OUT AT NIGHT
SUSAN ARNOUT SMITH

For my father

Ernest Weschenfelder

who taught me to love mountains

and my mother

Florence Weschenfelder Johnson

who showed me how to move them

Rest in peace, Dad

The use of recombinant DNA could potentially alter man and his environment, for better or worse, by intention or accidentally. Therein lies the promise and danger of this new technology.

—Testimony at HEW hearings on

recombinant DNA (1978)

All the predators come out at night.

—TOUR GUIDE, Palm Springs wind farm

Table of Contents

Cover page

Title page

Dedication

Epigraph

One Wednesday

Two Thursday

Three Friday

Four

Five Saturday

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen Sunday

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two Monday

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE Wednesday

“She’ll call the police if I don’t come home.”

Professor Thaddeus Bartholomew kept his hands on the wheel the way he’d been directed, his eyes straight ahead. Actually it was a desperate gamble, his last. His wife had been dead over two years.

“Shut up and drive.” The man in the seat next to him pressed the snout of the revolver against Bartholomew’s thigh and he tensed involuntarily and felt the gun nose him hard.

In the headlights, giant windmills whirred against the night sky. They’d been driving toward Palm Springs for almost half an hour and they were getting close.

Bartholomew had spent the entire time searching his mind for a way out and finding none. He was a scholar, at home in the tranquil world of old wars and settled battles; the voices that called to him were the ones that lived on the page and in polite debates on the History Channel. He realized in that instant he could speak so confidently about history because it was done.

It wasn’t sitting next to him reeking with sweat, crazed with some plan to maim and kill a substantial part of the world’s population.

A plan Bartholomew feared had every chance of working.

Bartholomew rubbed his hands on the wheel and tried again. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you could talk to me about it again. Make me see.” His voice held a tremor he didn’t like.

“Turn left here.” The gun jabbed him again.

“Careful with the gun.” Bartholomew instinctively jerked the wheel toward the dark dirt road leading between the high fields of soy. He slowed to avoid a sudden dip in the road.

He thought despairingly of how he’d almost made it to the car when the man had emerged from the shadows of the parking garage. He could admit it now; why lie, what was the point? He’d been flattered, more than happy to stand there a few moments listening. Relieved to postpone going home to an empty house and his solitary meal.

They’d talked before; or more precisely, he’d listened to him rant. Bartholomew wasn’t a man given to snap criticisms, but this man scared him.

At least he did now.

There’d been enough signs.

Documented. Why hadn’t he ever documented what the man was saying?

Ironic, when he thought about it. His lifework had been spent painstakingly resurrecting those marginalized, forgotten ones history had relegated to footnotes: the dispossessed, disenfranchised, the lost. Yet here was one of that very number whose words Bartholomew hadn’t thought to record. And the ingenious plan the man proposed had made him recoil in horror. The very next instant, it seemed, he’d found a gun pressing into his side.

Fast. It had happened so fast.

He wasn’t going to make it out of this.

Not alive.

“Stop right here.”

They were in a small dirt parking lot next to a four-acre plot of soy contained by a barbwire fence. On the fence was a sign:

USDA EXPERIMENTAL SOY PROJECT 3627

DO NOT ENTER

VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

“Turn off the engine.”

Bartholomew shivered, his head bowed. The man reached over and switched the engine off, yanking out the keys.

“Move.”

“Where?” His lips were numb.

He’d left the headlights on and in the wash of light, barbwire hung in strands where it had been cut, revealing a hole large enough for a man to crawl into the dark rows of soy.

“I’m giving you to the count of ten.” His voice was flat.

Bartholomew lurched off the seat and scrambled toward the gaping hole, his heart hammering.

“One.”

He clawed through the fence break, his jacket catching on the barbwire, and plunged into the soy. A cloying, sweet smell bit his nostrils. The ground was uneven and the darkness almost impenetrable. He stumbled and went down hard on his knee, feeling the dark cold earth and the familiar odor of mulch. Pain shot through his knee.

“Two.”

The voice was coming from the outside perimeter of the fence.

Bartholomew whimpered and immediately cut it off, swallowing the metallic taste of fear that was flooding his mouth. He grasped a sturdy plank of soy and heaved himself up. The stalks upended under his weight, the roots leaking clots of dirt. He took a staggering step and regained his balance. The pain was volcanic, roaring up his thigh into his groin.

“Three.”

He thrashed farther into the thicket and felt the stalks give way, sending him sprawling into a cultivated field. He panted shallowly, getting his bearings. In the dim moonlight, he could see the soy laid out in neat, bristling rows. He scanned the field and spotted another place along the fence where the soy seemed to be growing wild. He limped toward it, gripping his thigh above his injured knee to brace himself.

Dimly, he’d been hearing numbers.

“Eight,” his attacker said, his voice still distant.

Bartholomew wormed his way as far as possible back into the dense undergrowth and slid down, gripping his knees to his chest, making himself as small as possible.

His cell phone.

“Nine. I lied. Any last words?”

The voice was dead-sounding, clearly coming now from somewhere inside the fence, and most alarming, seemed to be turned straight toward him.

His attacker couldn’t possibly see him. Bartholomew yanked the cell phone free and dialed the familiar number, his hands shaking so badly he balanced the phone on his good knee to find the numbers. His phone was an old model, the kind nobody made anymore. The keys sounded unnaturally loud. He waited for the voicemail to kick in.

He had to focus now, figure out what to say and how to say it. He peered at the small electronic keyboard in his hand, lit with the comforting green light. His fingers moved carefully across the keys.

“Okay, then.” The man’s voice was closer.

The air seemed to shiver and in the next instant, a piercing pain slammed into Bartholomew’s chest. The velocity of it crashed him backward and sent the cell phone flying from his grasp.

At first all he felt was stunned disbelief coupled with a roaring pain, and then he realized something was lodged in his chest. A stick.

An arrow.

He couldn’t breathe. No, he could breathe, but not deeply; he couldn’t move, he was pinned to the ground. It was getting warm under him now, and that was a comfort. He touched the arrow and wondered if he could risk yanking it up. The soy above him parted and he stared up at his attacker’s face. It was blank as an insect’s. The man was holding aloft the cell phone.

Goggles, Bartholomew thought wonderingly. Why was he wearing goggles?

Wordlessly, the attacker shifted the crossbow in his grasp. He reached down and grasped the arrow and—God no!—yanked it with all his might and then tipped it back and forth as if trying to work it free and a fresh wave of pain engulfed Bartholomew.

He cried out in terror and pain, his voice an incoherent tumble of words pleading and thank God it stopped, stopped and his attacker pulled a water bottle from his jacket.

Bartholomew’s field of vision was narrowing, the edges fuzzy and gray. He fought to stay conscious. His attacker unscrewed the bottle and tipped it over him and for a brief instant, Bartholomew thought, Water, he’s going to grant me that, at least. He caught the sudden sharp odor of gasoline. Through an agony of pain, he peered up and saw the attacker light a match, the sharp tiny prick of flame a bright cold thing, the burning match falling, falling like a small meteorite through the black night.

Flames boiled up his body and the last thing he heard was a crackling noise, close to his face, and the attacker retreating into a haze of orange. And then the orange window narrowed to a pinhole and Bartholomew eased into it and was gone.

TWO Thursday

“Let me get this straight.” Mac McGuire shifted on the blanket, digging his feet into the sand. “You’ve come all the way from San Diego, down through Florida, on to the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, so you can take our five-year-old swimming on a beach that’s covered with razor-sharp coral.”

“First of all, it’s not covered with coral, just that one side.” Grace Descanso squirted a dollop of sunscreen directly onto his back and smoothed it in. “And secondly, she’s wearing beach shoes. She’s fine.”

A warm wind gusted across the waves, creating a froth of white that enveloped Katie in foam. She twisted her arms out like a windmill, the turquoise water sparkling around her chest, floating the ruffles of her hot pink swimsuit. Her hair was wet, the golden curls darker than usual.

Katie saw them watching and beamed. “Hi, Daddy Daddy Daddy.”

And Mommy Mommy Mommy, Grace thought sourly.

“Hi, sweetheart, I’ll be back out in a minute.”

Grace could tell by the sound of Mac’s voice that he had a sappy look on his face.

He kept talking, his voice dropping down into the reasoned, considered tone he used on air. He was a CNN health reporter, responsible for filing two stories each week and available for live reports. He was also the face of the unit, on air every weeknight introducing stories researched and prepared by producers behind the scenes. When viewers turned on CNN, they often thought of Mac. At least that’s the way they spun it in promos.

“I know she’s fine, I just thought it might be nice to take her someplace amazing. Both of you,” he amended.

Grace worked the sunscreen into his muscles a little too vigorously. He smelled like a tropical fruit drink. She’d already slathered Katie again, until her daughter was slippery as a baby seal and just as quickly had slid out of Grace’s grasp into the water. Then it had been Mac’s turn with Grace, his fingers strong, his touch lingering. The mating dance of the tropics.

