The Timer Game

Copyright © 2008 by Susan Arnout Smith

For my husband, Alfred Toulon Smith

with love and gratitude—

every day with you is a blessing

Beware the fury of a patient man.

—JOHN DRYDEN,
Absalom and Achitophel

THE TIME GAME

Chapter 1

Sunday

“If somebody’s following us, would you know?”

Grace Descanso glanced at her daughter as they squeezed past an inflatable ghost at the entrance to Party Savers. Katie’s dark eyes studied her gravely. She was almost five, small for her age, her honey-colored curls bouncing in two high ponytails under a Padres baseball cap.

“You mean right now this second?”

Grace kept her voice neutral but her gaze shifted to the salesclerk ringing up a line of customers and a group of teens clustered by a rack of spiders. The store was busy. Nothing jumped out.

“Why, honey? Do you think somebody is?” Grace picked up a shopping basket.

Katie shrugged. “I don’t know. I finally decided. I want to be a doctor.”

“When you grow up?” Katie shifted gears at dizzying speed, and Grace trailed after her, trying to keep up.

Katie slowed at a rack of pumpkin lights and kept moving. “No, silly. For Halloween. That way I can wear that thing of yours.”

“Stethoscope,” Grace said. She blinked. “I’m not sure I can find it, Katie. I haven’t seen it for a long time. You could be a princess. They get to wear sparkly pink.”

The cell phone in her pocket rang and Grace’s first instinct was to ignore it. She’d put it on
High
and
Vibrate
and now it whirred in her pocket like an angry bee. It was Sunday, her first real day off in almost a month from the San Diego police crime lab, and she wanted to spend it with Katie.

Katie cut a look at the phone and walked ahead down the aisle. They shared the same dark Portuguese eyes and angular grace, but Katie was tawny as a golden cat. Next to Grace’s ivory skin and dark hair, Katie always looked sun-kissed and radiantly healthy. Sleeping helped, too, Grace figured. She hadn’t been doing much of that lately.

They were both in shorts; for October in San Diego it was humid, and the store smelled of dust and suntan oil. The phone stopped ringing as Katie paused at a rack of fuzzy bat pencils, picking up one and examining it closely.

Katie’s birthday was coming up Saturday, the day before Halloween, and Grace didn’t have a lot of money to spend on treat bags. It embarrassed her that she was so tight for cash, but she was a single mother with no margin for mistakes, living in the house she’d grown up in, paying off her brother for his half, shoring up the leaky roof and splintery steps, repairing the gargling refrigerator and wheezing car, trying hard not to completely lose her mind.

“Those are fun,” Grace offered. And affordable, she added silently.

Katie nodded and put the pencil back in the rack.

The phone rang again and Katie looked at her. “You’re not going to get that?”

There was something tight in her young voice, and Grace knew that even at her age, Katie knew how much their fragile security depended on this job, on things going well.

Grace flipped open her cell and recognized Dispatch. She smiled reassuringly at Katie. “Grace Descanso.”

A man’s voice crackled over the line, his voice unrecognizable.

“I can’t hear you.”

In Grace’s ear, the voice was irritable, distracted. “Sergeant Treble, headquarters. We got one. Let’s roll.”

“I’m not on rotation this week.”

She transferred the phone to her other ear, watching her daughter. Katie was counting out seven pink erasers in the shape of porpoises and putting them into the shopping basket, along with a set of fake teeth.

“Hell you are; you’re secondary after Larry and he’s not answering his beeper.”

“You’re working the wrong sheet.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass, sort it out Monday. You answered the phone, you’re It.”

“I’m not on duty,” she insisted.

“Yeah, but I say you are.”

She swallowed her rage. The lab was set up so someone was on call a week at a time. Her week wasn’t there yet; it started Tuesday morning at seven-thirty. She’d been pulling overtime in the lab lately, processing two homicides and a particularly messy frat party that had left one participant with his little toe shot off by a naked, unknown assailant wearing a Bart Simpson head mask. She was looking forward to this free day with Katie.

