The Stars Shine Bright

by Sibella Giorello

  The housekeeper answered. She asked me to wait while she went to find “Mr. DeMott.” Holding my breath, I stared out the patio door. The early evening sunshine sparkled on the water and I thought of the crystal chandeliers that would be glittering above the mahogany table that seated twenty-six comfortably.

  “Raleigh?”

  Oh, his voice. My heart flew.

  “Raleigh, is that you?” DeMott’s voice was bred by the Old Dominion. My name in his mouth sounded like a song.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “I can’t believe it—you’re on the phone!” He laughed.

  I couldn’t believe it either. What joy in his voice. He missed me, he really missed me. The real me.

  “Wait—” he said. “What’s wrong? Raleigh, are you all right?”

  I held back the sigh. All that joy, once again clobbered by his mallet of worry.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said, but added, “Aunt Eleanor had a hard day.” Just to remind him. He knew the bare minimum about my assignment and my assumed identity. “But otherwise we’re doing fine.”

  “Are you sure? You sound upset.”

  I took a deep breath and wished the sudden pain in my ribs could evict the terrible thoughts in my mind. DeMott’s fear, his anxiety, they annoyed me so much. What happened to calm DeMott, peaceful DeMott? He disappeared almost immediately after he put this ring on my finger. The even-keeled guy I’d known since grade school was replaced by a man of worry, full of what-ifs and shoulds.

  “I got the invitation to the baby shower.” I checked my watch. If the call was longer than what was needed to order a pizza, the case agent would check the conversation. That meant Jack. Listening to this. “Congratulations,” I said. “That’s great news.”

  “Oh. You’re calling about Mac’s shower?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is wonderful, isn’t it? Pretty soon we can start our family. The babies will be cousins.”

  In the significant pause that followed, the stainless steel stove glared at me, clean and accusing. No fingerprints. No smudges. No home-cooked meals. Not one trace of human life in this place. The appliances seemed to wonder why I wasn’t leaping at the chance to marry DeMott and join that esteemed line of Fieldings. Life at Weyanoke. On the historic register.

  “DeMott, I can’t talk long. I have to—”

  “So that’s it,” he said. “You just called to say congratulations?”

  “I’m really busy, I should—”

  “Should what?”

  There was one very big should in all this: I should never have called.

  He said, “You haven’t even asked how I’m doing. Or Madame.”

  My mother’s dog, Madame. DeMott had offered to keep her while my mom and I took that cruise to Alaska. Ten days going on two-plus months. And counting.

  “So how’s Madame?”

  “She’s on antidepressants,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Something called Clomicalm. The vet prescribed it. He says she’s suffering from separation anxiety.”

  “Madame?” The small and willful dog was so self-sufficient I sometimes wondered if she was a human trapped inside a dog suit. “Madame’s never been depressed. Ever.”

  “Really? She quit eating.”

  “What are you feeding her?”

  “The most expensive dog food I could find.”

  “Well, there’s the problem, DeMott. Just give her a Big Mac.”

  “Raleigh, she won’t go outside either. I thought it was the summer heat. But even at night I have to carry her out in my arms.”

  I glanced at my watch. How long does it take to order a pizza? Two minutes, thirty-five seconds. Not that long.

  “I’m sorry, DeMott. What can I do?”

  “Come home.”

  I stared out the sliding glass door. Two kayakers were floating past, their paddles windmilling like double-edge swords. “Aunt Eleanor needs me here right now.”

  “There are other people who need you too.”

  “I can’t leave.” The first kayaker lifted his paddle to point at something in the water. “Not yet.”

  “Then how much longer?”

  A sea otter. It was rolling through the water, then floating on its back.

  “Raleigh, how much longer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The otter held a fish between its paws. The silver scales were flashing in the sunlight.

  He said, “I’ll bring her out there.”

  “What?”

  “Madame. I’ll bring her out there. She needs you.”