Now his skin glowed hot under her fingers; he’d arrived in the Bahamas the day before, and the sun had already streaked his hair with gold. Grace shifted position and kept working. Over his shoulder she could see part of his dark green swimming trunks. A fine pink scar ran up his left arm, still new. She felt a twinge. She’d put that scar there, and if it had happened the other way around, she doubted she’d be letting Mac anywhere near her body, no matter how good his fingers felt.

“I mean, it’s interesting the place you rented,” Mac continued. “But I would have opted at least for a real bathroom.”

“It’s ecofriendly.”

“It’s a compost heap, Grace, with a wooden throne that sits behind a curtain. How in the world did you find that place?”

“A Portuguese cousin in the travel business. Remind me to kill her when I get home.”

In truth, the bed-and-breakfast was a little more primitive than she’d expected; the promised gourmet lunches had turned out to be leftover mac and cheese wrapped in crinkled aluminum foil and cut into cold wedges, served with hamburger buns studded with raisins accompanied by a vat of peanut butter; and the beach billed as remote was an inaccessible clamber down spiny-ridged limestone. Luckily, she’d rented a car, and after adapting to the harrowingly narrow roads filled with traffic hurtling straight at them, they’d found the beach not far from where they were staying.

The main thing had been to get away. Everything else had been secondary. Life for Grace Descanso had changed in an instant on a sunny October day in San Diego when a monster had reached into her world and grabbed her daughter, and by the time Grace had gotten her back, nothing was ordinary ever again.

Mac was back, for starters.

She’d contacted him in the middle of the kidnapping, when she was desperate and cornered. He’d represented the best hope of getting Katie back. The only hope. And now Grace couldn’t say, Gee thanks, for saving my life and helping find our daughter, but you can leave now.

Katie Marie had no memory of the kidnapping, but Grace relived it beat by beat, startling at sudden noises, tensing at the sound of alarms, always looking for the shadow with the long arm that could snag into the shot and blur out of frame, loping away with Katie in its jaws.

The price of getting her back was constant vigilance. Even worse was the guilt, and Grace feared that would never go away. She had lied to Katie growing up, telling her daughter that her father was dead, and now here he sat, sucking down a canned mai tai and criticizing her parenting skills.

“You know this isn’t healthy.” His voice was mild. “You need to take a breath. Relax. The bad guy’s gone.”

She snapped her eyes back to his shoulders. She’d been watching Katie with the intensity reserved for photos on a post office wall. Mac had the kind of skin that never burned, turning golden and ripe as a peach and then browning. Katie had that skin, and his hair color too, but she’d inherited Grace’s dark Portuguese eyes and a dimple that appeared whenever she smiled, and Grace had to admit she’d been seeing a lot more of it lately, ever since Katie had learned her father was still alive.

“And you know the bad guy’s gone because?”

“I have the money and resources to figure things like this out, that’s the because. He’s not getting back into the States, don’t worry.”

“We’re not in the States.” She glanced around the quiet beach and saw a sand crab busily dragging the corpse of a small sea anemone across the sand.

“Still.”

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” Katie crooned. She clasped her small hands together as if she were holding a Mr. Microphone in a karaoke bar. “I just want my daddy.”

“I’m coming, princess.”

Pet names. He’d met Katie face-to-face for the first time exactly twenty-four hours before, and already he had a raft of them. Little dimple toes. Miss periwinkle flippy hair. Sunshine happy girl.

He clambered to his feet and reached for a towel.

“Do you remember that old movie, A Man and a Woman?” Grace twisted the cap back on and tossed the suntan lotion aside.

“I wonder if I should take off my sunglasses.”

“Remember, Anouk Aimée, and she loses her husband, and then she meets this race car driver, and they both have adorable kids and then they all go out to dinner? Or maybe she lost her race car driver husband, and met somebody else, I can’t remember.”

“She’ll probably splash all over them, right?”

“Well, it’s not like that here.”

“What are you talking about?” Without the sunglasses, his eyes were a brilliant green against his skin. He dropped the sunglasses onto the blanket.

“The kids. In that movie. They were there. But somehow in the background. They were present, but didn’t take over the whole thing. The grown-ups still had a nice, normal dinner and they were flirting to beat the band and—”

“So.” Mac shot Grace a swift, evaluating look. “Are you thinking about the dinner or the flirting part?”

“I am hungry.”

He smiled, his teeth very white, and she felt her body flush.

“Daddy.” Katie flung her arms wide.

“I’m coming, sweetie girl,” he called, his eyes still on Grace. “Ten minutes. Then I take you and your mom back to your place so you can get changed for dinner.”

They’d already agreed to that; it was just that he said it with such authority, and she thought about that as she gathered up the blanket and stowed it in the car. What she didn’t want was Mac upsetting the balance she had with her daughter, and it was already too late for that.

He had come over in the morning in his rental—a classier, cleaner car than the cheap one she’d rented before he got there—and picked them up, and now he was driving them back, and it seemed, incrementally, that he was in the driver’s seat a lot. She still wasn’t certain how she felt about that.

From the moment yesterday when Mac had flown in and found them, the life she’d shared for five years with Katie had been over. She’d stepped over a threshold into another world, and it scared her.

What was worse, she had no idea what it was doing to Katie.

Katie had been subdued—shocked—when she’d met him, stealing quick looks up at his face before moving out of reach. Mac had taken it slowly, never pressing, and that, too—his restraint—pressed a guilty place in her heart and made Grace want to run.

That first night, they’d eaten dinner in a small local café, the only outsiders. The wife of the cook served them steaming plates of rice and fish and when Katie yawned as the plates were cleared, the server said in a musical voice over her shoulder as she swayed back to the kitchen, “Looks like it’s time to get your little one home.”

Home.

They were so far from that, all of them. Far from the safety of home. From the idea of it. And Grace feared she’d never find her way back, and that even if she could, she might be returning empty-handed. Losing the one thing that mattered most.

She watched as Mac and Katie came up the beach toward the car, wrapped in damp sandy towels, Katie chattering. There was a warm gusty wind but suddenly Grace felt chilled, the growing tug of distance, separation.

She gripped the side of the window as Mac bumped the car down the narrow rutted road that led to her bed-and-breakfast. They turned a corner and a haphazardly built octagon painted a startling shade of Creamsicle purple appeared, set back in a tangle of undergrowth.

A truck idled in the drive. The back looked like a flimsy covered wagon held together with duct tape. A sunburned man with a nest of red dreadlocks sat hunched in the driver’s seat, talking on an iPhone. He clicked it shut and sat up and eased out of the truck as Grace and Mac got out of the car. Mac was taller and bigger through the shoulders but the other guy was younger. He smiled.

Grace made a sound. “He’s back. That’s my landlady’s son. Clint. He likes to stop by unannounced.” She reached into the backseat to help Katie out.

“Swell,” Mac said. “And he has the key, right?”

“Actually the door doesn’t lock.” Grace unsnapped Katie’s seat belt and she scrambled free.

“Ah.” Mac nodded.

Clint plodded over and pulled a crinkled envelope out of the pocket of his board shorts. The flap had been opened and resealed with a piece of cloudy Scotch tape.

“Here.”

She ripped the envelope open and pulled out the single sheet, scanning it.

“Is that who I think it is?” His voice had a lilt to it, as if he’d had a couple extra beers and couldn’t quite shape the hard vowels anymore.

She glanced up.

Clint was staring at Mac.

“No, Clint, you’re getting them mixed up.” She refolded the letter and put it in the pocket of her cover-up. “The other guy’s better-looking and works for Fox.”

Clint frowned and brightened. “Oh, I get it. A joke. Very funny.”

Mac touched her arm. “Okay?”

She knew he was talking about the letter. She shrugged. “Why don’t you ask him, he’s already read it.”

Clint ignored her, hitched up his board shorts and padded over to a twisted tree that stood in the yard.

“It’s from my uncle Pete,” she said to Mac. “Wants me to call him. Said it’s business. He works for the FBI in Palm Springs. Whatever it is, it can wait.”

“I didn’t know you had an uncle in the FBI.”

“He’s not even a blip on my radar, Mac. We haven’t talked in years.”

“Forgot to tell you, Grace, about this tree.” Clint cleared his throat importantly. “Katie, this is important for you, too.”

Katie started to trot forward and Mac shot out an easy hand and stopped her.

Black sap oozed from creases in the bark. Clint scooped a finger of sap and held it out. “See this sap? Don’t touch it. It’s called a poisonwood tree, because that’s what it is.”

“Poison?” Katie cried. Grace instinctively reached for her but Mac was there first. He rested his palm on Katie’s curls.

“Yes, Katie, it can kill you.” Clint leaned on the word kill like it was a horn. “Some people are immune, like me.” He wiped the sap onto his board shorts and left a trail. “But no worries! It stands next to this tree.” He patted an ashy colored tree with flaking bark. “It’s the antidote. I haven’t figured out how to use it yet, but it’s here, if you need it.”

“Ah,” Mac said again.

A black snout poked through the slats of the truck, followed by a second, more massive head.

“Oh, and don’t worry about those guys.” Clint gestured grandly to the dogs. He walked down the path toward the front door of the B-and-B. “They only attack if they smell fear.”

He pushed open the door. “Got anything to drink?”

