The Timer Game (24 page)

It was close to three in the morning. The line in front of the CBS building was longer now, people in lawn chairs and lying on blankets, eerily replicating the scattered surge of homeless people she’d seen grouped along the boardwalk in San Diego.

A solitary car sailed silently past her and she hesitated, her hand frozen at the coin slot, until the car picked up speed and made the light.

Marcie answered right before the voice mail kicked in, her voice thick with sleep.

“It’s me.” Grace started crying.

Marcie came instantly awake. “Oh, my God. Where are you? What’s happened?”

Alert the cops, and Katie dies.

Like Paul, Marcie was a nonsworn, a tech in the crime lab, not a cop, but it was clear the Spikeman wasn’t making that distinction, and what could Marcie do if she got her involved? He’d find out, somehow. She wasn’t going to take any chances.

“I’ve only got a minute.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Marcie, what did you find with the birthday paper?”

“You need to tell me what’s going on.”

“Please. Don’t ask questions and tell no one that I’ve called. I mean it.
”
Her voice cracked. “Katie’s life could depend on it.”

“What’s happened to Katie?” Marcie cried.

Grace was silent.

“Grace?”

“I can’t,” Grace said heavily. A long moment went by. She could almost feel Marcie nod on the line, trusting her, even though she didn’t understand, and it filled Grace with blank gratitude.

“First the heart. It was a pig’s, from the blood sample, just the way you thought. I gave the clown paper to Paul but he didn’t find any prints.”

“How’d you explain it?”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him. The ink used to write the message was part of a shipment of four million Bic pens sent to supply stores across six different states. The string was something you can get anyplace, but the actual paper itself was gold. I took it to Tracy in Fibers and—get this—it’s cotton.”

“Okay, so it’s handmade.”

A couple in bunny ears wandered past her hand in hand, chattering animatedly. Grace shifted the receiver to her other ear and leaned into the phone, shielding it with her hand.

“Yeah, but most handmade paper isn’t organically grown. There’s no trace of bollworm.”

“I give. What does it mean?”

“It means the San Joaquin Valley. The California Institute for Rural Studies cultivates about ten thousand acres of organically grown cotton, caterpillar free, by imposing a strict ninety day ban every year.”

“But the paper’s blue,” Grace remembered. “So it was dyed.”

“The fibers are dyed, yeah, and stained the paper a faint blue. Those blue fibers were added to the cotton, by the way; turns out they come from recycled uniforms. Also there’s the distinctive stippling of trace metals, the kind found in license plates. I looked it up in Tracy’s little book. Seems there’s a successful print operation there, where they manufacture survey marking tape, binders, custom files. They tried handmade paper for a while, too, a couple of years back.”

“I’m not getting it, help me out here.”

“License plates. Uniforms,” Marcie said. “The wrapping paper around the bloody doll and note paper—both were handmade three years ago in a small manufacturing plant at Folsom Prison.”

Grace shifted the phone.

“Grace? Are you still there?”

“Folsom.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to need you to get me in there later today, say around six or so.”

“It’s a Sunday, Grace. And Halloween, in case you’re interested. They’re not going to do that. That’s totally against policy. These things take time.”

“I don’t have that.”

“Grace, look, whatever’s going on—”

“Marcie.”

There was silence on the line. Marcie said, “How do I explain it?”

Grace thought about it. “There’s an AW I know. He might come in. He likes working weekends.”

She’d met him through AA. He’d attended some meetings at the group Grace frequented when he was in San Diego on prison business. On a couple of late nights over cups of coffee, they’d shared war stories from work and their last names. Alcoholism had cost him his family, and he’d confided to Grace that he worked all the time because he hated going back to an empty apartment, but Marcie didn’t need to know that.

She searched her memory for his name and found it. “Syzmanski. First name Thorton, but he likes to be called Thor.”

She dug through her wallet and came up with a card and read his home number off it.

Marcie copied it down. “What do I tell him?”

What could she say that wouldn’t circle back to Katie? “Tell him I’m working a case involving a serious threat against a prominent businessman. We tested the postcard in the lab.”

“Postcard?”

