The Timer Game (13 page)

She opened her mouth to protest and he held up his hand. His palm was light and spidered with lines.

“—that they’re exerting undue force in arresting and subduing minorities.”

“Eddie Loud was white, Theo.”

“He was a schizophrenic, Grace.” He looked at her sharply. Too late, she realized he was checking to see if she already knew that.

“I already knew that.”

“I saw.” He sighed, and when he spoke, his voice was dangerously quiet. “You’re not going to interact with the senator again, end of story. I don’t want to see your face until your lab boss, Sid Felcher, tells you to come back. You’re going to sit home on your skinny Portuguese ass and watch your tax dollars at work as we climb our way out of this mess.” Theo slid the pages over to her. “Now sign your statement and get out of here.”

“Half Portuguese.”

“What?”

“Just on my Dad’s side. That makes me half Portuguese.” She skimmed the statement, a page and a half, single spaced. “What about the blood?”

“At the meth house? Slimeball number one knocked around his old lady and she split. She came back the next day with a fat lip.”

“So Eddie wasn’t part of that group?”

“Doesn’t look like it. He was selling tacos to old ladies down the street, using that knife to slice onions before he stopped in the alley.”

“Theo, he said my name.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s all in the statement.”

“It was a warning, Theo. What if somebody really is after me?”

Theo grimaced and pulled a folded newspaper out of his drawer. Grace recognized it immediately. It was the piece written six months before, accusing a fibers tech in the crime lab of slopping samples, the worst thing imaginable. A slopped sample was enough to get a case thrown out of court. The accusation came after the tech had been caught on a crime scene video inadvertently dragging the tail of a victim’s shirt through an unidentified footprint after being up processing the scene for almost twenty-four hours. That tech had been fired and all the cases she’d been involved in were still mired in review.

It had been a nightmare of a case, a double homicide, and Grace had been on site doing the tedious, meticulous part of evidence evaluation: examining clothing, stains, the room itself for the presence of biofluids, taking detailed photos and measurements, and cutting stains out for biotesting. Except it had gone on too long, and Grace’s babysitter had gotten antsy. A frantic call to Marcie, and her friend stepped in to relieve Grace so she could go home that night to Katie. No samples of theirs were involved or proved to be contaminated, but it had been enough to get them taken off the CSI rotation, and even more galling, to have to have everything they did rechecked by another lab tech before Sid signed off on it. Grace had only just gotten off restriction and back onto CSI detail when she’d shot Eddie Loud.

“Not the article, this.” Detective Sullivan flipped the fold and pointed. It was a picture of Grace and some of the others, working in the crime lab. “Your name, Grace. Right here, along with your face.”

“You’re saying he got it from that.”

“Looks that way.”

“Theo, he drove by!” she protested.

“He drives by, sees your face, stops. Know where I got this paper?”

She folded her arms. “Dying to find out.”

“It was in Eddie’s room, Grace. Senator Loud himself dropped it off. This guy wasn’t trying to warn you about anything. He was too busy being crazy.”

She thought about it. Maybe Eddie Loud had seen Warren’s picture in the paper, too, and had sent him a postcard with a knife sticking out of his chest. It could have happened like that. It was possible. A cloud was starting to lift.

“Eddie had spikes in his room, Theo. Wanted to work on the railroad.”

“There you go. Spikes. Spikeman. Can we go now?”

The door opened. It was Sid, wearing a pink shirt with flamingos and a string tie. “Grace. I’m so glad I caught you before my walkie.”

He actually talked like that. He pulled a chair close and sat, gripping her hand and clamping his other on top of it, as if he were making a Grace sandwich. She moved her knees so they wouldn’t touch any part of his body.

“How are you?”

“Fine, Sid, couldn’t be better.”

Sid clicked his tongue against his teeth, making little
tsking
sounds. “Grace, you can’t kill somebody with a famous father and expect your life ever to be the same.”

Grace removed her hand from Sid’s grasp.

“Want to know what’s going to happen to you?”

“No,” she lied, and picked at a nail. “Not particularly.” She had Andy as a younger brother. She knew how this game worked. If she acted interested, he’d never tell. She yawned.