“Okay,” Mac said. “We’re done.”

Half an hour later, Mac moved them. He turned in both cars, took them by water taxi to Harbor Island five minutes away, and relocated them to the Pink Sands Hotel, owned by the man who started Island Records. Now they stood in the living room of a villa.

Katie dropped her backpack, her eyes wide. “Wow. It’s got flatscreen.”

“And movies, Katie. I can rent whatever you want.”

Katie flung her arms around Mac’s legs and Grace looked away. The windows and French doors opened onto a patio that faced a three-mile pink-sand beach dotted with lavender beach umbrellas, sand as soft as corn silk, the water a turquoise that slid into mauve at the horizon.

“Come on, I’ll show you where you’ll sleep.”

Katie took his hand and skipped beside him and Grace trailed behind, the sherpa hauling suitcases. It occurred to Grace that Mac already knew where the bedrooms were.

“Here’s where you and your mom can stay.” The room held two queen-sized beds with a view of the beach. “My room’s on the other side, and the bathrooms are in between. Want to see?”

Katie nodded, her eyes round.

“I’ll wait,” Grace said. Mac shot her that look again and she flushed.

That night they ate in the hotel dining room at a small table covered in brocade, next to a plaster wall of vivid pinks and oranges, wooden mermaids hanging in the archway. Katie sat next to Mac and insisted he cut her chicken, and he bent over it as if it were a sacrament. Nobody bothered them.

Clemens, the manager, explained that their villa had housed kings and queens, heads of business and Hollywood royalty, and that one of the hallmarks of the place was the other guests’ exquisite ability to leave those whose faces were familiar alone.

That, and the staff’s attention to detail, anticipating every need and silently meeting it.

It was as if the ground were slipping, but it was quality ground, a finer silt than Grace was used to. Even the towels she used to dry Katie after her bath felt better. Fluffier. Softer. Whiter. Part of Grace loved being taken care of. And part of her feared it. But Katie seemed to be slipping into this life with Mac effortlessly—and that, too, scared her.

She’d been alone for so long, making every decision about Katie, and now here was a man—her man, he’d been, a long time ago—reverently embracing his role as dad. Daddy. The big guy. Mr. Right who could do no wrong. At least not in Katie’s eyes. Part of her wanted to yell, Hold it! Wait! Who’s the parent here, anyway? Not wanting to hear the answer.

Some uneasy thing tremored under the surface and Grace knew what it was.

Sometime soon, Katie would look her right in the eye and ask out loud why Grace had lied to her about her dad. Lied about the most important thing in Katie’s life.

And Grace didn’t have a good answer.

She doubted she ever would.

“How do you want to handle this?” They were sitting on lounge chairs on the patio. From the bedroom, Katie murmured in her sleep.

Mac reached across the dark expanse and took Grace’s hand, his fingers warm, touch solid.

Past the railing and down the terraced walks, waves foamed whitely against the dark expanse of sand. Landscaping lights illuminated the palm trees and Grace saw a man and woman wading along the edge of the waves, holding hands in the growing dark.

The setting sun was turning the water a soft pink that glowed as if it were lit from within, and the air was heavy with the scent of hibiscus and the sea.

“We have to take it slow,” Grace said.

And then she got up and sat down next to him on his lounge chair, placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him. He kissed her back, and pulled her on top of him. The rush was instantaneous, greedy, joyous, drugged with heat and desire. He rolled to his feet, picked her up, and carried her to his bed.

The clothes came off, and she wished again she’d packed better underwear, but who knew that instead of playing four rounds of Candyland she’d be sliding her hands over a man voted by People magazine as one of the top 100 sexiest men in America?

Last year’s list, she reminded herself. Although he still looked pretty good. His chest gleamed with a fine sheen of sweat. He shifted and she felt him against her. Liquid fire.

“Oh, brother,” she said. “Oh, oh, brother.”

She rolled away and wrapped a sheet around her. She took a long shaky breath. She rolled back toward him and put her hands on the flat of his chest. His skin burned the palms of her hands and that close, his eyes were heavy-lidded, his gaze intense.

“Grace.” He kissed her shoulder blade, the hollow in her throat where her heart was beating. “Talk to me.”

“It means too much.” Her voice was quiet. “If we made love and it didn’t work—and it would be making love, Mac, not just the physical part, what it means.”

He slid his hand under the sheet and cupped a breast and she sucked in a breath, almost in a panic, her body flooded with warmth.

He removed his hand with effort. He was breathing through his mouth. He had a nick on an incisor. He’d chipped it as a kid using his teeth to cut a fishing line. She was doomed. She already knew how he’d gotten all his childhood injuries. His knees touched her shins and shifted away.

He regarded her, loss and desire on his face. “What do you want, Grace?”

Her eyes filled. She felt his breath, soft, on her face. He searched her eyes. All the bones in her body seemed to soften; she was warm wax in his hands.

“For the last five years to go away. Not the part with Katie. The part without you.”

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. In the moonlight, his eyes glowed bright. “But see,” his voice was low. “That’s just it, Grace. That was the part without Katie. For me. That was the part.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her throat closed. The night air felt heavy against her face. She had done this, she had done this. And there was no fixing it.

She rolled away from him with effort and slid free of the sheets. She stood. Her legs trembled. Their clothes lay in a jumbled trail across the Saltillo tile floor and she took a shambling step.

“You bolt at the first sign of trouble.” There was no accusation in his voice; it was as if he were tracking the beats of a song, figuring out its rhythm. She realized her heart hurt.

“I bolt.” The floor was cold. She found her T-shirt and put it on. She needed underpants. She needed distance. She needed to remember to take her birth control pills.

“It’s as if you’re there one moment, and then you flip a switch and you’re gone. I don’t want you to go.”

Mac flung off the covers and stood. The heat between them was old, and raw and real. She looked away, but not before she’d seen that he’d seen it, too, in her eyes, on her face.

He pulled her to him and kissed her and she wrapped her arms around him and stood trembling, feeling the shock of his presence, the immediacy of his reaction. His arms seemed harder, somehow, than they’d been five years before, his muscles knotted.

“Hunger does that.” His voice had an edge.

She could feel her heart start to race. “That’s a little scary. Reading my mind.”

“I’ve had five years’ practice. You were squeezing it,” he added.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My arm. The muscle. You were squeezing it as if you were testing its strength against your memory. My arm won.”

“Yeah, memory’s a tricky thing.”

“Been my experience.” His body shifted and tensed and she felt the familiar fit of his body, both of them wanting more.

She dropped her hand to his back. She could still feel the sun in his skin. “Have you had a lot of that? Experience?”

“Do my best.” He slid a hand down her back, and she could see him tracking its impact, evaluating mentally the way her back tensed, the short intake of her breath when his bare hand slid from her T-shirt to her skin, the hooded light in her eyes.

And then it rounded a corner again, what she was feeling, and her eyes filled.

He stopped his hands and moved his naked strong body a fraction away.

“I did this to us, okay? I made it be not simple.”

“So now you’re beating yourself up.” His hands found her hips. He pulled her gently toward him and she felt again the blurring sweetness of desire, the melting heat. His palm grazed her buttocks, his eyes still on hers.

She was going to have to push him away. If not now, then soon.

Her breath came in short gusts. “What are you offering, Mac?”

“I think that’s pretty clear.”

“No, I mean it.” She rocked back away from him, but all that did was position her closer. If he moved, even slightly, toward her. Into her.

“Okay, what am I offering. The truth. Ask me anything.”

“Risky business.”

“Riskier not to.”

He touched her breast, her belly, the soft part of her that melted under his touch. They stood together in the dim light, their bodies naked except for her T-shirt. He swallowed. Sighed as if it took everything he had. He pushed her gently away.

“Truth then. I get the feeling you’re a whole lot of work. Maybe I’m not up to that. Maybe I’d give it my best shot, and still come up short.”

Her heart was beating very fast.

“You kept Katie away for five years. When I think about that too much, it makes me crazy.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“Maybe it is too late. Not for Katie. But for us.”

His room held a king-sized bed, a mahogany sideboard, a bar, a flat-screen TV. Through the French doors she could see the ocean. She looked everywhere except his face.

“So that whole ‘sticking around when you’re not sure’—that stuff you said after you got out of the hospital and flew here to surprise us and meet Katie—that’s bullshit?”

“I don’t want to do this anymore. Not here. Not this way.”

He was a big man, his movements economical. He found his shorts and pulled them on. It was abrupt, final, and changed everything. The small window he’d offered—the one through which she could have slipped without penalty or disguise—had closed.

It would take much more now to open it.

Yet as Grace returned to her solitary bed next to Katie’s, listening to the commingled sounds of the surf and Mac gargling into his sink, it seemed as if they’d been doing this forever, or a version of it, and maybe when things evened out, they’d add back in the sex part and get married.

A fantasy she’d construct brick by fragile brick.

THREE Friday

They spent the morning in a golf cart touring the candy-colored clapboard Harbor Island village, stopping at Angela’s Starfish for fresh conch, searching for Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburger in Paradise. Mac had been polite and remote with her, lavishing attention on Katie and right before Grace’s eyes, their daughter bloomed.