  Whatever the feeling was, it shot across my chest, circled my lungs, and began choking out my air. I couldn’t speak.

  “Raleigh, she’s so thin. And her eyes, they’re . . .”

  “Okay, all right. Send her out. What, air freight?”

  “Are you serious?” He sounded indignant. “I’m not going to toss her on a plane. Alone? Not in the condition she’s in. She could die.”

  I loved this guy. Really, I did. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “I’ll bring her. But I won’t stay.” He paused. “Unless you want me to.”

  I was trying to decide which thing scared me more. DeMott coming out here, or Madame suddenly needing a home when my mom was in an insane asylum and I was working day and night. And my real aunt kept a house full of vicious cats, and I couldn’t go see her anyway. But just like that, another concern popped up. I looked at my watch. How was I going to explain this call to Jack? To OPR? And if this phone was tapped by somebody else, did they just figure out Raleigh David might not be who she said she was? And all that wondering stretched out, creating a weighted silence that finally snapped.

  “Fine,” he said. “I won’t stay.”

  “DeMott—”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He hung up.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Out of sheer spite, I refused to eat any of the groceries from Jack. And out of resentment, I yanked off my Raleigh David clothes and changed into my own Levi’s, T-shirt, and Teva tennis shoes. Then I stomped downstairs and flew the Ghost down Dock Street, checking the mirrors every third second.

  But the black Caddy wasn’t there. Which made me wonder about any taps on my landline. Did the driver leave to report on the conversation? And who would he report it to? My first guess was Sal Gag. That Caddy looked like a complete Mob taxi.

  Near Wright Park, I found a convenience store with a sign proclaiming “Gas. Beer. Food.” If my mother were with me, she would read those words in the opposite order and tell me they made better sense that way—gas came after food and beer—and then she would’ve turned the words into an acrostic until she found some hidden message, some horrible warning about people trying to hurt her, about spies watching her every move. In the paranoid Olympics, my mother could win the gold medal.

  Inside the convenience store, I saw a little girl running down the aisles, singing to herself. The air smelled of cumin and onions, mangoes and curry, but I saw only breaded chicken wings and glistening hot dogs under heat lamps on the counter. Farther back, an Indian woman wearing a sari stood at a grill stirring several pots. She was jabbering with an elderly woman who also wore a sari. The only man, also Indian, stood silent at the cash register. His name tag read Raj.

  “Do you have cheeseburgers?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. I make very good cheeseburgers. Very, very good.” His accent was thick, that Indian tongue that somehow made every word sound both lyrical and staccato. “I will load that thing to the very bun. It is delicious.”

  “Fries?”

  “Many fries.”

  “Perfect. Thank you. I’ll take one cheeseburger, loaded, and a double order of fries.”

  I walked past the refrigerated cases and down a hall, searching for the restroom. It was next to an old pay phone. When I stepped inside, turning to close the door, the little girl was right behind me. Her two black pigtails stuck out above e
ach ear. I locked the door, opened my cell phone, and saw a small dual shadow under the door. The girl’s feet.

  Jack answered on the second ring. He said, “No need to thank me.”

  I was still thinking about DeMott’s last words—“You’re welcome”—and suddenly wondered if Jack had listened to that phone call. “Pardon?” I said.

  “The food. No need to thank me.”

  “Fine, look, I need you—”

  “I know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You need me, Harmon. And the sooner you figure that out, the sooner you can start living your life.”

  I was tempted to flush the phone down the toilet.

  “Listen, you—” I held back the word jerk. “The track just found some suspicious material under the starting gate. They called in the Auburn police department, and the cops sent everything to the state lab. I need you—”

  “Again.”

  I gritted my teeth. “To call the state lab. See if Tom O’Brien’s working in the forensics lab. If he’s not, get his home number.”

