Out at Night (8 page)

“It came out of an innocuous pastime, people wanting to trace family trees, get a handle on their ancestry. Now police use it to flag suspects. Somebody kill the lights.”

She started her flash drive as the room went semidark, illuminated by the ghost stamp of light still coming from the hall.

“First off, what the tests do is break down percentages, not actual race.”

She tapped the keypad and her first graphic came up on the wall. It was a map of the world with three small silhouettes standing along the bottom. She was using the wall as a screen; it worked fine.

“Basically a lot of our DNA is junk. It’s a matter of geography. Let’s say—a long time ago— we’ve got an Asian who lives someplace in the Pacific Rim. Let’s put him, for our purposes, in China.”

She transferred a small figure to China and filled in the figure with slanting lines.

“His family stays there for generations and over time, there are a few minute variations, some hiccups in his DNA that naturally occur randomly, and once they occur, they get passed down through generations. Those are called polymorphisms in the DNA, or SNPS, pronounced snips.”

She waited as the scribbling subsided and the group was ready for her to go on.

“Now let’s move a different guy to Cape Horn. He started out there and his family lives there for generations, long before recorded time. He’s called a sub-Saharan African.”

She placed a second figure in the south of Africa and filled in the outline with gray pixels.

“Same deal. Lives there eons and he has random snips that are passed down through his line and everybody in his part of the world has some of these same snips, but and here’s the key thing, the guy in Cape Horn probably never went to China, not even on vacation—we’re talking thousands of years ago, not now, jumping on a plane. So, the guys in Asia are going to have different snips than the sub-Saharan Africans living at Cape Horn.”

She danced the third figure into what looked like the middle of France.

“Here’s our third guy. He started out in what is now Europe. He has his own snips that go way back in time and that we still see coming up in his relatives alive today. He’s called Indo-European.”

She filled the third figure in with dots and turned to the audience. “These snips insert themselves randomly and are then copied and passed down through generations. Different continents fostered different snips. We fast-forward to today.”

She tapped the keypad again and figures appeared across the world, each a mix of slanting lines, gray pixels, dots; each figure different.

“Nobody’s stayed in a neat little box, but we can pretty accurately trace percentages, how much percentage of a person comes from each of these subgroups. The most sophisticated tests involve one hundred and seventy-six of those snips, narrowing the ancestral pool pretty conclusively. Lights, please.”

Zsloski blinked in the sudden light, looking confused and Grace amended it.

“It means that after testing a sample, the most sophisticated tests can accurately say that a person is maybe—say—ninety-two percent Indo-European and eight percent sub-Saharan African.”

“So we’d be looking for a white guy.”

“In that example, Mike, yes; if you had this DNA sample at a crime scene, you’d be focusing on white suspects, because it would be genetically impossible for the perp to have come from a predominantly different subgroup. It stands to reason that it would serve to narrow the suspect pool in a reasonable way and save valuable time on the street.”

“I got it.”

“It’s not an exact science but I can tell you this, there’s a DNA printing outfit in Florida that’s a leader in this type of thing; they routinely do blind tests and nail it, every single time, just based on DNA. That means that if they analyze a sample that’s predominantly Indo-European, the features of the actual person will express in Caucasian features and skin tones, ditto if it’s Asian or African.”

She clicked off the graphic.

“Any questions?”

FBI Special Agent Beth Loganis raised her hand; not really a hand, the merest flag of a manicured finger elevated for the briefest of seconds. She was about Grace’s age, early thirties, with the burnished look that always spoke of enriched preschool and normal childhoods with mothers who remembered to lay out lunch money and buy laundry soap. It was a look that, despite years of faking, Grace knew she’d never get right. Knew that all a woman like Beth had to do was take one look at her to know that, too.

“This is the lecture Bartholomew crashed?’ A faint tinge of condescension colored Beth’s question.

Grace swallowed her irritation. “Pretty much. Little simpler this time, but yeah.”

Zsloski harrumphed into his hand.

“What do you think Bartholomew was trying to tell you?” Beth clicked her sterling silver pen and readied it.

“The only time I met Professor Bartholomew, he was lunging at me with a protest sign and spouting sound bites from the Bill Ayers playbook.”