There had been one reoccurring speed bump, an awkward one, when she noted it: she seemed incapable of letting Katie and Mac hold a conversation without interjecting herself into it, trying to change the focus, not to her, but so that Mac was closed out.

He’d point at a modest wooden house set back from a road and tell Katie it was a library. Grace would turn her in the other direction and point out the sea.

As the morning wore on, the tendency became more pronounced until Katie and Mac’s defense was to close Grace out entirely, and it was then that she finally lost her footing on the emotional cliff face she was climbing—this strange new territory with no toeholds—and slid a good distance backward, scraping parts of her psyche she didn’t know existed.

Battered, she thought jauntily. But still there.

On the heels of that thought, she felt it start in her throat, and then behind her eyes. She’d found herself close to tears.

Now she and Mac lay on lounge chairs at the pool, watching Katie paddle in the shallow end, her water wings bright glints of inflatable pink plastic against the turquoise. A brilliantly colored wall of bougainvillea shielded the pool from the walkway. There were other people sunbathing on towels, but Grace didn’t get the sense that anybody was actively listening. It was only the two of them side by side, and the quiet sounds of Katie paddling and singing a small, tuneless song.

“I talked to my folks.”

“And?” She reached for her lemonade and drank.

“They were wondering if I could take Katie back to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. They live about an hour away. They could drive in.”

“You mean, by herself?” Grace kept her voice steady, but the panic was rising.

“Well, me.”

“That’s in less than two weeks.”

He was silent.

It hadn’t occurred to her until just that moment that maybe rehabilitating herself with Mac would be the least of her worries. The image of grandparents, bewildered and furious at having had a grandchild withheld, suddenly rose in her mind. It was another prick threatening the bubbly bliss of Grace’s imagined life.

“She’s barely five years old. I thought we were going to try trips, the three of us.”

“This is sort of one.”

“You flew out. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I wasn’t going to meet Katie while I was in the hospital, Grace.

We agreed. I didn’t want to scare her. You’d told me any time I was ready was fine with you.”

“Yeah, well, people usually call first, but maybe that’s me.”

He started to speak and stopped. This wasn’t going the way she’d envisioned.

“She’s got a whole other side of the family, Grace, she’s never met.”

“She’s got plenty of relatives she hasn’t met on my side either, she can start with those; I barely know them myself, we can start together.”

She stopped. It was exactly what she’d done all day; promised herself she wouldn’t do again.

“I found us a therapist. Elise Lithgow.”

She sucked in a breath.

Mac scribbled a phone number on a napkin next to his Coke and passed it to her. Grace glanced at it. It was a Mission Hills prefix.

“She wants to meet both of us separately first, to see if we’re each comfortable with her, so if it’s not a good match, I’m open to something else, Grace, if you’ve got another idea.”

Grace shook her head. Katie grabbed the side of the pool and kicked. She was wearing pink nail polish on her toenails and every so often the color winked in the water.

“Grace, when you stopped me last night—slowed me down so I could think through what I was doing—I realized something. You were right.”

“No, no, I wasn’t. Do over. Let’s do a do-over.”

“Let’s just do it right.” He looked at Katie and hesitated. “When I was in the hospital I worked with a Realtor. I bought a place near your house; with the market sliding, everything’s available. It’s a condo in the Rondolet. Right around the corner.”

“I know where it is.”

It stood on Shelter Island, an enormous round building with views on one side of the San Diego Yacht Club.

“It’s far from perfect right now; it’s packed with an old person’s furniture—I bought the place from an elderly woman moving into a nursing facility—but it’s a place, and it means Katie will have her own bedroom when she visits.”

It sunk in. He had planned this. The whole time he was in the hospital, while she sat by the edge of his bed. While they talked about how the light fell on San Diego harbor and the exact timbre of their daughter’s laugh. He’d been working with a Realtor.

“Lots of kids wind up going between two houses. It’s not ideal, but it’s not the worst thing, either.”

Dissolving into sparkly bits! The big candy-colored house with the granite counters and the security gate. Evaporating into air! The three of them climbing, skipping the stairs to some phantom life where Mommy and Daddy lived in the same bedroom and Katie was down the hall and everybody ran in slo-mo in fields of daisies like some personal hygiene commercial. Fragmenting into pieces! The dream of laughing around the kitchen table ha ha ha and having the only silences be good ones, not the lethal kind that took years of explaining and apologies and therapy to sort out.

Gone, gone, gone, not ever having to work at it, and never, ever having to say she was sorry.

She started to say, Right! Say it with conviction and nonchalance and stopped, straightening in her lawn chair.

A Royal Bahamas policeman was bicycling to a stop outside the gate leading to the pool, and even before he scanned the sunbathers and locked eyes with her, she knew he’d come for her.

FOUR

They walked the beach. Pink sand foamed into a burst of white, the waves a dark green flattening into a purple so deep it looked inked. On the horizon a sailboat stood motionless.

Grace cut him a look. He was slightly built, very black, his gray shirt and shorts still crisp despite the humidity. He was wearing sandals. His name on the tag read epsten and when he spoke his voice was a deep baritone. “Thaddeus Bartholomew. Does the name mean anything to you?”

Grace shook her head.

He glanced around. No one was close enough to hear. A man in a leg cast and crutches limped away from them down the beach, his wife walking ahead, holding a cooler and a blanket. The wife never turned to check on him, striding briskly away from her husband as if he was paying for something not quite current in the marriage account. She seemed to be picking the least steady ground, the softest sand. He followed, a resigned slant to his shoulders, his wedding ring a dull flash against sunburned fingers.

“You received the message from FBI Special Agent Peter Descanso.” Epsten peered at Grace, his eyes bright.

“I’m on vacation.”

“Yes. With your daughter and her father.”

Grace shot him a look of surprise.

He said mildly, “Not all white people look the same, but those two do.”

“She has my color eyes,” Grace said. A rogue wave washed toward them and Grace took a step back. “And a dimple. You can’t really see that from where you stood, but it’s there.”

He started to speak and stopped.

“Some people think that Mac’s the one with the dimple, but he really isn’t. His is more of an indentation.”

He looked at her a long moment. “Thaddeus Bartholomew,” he repeated gently.

“Name’s vaguely familiar but that’s as close as I can get.”

She was still smarting that a stranger had immediately seen the connection between Mac and Katie. What if it wasn’t just physical? What if it transcended any bond she’d built with her daughter? And wow, the wrongness of that. Already putting Katie between them in a game of cosmic tug-of-war.

“He died in Palm Springs two nights ago. He was a history professor at Riverside University. Somebody shot him with an arrow. A bolt, they call it, in the States.”

“Special Agent Descanso—my uncle Pete—has been trying for years to get me to spend more time with him and his family. If you knew him—”

Officer Epsten shook his head.

“—but if you did, you’d understand this is so. Like. Him.” She was working up an aggrieved tone of voice. Soon she’d be able to thank Officer Epsten nicely and he’d leave, reassured that she’d done all she could, had nothing to offer. “Tracking me down on a family vacation so I could get pulled into something I know nothing about. Have no relationship to.”

Epsten stopped walking. “Special Agent Descanso, he didn’t explain in the letter?”

She shook her head.

“Mr. Bartholomew left a clue, one investigators think does involve you. He was dying, but resourceful.”

Epsten’s voice was measured and Grace realized in that instant she’d underestimated him. He wasn’t going away.

She was.

That’s what he’d come to tell her. She stared at the water. A teenage girl stood in the waves, her hair a springy golden mane against perfect skin.

“He sent a message to his home phone right before he died. At first, they thought it was just clicks, a child perhaps, playing. He had an oldstyle cell phone, no text messaging.” He turned. “It was Morse code.”

She snapped a look at him. He stared at the water. From the side, his profile was strong. A slight graying near his glasses betrayed his age.

“He spelled out your name, Grace.”

She licked a lip. “My first name? Because spelling out the word grace when you’re about to get killed by a maniac with a crossbow is probably standard stuff.”

“Both names. Actually the exact message was Find Grace Descans. He was cut off before he could add the o. He picked you, and they’d like to know why.”

He stooped and picked up a shell. It was small, fan-shaped, a soft purple and cream. He wiped off the sand and tucked it in the pocket of his shirt. “My granddaughter collects these.”

“I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“Not really.”

The teen in the ocean turned. It was a woman in her forties who’d had very good work done. A little too tucked around the eyes for Grace’s taste, but still.

“It’s bigger than somebody dying randomly in a field. Isn’t it?”

Three horses picked their way carefully down a path toward the water, riders gripping saddle horns, and Grace turned back toward the Pink Sands cabana on the beach where a Bahamian attendant named Bolo smiled, waiting to offer a towel and a mauve-colored lawn chair. Grace smiled and shook her head and kept walking, taking the soft sand trail cut into the side of the hill that led back to the villa. Officer Epsten kept pace.

“Are you going to answer my question?”

“There’s an international agricultural convention hosted by the United States government that starts in Palm Springs tomorrow and runs through Monday night.”

“Heard about it. Its official name is the International Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology.”

