Read Online Out at Night by Susan Arnout Smith - Free Book Online Page B

tollbooth, and she slid her ID in so he could check it. He looked up briefly, making sure the picture matched. She resisted the urge to tell him she was much better-looking at night after he’d had a few drinks.
    He slid her ID back and buzzed her through an adjoining door that opened into a small conference room. A beeper went off: the all-clear signal that she wasn’t carrying.
    “They’ll be in soon.” His hair was brown, without a trace of gray. He could be any age from thirty to sixty. He was wearing a wedding ring and blue veins roped the backs of his hands, old hands, which had the curious effect, Grace thought, of making his face look even younger.
    He glanced at the bag she was carrying. It was leather and brown with straps. She’d bought it at a Coach discount store in Cabazon when she first started working in the lab.
    “There’s a wall outlet here if you need it.”
    She nodded and pulled out her computer.
    He closed the door and left her.

    __

    Grace looked up from her flash drive and for an instant, it felt as if she were flattened in another dimension, looking into her life from a distant place. There was no air in this other place. She couldn’t breathe. Her head felt squeezed, elongated.
    Her dead father stood in front of her, bulkier, with drooping lids and fierce brown eyes. A welter of lines cracked his face as his lips moved.
    He smiled with no tenderness.
    “Uncle Pete.”
    “SA Descanso in here.”
    His voice was lower than her dad’s had been, and she could almost guarantee this man had never hit the high notes singing “Louie Louie” as a good-night song. She actually couldn’t imagine him singing much of anything to his five kids, now that she considered it, and for a moment, she wondered what her cousins’ lives had been like in some airless, cheerless dimension with a man who didn’t easily smile.
    “Ready? They’re on their way in.”
    She noticed he didn’t wait for an answer.

    __

    “What do you know about racial profiling using DNA?”
    She looked down the table. Zsloski slouched next to her uncle. Across the table sat an investigator named Thantos from the Riverside sheriff’s department who was part of the joint terrorism task force, and another Palm Springs FBI agent named Beth Loganis.
    The sounds of a busy office carried through the closed door into the room; somewhere a fax machine churned and phones rang. A small window had been cut into the door of the conference room; Grace caught a glimpse of two agents rushing past in the hall, voices urgent and muted.
    She waited. Usually it took a beat before they got it.
    Zsloski was frowning and doodling on a pad. He raised his shaggy head. “Hold it. Race is in the DNA?”
    All heads came up.
    “We’ve been able to do it for a while; we just don’t call it that in press releases. We can figure out a suspect’s race from collected DNA found at a crime scene. We say race, and people think target, when what we’re actually talking about is the narrowing down of a suspect pool, catching a bad guy before he does it again.
    “If you knew from collected DNA that a suspect was a white male whose skin easily sunburned, wouldn’t you want to know that chances are the perp has red hair and freckles? Figuring that out is a little complicated, but—”
    Zsloski threw down his pen. “Uncomplicate it.”
    She was trying not to stare at her uncle. In the way he held his pen she saw her dad, in the slope of his shoulders, her grandfather.
    “It came out of an innocuous pastime, people wanting to trace family trees, get a handle on their ancestry. Now police use it to flag suspects. Somebody kill the lights.”
    She started her flash drive as the room went semidark, illuminated by the ghost stamp of light still coming from the hall.
    “First off, what the tests do is break down percentages, not actual race.”
    She tapped the keypad and her first graphic came up on the wall. It was a map of the world with three small silhouettes