Out at Night (24 page)

“The QA’s all done, what are you talking about?” It was the man in the suit again. Judith had pushed too far. “The man’s wife is in labor, Jude. And his job is done. You know it, and I know it.”

Grace kept quiet. The truth was, Vonda was probably four hours away from delivery, but she figured Stuart deserved the chance to find that out the old-fashioned way, pacing the floor with his wife.

Judith cracked the brim of her cap down over her eyes, grabbed Grace’s elbow, and guided her a few steps away. The light from the switching signal flashed across Judith’s face. It was a strong, lean face. Grace thought it had probably been beautiful in makeup accenting the high cheekbones and sculpted jaw. Now there was the beginning of a good bristling menopausal mustache.

Judith’s voice was low and angry.

“Look. I have a small company here. Top-rated. My aim is to create an ecofriendly environment. Sending these wind turbines out is the biggest contract I’ve put together, and I’m behind. Over a hundred windmills total. Get that? I’m a little guy trying to make it in a very competitive world. Do you have any idea what it’s been like around here? With police roadblocks during protests, I can’t get half my workers in to do their jobs.”

Perfect opening and she grabbed it. “Tony Conroy.” Grace pictured Sarah’s husband during the brief moment she’d met him, the way his boots came within inches of her face, making her flinch. His smile.

“What about him?”

“He here Wednesday night, around seven-thirty, eight?”

“You mean when the murder was happening in that soy field. I already gave the police a list. Who are you again?”

Grace held out the FBI ID tag, still attached to her shirt collar.

“Yeah, Tony was here. Had a bunch of guys call in sick. There’s a nasty flu bug going around, as if I need anything else. Look, Tony’s a good kid.”

“Just had that little rough patch when he threw his first wife out of a moving vehicle and ran her over.”

Judith cracked her knuckles. A train whistle sounded.

“We’re done. I have to figure out a way to get Kansas where it needs to go.”

Chapter 29

It took an hour driving to get to Riverside University. Traffic slowed on the 10 around Palm Springs, but she made up the time as she approached Beaumont and the 60 turnoff. The moon glowed, a dagger stabbing downward toward a hillside clicking with wind turbines. The sky was starless, silky, and black.

She passed a row of fast-food restaurants and realized it had been a long time since she’d eaten. She could wait. The idea of another fast-food meal turned her stomach.

She knew from the map that the school was near UC Riverside and she’d visited the UC school before on a case. But Riverside U. was a private school; a professor had just been murdered; parents were spooked. She wondered what she’d find.

She got a map at the security kiosk and directions. Two stone lions, backlit so that their ruffs stood like ermine collars, guarded the entrance. A boulevard led into the school, both sides of the road landscaped with expensive, full-growth palms. Centered at the far end of the boulevard, a pointed clock tower constructed of pale rose marble stood erect between two low domed buildings. It looked like a Viagra commercial.

The campus was bright with lights, but the students walking kept their heads down and hurried along the paths, conferring timidly with each other, darting quick looks at the road and traffic, startled and stepping back to avoid the occasional student on a bike or long board. Everybody looked weary and upset.

Grace turned at a side street that wound through the campus and drove past a row of brick buildings. A girl stood in a dorm window, brushing her hair. Grace wondered if she realized she could be seen from the road.

She found the band shack at the back of a glittering gym, parked illegally at the curb and got out. She heard a brief burst of a trumpet, and as she got closer, laughter. The door to the shack was unlocked.

Inside was a kid’s clubhouse. A silk-screen print covered most of a wall—Che Guevara: soulful eyes, wiry beard, wearing a beanie.

The room was crowded with toys: a foosball machine, a pool table, ping pong—the paddles worn. The net on the table sagged. She didn’t see any balls. Beanbag chairs lay crumpled against the walls. A television set with the cord unplugged sat on its side.

The noise was coming from around the corner and she heard Nate’s hynoptic voice over the trumpet.

“Me myself? I’m voting Republican next time.”

Laughter and a celebratory toot on the trumpet.

“I mean it. We teach this stuff, year after year, none of it changes, none of it means a damn, except a good man gets snuffed.”