He stared.

She shrugged. “A friend has a friend who’s involved in it.”

“Apparently Mr. Bartholomew was involved in it, too.” He scuffed the sand with the heel of his sandal. “He was not who he appeared.”

“How so?”

Epsten stared at her soberly. “You’ll have to ask Special Agent Descanso that.”

The villa was coming into view and she could see Katie on the balcony. She waved, and Katie bounced up and down and waved back. Mac appeared on the patio and he put his arm easily around Katie’s shoulders and Grace felt hollowed out, light.

“If you know about Katie’s father, then you probably know we haven’t had much time together.”

“And I am sincerely sorry for that, madam.”

Katie was laughing, Mac bending over her saying something only she could hear. Katie impulsively reached up her arms and hugged Mac hard.

Whatever Grace’s uncle needed her to do in Palm Springs was far less important than the likelihood of Mac forging a bond with Katie that forever altered the relationship she had with her daughter.

“I’ll be back to drive you to the water taxi, which will take you to Eleuthera. On Eleuthera, there’s transport waiting to drop you directly at the plane. They’re holding it for you.”

“Am I supposed to go right to Palm Springs?”

He handed her a sealed letter with an FBI insignia on it. “That, I do not know, madam.”

“How much time do I have?”

He glanced silently at the villa. Mac and Katie had disappeared inside, the balcony empty. He looked at her neutrally.

“Enough to say good-bye.”

“Mommy! Mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy!”

Katie threw herself at Grace. She was still in her swimsuit; her skin smelled of chlorine.

“Daddy’s going to take me out in the golf cart later, just the two of us. We’re going to find a store where they sell kitties. We’re not going to buy one, just look. I want to hold a fluffy one.”

Grace met Mac’s eyes over their daughter’s head. He shrugged and Grace felt a territorial tug.

“You need to take a bath, sweetie.”

“There was a bird that flew onto the balcony. It had orange on its head and a very, very big beak. This big.” She held out her hands in front of her nose.

“Sweetie, that’s great. I need to talk to Daddy a minute, okay? Let’s get you out of this wet swimming suit.” Her tone held just the faintest hint of criticism, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mac tense.

It eased something in her. She rested an open palm on her daughter’s shoulder.

“Come on, kiddo, I’ll start the water for you.” She moved toward the bathroom, Katie skipping next to her. “I’m going to show Daddy how hot to make the water, so he knows.”

She glanced back at Mac just in time to see his jaw tighten. After a beat, he followed.

“What’s going on?”

Mac followed her into the bedroom and closed the door partway. From the bathtub came the sounds of quiet splashing, Katie singing an off-key version of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Grace could feel his eyes on her as she moved to the closet and pulled down her suitcase from the shelf.

“I have to go to Palm Springs and help Uncle Pete with something. Today’s Friday. Katie’s got Monday off—it’s a teacher planning day—she has to be back in San Diego for school Tuesday.”

“Katie stays here. You’re not taking her.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. A bold squaring off.

Her intestines felt spongy. “No. I know you need time with her.”

He crossed his arms loosely. He’d scuffed up his right hand somehow and the knuckles looked chapped. “I still want her Thanksgiving.”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“Now.”

The splashing stopped. “What?” Katie called.

Anger surged and spread through her body. Love was better, but this still had a warm glow to it. She shot Mac a look as she moved past him to the door.

“Everything’s fine, honey,” she called through the open door.

“I heard my name.”

“Daddy and I were just talking.”

“About what?” There was alarm in her voice and Grace went into the bathroom. A flotilla of rubber duckies bobbed in the water. A soap bubble bloomed on Katie’s shoulder, like a glittering corsage.

Grace sat on the edge of the tub and reached for the shampoo.

“About what a cool daughter we have.”

“You sounded mad.” Her eyes were dark and wide.

Grace massaged the shampoo into her scalp. “We’re fine.” She heard Mac come in behind her. “Aren’t we?”

“Absolutely.” His voice was a little too hearty.

“Lean back, honey, I’m going to rinse this off.”

Katie took a breath and held on to her nose and sank back into Grace’s hand. Katie’s hair floated in the water like a sea nymph’s, her lashes dark against her cheeks. Her head felt fragile in Grace’s hand, easily injured.

“You want me to—”

“Everything’s fine.”

He tried again. “But I could—”

“I’ll be right in, Mac, okay?” She lifted Katie up and squeezed out the water. She felt him moving away from the door, felt the absence of him.

“I held my breath.”

“I saw. When you’re done playing, I’ll rinse your hair again.”

Katie nodded, peering up at her uncertainly as if there was something that needed asking. That needed clearing up. That threatened world peace as she knew it.

“Okay,” she said finally.

Mac was leaning up against the door jamb, waiting for Grace when she got into the bedroom.

“She hears everything,” Grace said pleasantly, her voice low.

“I got that.” He smiled back pleasantly. “But let’s talk about you. What I especially liked was the bit about how hot to make the water. I think I can figure stuff like that out.”

Grace picked up a straw hat and a pair of espadrilles and carried them to the suitcase. She and Mac hadn’t danced this one before, but she remembered it from the times her parents did the steps.

“Go on, say the rest. The even-though-I’ve-never-had-the-chance-to part.”

He smiled. “Even-though-I’ve-never-had-the-chance-to.”

“Thanks to me,” she prompted. She lifted a clump of underpants and dumped them into the suitcase.

“Thanks to you. Here. Let me help you.”

“Gladly.” She was keeping her voice down, but it rang with hurt and her need to be right.

His eyes were bright with calculated interest. As if he’d waited a long time to play this game. As if he’d spent years studying the rule book. As if all bets were off.

He went to the set of drawers, yanked open the top one, and carried it over to the suitcase, upending the bras and tank tops into the suitcase, shaking the drawer hard.

“There. All set.” He tucked the drawer under his arm and carried it back to the dresser, shoving it back into the slot. “Anything else?”

“I’m good.” She unhooked a row of hangers and flung the shirts and pants in a clattering heap into the suitcase. “Ready to leave.”

“Works for me.”

The air left her body. A bullet of pain lodged in her belly. Not exactly a direct hit. He just needed more practice.

She was certain he’d been aiming for the heart.

She straightened. “I’ll be back in San Diego Monday night. Tuesday morning at the latest.” It sounded like a warning.

“Take your time.”

“You’re not keeping her.” It slipped out and the ferocity of it took her by surprise and made real the possibility of Katie leaving for good.

He looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time and not quite liking it.

“Why are you doing this?” His voice was even. “She’s my daughter, too. Mine. And frankly, that’s all I’ve been thinking about. What you did. What it cost.”

She slipped the shirts and pants out of their hangers, one by one, not looking at him. The hangers were wooden, well made. She carried them back to the closet and hung them up. They clicked together. The only clothes that hung now were the dresses that belonged to Katie, a small bright row of pink and lime green, splashes of yellow and orange.

“Grace?”

“Don’t think I won’t be checking with the school, to make sure she gets there safely.”

“Nice.” He shoved past her into the hall.

“Okay, so it’s going to be really fun.” Grace cradled Katie in her lap as she dried her hair with a towel.

“Why are you going?” Katie sounded worried.

Grace kissed her. “Oh, honey, I have a couple of days of work to do, that’s all.”

“But I want you to stay.”

“I do, too, sweetie.”

“But Daddy’s going to be here, right?”

“Right here.”

“With me.”

“Every second.” Grace lifted Katie down from her lap. The towel had left a damp splotch on her shorts. “Okay, what do you want to wear? A sundress, shorts?”

“Do you like Daddy?”

The question caught her by surprise. She turned away from the closet. “Very much. Why?”

“I think shorts. Those pink ones.” Katie dropped the towel and scampered to the set of drawers. “And the pink underpants. Everything pink.”

From the back, she was golden except for the pale band where her bathing suit had been. “Does Daddy like you?” Her voice was muffled as she dug through her underpants and pulled out a pair.

“I hope so. Sure. Maybe. Probably. The main thing is, Daddy likes you. Lots. I’m going to get the lotion we use on your hair, so we see the curls.”

Grace went into the bathroom she shared with her daughter and stared at herself in the mirror. A woman she barely recognized stared back. Her eyes were dark, intense, her face looked hunted. She slicked on gloss, smacked her lips together, recurled her eyelashes and fringed on mascara, her mind blank, back on Katie’s question.

Does Daddy like you?

She found the hair conditioner and went back into the bedroom.

Katie lay sprawled on her stomach, next to the open suitcase, shorts and a ruffled top a pale pink against her glowing skin. “How am I getting home?”

Grace sat next to her and worked a dollop of conditioner into her hair. “I’m glad you got dressed. That’s good. You’ll fly with Daddy and then stay in his house.”

Katie yanked up her head in surprise and Grace gently tipped it forward again. “He has a house?”

“Daddy bought a place almost right next to ours, so you’ll spend Monday night there, and then I’ll pick you up after school Tuesday.”

“He lives in San Diego in Point Loma?” Her voice was astonished.

“Not too far away. He bought it when he found out about you. He wants very much to get to know you and be a real daddy.”