On the phone Treble was saying, “Patrol responded to a complaint, usual deal. High traffic, bad smell. The duty judge is sending through the warrant.”

“We don’t process meth busts, you know that. Call the DEA.” The Drug Enforcement Agency handled cleanup in San Diego.

“Already ahead of you, Grace. These scrotbags left a bucket of blood in the living room. No body.”

“And you want to know if it’s enough blood for somebody to have died.”

“Doesn’t look like a nosebleed.”

He paused, and Grace could hear the scorn dripping from his voice. “Or I could just run it by Sid. Your level of cooperation.”

Grace grew very still. It had taken her six months to get back on CSI rotation after an inquiry into slopped samples and falsified data, an inquiry that had cleared Grace but left her feeling vulnerable and defensive, and after five years on the job, needing to prove herself all over again. She didn’t want to find herself stuck again in the lab. CSI meant overtime and that meant money, but she needed to plan things like a general, not be ambushed on the party-favor aisle.

“You’re really an asshole, you know that?” Grace said it low into the phone, so Katie wouldn’t hear.

“Save it, Grace, I’m already married.”

“Who’s the DL?” She fished into her purse for a pad and pencil.

“Lewin. Not a duty lieutenant, a sergeant. Western substation. He’s at the site.”

Katie looked at her, comprehension and resignation flooding her eyes, and Grace realized in that instant how much the day had meant to Katie, too.

“What’s the Thomas page?” Grace said into the phone.

Katie blinked and looked away.

It was a shady street in Ocean Beach, with shaggy palms and houses flecked in DayGlo colors, just close enough to the ocean to smell of salt water and kelp. The house stood halfway down the block, cordoned with yellow police tape. A ripped sofa sat in the front yard and trash clotted the tall weeds. Bedsheets obscured the front windows and a faded sticker clung to the front door
: NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH! CRIMINALS BEWARE!

A carved pumpkin adorned the junky yard and Grace felt a pang of guilt. Katie had been after her for weeks to buy one. She kept putting it off, and here even unkempt lowlifes living in squalor still made quality time for their kids.

A crowd was starting to gather as uniforms hustled three gaunt men out the door, hands cuffed, and pushed them into waiting patrol cars, followed by a wailing toddler on the hip of a Child Protective Services officer.

Grace pulled into a space vacated by a patrol car and locked up, the list already going in her brain on why this was a better career path then her last choice.
You see dead bodies but you don’t
make
them dead, that’s a big one.

She reached into her trunk, rooted past Katie’s T-ball bag, a dirty soccer sock, and a spilled carton of Legos, and lifted out her evidence collection kit and pearly white Tyvek protective gear.
You’re offered shapelier work clothes in attractive designer colors.

The front door opened and Detective Sergeant Vince Lewin emerged, flipping his mask off his face so it dangled on the front of his Tyvek suit. Plodding down the steps, he looked like a scowling Pillsbury dough boy. He gripped a cage covered in tight mesh wiring and held it as far away from his body as possible. A large snake banged against the wire, fangs bared.
You sometimes get to interact with nature.

“Show’s over. That’s it. It’s done.” Lewin handed the cage to a uniform who stowed it in the back of a patrol car.

Lewin was in his mid forties, with graying hair and a permanent crease between his eyes, made more pronounced by his scowl. Grace had worked with him maybe a dozen times, and the combative edge he carried into every conversation made her instantly tense.

“Dr. D. Takes forty minutes to get here.”

Grace took a slow, irritable breath. “Thirty-nine. I clocked it.”

“I expected Larry.”

“Yeah, well, I had better things to do, too, Vince, but they rescheduled my kidney dialysis so I could come.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She pulled on her Tyvek suit and looked past him toward the house. “What’d you find?”

“A shitload of nasty. Two pit bulls, assault rifles, six snakes—big ones.” He gestured toward the cage. “That guy was booby-trapped to the kitchen cabinet. Missed him the first time around.”

