Читать книгу Out at Night - Susan Smith Arnout - Страница 15

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 workstations 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 for 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 countrywestern bands. She dragged Andy and me all over the place.”

“She never told you? Aunt Chel and I tried to get you. Both of you. Fold you into our bunch. What’s a few more? Your mother wouldn’t hear of it.”

The blood drained from Grace’s face and her skin felt damp.

Her uncle stared at her wonderingly. “Jesus. She didn’t tell you.”

Her heart pulsed in her throat; she could taste the anger. She wondered if he’d told himself that lie so long that he believed it.

Grace scraped a hand through her hair. “We both know you’re lying.” Her voice was raw.

She shoved her chair back.

“I can’t do this. I absolutely can’t do this, so if this is what it is, I’m out of here.”

“You will sit.” His voice was low.

As a child he’d scared her. He scared her still. In her father’s eyes, she’d hung the moon, a bouncy, luminous pumpkin moon. In her uncle’s, that same moon withered and dried and blew away in a gust of stony fragments.

The silence stretched. Her uncle cleared his throat. She averted her eyes, hating him. She sat heavily back down in her chair and stared out the window. The field office wasn’t far from the Agua Caliente Indian reservation, and her uncle’s office overlooked a row of date palms and government buildings. The San Jacinto Mountains rose in a cliff of jagged granite.

“In your mind, this wasn’t my coming in to brief you about my lecture.”

“What?”

“This was you, bringing me in for questioning.”

He looked away. She followed his gaze to a set of Callaway golf clubs leaning against the wall. Dusty.

“I talked to your supervisor.”

“Sid? That guy’s a joke.”

“That’s odd. Because he speaks so highly of you. And—”

“I can’t believe this—”

“And, Grace,” he continued calmly, “he’s gotten permission from San Diego Police brass that if you do this job, providing you work with your own shrink, and as long as you don’t screw up and go Waco—”

“Waco?” she interrupted, outraged.

“You’re going to be able to go back to work, no harm, no foul. I assume you have your own shrink.”

“Waco’s not a good example to use, Uncle Pete, since as I recall, it was the FBI who shot up the place like a video game.”

“Are you in, or not?”

A silence.

He smoothed the front of his shirt with his hand.

You bolt at the first sign of trouble. That’s what Mac had said to her in the Bahamas. The fury she felt washed over her like an acid wave and with it the dull realization that Jeanne was right. In some way she couldn’t quite articulate, finding her way through this tangled maze of old anger she’d trapped herself in with Uncle Pete had everything to do with setting things straight between her and Katie and Mac. It was as if she’d spent five years in a holding pattern, waiting for the letter that had come for her in the Bahamas.

Waiting for a dead man to call her name.

Waiting to find her way home.

Did Grace believe in holy deaths? She wasn’t sure.

But Bartholomew’s was about as unholy as they came.

An image of his body, lying still in the morgue, flashed into her mind and receded. An outline lingered, as if burned into her retinas. Bartholomew had been a man not long ago, opinionated, angry. Alive. Suddenly it became even more important to her to find his killer.

“Monday night. When the convention closes, I get a free pass back to work at the San Diego Police crime lab. To my job.”

“You left out talking to your shrink, but yeah.” He opened a drawer, the movement random. He closed it.

“What do you see me doing here?”

He toyed with his pen. “Do you know what a coat-holder is, Grace?”

She waited.

“A guy who gets two other guys riled up enough to fight each other and then says, ‘Here, I’ll hold your coats.’ We think that’s what Bartholomew did. Stir up fights and stand on the sidelines, coatholding.”

“But not this time.”

“Not this time. He was killed Wednesday night and the GM soy field burned.”

“Where is it?”

“Not too far from the Union Pacific railroad sidings as you leave town, if you’re taking the 10 toward Indio. You can’t miss it. It’s the blackened earth that looks like it’s been hit by a meteorite. Surrounded by cops now, so flash this from here on in.”

He opened the desk drawer again, and this time pulled out a laminated tag identifying her as an FBI consultant. Her driver’s license photo stared back, big dark eyes, black hair, pale skin. Next time she’d put eyeliner on and more mascara. Her eyelashes disappeared completely against the blue background. And blush. Always blush. Something nice and pink. She clipped the tag to her shirt collar.

“This, too, if you need to show it around.” He pulled out a copy of the DMV photo of Bartholomew that Grace had seen stapled to the cover sheet of the coroner’s report.

She folded it and put it in the back of a notebook she’d bought at a Qwik Stop in Escondido on the way there.

“I heard Bartholomew had a running conflict with Frank Waggaman over genetically modified crops. And that he attacked Frank in a clothing store the day he died.”

