CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (15 page)

She drew a hand to her chest, searching for the stethoscope she’d left at the hospital. When she didn’t find it, she fiddled with the lapels of her lab coat, the back of her hand flowered with light freckles. “I stand by the rules, Detective. It’s my job. And frankly, I don’t see how knowing Gaya was one of my patients can help find Jennifer’s killer.”

I raised a brow. “Not even if I told you Huxley found out why Gaya died?”

My bluff had the effect I’d been looking for. Cox’s face drained of all color. By my side, Satish tensed. I knew what he was thinking and I didn’t care.

“Gaya died of leukemia,” she said, her voice low. “We did all we could possibly—”

“Her father doesn’t think so,” I interjected. “And I have reason to believe Huxley didn’t either. Have you ever heard of the expression
Proteus kids
?”

Cox’s eyes hardened. She wrapped her fingers around the empty Styrofoam cup, twirled it, then crushed it. “This interview is over,” she said coolly. “I won’t say another word until I talk to a lawyer.”

*  *  *

“Absolutely brilliant, Track,” Satish griped.

“You weren’t going anywhere either, okay?”

I was downright angry. Angry at the idiot who locked Huxley’s computer, angry at the bitch of a doctor for telling him to do so, and angry at the system because I should’ve gotten that computer days ago, when I started investigating the woman’s disappearance.
Unscathed by any of my woes, Satish watched Cox climb onto the cruiser taking her back to the Esperanza while happily whistling Charlie Chaplin’s tune “Smile”—Nat King Cole’s version, for the record, because he’s that kind of a classy guy.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Sat?” I snapped.

“With me? What the hell is wrong with me? You’re the one who’s all revved up.”

“I have a thousand reasons for being mad. How are we supposed to find out why Huxley got killed without the data she was working on?”

“We’ve got smart people down at Electronics. They’ll figure out a way to get to those files.”

“It’ll take months. You should’ve listened to me yesterday. You knew as well as I did the stiff was Huxley.”

“Track, you’re a smart guy and yet you still fall for these things. They’re legal traps. Had we gotten the computer yesterday, before the medical examiner signed the death certificate with the right name on it, whatever we would’ve milked out of the hard disk would’ve been inadmissible. And you know it.”

“Shit,” I mumbled, shuffling back to the elevator lobby. Satish pressed the call button and then chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I just thought of somethin’ my old man used to say.”

“Amuse me too. I need it right now.”

The elevator chimed and the doors slid open. We stepped inside, I pressed the button to the third floor and stared at Satish. Waiting. He shook his head, sighed, and laughed in contentment. “My first day in middle school. I felt all grown up. I wasn’t a boy anymore—I was a big kid. So my old man comes over, pats me on the shoulder, and tells me,
Remember one thing, Satish. They’re all out there to fuck you
.”

“Your old man said that?”

Satish raised a hand. “Hold on. Not finished yet.
They’re all out there to fuck you
, he said,
and the only difference is that some use more Vaseline than others. Stick with the Vaseline son, it’s pretty much all you can do
.”

I brought a hand to my head, squeezed the bridge of my nose, and smiled. By the time we got back to the squad room, I was laughing out loud.

“Track, what we did today was provide ourselves with a little more Vaseline. And believe me, when you get fucked a lot, a little bit more can go a long way.” He walked to his desk, retrieved his jacket, and slid it on. I watched him step out of the squad room thinking,
Satish Cooper. A man of few words, and always the right ones.

*  *  *

To the naked eye, the shoe cover I had cleverly—or so I believed—acquired from Cox was the exact same blue as the fibers I’d found on the Tarantino crime scene. I grasped the two ends and pulled.
Tear free
, Diane had said. I’d used enough of these to know it was true. I turned it inside out and concluded it was one oval piece of Tyvek with an elastic band sewn around the edge. The piece had clearly been cut with a blade before the elastic band had been sewn, and little filaments stuck out at the seam of the inner hem. I plucked a couple, pulled, and the trick was done: I was holding a clump of tear-free Tyvek fibers.

I drove to Cal State to drop them off. It was lunch hour and the Trace Unit lab was deserted, save for a beefy face with no neck doubled over a microscope. The face didn’t seem too happy to unglue from the optical piece to address my concerns, but I pretended not to notice.

“I need to know if this stuff is Tyvek and if DuPont is the brand,” I said, holding Cox’s shoe covers up for him to see. He stared at it with no interest whatsoever. The muzzle of a sheep grazing in a bucolic field of grass came to mind.

“They’re all made by DuPont,” he said, unsentimentally.

“Flash-spun, not woven?”

The guy nodded. He must’ve been a genius to see all those things with his naked eye.