  Tom O’Brien was a lab technician who worked on my last case in Seattle. He was my only chance for access to this new evidence. But I didn’t want to call him directly, because I didn’t want my number showing up on any records. If the case ever got to court, some defense attorney could suggest to the jury that I influenced the technician. Those technicalities sometimes freed even the guiltiest. “Tell O’Brien I’ll meet him at the lab.”

  “Harmon, you can’t go to the lab.”

  “The track closes in six days.”

  “So wait six days.”

  “Right. So I can read OPR’s report. Sitting there, like a dead duck?”

  “You know, when I was buying those groceries, I got to talking to the checkout girl. She didn’t believe all that food was for one girl. And that you were skinny. She also didn’t believe me when I said you dipped your fries in mayonnaise.”

  “Jack. Call O’Brien.”

  “Did you learn nothing on that cruise ship?”

  “I learned plenty, like how much I need my job. Tell O’Brien my visit is anonymous. No sign-in, no ID badge.”

  He muttered something—I thought I heard the word stubborn—but finally he said, “If I do this, then you have to give me a full debrief. I’ll need to file it tomorrow morning.”

  “Fine.”

  “Tonight. Seven o’clock.”

  “Fine.”

  “In the cemetery.”

  “Fine.”

  I closed the phone, washed my hands, and opened the door. The little girl’s pigtails bounced as she jumped back. Disarmingly cute, because the truth was her dark eyes looked as sharp as a Calcutta street vendor.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked.

  “Myself.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m crazy.”

  She followed me through the store. I grabbed a can of Coke from the refrigerator case and picked up my meal at the front counter. The cheese was dripping off the burger in gooey yellow stalactites. The fries were crispy, golden, greasy, glorious.

  “Do you have any extra mayonnaise?” I asked.

  Raj put the mayo in a small paper cup. I carried the food to a narrow counter near the front window. Outside, people were tapping numerical codes into the automated gas pumps. But there was no black Caddy in sight. I sat down, closed my eyes, and thanked God. For everything. For promises. For all these difficult things that I knew would somehow work together for good because of love. DeMott’s worry. Madame’s depression. The crime scene tragedy. And this paper plate of American food, made by foreign hands—

  “Are you really crazy?”

  The girl climbed onto the stool beside me.

  I picked up a fry. “No, not really.”

  Her face was solemn. She watched me dip the fry in the mayonnaise. I pushed the plate toward her. “Check it out.”

  She dipped it delicately, then bit. The pigtails bounced with a strong nod of agreement. We ate in silence while her father, then her mother, then the older woman in the sari, presumably her grandmother, told her to leave me alone. I didn’t really want her to go away, and the girl seemed to sense it. In a calm voice she told them that they were wrong and that I happened to like her. When we had almost polished off the fries, my cell phone rang, filling the store with a Muzak rendition of “Camptown Races.”

  Jack’s joke. He had programmed my ringtone to play the corny racing song. The girl dipped another fry. “If you open the phone,” she said, “we wouldn’t have to listen to that music.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  My favorite radio station—770 AM “The Truth”—was reminding its listeners that the Mariners were playing tonight at Safeco Field. Traffic heading into Seattle would move about as fast as a walk to first base.

  Cutting over to Route 99, I let the Ghost soar across the city’s industrial section beside the Deschutes River. We slipped by the shipping cranes and the rusted boxcars on the railroad tracks until just south of Boeing Field, where I turned down a side street and parked outside a laundry warehouse. Steam was rising from the building’s aluminum stack, the gray tendrils floating up to the clouds like prodigal mist. But I stayed in the car for several minutes, pretending to answer my cell phone while gazing in the rearview mirrors. Still no black Caddy. And no other car seemed to be following either. But to be safe, I walked into the laundry building. The parched air smelled of ground cornstarch, and an Asian man answered the desk bell. He looked like every ounce of moisture had evaporated from his skin. When I asked him for an estimate on dry cleaning horse silks, I felt ill as he did several calculations and offered me a price.