Katie sucked in a breath, her head still bent. Her curls were damp ringlets against her scalp. “He is a real daddy,” she said, her voice almost inaudible. “He’s mine.”

Grace nodded. “Yes, honey. He is.” The bullet now was burrowing, worming its way up toward her heart. It was one of those time-release ones, guaranteed to keep chewing up her insides for some time to come. She wondered what it would take to get rid of it.

“All done.” She carried the conditioner into the bathroom, found what she was looking for and returned.

Katie sat with her knees up, her face down, protecting herself.

“Sunscreen.” Grace put it on the dresser. “Even if Daddy forgets. Don’t you forget.” The bottle was bright orange and had a cartoon of a fish on it.

“Mommy.” Katie’s voice was muffled, forced. “Did you just forget?”

“Forget.” Grace looked around the room, her eyes settling on the open suitcase, mentally reviewing the contents. It was a jumbled mess.

“I think I packed everything.” She closed the lid and zipped it. “If I forgot something, bring it back with you, okay?”

“No, silly, that I had a daddy.”

Katie raised her eyes and looked at her. Her eyes were wide, dark brown, fathomless.

Katie’s aim was much surer than Mac’s. It was a direct hit.

Grace felt the aftershock first, the trembling as her body braced for a blow that had already come, and then she felt the pain coursing through her. It was hot, electric, a wire that stung with recriminations and truth.

Grace had tried to leave Mac behind for good. What she hadn’t factored in was how much that decision would cost Katie.

“Am I interrupting something?” Mac stood in the doorway, a hopeful look on his face, the parent at the fence, the one on the outside.

There was a split second when Grace could have said something, fixed whatever it was between her and Katie, a single word and everything would have been okay, but in that blinding moment of time, Katie turned toward the sound of his voice. Grace had always reached out to Katie, instinctively, joyously, but now she stalled, free-falling, unable to move. She stared at Katie and for the first time felt the awkwardness of not reaching out, embracing her, and in that instant she lost her standing as a mother. Not with Katie, perhaps, but with herself.

“He’s here. That’s what I came to tell you.”

Katie turned to take a look out the window. Officer Epsten sat in an idling golf cart. Katie trotted for the door.

Grace made a small sound.

“Wait,” Mac said. “Give your mom a hug.”

Katie came limply into her arms, her body angled away. Grace felt an elbow. Katie squirmed free, leaving behind the familiar scents of new-mown grass and lemon.

Grace swallowed. She felt faint and afraid. “My cell doesn’t have an international connection. I’ll call you from a landline when I get in.”

“Sure,” Mac said, his hand touching Katie’s curls.

Grace walked the two of them out the wide door and to the golf cart. Mac stowed the suitcase in the back.

Epsten eased the cart forward along the bumpy path and Grace grabbed hold of the frame to steady herself, and by the time she angled her body around to take a look behind her, they were gone.

FIVE Saturday

Grace drove past the shop, circled the block, and found a place to park on Newport Avenue. It was two blocks from the boardwalk in Ocean Beach in San Diego, not far from the YMCA youth hostel. She walked past a row of antique shops.

The sky was a paler blue than the one she’d left behind in the Bahamas. Mixed in with the sharp smell of the sea was the odor of dirt and sweat and grimy cement.

A group of glossy-haired teens stood panhandling in front of the grilled door. They looked at her and scattered, starting a game of bocci ball farther down the street as she opened the door and went inside.

Helix yipped and clattered over on his fake leg, tail wagging joyously, and Jeanne looked up from her work. A fan shot a current of cold air across Grace’s body.

The shop was empty except for a fragile-looking woman in the chair wearing shorts, a tank top, and headphones the size of Egg McMuffins. Her eyes were closed and her mouth had dropped slightly open. She was sleeping.

“You’re back early. I wasn’t expecting you until Monday. Where’s your sidekick?” Jeanne put down her needle and reached for a new color. The beginning of a unicorn glistened on the client’s left calf.

“Hey, buddy.” Grace bent to Helix and scratched him behind his ears and he licked her face and woofed. “You sent Mac down there. To find us.”

Jeanne sorted colors, held up one to the light, put it down. “The light in here is for shit. Turn on the lamp, okay?”

Grace clicked on a standing lamp and positioned the light. Jeanne’s hair was a startling shade of red. Age had wrinkled the rose tattoo on her arm so that it looked wilted, the petals convoluted.

“You gave me directions to the beach you said you went to.”

“As a precautionary measure, Jeanne. Not so Mac could fly down there.”

Jeanne looked at her sharply. “You are talking about Mac McGuire, the hero in this deal, right?” She picked up a bottle of eggshell blue ink and squirted it into a cup.

“Is Jeanne feeding you?” Grace rubbed Helix’s belly.

He groaned and wriggled. He was a mongrel mix, black and white, with a fake leg that spasmed in the air like a Rockette executing a tricky high kick.

Jeanne rolled the calf gently and held it steady as she positioned the needle, delicately stippling the skin. The woman flinched slightly and Jeanne swabbed the calf with an antiseptic pad. “What’s going on?”

Grace swallowed, suddenly close to tears. “Why does something have to be going on?”

Jeanne stared at her over her glasses and went back to work.

“Can she hear us?”

“She’s listening to the Dead full blast. I’d be surprised if she could hear anything after this.” She shrugged in the direction of a chair. “Sit.”

Grace pulled a chair over from another workstation and positioned it so that she was facing Jeanne over the legs of the client. They were skinny legs—a kid’s—and Grace wondered if Jeanne had carded her before starting. The girl didn’t look old enough to be making a choice that lasted a lifetime, but then again, Grace knew age hadn’t protected her from doing things that cost. Were still costing.

She clasped her hands between her knees. “Can you keep Helix until Tuesday?”

Jeanne shot her a measured look, bent over the calf and inked in a shadow along the unicorn’s legs, so that the animal looked as if it were springing off the skin in a three-dimensional leap.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.”

Jeanne put down the needle and swabbed the skin. It was pink around the fresh needle marks. She tossed the pad into the trash.

Grace blinked. “I’ll put him in a kennel.” She started to get up.

“Sit. Sit.”

Helix wagged his tail and sat.

“Not you, you.”

Grace sat.

“Of course I’ll take him. What’s this about?”

Grace felt tears leak onto her hands. Jeanne yanked a Kleenex from a box and Grace reached for it blindly and dabbed her eyes.

“He wants to take her for Thanksgiving.”

“He’s her father, Grace.”

“Without me.”

Jeanne looked at her steadily. “How close are you?”

Grace licked a lip. Her mouth felt dry. She reached into her purse and took out a miniature bottle of bourbon and put it down on the worktable next to the bottles of ink and a glass container of doggie treats.

“Honestly, on the plane? When the stewardess made the announcement that she’d appreciate correct change, I told myself I was helping her out, buying this.”

Jeanne smiled briefly and reached for a new bottle of ink. “You didn’t drink it.”

Grace inhaled, blew the breath out.

“Take a meeting.”

“Can’t.” She felt rubbed raw. She stole a glance at the small bottle of bourbon and wondered if she could get it back in her purse.

Jeanne shot her a look and went back to work. Grace stared at the far wall. A crumbled set of terra-cotta pots lined a high shelf. Somehow Jeanne had managed to get tulips to bloom, and the bright yellow and orange and pink waxy petals bobbed on some invisible current as if they were watching a tennis match from the bleachers. Leaning against the wall under them was Jeanne’s cane, its thready topknot wearing a pink Barbie-sized baseball cap.

“I need to drive to Riverside County. Examine a body in a morgue.”

Jeanne looked at her a long moment. “It’s not Guatemala, Grace.”

“I don’t know if I can remember that, when I see it.”

“I could say it’s time you got over it, and you don’t want the bad guys to win by giving up a piece of who you are, but the truth is, we all give up pieces, every day, just to get by.”

Jeanne reached for a new color, a soft red the shade of old blood.

“I thought you couldn’t go back to work until they health-checked you.”

“It’s not the crime lab. I have an uncle who works in Palm Springs for the FBI.”

“Your uncle’s dead?”

Grace made a small sound. “You’re busy. I shouldn’t even be talking to you. You’ll ink in an extra leg.”

“I did that once. Told the client it was an Asian fertility symbol. I didn’t know you had an uncle in the FBI.”

Grace lined up bottles of ink. The bottle of black was bigger than the rest and she lined the cap up neatly so that the caps were straight across. A tear splashed onto a bottle called pink ochre and she wiped it off.

“He did something to my family that was pretty unforgivable.”

“That changed the course of family history?”

Grace dropped her hands. “I’m not joking, Jeanne. It was when my dad died, and things were bad. I haven’t talked to him in years, and the idea that I’m getting dragged into something that’s his, having to fix something that belongs to him—”

“Honey, if you want me to give you hell, you’re going to have to give me more to go on.”

Grace fished a treat out of the jar and fed it to Helix. “You’re lucky, you know that. I get you home, we’re working on that belly. Doggy aerobics.”

Helix smacked the treat down, snuffled the floor, picked up crumbs, and looked up at Grace expectantly.