“How common are they?”

He shrugged. “I got a lot of fifty boxes right here. Wanna buy some?”

“Fuck off, Einstein.” I shoved the shoe covers back into my pocket and stepped out.

Latent Prints was a bit more crowded but equally disappointing. I was eager to find out whether or not fingerprints had been lifted from the funeral card found in Robert Tarantino’s recycling bin.

“Novak left and we’re backed up,” an Indian woman told me, wearing a shimmering red sari underneath a white lab coat. An Indian woman in a shimmering red sari and a white lab coat on top is like Italian wine in a chipboard box. I thanked her and went my way.

Diane was out. I dropped a note on her desk and left the Hertzberg-Davis building feeling as impersonal and dull as a drive-through order delivered through an intercom.
A number four combo, a side of tots, and a large Hi-C
. How anybody can translate that kind of jargon into food is beyond me.

Back at the squad room, I found a printout on my desk, left by Knudsen, the New York officer turned into philosopher who’d searched the wondrous world of the Internet under my request. I stuck a paperclip in my mouth, scanned the first paragraph, and thought,
What a sucker
. It read, “Proteus, one of the early gods of the sea. His children: Eidothea, Polygonos and Telegonos, the latter two both killed by Heracles.”
What’s this, an essay on Greek mythology
? “Other uses of the word Proteus: a search engine, a bacteria, a syndrome, a synonym for alchemy.”

I crumpled the piece of paper, tossed it in the trash, and then called Electronics. Still nothing on Tarantino’s hard disk. I tried another number and asked about DNA evidence on Huxley’s body or vehicle. Nothing there either—everything was backed up. Mighty frustrating. I was entangled in a jumble of partial facts, suppositions, and pieces of information cluttering my brain with no apparent order. It made me feel like Maria Ramirez’s pin board, the
collector of everything who worked at the Chromo human resources department.

The data on that computer has been obtained through my grant and is therefore my intellectual property
. I grabbed another paperclip and stuck it between my teeth.

Her data, her grant, her fucking intellectual property.

I sprang to my feet, walked to one of our terminals and logged onto the network. After browsing for fifteen minutes, I grinned, as my intuition had been right: dear Dr. Cox could claim whatever privacy on her data. NIH grants, though, were far from private. The National Institute of Health had budgeted for the 2010 fiscal year close to thirty billion in grant money. Of the two million, Julia Cox had received over the past two years, one had bought the Illumina Beadstation, the machine I had admired at the Esperanza lab. It didn’t take me too long to figure out where the rest of the money had gone: computers, technicians’ salaries, travel expenses, lab equipment.

When I folded it all in, what had originally struck me as a conspicuous sum appeared meager.

Where did she get the rest of the money
?

On the Esperanza website I found a whole section dedicated to Julia Cox and her team, research, mission statement, publications. A number of philanthropists and private institutions were listed in the acknowledgments for providing additional support to Cox’s battle against leukemia. Finally the numbers were adding up. And as I scanned down the list of patrons, one name jumped to my eyes: Richard F. Medford, Chromo Inc. My hand froze over the mouse. The Chromo CEO turned out to be one of Cox’s most generous donors.

No wonder the minute I mentioned the Proteus kids you lawyered up, Julia
.

Two detectives from Homicide stepped into the squad room triumphantly announcing they had finally handcuffed their suspect after an investigation that had languished for over a year. “Did you get a confession?” another detective asked.

Keegan, an older dick with a Charles Bronson kind of mustache, grinned. He ambled to his desk, slumped in his chair, and propped both feet on his desk. “All I got from the asshole is,
I’ll give you a hell of a time in court, you bastard. You’ve been after me just because I’m a Jew and you Irish dumbasses hate Jews
.” Keegan flew a hand to his breast pocket and produced a cigar case. “You know what I told the asshole? I said,
I don’t know about the other Irishmen, but this Irish dick right here”—
he tapped on his breastbone
—“loves you, man. I’ve been after you for so long, I’d be out of a job without you
!”

I joined the burst of laughter spreading across the squad room. As I swiveled back to the computer screen something new roused my nostrils. A second before I recognized it, my pulse quickened.
Danger
. I inhaled, longer this time, giving my brain time to process the information.

Somebody I know just stepped out of the elevator. Somebody I hate
.

I sprang to my feet and darted out of the room, the trail of the new scent leading the way. A foul smell, sour sweat and burnt cilantro, a tang I’d met before.

Huxley’s assassin.

I can’t be wrong, I know his smell now
.

There was no way I could mistake it, the man in Huxley’s car, the same individual who rampaged her place, his smell was right there, on the third floor of the Glass House. How the f—

“Good afternoon, Track. I got your message. I’m parked on Los Angeles Street. Are you ready to go?”

