next to the bed as Vonda carefully detached her infant. A bubble of milk beaded his lower lip on a small, rosebud mouth. A crater of shock rocked through her.

It was an Asian face. Dark blue irises stared back at Grace. Eyes set in epicanthic folds slanting down. A small nose against wide cheekbones.

“He’s beautiful.”

Vonda was busy cooing at Sam, but Stuart looked at her carefully.

To see if she were lying? She wasn’t sure. Sam was beautiful. But it was clear from the veil that had dropped over Stuart’s eyes that he had seen her surprise.

She wanted to handle it properly, and that rocked her back a second time. She’d never thought of herself as being particularly conscious of race, and yet there she stood, choosing her words carefully, checking to see which ones were weighted, which ones held.

“They should tell people labor hurts.” Vonda grimaced. “I had that Percodan or whatever it is that makes labor come like it’s this fist grinding and then they finally took him C-section. It’s hard to sleep; I want to hold him all the time.”

“You can stay with your folks.” Doing one more loop was risky. Grace wasn’t ready yet to ask how two Caucasian parents came to have an Asian baby.

“I can’t.” There was sadness and finality in Vonda’s voice. “I just can’t. Dad’s a hard-core law-and-order guy, with no room for mistakes, for
life
. When Sammy was born, it occurred to me. This was my shot at getting it right.”

Grace reached out and gently touched the infant’s hair. It was soft as the inside of an egg. “You did it. Both of you. You kept trying. And now you have Sam.”

“It was Stu’s idea to use a sperm bank, try a genetic background different than ours. We’d tried for years. Then he got this idea, and I said why not?”

Vonda put Sam on her chest and patted gently.

Grace’s cell phone rang. She checked the number. “I have to go, Vonda.”

“I’ll go with you. Be right back, hon.”

Vonda held up her arms to Grace. “Wait. A hug.”

Grace wrapped her arms around her cousin and for a brief instant, Vonda held on convulsively.

“Family,” Vonda whispered.

“Family.” Her throat felt heavy. She disengaged.

In the elevator going down he said, “Grace, what’s going on?”

“You know I can’t discuss—”

“Grace, if you’ve found something that could hurt my wife and baby, I deserve to know. We’ve waited too long for Sam to have anything happen now.”

“When are you leaving?”

“You haven’t answered my question. Frank Waggaman promised us this seed was pure. Organic. I need to know if he lied.”

He stared at her tensely, his eyes searching. He must have seen something, followed some dark path. She felt the intensity of his probing. He reared back as if he’d been stung. “Shit.”

The elevator doors slid wide.

“Shit,” he said again.

“I’m not sure what we’re looking at yet, Stu. It could be nothing.”

“But that’s not what you think, is it?”

She hesitated. He deserved the truth. “No.”

She could see his energy coil. Something volcanic shot up his body. His hands curled into fists and she imagined for an instant what he would have done to Frank Waggaman if he’d been standing where she was.

Her cell phone rang. She checked the number and let it go to voice mail. “I’m going to need to call this number when we get outside, Stu.”

“If Frank Waggaman did something to my family. . .” It was a low cry of despair and rage. He walked ahead of her through the lobby and when he turned, his face looked ashen. “I’ll bring the van around and off-load the seed bag while you make that call.”

She nodded. You have to be willing to die for your beliefs. That’s what Andrea had said in jail.

Is that what Frank Waggaman believed, too? She mentally reviewed the contents of Frank’s office. The fertilizer bags, the GOT SOY? poster, the high wall of bubble-wrapped boxes.

Boxes. Maybe they weren’t boxes. Maybe they were drums. Goat-hide drums loaded with anthrax. What better way to guard them than to keep them close, in his office, sealed in bubble-wrap and protected by an armed security guard at the door.

It meant he knew. It meant he was part of it.

Those drums had to have been brought in early, as part of his office.
Wheel in those three metal filing cabinets, stick them against the wall next to the wardrobe, and could you stack these bubble-wrapped drums laced with anthrax up next to the door?

She punched in her uncle’s number as she crossed out of the lobby. A cold wind flicked pebbles across the parking lot. It was a damp cold, a cold that in the desert could cut to the bone in another month.

Frank Waggaman was competitive. That’s what Denise Bustamonte had said in the lab. Maybe his competitiveness had driven him to snap, to murder.

And on the heels of killing Bartholomew must have come the crashing realization that the soy field would be a murder site, off-limits to delegates. All Frank’s work for nothing.

But his ego wouldn’t let him leave it there. He still wanted to be part of the action. He set up the fire in the sugar beets crop as he was walking through it with delegates. Great footage. News at eleven.

And the soybean spores. Hiding them at Jeanne’s.

Jeanne isn’t who she said she was
. That’s what he’d protested to Grace.

You are?

He’d put his finger over his lips. As if to stop himself from giving up a secret.

“Yeah.” Her uncle barked into the phone. A shrieking sound in the distance, and a swell of voices and noise.

“Check the bubble-wrapped boxes against Frank’s wall. I think that’s where the drums are.”

He hung up without answering. Her cell phone rang again immediately.

“It’s Denise Bustamonte,” the Riverside University scientist said without preamble. “I’ve figured out what human DNA’s been encoded in the soy. And Grace, it’s gruesome.”

Chapter 42

“I’m listening.”

Grace walked to a gravel island under a halogen light. She spotted her car a couple of rows over and unlocked the doors with the remote, and the lights winked in the dark. Stuart looked in the direction of the blinking lights, found it, and nodded. He peeled off in the direction of a mustard-colored van parked a distance away.

“You know about racial profiling using DNA?”

Grace frowned. “Yeah, I gave a lecture on it in Indio a while back. Bartholomew was in the audience, actually.”

Denise sighed. She struck Grace as a solid, methodical, brilliant woman, unflappable. But something had disturbed her. She sighed again, and Grace realized she was trying to catch her breath.

Grace walked to her car, unlocked the trunk and lifted the lid. Across the parking lot, she saw the lights of Stuart’s van come on. The keys jammed in the trunk lock and she left them there as she pressed a finger over one ear to hear better. “Go on.”

“Whoever doctored the soy—what he’s done is insert a command that only affects a specific race.”

“What?”

The van coughed and sputtered to life and Stuart eased it out of its parking space.

The words made no sense. “Wait, back up. Something’s embedded in the soy that affects a specific race. There’s technology around to do that?”