“Yeah, there was a postcard, Marcie, but I can’t tell you more than that.”

‘If he asks?”

“Then I’m in trouble,” Grace said simply. “No, tell him it’s a prominent bioreseacher.”

“Shit. Was it?”

“Who wants this handled quietly.”

“Damn, Grace. This wasn’t tested in the lab. You want me to lie for you.” Marcie sounded tired.

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“My integrity’s more important than what?” Pissed, needing to hear Grace’s answer.

Than my kid dying. Than my kid gone forever. “Look, Marcie. Katie’s been—” She stopped, her throat thick. She tried again. “Somebody—” She cleared her throat.

Marcie took a breath and blew it out slowly. Grace could hear her start to write, her voice subdued. “Okay. We tested the postcard in the lab and what? It was made out of the same stock paper as the wrapping paper?”

Grace was silent.

“Are you serious? It was made out of the same paper?”

“It had the same blue thread, that’s all I know. Remember this case we worked when I first started five years ago?”

“We worked a lot of cases, sweetie.”

“Closer to five and a half is how long I’ve been there. The one with the clasp on the file that turned out to be an audio bug that the research assistant carried into top-level meetings to steal biotech secrets for her boss. She’d cut herself on the underside of the clasp and that’s how we nailed her.”

“Vaguely. What do you need?”

“Names, the case, how it came out, everything you can get for me.”

“Where can I send it?”

“Can’t. I’ll call you when I can. Take your cell with you if you go out.”

“I suppose it’s too late to tell you to be careful.”

“Little.”

“Still.”

“I will. And don’t tell anybody what I said. About Katie.”

Marcie made a sound. “I can keep secrets.”

Grace hung up, shaken. It was someone at Folsom. Someone who’d worked in a print shop. Who was out of prison now. Or still incarcerated, passing that peculiarly distinctive paper to someone outside. Okay, that was a place to start.

She checked her watch and realized the window of time she felt she could safely be out of the room was rapidly vanishing. She dug into her pocket and pulled out more coins and dialed Jeanne’s number, rousing her out of bed and telling her what she needed.

Afterward, she stacked the last of the coins on the narrow shelf under the phone. She was stalling and she knew it. She rearranged the coins. She’d given herself an hour. Any longer and he could find out she’d gotten away.

She’d done everything she could think of, to make it seem she was still in her room at the Farmer’s Daughter watching TV. She’d called downstairs; hold her calls, she was in for the night. She’d turned off the cell phone and left it and the charts behind, positioning them on the bed next to the TV so the audio would pick up the channel tuned to an old Reagan movie, eased open the door and made certain the hall was clear before slipping into the stairwell, later joining a group of revelers coming into the lobby. This close to Halloween, nobody gave her costume a second look.

Almost half an hour gone. She found the scrap of paper in her purse and punched in the numbers, fed in the coins required, and waited. She could hear him pick up and pat around, as if trying to remember where he was. Asleep, for starters.

Or had been. “‘H’lo.”

She’d heard his voice on television. Impossible not to. But this was intimate, deeply personal, and she felt the years slip away, the walls disintegrate.

Her mouth felt clumsy. She said her name and he came wide awake.

“Where are you?”

“I’m only going to say this once. Go to a secure line. Nothing inside the building where you are. Nothing in your car. Secure. Call me back at this number.” She read the number off the phone. “Have it?”

“What is this?”

“If I don’t hear from you in ten minutes, it’ll ring into space, Mac. That’ll be it.”

“Grace, is that you?”

“Nine and a half.” She hung up and rubbed her arms, trying to warm them. Time stopped.

Bits of memories shot through her mind. The warm lump of Katie’s small body heavy against her chest, and there she was, stunned with fatigue, scared and weeping into the downy scalp of this sleeping infant who depended solely on her to survive and she couldn’t even remember to buy baby shampoo. A soccer ball hurtling toward the goal and Katie snapping up her skinny arms and diving for it, a look of terror and triumph blazing across her face as she skidded hard across the dirt, reaching up, catching it. Grace standing over the kitchen sink, still jet-lagged and nauseous after three days rattling in claptrap buses and transferring to sputtering small planes and winding up in a jumbo jet lifting into the blue Guatemalan sky like a magic trick, standing there at the sink and squinting at the bright pink square blooming in front of her in the pregnancy test kit, blooming like a rose, and still not getting it, not believing, needing to go back and buy a second kit just to be sure.