I screeched to a halt, flabbergasted. Diane. The assassin’s smell. On Diane. I gaped, looking like a total idiot.

“What?” She touched her head. “Do I have toothpaste on my hair?”

I shook my head, still gaping. It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t want it to make any sense. Diane lost it and scoffed. “Track, what’s freaking wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “Let me go get my jacket.”

Diane
, I thought, as I left her waiting in the elevator lobby. The Roman name for Artemis, the Greek hunting goddess. Beautiful and wild, a seducer and a killer, as, according to some legends, she slew her lover and companion Orion.

Would Eve have been drawn to the Tree of Knowledge, had she not known its fruits were forbidden
?

CHAPTER 19

____________

Thursday, October 16

Diane pulled to the curb, turned the engine off, and stared at the gates. “Are you sure this is the place?”

“Do you expect a cemetery to look any different?”

“No.”

Green Lake Memorial Park was a citadel of the dead surrounded by white walls, the bronze statue of a genderless angel guarding its entrance. A row of palm trees emerged behind the enclosure, their skinny trunks lining the blue outline of the mountains.

“Let’s move,” I said, stepping out of the car and slamming the door. “They’re probably at the burial site by now.”

I was mad and on the verge of losing it. I felt the beast in me fighting to get out.
What’d you do last night
? I asked Diane on our way here.
Who’d you see, where’d you go
? As I pressed her, she became more and more defensive.
Who’d you sleep with
?

Fuck off, Track! Is this how you hit on girls
?

I wasn’t hitting on her. I had a hit on her scent.

I’d ridden in her car with the window rolled all the way down. It was all over her—in her hair and on her clothes—somebody else’s smell, the same faceless person I had confronted the night before in Huxley’s apartment. My eyes saw Diane and my nostrils perceived a ruthless killer. The odor enraged me, more so given the events of the night before. Whoever he was, he’d defeated me and I hated him. How could
he
be all over Diane? Was she a pawn, an accomplice, or just a by-stander?

Maybe you’re wrong, Ulysses. Maybe it’s not him you’re smelling.

I’m
never
wrong.

Then follow her. Stalk her. She’s the key to the assassin.

Smells are elusive, though. And so are people.

Diane locked the car and we hurriedly hiked up the incline to the gates. “It’s not my fault we left late,” she protested.

“Zone F, Detective,” a uniformed officer stationed at the entrance told us after checking our identifications.

“Busy?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Not much. Small, private service. A couple of news crews showed up at the beginning. They took pictures, did their gig right here in front of the gate, and when I informed them they weren’t allowed inside, they left.”

“There’s a better celeb monopolizing the headlines these days,” I said, thinking of movie director turned assassin, Jerry White.

We followed the road slithering through the various zones of the cemetery, its edges marked by purple heather and white petunias. Between two rows of poplars, a grid of ground markers was embedded in a field of freshly mowed grass. The sun framed the silhouette of a woman kneeling by one of the stones, while an unconcerned child played her own version of hopscotch between the graves. A smile surfaced on Diane’s lips as she silently watched the scene. A warm breeze brushed the tree crowns and then came down to ruffle her hair.
The smell is finally gone
, I noted with relief. My mood instantly changed.

“My mother used to bring me to the cemetery once a month when I was growing up,” Diane said.

Me too
, I thought. “Grandparents?”

“No. All the children she miscarried until they finally told her she couldn’t have any. My parents buried them one by one and made sure they always had fresh flowers.” I puzzled over her words, unsure how to take them. “I was adopted,” she explained softly.

We left the road and followed a sign pointing to Zone F. In the distance, voices intoned a sad tune, the notes mingling with the rustling of the leaves and the trickling of an artificial creek.

“It’s like being haunted by ghosts,” Diane continued. “The siblings I never had.”

“At least they never stole your lunch box or beat you up in school.” It was a stupid comment, yet I couldn’t come up with anything better to say. It made her smile. She brought a hand to her face to cover a snort and, in spite of myself, I found it damn cute.

Two black hearses were parked next to the one another under the drooping boughs of a willow. The chant came to an end right as we joined the gathering.

“Keep your eyes open,” I told Diane. “There’s a good chance our killer’s right here.”

She knew her assailant. Somebody so close she didn’t mind to let him in at a vulnerable time
.

We split, Diane to the left and I to the right. I spotted familiar faces interviewed at Chromo the day before, including a distraught Ms. Hennessy, the receptionist, who kept sniffing and bringing a tissue to her nose. I pictured her the next day, spending hours on the phone describing hats, shoes and faces she had studied and appraised during the ceremony. Including mine.