“That inspires confidence.”

“I’m not paid to hold your hand, Grace.” He was still grumpy about the dialysis joke. Too late, she remembered his mother-in-law had died of renal failure.

A balding man in his midtwenties detached from an assistant DA in the crowd and trotted over. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a Tyvek suit in a muddy tan color that signaled he worked for the DEA. Agents apparently hadn’t gotten the memo about looking spiffy. The suit looked a size too small.

“You guys met? The new DEA chemist Chip Page; Chip, Dr. D.”

“Grace Descanso,” she corrected pleasantly. She pulled on a bootie.

“Yeah, fine. Grace Descanso. She’s been a police forensic biologist for—I don’t know, what?”

“Five.”

“Five years. Sol retired early and moved to Florida so we got Chip.” Lewin answered her unasked question and tapped his clipboard, as if the small effort at pleasantry exhausted him. “Set to live here the next few days?”

“Sure,” Grace lied.

“Then welcome to amateur hour. These guys didn’t go to the Cordon Bleu.”

A taco van turned onto the street and the driver grinned at Grace and gave a jaunty thumbs-up as if he knew her. She took a good look at him as she pulled on the other bootie.

He had a narrow face and glassy eyes and a thatch of black hair and seemed to be about her age, thirty-two. The taco van veered—he’d been staring at her rather than the road ahead—and the uniform on crowd control bellowed at him to move it along. Things could be worse. She could be driving a rancid food truck, trying to stay one step ahead of the Department of Environmental Health.

“Heard some bozo blew up a trailer park in Reno drying down acetone in an oven.” Lewin pulled on a second set of gloves and passed the box to Chip. “They found body parts in trees. Chip, any questions, ask. Don’t want to send you home in a box. Several.”

Chip blanched and Lewin looked away, satisfied. Grace smiled at Chip in what she hoped was a reassuring way.

“You were really a doctor?” Chip asked. It was a blurt. “What happened?”

“Double glove, Chip.” Grace passed him the box again, her good humor gone.

The crowd drifted off and stationed themselves in nearby yards, talking quietly. Vince Lewin turned back to Grace and Chip, all business.

“Chip, you got residue but nothing exciting, no pounds of product. Grace, work your magic. There are enough spatters in there to keep a busload of Rorschach head shrinks happy for a year. The house is sealed and it’s going to stay that way. We’re clear on phosgene. We’re gonna dust, collect. Be smart and stay alive. Ready?”

Grace cinched the hood of her suit and attached her bug mask—an air purifying respirator—and followed him up the stairs, Chip lagging behind her. Grace let him go past her through the door. An armed patrol officer stood at the door, feet spread, another one at the perimeter, and Grace remembered hearing how they’d once busted somebody who’d wandered into a meth house after the task force had secured it. He’d come to do a buy, realizing too late that Joe and Jim and Rudy were already downtown rolling their fingers across ink pads and that the nice man inside with the wide smile wasn’t selling anything except a felony conviction.

The interior was dark, windows covered in duct tape and sheets, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. A dark stain saturated a sliver of ratty carpet and spattered a nearby wall.

“Chip, don’t come near this, okay?”

She squatted down carefully out of reach of the stain and roved her flashlight beam over the wall. The drops curled like exclamation marks in a hurry, which meant that whoever was bleeding had been moving. Or blood had scattered from a weapon that was moving. Or maybe it had been an earthquake and the wall had been moving. Something had moved, and whatever it was, it meant work on her end, and a lot of it.

“Lovely.” She’d never see Katie again.

Grace stood up. Already her arms inside the Tyvek were damp as boiled hot dogs. The suit sealed her like a deli chicken. Too bad she hadn’t wrapped herself first in secret herbs and cellophane; she could lose six inches in an hour. She wondered if women losing inches in a spa wrap suddenly exploded like a hot sausage the instant they drank a glass of water. She had to stop thinking about food.