Out at Night (7 page)

“Bartholomew had first been hit by a bolt from a crossbow, and from the distinctive cracking pattern in the ribs, the killer tried to extricate the bolt and failed.” Salzer pointed at a section of tissue. “Normally, a wound of this kind would have been tight. He used an expandable broadhead, a tip that explodes a barb on impact. The bolt would have plugged the wound and there wouldn’t have been profuse bleeding.”

He lifted a clipboard off the wall and scanned it

“In this case, fifteen hundred cc’s of blood were recovered from his chest cavity. Where you see the raw pink and red tissue and white rib bone, under the blackened, charred skin in the concave of this chest, is the area where the bolt had been. I removed it in the course of my examination.”

“Who has it now?”

“The Palm Springs police were first on scene, followed by the Riverside sheriff’s deputies. The area’s just close enough to the outskirts of town that sometimes they both show up, especially now with the convention. As for who has the bolt now. . .”

He skimmed the clipboard, found it.

“Police. The bolt had lacerated a lung and punctured the heart in the upper right quadrant of the left ventricle. Death would have been certain, and imminent, but this guy didn’t want to wait around. In essence, Bartholomew was bleeding out as he burned to death.”

Salzer hung the clipboard back on the wall next to a grease board where four current autopsies were listed, amounts and weights itemized in neat columns.

“What was the carbon monoxide saturation level?”

“You mean in his airway?”

She nodded. She was still thinking about what Bartholomew’s last moments must have been like, pinned to the ground by the bolt, in shock, still alive enough to know what was happening, yet incapable of preventing it.

“Toxic saturation levels, but not lethal. His lungs were heavier by a couple hundred grams from fluid produced when the lungs were seared and his airway had narrowed to protect the lungs.”

He covered the body again with the sheet and waited as she went through the door. He turned off the lights and locked up and they walked down the hall.

“I worked the Esperanza fire,” he said quietly. “The burn-over on this one would have been just a few minutes.”

“Burn-over.”

“Fire literally can burn over the top of things. Here, there was a limited amount of fuel and the body was only partially cremated. Bodies cremate at between fifteen hundred and three thousand degrees.”

They were back at the deputy bullpen. He pushed open the front door and the heat smacked her like a living thing.

“Get this guy, Grace. He’s a nasty piece of work.”

She nodded and stepped into the parking lot.

After the door closed on him, Grace trotted behind her car and threw up.

Chapter 8

She took 60 to the 10 to the 111, navigating switchbacks of purple hills cut with dark brown trenches and expanses of sand. Miles of desert stretched ahead. Wind turbines stood close to the road, marching in regiments up the brown hillside, protecting what looked, at a distance, like a compound of windmills—a family—the big ones towering over the little ones. She passed shopping outlets and a billboard advertising dinosaurs. Next to the road, the Union Pacific carried freight in a steady stream of double boxcars.

It was just after four and the dry desert sun turned the asphalt a shiny black. Just after seven in Harbor Island. She’d tried reaching Katie that morning when she’d flown in to Lindbergh Field and taken a taxi home to pick up her car and pack a few things for Palm Springs.

No answer. She’d tried again, compulsively, right away, and this time, the hotel desk clerk had apologetically said he’d thought they were already out.

Maybe they’d be back by now, Katie brimming with news.

Or not.

Maybe Katie wouldn’t want to share a piece of the day she’d had with her dad.

Grace hit the gas and passed a slow truck. The wind punched against her car and lifted it sideways in a scalding wash of blowing sand. It was a bump, a hiccup, a swat of a giant invisible hand, but its power sent a flush of heat up her body. She gripped the steering wheel and steadied the car. A row of giant windmills gyrated in a frenzied dance and the boxcars rolled on in a yellow swirl of dust.

Traffic was stalled on Indian Canyon Drive and Grace cracked her head out the window, straining to get a better look. Up ahead a police siren wailed, the sound undercut by the murmuring roar of protestors. The cars crawled forward.

Through her passenger window, Grace caught a glimpse of a brown valley sweeping down to her right. Wind turbines churned on the ridges. Dust spumed across a dirt road leading to a small train depot.