“You mean, could Frank be good for it? Think about it, Grace. If Waggaman shot Bartholomew he would have let us know. He would have spelled out Waggaman’s name in Morse code, or enough for us to get it. God knows, the man knew how to spell.”

“You’ve got a list.”

“Suspects? Yeah. We’re working some.”

Annoyance flared. His inability to open up mirrored his lack of generosity when she was a child. Everything had a cost. He seemed to sense her thoughts.

“Last night, a second field was torched, also a GM crop—sugar beets this time. Twelve arrests, misdemeanor vandalism and destruction of property. The thing we don’t know is if the murder and fire in the soy field is more than superficially connected to the second torching.”

“Same accelerant?”

“Different. Car gasoline, unleaded, burning Bartholomew’s body in the soy crop. Diesel fuel in the sugar beets.”

“Anybody taking credit?”

“You mean for the second one? It started as an opportunistic student call to arms against Bartholomew’s murder, organized on Facebook. It morphed into something else.”

“Opportunistic?”

“Finals start next week at Riverside U.” His voice was dry. “What better reason for not studying than honoring a dead professor by taking over a genetically modified crop in his name. There were about a thousand kids. It was a candlelight vigil that turned into a swarm. The ag convention head, Frank Waggaman, was giving a tour to delegates in the sugar beets field when it happened.”

She digested that. Jeanne’s boyfriend, Frank Waggaman, in the mix again.

“A lot of it’s caught on tape.”

“They must love that over at Channel Two.”

“It’s Three, here in the Valley, but yes.”

He leaned on an elbow, pressed a finger to his temple, massaged his forehead.

“I love this place, Grace. The Palm Springs Film Fest and the White Party and the Coachella Stagecoach and the tennis matches at the Grand Champions and the Bob Hope Golf Tournament. I love the little stuff, too. I love the statue of Sonny Bono and the horses carrying tourists and lovers. How people can walk down the street here safely holding hands, no matter if they’re green, purple, or polka-dotted, and trust me, I’ve seen them in all those combinations. This is a place with a huge heart, Grace, and it’s my job to protect it.”

He lapsed into silence.

“So you want me to do what, again?” Grace asked.

“Oh, yeah. Lost my train of thought; too busy listening to the ‘Marine’s Hymn’ in my head.”

She half smiled. She didn’t want to like him.

“Grace, you didn’t know Vonda very well.”

She remembered a tea party she’d orchestrated; her younger cousin’s shy delight at the way Grace had placed teddy bears and dollies in a circle, a toy plate holding a crumb of doughnut in front of each. Downstairs, the voices of the adults had been soft, relaxed, mingled with the cries of the boys playing a raucous game of tag in the backyard.

One of her few, undiluted golden memories of a time when things were easy.

Interrupted by other memories—Vonda teetering blindfolded on the edge of the pier, screaming on the handlebars of an older brother’s bike, running into traffic for the sheer rush of seeing terrified drivers slam on their brakes.

Grace remembered Vonda well enough to be afraid of her. For her.

Her uncle rubbed a finger into his eye, exhaled. “She’s our youngest, our only girl. I guess we always babied her. She’s—how old are you again?”

“Thirty-two.”

He nodded. “She’s twenty-six.”

He glanced behind him and Grace saw a frame of Popsicle sticks painted in blue poster paint and decorated with sparkly buttons. In the photo, a young Vonda stood smiling in a party hat, eyes shiny as black buttons.

“Married. We thought that would settle her down. She lives here now. That was one of the reasons I requested a transfer to this field office. I’ve been here six months.”

“Just? Explains the holes in the wall.”

His gaze went to the wall.

“The guy before you had pictures.”

Pete picked up a crystal paperweight embedded with a gold FBI seal and put it down gently. “Vonda might be involved in Bartholomew’s murder.”

Outside, the silence was cut by the faint drone of a jet.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what I need you to find out. Report to me. You won’t attend briefings. I want an outsider’s perspective. See if there’s anything I missed. I’ll make everything available. Whatever you need, ask. Here are contact numbers and directions to the murder site.”

He scribbled on a pad, tore it off as if it were a prescription, and passed it over to her.

“Should have been a doctor, Uncle Pete.”

“What?” His face was shot with worry and blank love.

“Got the handwriting down.” She stuck the paper in her bag. “I take it her alibi’s checked out for Wednesday night.”

“Her husband’s. Hers, not so much.” He opened his mouth as if there was more, closed it, and rocked back on his chair.

“You’re not telling me what those alibis are?” She kept her voice pleasant, but inside, she was fuming. It felt like a clumsy version of “I’m not telling until you guess,” a game Katie was brutally good at.

“It would be more helpful if you did your own investigation, came back with what you find.”

“If you think Vonda’s involved, how can you work this case?”

“Conflict of interest, you mean. Columbine settled that one for the agency.”

“Columbine.”