“What happens is, you’re on administrative leave from the crime lab. I might stick you someplace else, but maybe not. The DA will send around an investigator to sift through all the statements and evidence, and then the department puts together a shooting review board, and those guys, along with the DA, decide whether there’s a case to make you criminally liable.”

“Is that all?”

“Well.” Sid frowned, a difficult quiz. “You’ll have to surrender your evidence kit.”

She glanced pointedly at the door. Sid got up.

“Another thing. Word's come back you haven’t scheduled time yet with the police liaison."

"The what? Oh, you mean a shrink." She shrugged. The last place she’d dump her guts was in the lap of a shrink paid for by the department.

Sid walked to the door and cocked his head. He was a small man with a porcine belly that today strained the flamingo on his shirt so that it looked as if the long neck and beak were gulping and swallowing some large foreign object. His hair tufted in wings over his broad forehead, giving him the appearance of having fluffy horns.

"Grace, everybody suits up, they want a shot at the ball.”

"I ran cross-country.”

Sid pursed his lips, processing it as he went through the door and it snicked closed behind him. For an instant, she thought she saw an amused look flash across Detective Theo Sullivan’s face before it returned to its neutral penetrating gaze.

“I need to touch base with Marcie before I leave. You okay with that?” She stood. Her legs felt a little tingly.

Detective Theo Sullivan stood. “Funny thing, I’m going that way.”

“And you’ll be conveniently in the hall right about the time I’m leaving, right?”

“Most likely. Almost forgot. Got a visit this morning from some top gun at CNN, saw you during the coverage of Eddie’s shooting. Claims he knows you. Mac McGuire.”

Grace felt her face grow hot.

Theo sucked his teeth. “I thought so. Dammit, Grace, you’re just one problem after another.” He fished a folded scrap of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her.

__

He’d found her. That added to the anxiety she was already feeling. Something wasn’t ringing right about Eddie Loud, and she couldn’t put her finger on it.

She studied the slip of paper. Mac’s handwriting was still familiar after so many years. She felt Theo watching her and tucked the paper into her purse as they rode the elevator to the sixth floor.

The elevator opened and they went past a door marked
CS UNIT
and stopped at
FORENSIC BIOLOGY
. The lab was quiet except for the hum of a centrifuge machine. Long white counters, workstations with stacked court papers, coded vials, cabinets overhead. Everything tidy, silent. They were probably in a staff meeting. That always happened after a shooting.

“So,” Theo said, surveying the quiet.

“So,” Grace agreed. “I’ll leave her a note.”

Theo nodded and let her walk down the long row of stations by herself. Her lab station was bare. The active-cases pile at her station, usually high with bulging files, was empty and she felt a flash of humiliation mingled with loss. Already her work had been divided up.

Grace and the others toiled in a swamp of grimy fibers, blood-soaked clothes drying in racks, semen swabs, gunshot residue, narcotics spittle, smeary prints. It was part of a hive humming with experts delicately dissecting the dark tracings left behind after violence erupted and sheared apart whatever flimsy safety net was rigged to keep the bad things at bay, a world of long hours, catnaps on cots, exhaustion, mistakes, rechecking results, tight time frames, and the terror of missing a court deadline and getting called in to explain themselves in front of a judge.

Then having most of it discounted because a jury couldn't understand its relevance anyway. But it was a job, a good job. Already she missed it.

She spotted a rape case of hers in Marcie’s pile, and a double homicide she’d been working in a stack of files belonging to Nolo, another biologist. That file was open at his station, as if he’d disappeared in a levitated puff of smoke while reading. A small Asian with a mullet, she could see his exhausted face in her mind’s eye. The CSI she’d taken should have gone to Nolo; it was his week on call. She wondered again how the sheets had gotten screwed up.

A small sound made her look up. It was Marcie coming around a corner with a rack of test tubes that had just come from the centrifuge. She was a tall, emaciated woman with close-cropped hair, wearing a billowing violet peasant skirt under her lab coat. Exhaustion made her look even more gaunt. She stopped in her tracks when she saw Grace.

“Oh, my God, you’re here.” She put the rack carefully down and bent to embrace Grace. The hug was a little too hard and Grace stiffened.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said in a rush. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Marcie, get a grip. I’m fine.” Grace half laughed as she pulled away. Leave it to Marcie to need calming down after Grace had almost gotten killed.

