The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

the Publisher

       ONE

       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 had been 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 in 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 in 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! CRIMINAL 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 than 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