Her uncle nodded. “At the time of his death, he was a full-tenured professor at Riverside University, teaching a popular undergraduate-level course called ‘Silent Voices.’ It was about the ones history forgets—the ones on the bottom. He was arrested at Grace’s lecture by a Palm Desert cop in a roomful of forensic biologists.”

The sheriff investigator patted the pocket of his tan shirt. He had penetrating mahogany-colored eyes the same color as his skin and wore his hair close to the scalp. His brass ID bar read T. THANTOS. “So he wanted to get arrested.”

“Looks that way,” Pete said. “He got press, if that was the plan.”

In her mind, Grace saw the Desert Sun article taped to Bartholomew’s wall.

Thantos pulled a Mars bar out of his pocket and unwrapped it. “DNA testing for race would definitely have pushed Bartholomew’s buttons. From what we’ve got so far, he was all about how human dignity was compromised by putting racial groups in boxes.”

“Bartholomew could have been trying to tell us we’re looking for a racist,” Grace offered. “But if the doer was using racial percentages somehow, the question is why? What’s the point? Why would those be flagged?”

Zsloski shifted his bulk in his chair. “It doesn’t have to be a racist. Could be somebody in law enforcement. Based on what you said. I mean, we’re the guys who use this stuff, right?”

“Or some genealogist with a grudge,” Beth suggested.

“Or it’s possible the suspect had a genetic anomaly shared by only a small subgroup.” Grace shut down her computer. “Any idea yet what kind of crazy Bartholomew was?”

Her uncle shook his head. “We’re doing cross-checks with every face on that wall. Dividing the photos into subgroups—class, gender, race. Whatever it is, it’s not in either his university file or medical chart, so right now we’re shooting in the dark.”

The group was already starting to gather notepads and pens and tuck them away. Grace looked down the table. “Any more questions?”

Agent Beth Loganis flipped open her cell phone and checked for messages.

Grace felt a slow burn. “Good, because I’ve got some. What in the hell is going on here?”

Faces looked up. The noise stilled.

“Two fields torched and somebody’s died. What is this?”

She stared at her uncle. He stared back, dark eyes inscrutable in a face creased and grooved and furrowed, as if everything he’d seen in his job had chiseled out a piece of him. Another couple years and he’d be left with nothing but a skull.

“I’ve flown over three thousand miles through the night and driven in from San Diego. I think I deserve to know.”

Her uncle grew still. She could feel him weighing what to say.

“You understand this is information that you are not to share outside this room.”

She couldn’t believe he’d actually said that. “Or you’ll have to kill me, right?”

“We’ve had lots of experience. There won’t be seepage.”

She narrowed her eyes. He stared back blandly.

“Fine. All right. I get it. I’m not going to say anything.”

“We’ve gotten word from FIG, Field Intelligence Group, out of Norwalk. They did a threat assessment on the convention. My SSA and the OCC’s involved, and when FIG passed along—”

Acronyms made her testy. “Okay, so your boss in Riverside and the operational control center out of L.A.—”

“Right. OCC’s set up to manage big situations. We’ve been lining up assets and manpower for months, pulling in bodies from all over Southern California. Field Intelligence monitors Internet chatter, blog sites, confidential sources. We have reason to believe a group calling itself Radical Damage has plans to disrupt the agricultural convention during closing ceremonies. ”

“What is it?”

“A violent offshoot of ELF out of Northern California.”

He shifted in his seat.

“These guys aren’t worried about collateral damage. They’ve taken credit for explosions in three labs that have led to the death of four scientists and crippling injuries to five others. One guy was left blind and without hands. The vics all worked with genetically modified plants. Here’s what’s at stake. There are delegates from every state and almost sixty countries at this ag convention. Frank Waggaman’s had death threats. He heads up the teams that created ten fields of GM crops here, six soy, a couple of sugar beets, and two corns.”

“I didn’t think any of that stuff grew here.”

“That’s why they picked Palm Springs for the convention. The genetic modifications—each field tweaked differently—had to do with making crops drought-, pest-, and-weed-resistant. Ag convention director Frank Waggaman believed that one field in particular, USDA Experimental Crop Project 3627, held the key to helping solve world hunger.”