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling even worse with my next fib. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I stepped back outside. A row of white panel trucks were backed up to the loading dock, and across the street a propeller repair shop was closed for the night. The junkyard next to it looked almost abandoned. Hopscotching over a series of kettle lakes created by the earlier rain, I ran to the next building. It was one of those square boxes built in the 1970s, back when bronzed steel seemed hip.

  But at five thirty on a Thursday night, the Washington State Crime Lab was so quiet that the sound of the front door opening startled the girl sitting at the front desk. Her hazel eyes widened, as if to say the witching hour didn’t usually begin until Friday.

  “Here to see Tom O’Brien,” I said.

  She set down a paperback novel and picked up the telephone on her desk. The book’s cover showed a knife with dripping blood, bleeding into the title and the author’s name, and moments later a steel door opened down the hall. Tom O’Brien held a visitor’s badge and checked a mark on the receptionist’s log.

  “She’s with me, Sandie.”

  But the receptionist was reading again. She only nodded.

  I waited until the stairwell’s steel door had slammed behind us. It had a loud tumbler lock, the definitive noise of prison cells. “Sorry to keep you so late,” I said. “But it’s urgent.”

  “I accept your apology.” He took the stairs by twos. “But it’s really no problem. My wife and I have season tickets for the Mariners. I can work late and leave the car here. No parking fees, no driving in traffic.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “Thanks.” He was tall with big feet and hands. Since I’d seen him last year, his black hair had turned white at the temples. “Last thing this place needs is more bad publicity.”

  The local media was continually hammering the understaffed lab for its slow turnarounds on DNA evidence. They had also convinced the state legislature to freeze funding until the pace picked up, which was a complete catch-22 because a leaner budget meant the lab couldn’t hire new technicians. But the battle was nothing new. During my five years in the FBI’s mineralogy lab, I learned that two of the worst bedfellows were justice and politics. While justice focused on the truth, politics manipulated the truth for its own gain. Throw in the media,
which only reported the truth that fit their preconceived ideas, and it was little wonder that the fallen world was speeding toward hell in a handbasket. The political games were part of what pushed me out of the lab. But the biggest reason was that after my dad was murdered, I couldn’t sit at a microscope anymore. I needed to do more.

  The main exam room was stretched out down the length of the building. The dozen workstations were divided by high counters that were further elevated by thick books that focused on everything from blood evidence to pharmacology to skin cells. The lower counters held centrifuges and high-resolution microscopes and plastic caddies full of glass pipettes, along with that steady workhorse, the Bunsen burner. At the far end of the lab, a young guy sat in front of a large computer monitor, and behind him, the tinted windows framed a section of Interstate 5. The northbound traffic into the city was at a standstill.

  “Did you have a chance to look at the stuff from the track?” I asked.

  “Just a little. After that agent called and said you were coming in.”

  “What’s your first impression?”

  “Agricultural.” He offered me a small cardboard box, like a Kleenex box, only it contained latex gloves. “But I could be wrong,” he added.

  It was probably my favorite remark from a scientist: I could be wrong.

  He waited for me to snap on the gloves. “The black tube doesn’t look like something that sells general retail,” he said, “so we’ll try to track it through wholesalers. Farm mercantiles. Ag-supply companies, those places.”

  “Be sure to check any place linked to horses.”

  “I’ll make a note.”

  The black plastic tubing that Mr. Yuck had pulled up now lay on an exam table. It had been cut into sections and placed inside clear evidence bags the size of pillow cases. With my gloved hands, I picked up one bag, trying to get a close look at the tube. Dense but pliable plastic. And brown tape was wound around it, the earthy color ideal camouflage in the track’s turf. But the tape didn’t cover the funnel cones that rose from the round surface like miniature volcanoes.

  I glanced at Tom. He was waiting for me to say something.

  I chose my words carefully, thinking of attorneys. And OPR. “The first people who picked this up weren’t wearing gloves. So fingerprints and DNA analysis might be a bit of a mess.”