A short burst of Taps on the trumpet; no laughter this time.

“Come on, Nate.” It was a soft female voice.

“T.A. Nate to you.”

Grace couldn’t tell if Nate was serious about wanting to be called a teaching assistant, or just trying to bring the mood up after he had so successfully dampened it.

“Tits and Ass Nate?” A different female voice, slightly mocking.

A scatter of laughter; uneasy this time. The combination of death and sex had cast a pall.

“Wait, did you hear the door open?”

A patter of footsteps. Grace came face to face with a young woman wearing tights and a smock, her hair tufted in blue and white streaks. She looked at Grace doubtfully, and for a moment, Grace saw herself through the girl’s smoky kohl-rimmed eyes.

“Are you lost?”

Grace didn’t answer. She walked around the corner. Nate sat on a desk in a tiny room stacked with band equipment. He was wearing jeans and a soft striped shirt, swinging his feet, his hands clasped loosely between his legs. In front of him crouched a group of kids taking notes, mendicants at the feet of the oracle.

He’d managed to control his cowlick. He made sleepy eye contact with her and jumped off the desk. “Okay, kids, find current examples of how the dominant culture reinforces ‘knowing one’s place,’ what steps you’d take to change things—and this is the most important part—how those steps would change the culture from the bones up. Everybody out, see you next week.”

Six students filed past, stealing quick glances at her and hurrying past. She didn’t recognize anybody. Nate waited until they heard the door in the other room close and the last voices die away.

“You don’t look surprised to see me.”

“Bad pennies, foot fungus, and Vonda’s cousin, yeah, I thought you’d keep showing up. What can I do you for?”

He picked up a small spiral notebook and tucked it into his jeans’ pocket.

“I talked to your mom.”

He frowned. “Leave my mom out of this.”

“She told me how much you wanted Bartholomew’s job. How you would have done anything to get it.”

It stopped him cold and he half laughed, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. The stamp of hair under his lower lip jumped as he sneered. “You are so full of shit.”

He walked out the door and flipped the light off behind him. Grace followed him into the bigger room.

“How long have you been carrying the load for him? A year? Longer? I bet in his office, he didn’t even have a computer, did he? So who wrote up the lesson plans for the classes, who contacted kids if a schedule changed? And you’re telling me you weren’t sick of this guy?”

Nate darted his tongue between the gap in his front teeth and pressed, as if he were trying to pry his teeth apart. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Then who did?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

He yanked open the door. A cold wind gusted into the room.

“Security’s going to be by if we’re not out of here.”

“What’s that class you were teaching?”

“A salon,” he spat. “Not a class.”

She stepped outside and turned back to look at him.

Venom spewed from every pore.

“If you didn’t kill him, who did?”

“Some fucking cop, that’s who. Bartholomew’s been on every hit list for years.”

He snapped off the light, stepped outside and slammed the door shut behind them.

__

Grace was buzzed into the jail by the same corrections officer from the day before. The CO had gelled her hair and it lay flat against her scalp instead of drifting in a fuzzy nimbus around her face, but her cheeks were still pink, her face unpainted.

“Agent Descanso and Detective Zsloski say to send you right back. Follow me.”

She led Grace to the booking area lined with a bank of video monitors and an IN CUSTODY board with names in greasepaint. Past a blue wire locked door, two police officers flanked a prisoner duck-walking in chains down a corridor to another door. On the monitor, Grace saw that the door led to a parking garage where a police van idled, waiting to take the prisoner on the next leg of his little journey through life.

The not-so-pleasant part.

“That’s where they go after they’ve been bound over for court,” the CO said, watching Grace watching the monitor.

And then three things happened almost simultaneously, information crowding in that changed everything. A name she’d scanned on the IN CUSTODY board filtered into her consciousness. It was a name she knew well.

At first there was a jolt of surprise, followed by a surge of relief; it was a joke, had to be; then acid slammed up her throat as her gaze dropped from the monitors to the blue cage right outside the jailers’ station.

It was Jeanne, hunched over her knees in the holding cell.