She put up the windows, adjusted the air conditioner, and spread MapQuest on the seat, wishing she had a map to navigate what came next.

___

It was an older neighborhood off Ramon Avenue, fading apartments and duplexes and cottages with cracked sidewalks. Grace missed it the first time and circled back. Bartholomew’s house was set back from the street, a cement pebbly structure with an iron gate. Barrel cactus lined the sidewalk.

Yellow police tape stretched over the paint-blistered front door. There was a padlock below the door handle. She pulled to a stop at the curb behind a police unmarked and locked up. A big guy fighting flab got out of the unmarked. He came over and they shook hands. Homicide Detective Mike Zsloski. Older, face permanently flushed, right on the edge of having a stroke.

She followed Zsloski up the walk, trying to recall which case they’d worked together. She went back in her mind through the cases in the last year and found it. A black gang member working out of north Palm Springs in the Gateway Posse Crips, who’d ended up stuffed into a sealed drum in San Diego harbor.

Zsloski offered a pair of gloves and she put them on as he took off the police tape and unlocked the padlock. “They finished up an hour ago.”

Grace nodded. It had taken from Wednesday night until midday Saturday to process Bartholomew’s house. She wondered why. He hadn’t died there.

The living room was an explosion of books, papers, folders stacked against the wall, burying the carpet, spilling out of the bookshelves, piled high on the coffee table. Crime lab print powder crusted the books and walls and light switches.

“Not that Bartholomew read much,” she said.

Zsloski smiled briefly. “We’re due there in fifteen. What you want to see’s in here.”

He took her down a short hall, opened a door and stood aside, letting her walk in first. Letting her see it.

Her stomach flipped.

It was a small room. In a normal house, it could have been a child’s bedroom, or held a TV and favorite books and some comfortable chairs.

But there was nothing normal about this room.

Small school head shots covered the walls. A dizzying blur of faces smiled back, eyes friendly, direct, frozen in time, photos placed so thickly together Grace wasn’t sure what color the walls had once been.

Under each photo Bartholomew had carefully blockprinted out the name of the student. His handwriting was neat, precise. The hairstyles in some of the photos went back thirty years—lacquered helmets and mullets and bubble cuts, and the tape holding the photos and names to the walls was yellowed and cracked.

At some point, Bartholomew had run out of room and had started using the floor and ceiling. It looked like a fungus encroaching, a swirling mass of color and imagery so intense and dislocating Grace had to stop herself from walking out.

It was stuffy in the room but Grace felt cold. She walked around a desk he’d constructed out of a wooden door propped up on cinder blocks, stacked with foot-high columns of books and papers. A brown plastic kitchen container held pens and pencils instead of knives and forks. Buried in the middle of the papers was a Remington typewriter with a piece of paper wound into its platen.

Grace twisted the cartridge. The paper in the typewriter was blank. She looked around the room, trying to absorb it. Trying to slow her heart. Trying not to run.

“What do you think?”

“Reminds me of John Nash.”

Zsloski was silent.

“That schizophrenic mathematician at Princeton who created game theory and later went on to win a Nobel prize. He had a room like this. Only not photos. Equations and—

“Oh my God.” She rocked back on her heels as if she’d been hit in the face. Her stomach clenched and for the first time, she felt a jolt of fear.

Zsloski followed her gaze.

Grace went over to the corner, where two walls connected.

Amid the swirling cacophony of images, taped onto the crowded wall, was a blurry snapshot of Grace, her name block printed under it. Next to the photo, also taped to the wall, was an article from the Desert Sun about the lecture and Bartholomew’s arrest.

Zsloski nodded. That was what he’d brought her here to look at, she knew that now.

“He took that picture that day he crashed my lecture. A month ago.”

“Any idea why?”

She shook her head.

He nodded as if he expected that. “They’ll be asking you about that. And the lecture. You’ve got the address, right?”

She nodded, her eyes still on the photo. She’d seen evil before, more times than she cared to remember. But never such a clear manifestation of insanity. It was a darkness at the end of the road. A troubling message from the grave, every bit as potent as Bartholomew’s Morse code summoning her.