Marcie wet her lip. “I feel really bad. So helpless.” She averted her eyes.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” Grace felt a flash of exasperation mingled with affection. Marcie didn’t handle emotions well, especially those that involved other people.

“I mean, we were always afraid this could happen,” Marcie nattered. “Some whacko coming at us, but I never—”

“I’m okay,” Grace repeated.

“I really never thought—whoever thought it would really happen, right?” Marcie went on as if she hadn’t heard. “How many CSI’s have we been out on?”

“Not many lately,” Grace said crisply.

That seemed to jerk Marcie back. She nodded too hard. “Right, right, that’s right.”

Grace changed the subject. “You and Frank and the kids still coming to Katie’s party, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Marcie said heartily. She uncapped a tube, rechecked its label, reached for a slide and picked up a pipette, carefully squeezing up a pellet of cells and delicately expelling the cells onto the slide as if by ignoring Grace long enough, she’d go away.

She didn’t.

Finally, Marcie said, “You want help, writing out clues for the Timer Game?”

“I’m set.”

Marcie glanced longingly at the incubator where she’d be drying down slides. She wasn’t the least bit interested in the Timer Game, Grace knew. She just wanted Grace gone before everybody got back.

“Tell me the truth,” Grace said.

“The truth,” Marcie said faintly.

“Tell me what they’re saying about my killing Eddie Loud. I’ll leave then, I swear.”

Marcie breathed through her nose. “Okay, it does seem like maybe you jumped the couch on this one.”

“That’s what they’re saying?”

“He was shot five times, Grace. Doesn’t that seem a tiny bit excessive?” Marcie readied a Christmas tree stain of nuclear-fast red dye and green picro indigo carmine.

“I wanted to make sure he was good and dead.” Grace looked away and her gaze settled on the high stack of work orders at Larry’s station.

“If Larry had picked up, none of this would have happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Yesterday. That's why I got the call. They’d screwed up at headquarters and were using the new sheet. If they’d been working the right sheet, they would have called Nolo, but they thought it was Larry’s turn in the box and he wasn’t picking up. So they went to me.”

Marcie frowned, preoccupied, readying another slide. “Larry was here the whole day. We both were. We were backed up on a court date.”

The temperature in the room dropped. A cold draft of air moved across her neck.

Grace had been contacted because Larry couldn’t be found. That’s the way it worked.

“Well, he wasn’t picking up his pager,” Grace said more loudly. “That’s why I went out. He wasn’t answering.”

Marcie raised her head and locked eyes with Grace. Her voice was low. “He was here. I was working, so was he. His pager was on, I saw it.”

“But all the time?” Her voice raised a notch. “Couldn't it have been turned off?”

Marcie shook her head more vehemently. Her shoulders looked bony under the lab coat and Grace wondered if she was eating regularly.

“It was on the counter, I saw it. We worked together all afternoon. He was standing right here when his pager went off and we got word that a drug agent and two officers were down.”

“Oh, God.”

The two women stared at each other. Marcie looked as sick as Grace felt. In the hallway, Detective Sullivan shifted his weight. Grace lowered her voice.

“The bottom line is, somebody wanted me out there. Somebody wanted me to work this meth bust, intersect with Eddie Loud. They wanted all this to happen to me.”

“But who, Grace? Who’s after you?”

“And more to the point,” Grace said, “why?”

Chapter 14

Every local channel carried her face and the story of the carnage at the meth house, and she channel-clicked and kept it on mute until she found the right station, turning the sound to a low mutter. It was the commercial break right before he came on. She was curled up on her bed, the shades drawn. She could hear Katie sighing in her sleep down the hall. From his standard place on the rug, Helix yipped softly, his eyelids moving as he tracked invisible quarry.

Her eyes strayed to the closet and she got up and rummaged through her sweaters until her hands closed around the box. Her chest felt constricted but she was used to that, and she sat in her rocking chair and opened it. The inside of the lid was bright enamel yellow. She stared at the contents for a moment without touching anything. The lily had dried long ago, but when she lifted the box, closed her eyes and inhaled, she still caught the faint sweet scent that always reminded her of the Guatemalan highlands.