Out at Night. Susan Smith Arnout

      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