“Don’t even think about it.” He thumped his tail and Grace scratched his white chin. He had a narrow jaw, little teeth. He slopped out his tongue and kissed her. Grace bent down and scratched the place right in front of his tail and he raised his rump and wagged his tail.

“I get called into this by some guy. Asks for me by name when he’s dying. So in the airport in Florida, between flights, I go to a business center and Google him. Turns out he stormed a lecture I was giving last month to forensic biologists on DNA and profiling. Storming a roomful of police nonsworns, can you believe it? Probably set some record for speedy arrest. Thaddeus Bartholomew.”

A clatter of bottles. Grace looked up.

“You okay?”

Jeanne had knocked over the bottle of red ink and it spilled across her fingers. Grace caught a swift smell of vomit and wood sap, a sharp image of bloody hands bent over a prone body, chest open.

Grace closed her eyes and waited it out.

When she opened her eyes, she was back in the tattoo shop. Jeanne groped for a Kleenex to mop it up. She missed the box and tried again.

“He’s a bad actor, Grace. Ted Bartholomew.”

“I wondered if Frank knew him.”

“We ran right into him, the day he died. Palm Springs isn’t that big.”

The skin around Jeanne’s eyes was getting crepey, and the eye shadow she used clumped in tiny balls of violet that made her eyes look very blue.

The teen in the chair stirred and Jeanne patted her calf heavily and stared out the front window. Grace had helped Jeanne paint the words rose tattoo in ornate red letters on that window years ago. Last year, Jeanne had added the words and removal, and Grace wondered how long it would take for the girl in the chair to come back for that part.

“Frank’s been putting this ag convention together now for over a year. That creep Bartholomew—sorry to be disrespectful of the dead—has been on his ass for most of it. Calling him a killer for GM-ing crops. Frank,” Jeanne said wonderingly.

Grace remembered Jeanne’s boyfriend as tall, with long, expressive fingers, smelling faintly of mulch, wearing brown boots and a laminated California state ag tag on a plaid shirt. Two geeks in a pod, Jeanne called herself with Frank.

Jeanne had met him at a conference for genetically modified crops, an interest that had morphed naturally out of her retirement as a scientist, and dovetailed with her lavish gardening efforts. A recent blue rose crossbreed had earned her a blue ribbon at the Del Mar Fair.

“I heard Bartholomew was killed in some field.”

Jeanne’s mouth tightened. “Well, he was alive when we saw him in Gerry Maloof’s. Frank hasn’t bought a single new thing for himself in years, and I made him go with me to get some pants. He has to introduce the secretary of interior, for crying out loud. He’s so hard to fit, with his long inseam.”

Grace didn’t want to hear about Frank’s long inseam, or any other part of Frank’s body, either. The small, homely beats of a relationship reminded her too much of Mac and what she might never have.

“And that’s where you ran into Bartholomew.”

Jeanne stippled in the red and the unicorn glowed. “It’s a fine, fine store. They were having a sale on these lovely linen pants.”

“What was Bartholomew like?”

“I’m not exactly an impartial witness here, Grace.”

“Your impression.”

Jeanne moved the needle, drew another line on the pale skin. “Fiery. Passionate. Threatening to sue.”

“On what grounds?”

“You need grounds?” The needle made a small metallic whirring sound. “No government oversight. Accidental gene transfer to new crops. Disastrous, life-threatening killer bad stuff we don’t even know about yet, and somewhere, a monarch butterfly is keeling over dead in the food chain. The usual. And if that doesn’t work, he vows to shut down the conference by force, if necessary.”

“By force. He used those words.”

Jeanne nodded. She swabbed the skin with a fresh pad and the sharp odor of astringent cut the air. She dropped the pad into the trash.

“What was Frank’s reaction?”

“Subdued. He’s maxed out, Grace. Has meetings from early in the morning until late at night. Probably knows your uncle better than you do.”

“Then he needs to be careful.”

Jeanne tightened her arms against her body, as if trying to warm herself. “Frank can only tell me a fraction of what’s going on, but everything he says, Grace, scares the hell out of me. You have no idea how many times a day bad guys threaten to maim or blow up or poison somebody.”

“Uh. Yeah, actually, Jeanne, I do.”

“I’m talking about Palm Springs, Grace. Crumbly, aging, jauntyfaced Palm Springs. Every time they slap a face-lift on that old girl, the plaster crumbles. She’s still got the moves, but it’s motor memory. She’s harmless. And an ag convention dealing with world hunger. That sounds safe, doesn’t it? Except lots of countries ban GM crops. Frank says he thinks the protests have tapped some big nerve.”

“Mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

“Exactly. I loved that movie, too. Liked it less when I saw it in the middle of men’s sportswear waving its fist at my Frank. Oh, and get this. Then Bartholomew whips out this throwaway camera and takes a picture of me.”

Grace shifted in her chair. The fan feathered cold air along her arms.

“He did the same thing the day he crashed my lecture. Got right up in my face and snapped a shot.”

Jeanne looked at her. The cracks along her mouth seemed to have deepened in the weeks since Katie’s kidnapping. “Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“What are you supposed to do there?”

“You mean, today? It’s one thing to go to Palm Springs and tell a bunch of FBI agents the gist of my lecture. That’s my only intersect with the vic and maybe they can find something in there. It’s another getting dragged into the middle of a murder investigation, and that’s exactly what Uncle Pete’s doing. He booked a room for me. I’m there for the count.”

“Except that’s not your only intersect with the vic.”

Grace looked her.

Jeanne glanced at Grace over her glasses and hunted through bottles, picked one up, held it to the light.

“Bartholomew didn’t call out Frank’s name. Or mine, either. He asked for you.”

A dark green liquid sloshed inside, as if it were a vial of alien blood. She twisted the cap off and inserted the needle.

“Look. I didn’t like that guy any more than you do, Grace. And my reasons were a lot better.”

“Yeah, but he had the nerve to send for me when he was dying.”

“There you go. Good reason to stay away. Why get involved if it’s not about you?”

“I guess what I’d like to know,” Grace tried to keep her voice light and failed, “is whether it’s okay not to go. Not to do some things. Even if we’re asked. Even though we’re called.”

“What’s the cost?”

Outside, someone went by on Rollerblades, the cracks in the sidewalk making the rollers clack. It sounded like steel balls in a garbage disposal.

“Maybe nothing.”

Jeanne shook her head as if Grace were a very slow pupil. Grace held her gaze defiantly.

“Go in peace, my girl. Live.”

Grace looked away. “I’ve worked hard to hang on to this anger, Jeanne.”

“Be a shame to give that up.”

“Uncle Pete hurt my family.”

“And you’re trying to come to terms with the guilt you feel about lying to Katie and Mac by doing what again, exactly?”

Grace checked her watch and slipped her bag over her shoulder. “I have to go.”

Helix cocked his head, looked from Grace to Jeanne, whined, his tone urgent, mournful.

“Shit.” Grace sat down. “A recipe for living, please. In English. Make it snappy.”

“All I’m suggesting is that maybe by pushing into whatever snarledup mess is waiting for you in Palm Springs, you’ll find a way through the stuff that matters.”

“Let me guess, it involves sacrifice, right?” She held out her hands, palms up. “Slit my wrists right now and be done with it.”

“Actually, the real question, Grace, is what are you not willing to sacrifice.”

On the wall were posters of body art. Grace’s gaze settled on a skull filled with flowers.

“I’m going to lose her, Jeanne. I’m going to lose my daughter.”

“I think you’re underestimating the power of forgiveness.”

“Hers? Or Mac’s?”

“Try yours.”

It was a strong, sweet sucker punch and it took a moment to recover.

“Can’t see myself trying that, Jeanne. Not anytime soon.” She got up. Helix thumped his tail once and put his head between his paws. “I’ll be in Palm Springs.”

Grace was almost at the door when Jeanne spoke. “I need you to do something.”

Grace turned. Jeanne pulled on her lip. She wasn’t looking at Grace, and then she did, and her eyes were filled with anxiety and defiance. “It wasn’t just any field.”

Grace waited.

“Where Bartholomew was killed. He picked Frank’s field to die in. My Frank. He got my Frank involved.”

“As a suspect?” Grace felt as if she had slipped down a rabbit hole.

Jeanne shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. Frank didn’t tell me, Grace. I had to find it out on TV. It’s all over the TV. He’s not telling me squat. And another field went up in smoke last night. He’s trying to protect me, and all I want is the truth. Help me get the truth.”

Grace tightened her grip on her bag and nodded.

“Two fields burned, Grace, and a man dead. Be careful. Come home to us safely.”

“Sure. Will do. Easy. As soon as I find where that is.”

Jeanne put down her needle and held open her arms. “Come here, sweet girl.”

Grace went to her and knelt, the embrace clumsy. Jeanne’s skin smelled leathery and rich.

She stayed that way, her head cradled in Jeanne’s arms, a long time.

SIX

Grace got caught in truck traffic heading north on the 15. She had a low-grade headache that carried her past the brown and yellow scrub of Camp Pendleton, the blackened burn area from the Indio fire through the checkpoint as officers glanced into cars looking for illegals, and on past the auto dealerships and neat rows of identical condos stitched together with soft red roofs.