Grace stared. “And that’s where Bartholomew was killed? In USDA Experimental Crop 3627.”

Pete nodded. “This whole thing could explode in our faces. The GM fields are off-limits now to delegates, but all we need is a foreign delegate killed and an international incident on our watch.”

“Monday night.”

“Monday night.” He glared at Grace, his eyes small balls of bright fury under drooping lids. “Two days from now. We need to figure out what Radical Damage has planned and stop it. The clock, as they say, is ticking. And damn, I hate that expression.”

“Same old Uncle Pete. You still haven’t told me how I fit into this.”

He glared. “Same old Grace. Always pushing it.” He stepped away from the table. “We’re done here. Not you, Grace. You’re coming with me.”

Chapter 10

She followed her uncle past a gray fabric wall with notices tacked to it. On the other side of the wall was a row of work stations with access to a balcony that ran the length of the agency. Her uncle’s silence made her review every wrong thing she’d ever done. He kept walking and that gave her a chance to flip it, and think about every wrong thing he’d ever done, and by the time he opened his office door and motioned her in, she was herself again.

He stood uncertainly, as if wondering whether to hug her, and Grace pretended to dig through her bag. She dropped into the chair across the desk from him, and when she looked up, he was seated.

He looked smaller, somehow, diminished. His shirt had a button loose and he needed a shave. “Thanks for coming.”

“Did I have a choice?” She folded her arms.

He studied her a long moment. “I don’t think there’s anything I could have done that would have changed it.”

Grace looked away. The walls were devoid of personal touches except of a framed photo of a much younger Pete in a SWAT group shot, but family photos jammed the top of the filing cabinets behind him. Her eyes settled on a black-and-white of three dark-eyed skinny boys shivering in wet swimming trunks, arms around each other. Her body knew it before it registered in her mind; heat coursed through her and pressed against her eyes. Her dad smiled back, the one in the middle, a tooth missing, squinting at the camera.

“He always looked up to you.” Her voice caught.

“When your dad ran off with Lottie—”

“We were cut out of almost every family gathering, and why? Because he’d married outside the faith? Outside the Portuguese community? Give me a break.”

“Look, you don’t know how it was.”

“I know exactly how it was. I lived it. It’s the first story I ever learned.”

Her dad, Marcos, the middle son and two years younger than her uncle Pete, had impulsively stopped by a bar one night on his way home after cleaning his boat, The Far Horizon. He was twenty-three.

He’d been at sea for three months chasing tuna, sunburned and exhausted and dry mouthed, and it was his dry mouth that night that had gotten him into trouble he never quite got out of. At least not easily.

Not until the night he disappeared for good.

But that night in the beginning, Marcos, the shy, methodical man not given to bouts of spontaneity, blinked in the sudden blaze of the spotlight as Lottie pranced onto the dusty beer-washed stage, shimmying and sparkly, with platinum hair and fishnet stockings, and inexplicably, hours later, he’d decided to drive to Las Vegas with her and get married.

In the faded photo Grace had of her parents shot in the Temple of Love, Marcos stood up in his reeking, fish-slimed jeans, a glazed and thunderstruck look on his face, mouth gaping open, as Lottie leaned next to him, her spandex top somewhat obscured by the yellow rain slicker he’d given her as a cover-up. Her head was cocked and she had a triumphant smile on her face, but the lines around her eyes and mouth were those of an exhausted woman, as if she’d just landed the biggest fish imaginable after a long and harrowing battle at sea.

“He was engaged to a Portuguese beauty from a good family,” Uncle Pete said feebly.

“Well, your wife seems to have gotten over him.”

“I was comforting her.”

Grace threw up her hands. “All I’m saying is, this cord was severed long before I ever came into the picture, and you—you were the favorite son, the favored son, the oldest. One word from you and things would have been different. You did nothing.”

“That’s not true.” He looked pained.

“I was eleven when Dad died. I spent the rest of my childhood living out of suitcases while Lottie worked the West Coast, playing in country-western bands. She dragged Andy and me all over the place.”