Grace must have cried out because Jeanne turned. It looked like she’d dressed in a hurry and Grace wondered if her uncle and his team had gotten her out of bed. A vein under her left eye bulged like a small purple worm. Her eyes were wide, dazed. She focused on Grace as if she were a drowning woman grabbing hold of the last floating thing in an ocean of dark. She was wearing a lacy brown bra under a yellow tank top, and a strap angled across her rose-heart tattoo, as if it were crossing it out, a classic no! sign.

“What is she doing here?”

“She’s wanted for questioning.”

“Are you nuts? Where’s Mike? Where’s Zsloski?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She yanked open the door leading to the hall that held the cage. Jeanne limped over and dug her fingers into the wire that separated them.

Grace leaned in, her voice urgent. “What in the hell is going on?”

“There was a dog hair on Bartholomew’s body, Grace.”

“I heard. The coroner told me.”

“It’s Helix’s. It’s your dog’s.”

“What are you talking about?” The words didn’t make sense.

Jeanne repeated them, more slowly, her eyes wide and desperate.

“Bartholomew’s body. The coroner found dog hair.”

“Right, he told me.”

“It’s from Helix, Grace. A piece of his hair on Bartholomew’s body. I didn’t do it, Grace. You have to believe me.”

Her stomach roiled. “Where is Helix?” Grace imagined her dog in the back of the cruiser car, tail thumping at the approach of any stranger.

“I called that vet place on Voltaire you use sometimes to board him. He’s not here.” Jeanne looked at her. “You’re not getting any of this, are you?”

Grace shook her head. Her legs felt rubbery and she grabbed the cell wall that separated them and held on.

From the area next to the holding cell, she could see back into the jailers’ nerve center. The door opened and her uncle walked in.

He saw her first in the monitor, dropped his gaze, and wordlessly opened the second door.

“Follow me.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“If you want to see her again, follow me.”

“I’ll be back, okay? You hang on, Jeanne.”

Pete held the door open for her and they stepped into the corridor. She was close enough now to smell soap and aftershave and the pressed smell of a clean shirt.

He walked her past a bullpen that looked out on the main police lobby. He opened the door to a conference room. Grace followed. Jeanne had been picked up in San Diego. It didn’t make sense.

Her uncle motioned to a chair and sat. “This is a room that can record video and audio, but it’s not recording now. Thought you’d want to know that.”

Grace stared at him in stony silence.

“She’s wanted for questioning in a variety of terrorist activities.”

“Jeanne Bigelow. My AA sponsor. A terrorist. This is it. I was giving you this one little window—”

“Grace—”

“No, I don’t even want to hear it. You set me up. Wanting me to investigate your daughter, my cousin, make sure she was clean. You just didn’t want me anywhere near what you were doing to Jeanne.”

Her uncle looked at her. “How much do you know about your sponsor?”

Grace didn’t respond.

Jeanne had been everything her real mother, Lottie, was not. Lottie was a drive-by parent, and the weapons—lethal words lobbed like grenades, an unshakeable narcissism that put her at the center of every story, an unerring ability to go right for the pain and probe it—were perfected over a lifetime. It annoyed Grace no end that everybody overlooked Lottie’s obvious defects and was half in love with her, finding her funny and fierce, mesmerized by the swing of her tasseled boots and the twitch of her hotpants, the brave sparkle of her platinum hair.

When Grace had gotten pregnant, the first thing she realized was how little she knew. She’d been lost, afraid, alone, a wandering young parent, terrified at making mistakes, without a guide. Later still, a drunk in shadows, with shadows. Holding a child of light. And Jeanne had stepped in and saved her life.

Grace knew all about saving her own life. But she’d made changes first for Katie, one small painful step at a time, long before she was able to muster what it took to do it for herself.

Jeanne was her safe place. The one person she could always count on to tell the truth.

If Jeanne were at the conference table instead of crouched in the holding cell next to the intake bay, she’d be busy telling Grace that Grace herself was the only one she could count on to be the truth teller.

That no truths were plain to see.

That all truths were hard-won.

That forgiveness cost.

“Grace?”

Uncle Pete sighed, patted his shirt, and fished out a toothpick. “She knew him. Did she tell you that?”