She passed a nursery with palm trees on a brown stony hillside, trunks cut so that they looked like rows of crosses. She stopped at a roadside stand in the heat and bought organic cherries and then found she couldn’t eat them. The heat bled the juice onto the paper bag like spatter at a crime scene. She put the bag in the trunk, changed her mind, and tossed it in the trash.

She reminded herself that Guatemala had happened a long time ago. Before Katie was born and she was five now. What had happened there had been serious enough that she’d quit medicine and taken a job in the San Diego Police crime lab, working with fluids and not people. She’d stopped the drinking and reached the point where she could work crime scenes, handle spatters, dead bodies, compartmentalize. But since the kidnapping, the fragile boundary between reality and nightmare was porous again, and it took all her energy staying in the moment. Not going back. She wasn’t ready to see a dead body.

She pulled in to a rest stop when she got to Highway 215. She had a fresh shirt in her suitcase and she put it on over her tank top. A row of hang gliders floated high inland as she took the Perris exit. They hovered against the sky like a band of delicate, mutant butterflies.

She pulled into the parking lot next to the sand-colored coroner’s office and parked. She turned off the ignition and immediately the air in the car grew suffocating.

Her nostrils felt pinched. She took little sips of air, as if she were rationing it, delaying going in, and finally burst out the door in a damp gulping rush, hurrying down the white bleached path to the sliding front door.

Deputy Coroner Jeff Salzer met her at the front desk and led her through a work space of laminated counters and computer stations. His hair was starting to thin. He carried himself like a retired military man, shoulders back, as if tensing for a bullet that hadn’t been fired yet.

Air-conditioning blasted. A chunky deputy in rolled-up sleeves glanced up from her notepad as they went by in silence.

Salzer closed the door and motioned for her to sit. Through the window, her car already looked glossy with heat, as if the chrome were melting. She took the seat across from his desk.

“Special Agent Descanso said to give you whatever you need on this one.”

His desk was swept clean except for his computer. It was on, the screen blank.

“I thought the body would have gone to the Indio morgue; that’s closest to Palm Springs.”

“Would have, but the air-conditioning in Indio blew out in this heat. We’ve gotten all of them for a week now. They come in refrigerated trucks. Full house. Let me get the file.”

Salzer pushed away from his desk and his pecs bunched under his shirt. He riffled through a file drawer. Grace tried not to visualize what full house looked like in a morgue.

He pulled out a thick file and handed it to her. “You can use the conference room. You can’t make copies, but you can take whatever notes you’d like.”

She nodded and followed him into the corridor. She caught the faint whiff of formaldehyde. Her stomach churned and she tasted acid.

“Palm Springs is a real dog’s breakfast right now with that ag convention. Where’s your hotel?”

“Right off Palm Canyon.”

“You’re going to get a dose of it then. They start at the Convention Center and spill out onto the main drag.”

“I heard a second field was torched. Anybody else killed?”

A deputy rolled a rack of files down the hall and squeezed past them. Salzer shook his head and resumed walking.

“No, but a couple of delegates were hospitalized for smoke inhalation. It’s going to get nastier. Protest organizers took out a march permit for eight thousand people. They’ve blown right through that number. We expect ten times that amount. The last time the U.S. hosted this conference was in Sacramento. Major protests. That came on the heels of riots in Seattle during the World Trade Organization, which led to looting and the declaration of martial law. You know how many rioters showed up for that one?”

Grace shook her head.

“Close to a hundred thousand, Grace. We have two hundred cops, security guards, and a handful of National Guardsmen piled in, from as far away as L.A. The FBI’s running the show. Not bad, but it’s not good, either. Makes everybody nervous. Plus, we got people drinking, raising hell, so we’ve had a rash of unrelated accidents, car crashes, partygoers using loaded weapons. A mess here. We’ve got three autopsies backed up. I can rustle up coffee, water, maybe some soda.”

“Water’s good.”

He nodded and closed the door. She took a seat at the long table in the quiet room. Empty bulletin boards with tacks adorned the walls. A detailed map of the Coachella Valley hung over a coffeemaker. The coffee smelled burned.

She opened the file. Stapled to the cover page was Bartholomew’s DMV photo. A heavyset man in his sixties stared back, with beetling eyebrows and shrewd blue eyes, looking into the camera with a mixture of intelligence and amusement, as if he was party to some small secret.

He was wearing a blue oxford button-down shirt, open at the neck, and a tweed jacket. His silvery hair was long, parted in the middle, his face a series of pouches: fleshy jowls, pink balloons of cheeks, and smaller, bluish bulges under his eyes. He looked impatient and tired, a combination Grace remembered from the day he’d burst into the lecture hall in Indio, not far from where she was sitting right now.

That day he was yelling, waving a sign and pointing a camera like a weapon:

DOWN WITH RACIAL PROFILING. POLICE PIGS ARE WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

He’d been cuffed and hustled out, and as they’d closed the door and she’d resumed her lecture, she’d heard him screaming, “Sow it, you’ll reap it!”

From Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech, taken from the Bible. Grace was just Catholic enough to have felt immediately guilty.

She’d never seen him again. Palm Springs police had taken her statement, but they hadn’t needed her to testify: He’d pled guilty and spent three days in jail for disturbing the peace. A month ago. And now he was dead.

She turned back to the file and studied the crime scene photos. Bartholomew had been reduced to looking like a charred piece of meat, the arrow still embedded in his chest.

She’d seen plenty of crime scene photos. She could get through these.

She looked up as the door opened and Salzer came in with a bottle of water.

“Thanks.”

He nodded and sat. Grace turned the page and read the report.

“Tracking?” She twisted the top and took a gulp of water.

Salzer nodded. “The way they think it went down, Bartholomew was driving, and he was either surprised by the perp there, or they rode out together. My guess? The UNSUB was in the car, directing him. Bartholomew parked badly and left his door open when he got out. By the time he entered the field, he was in a major hurry to escape whoever was after him. The police found a scrap of his tweed jacket on the barbwire, where he tore it. He stumbled, at some point, and when he got up, his stride was uneven, shorter. He’d injured himself, apparently, when he fell.”

She took another drink. “How about footprints, did they get anything they can use?”

Salzer shrugged. “It’s not in the coroner’s file if they did. The official cause of death was massive blood loss due to a direct arrow hit to the heart, and thermal injuries.”

“Thermal injuries?” She took a long swallow of water and wiped her lip.

“Yeah, Grace, he was still alive when his body was set on fire.” He got up. “Ready to take a look?”

SEVEN

The short answer to that would be no, she thought.

A wave of nausea washed over her and she felt her skin grow clammy. Salzer stared at her sharply.

“You okay?”

“I think it’s the heat.”

“It’s cooler in there.”

She nodded and followed him in. The autopsy viewing suite was a windowless room, filled with two empty tables, stainless steel sinks, metal filing cabinets equipped with scales for weighing and measuring the cost of death.

The body lay under a thick white plastic sheet on a metal table that was raised on the edges to catch fluids. Salzer hesitated briefly, as if to issue a warning, but Grace knew no warning from him could soften the images she was about to see. There had been fire in Guatemala. And death.

She nodded and Salzer slipped the sheet free. The odor of burned flesh permeated the room. “I’ll be right back.”

She went into the hall and leaned against the wall. Gradually the walls stopped moving. She went back inside and closed the door behind her.

He offered a box of gloves and she took a set and put them on, as if stepping into the hall was the most natural thing in the world. Maybe in that room it was.

The body lay on its back, claws pointed toward the ceiling, blackened arms frozen over its head as if trying to protect the face from the accelerant that was about to be dumped onto its dying body, but the face was curiously intact. The hair had been burned off, along with the eyebrows and ears, but in the shape of the brow and the slope of what was left of the nose, the face was still recognizably human.

Especially in the shape of the mouth, open in a frozen scream. The scalp had been cut open in a coronal incision from ear to ear and closed with white stitches. White thick stitches also closed the Y chest incision. The torso was severely charred, the tissue blackened and peeled back in some places to expose red flesh and bone underneath. The chest cavity was collapsed and sunken around a blackened hole.

The underside of the body was still intact. Shreds of what looked like khaki pants, a tweed jacket, and a beige shirt still were visible.

“The clothing remnants weren’t removed?”

“I took samples. They’re fused to the body.”

His feet were unharmed, and seeing two pale feet rising above the blackened carnage of his torso made the damage even more real. This had been a man not long ago, and the doer was still out there somewhere.

“Any genetic material found on the body?”

“Not human. A dog hair. The lab’s got it. As you can see from the severe charring of the midsection, the perp dumped the accelerant directly onto the body in the chest area and then lit a match.”

The smell was an overpowering mix of chemicals, residue from the fire and the decomposing body. Her mouth tasted of death and she blinked and stared across the room, her vision blurred. Salzer glanced at her and dropped his gaze to the clipboard. Grace appreciated that. She stared at the linoleum until the pattern came into focus.

“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 ccs 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.

EIGHT

She took 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 protesters. 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 block-printed 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.

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.

“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.”

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