The phone startled her. “Yes?”

“What did the inside of the room look like?”

She checked her watch. “Look, Mac, I don’t have time.”

“What did it look like?”

She exhaled. He made a sound. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

He was hanging up. He couldn’t.

“Wait!” she shouted, and across the street, a person in line turned and stared at her blankly.

“Where we stayed?” Her voice low now, intense. “Or where you said good-bye?”

She could tell by his silence he was startled. Yeah, asshole, you said good-bye, remember?

“Where we stayed. Location. Description. How it smelled.”

She closed her eyes. “The walls were bamboo. We slept on a straw mat. We’d left the window open so we could feel the rain. Warm rain. Hot breeze. Not an unusual combination for the Guatemalan highlands.”

He drew a ragged breath. “God, it is you. I’m so sorry. My business attracts these women who. . .” He stopped. “That’s not important. What I want to say is, you wouldn’t believe how hard I looked for you.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”

The silence grew.

“You were looking for the story that would get you onto CNN. Looks like you found it.”

That stopped him. His voice changed. “So the question is, after all this time.”

“I need something, that’s all.” She tried to keep her voice even and failed. Her mouth worked and she felt close to tears. She couldn’t cry.

“Grace?”

Tears stung her eyes. “Mac, I’m in bad trouble, and I don’t know who else to trust.”

“Oh, honey.”

His voice real now. Not his broadcast voice, plumper, richer, but the remembered voice of the man whose calloused hand had gently caressed her hip and told her he loved her, now and always, forever and ever. The voice of the man who had rocked her in his arms night after night, and buried his face in her hair, groaning as she wrapped herself around him and they melted into each other, sweat and tears and time fusing so that even now, all this time later, it still burned like a chipped star in her heart.

“Talk to me.”

Chapter 27

All Hallows’ Eve, 6:01 a.m.

She was up until almost four in the morning working everything out, and then sleep yanked her into a drugged undertow.

The meditation timer woke her up slowly a couple hours later. First she was aware of a mellow, insistent sound and then it occurred to her she’d been hearing it for some time. She patted her nightstand and finally found the off switch buried in the top wooden inset. Every bone ached and her mouth felt gritty. She lay quietly staring at the ceiling, and then it came rushing in. Katie was gone. She pushed herself out of bed and made a pot of coffee.

If she let herself think about Katie and where she’d spent the night, it would derail her. She stood in the shower under stinging hot water, brushed her teeth, and changed into the clothes she’d purchased at Target: underwear, a dark green T-shirt, and cotton pants.

She was living two lives now and she had to keep them straight. Katie’s life depended on it. In the one life, she followed the clues set out by the Spikeman, clues that were leading her to interviews with Robert Harling Frieze and maybe the others. In her other life, she was secretly pursuing avenues he knew nothing about. Leads that might take her to Katie.

She pulled back the curtains. Pale light washed into the room. This early, the street was empty. She sat at the desk and opened the charts, positioning her legal pad and reviewing what she knew. Five charts all from the Center, one for Katie’s simple surgery, four for ultrasounds revealing fetal heart anomalies. Two of those kids got lucky: Eric Bettles last year and Hekka Miasonkopna sometime soon, each getting hearts-in-a-box built out of their own cells by Lee Ann Bentley.

That left two. Robert Harling Frieze lost his son to tumors when the toddler was two. Tumors the grieving artist was certain were caused by an experimental injection his infant son had gotten at the Center when he was still in utero. Is that what happened to the Wingers’ baby? She reached for the Winger chart. Five years ago, Fred and DeeDee Winger lived in Fallbrook, a rural community east of San Diego. Twenty-two-year old grad student Fred worked as a TA at San Diego State, while his young pregnant wife, DeeDee, typed and filed in law firm.