Out at Night

NINE

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 smile easily.

“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 for it. Usually it took a beat before they got it.

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

All the 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.

“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. 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 to move there, 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-Europe-an, 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.”

Pete 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 mentioned 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.”

He waited.

“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 is 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 deaths of four scientists and crippling injuries to five others. One guy was left blind and without hands. The victims 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.”

TEN

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.