She wondered if somewhere in the room, hidden in plain sight, Bartholomew had taped the face of his killer to the wall.

If even now it was staring at her, smiling.

Chapter 9

The FBI substation was tucked in a group of brown office buildings trimmed in succulents. Perry Como was singing through speakers as she crossed the covered parking lot. There was no identifying sign on the building, nothing in the lobby.

Upstairs, the door was made of steel. To the right was a keypad, to the left, a buzzer. She scanned the ceiling and found it, what looked like a gray convex ceiling light.

Behind the locked steel door were video screens, and on one of those screens she stood in the hallway, leather satchel in hand, a woman of uncommon beauty.

She’d added that last part to make herself smile. Always good to be smiling when caught on a camera in front of an FBI door. It didn’t work. The room in Bartholomew’s house had knocked the smile out of her.

She pressed the button and was buzzed into a small anteroom where an agent stood behind Plexiglas. He was wearing a sports shirt and slacks with no ID tag. He didn’t introduce himself.

There was a metal slot in the glass, like a tollbooth, and she slid her ID in so he could check it. He looked up briefly, making sure the picture matched. She resisted the urge to tell him she was much better-looking at night after he’d had a few drinks.

He slid her ID back and buzzed her through an adjoining door that opened into a small conference room. A beeper went off: the all-clear signal that she wasn’t carrying.

“They’ll be in soon.” His hair was brown, without a trace of gray. He could be any age from thirty to sixty. He was wearing a wedding ring and blue veins roped the backs of his hands, old hands, which had the curious effect, Grace thought, of making his face look even younger.

He glanced at the bag she was carrying. It was leather and brown with straps. She’d bought it at a Coach discount store in Cabazon when she first started working in the lab.

“There’s a wall outlet here if you need it.”

She nodded and pulled out her computer.

He closed the door and left her.

__

Grace looked up from her flash drive and for an instant, it felt as if she were flattened in another dimension, looking into her life from a distant place. There was no air in this other place. She couldn’t breathe. Her head felt squeezed, elongated.

Her dead father stood in front of her, bulkier, with drooping lids and fierce brown eyes. A welter of lines cracked his face as his lips moved.

He smiled with no tenderness.

“Uncle Pete.”

“SA Descanso in here.”

His voice was lower than her dad’s had been, and she could almost guarantee this man had never hit the high notes singing “Louie Louie” as a good-night song. She actually couldn’t imagine him singing much of anything to his five kids, now that she considered it, and for a moment, she wondered what her cousins’ lives had been like in some airless, cheerless dimension with a man who didn’t easily smile.

“Ready? They’re on their way in.”

She noticed he didn’t wait for an answer.

__

“What do you know about racial profiling using DNA?”

She looked down the table. Zsloski slouched next to her uncle. Across the table sat an investigator named Thantos from the Riverside sheriff’s department who was part of the joint terrorism task force, and another Palm Springs FBI agent named Beth Loganis.

The sounds of a busy office carried through the closed door into the room; somewhere a fax machine churned and phones rang. A small window had been cut into the door of the conference room; Grace caught a glimpse of two agents rushing past in the hall, voices urgent and muted.

She waited. Usually it took a beat before they got it.

Zsloski was frowning and doodling on a pad. He raised his shaggy head. “Hold it. Race is in the DNA?”

All heads came up.

“We’ve been able to do it for a while; we just don’t call it that in press releases. We can figure out a suspect’s race from collected DNA found at a crime scene. We say race, and people think target, when what we’re actually talking about is the narrowing down of a suspect pool, catching a bad guy before he does it again.

“If you knew from collected DNA that a suspect was a white male whose skin easily sunburned, wouldn’t you want to know that chances are the perp has red hair and freckles? Figuring that out is a little complicated, but—”

Zsloski threw down his pen. “Uncomplicate it.”

She was trying not to stare at her uncle. In the way he held his pen she saw her dad, in the slope of his shoulders, her grandfather.