The priest gave the final blessing and aspersed the two caskets.

Cordelia, the Tarantinos’ daughter, stood closest to the burial site. The pallbearers lowered the first casket, and when it reached the bottom Cordelia tossed a pink carnation over it.

Among the forest of dark suits, the hems of a teal blue scarf billowed, soon restrained by a white gloved hand—a smear of color in a sea of black. A matching bow sat on a wide hat, below which blond locks draped the narrow shoulders of a navy blue dress. Sexy pantyhose, with a vertical line drawn over perfectly shaped calves, blended into black high heels. Next to her was Richard Medford, easily recognizable by the mop of white hair crowning his head. Hands clasped behind his back, the Chromo CEO stood like a general at an official ceremony.

Medford’s eyes darted, wandering among the bowed heads around him. Something caught his attention, making him shift and crane his head. At the other end of the congregation, Diane met his stare, blushed, and immediately looked away. Medford smiled, licked his lower lip, and then slid a hand around his wife’s waist, drawing her closer and making her sway on her precariously high heels. Diane’s face slid away, and a different lady caught my attention, standing farther away by a mortuary pillar, her face concealed behind large butterfly sunglasses. Painted in bright lipstick, her lips stood out like a drop of blood on a white wall.

A sudden murmur welcomed the end of the celebration. Feet shifted, heads bowed, arms reached out in muted hugs. The sudden liveliness of the congregation momentarily distracted me, and when I looked back, the mysterious lady had vanished. Like leaves blown by the breeze, the crowd dispersed in random order. Some ringed around Cordelia to offer their sympathy. I had expected Tarantino’s sister to stand by her niece’s side. Instead, she shuffled away with her husband, her frail figure leaning against him. Cordelia startled when a hand rested on her shoulder. Richard Medford stepped closer and kissed her pale cheek. I searched for the wife in high heels and spotted the teal scarf farther away, her white gloves flirtatiously stroking the expensive jacket of a friend.

“I’m doing okay now, thank you, Dan,” she muttered in a low voice.

“Call us if you need anything.” He had ash-blonde curls, an important nose, and a square chin charmed by a dimple. Despite wearing shades and a black felt hat, his distinctive features gave him away. I watched him bid his party goodbye and then crossed his path.

“Mr. Horowitz? Detective Presius, LAPD,” I said, holding up my badge.

Dan Horowitz narrowed his eyes. “I’m in a hurry, Detective. My wife will have a fit if I don’t show up in time for our daughter’s ballet performance.”

“Won’t take too much of your time. I understand the Tarantinos were at your house the night they got murdered.”

“Like about a hundred other people,” he scoffed. Peevish guy, I noted. Naturally suspicious, fond of his grounded certainties, and not well inclined towards crowds where it wasn’t his ego to shine the brightest. Nothing like the happy Californian he depicted himself to be on TV.

“I’m just curious, Mr. Horowitz. How did you happen to know the victims?”

“Friends of mutual friends,” he replied with a shrug. “If that’s all—”

“Would those mutual friends include Mrs. Medford?”

The showman froze for a second, looked away, and then smirked. “Detective, everybody
knows
Elizabeth Medford.” 

“What about her husband?”

The smirk widened and became a grin. He looked over his shoulder, stepped closer, and whispered, “He loves it.” His breath infiltrated my nostrils: a greasy lunch wolfed in a hurry and washed down with some herbal tisane his wife—certainly not him—made him therapeutically ingest on a daily basis.

“What do you mean?”

A sneer was all the answer I got. He brought a hand to his forehead to mock a military salute and left.

“You look funny, Track.”

“Do I?”

Diane let the wind blow a lock in her face before brushing it away. Around us, voices turned into murmurs and tapered off.
Withered strands of grass lay where the congregation had previously stood. “I spoke with Mrs. Medford,” she said on our way back to the car. “Turns out, she’s not only good friends with the Horowitzes, but knows Jerry White as well, together with a whole bunch of Hollywood people.”

“How did that come up?”

“She asked me if we were also investigating Conrad’s murder.
Poor Jerry
, as she called him, has been under a lot of stress after his daughter’s death, but is basically a saint and wouldn’t harm a fly.”

I snorted. “And how does she suppose his gun ended up at the crime scene?”

“She claims somebody led him to it.”

“How come she’s smitten with all these celebs?”

“Exactly what I asked her. She gave me this.” Diane handed me a colorful pamphlet with the word CHROMO printed on the first page, then unlocked her car and sat behind the wheel. I slouched on the passenger’s seat and flipped through the booklet while my nostrils, with a mind of their own, widened and tested the air for possible unfriendly odors.

Gone. The wind carried it away. Or maybe you were wrong, Ulysses.

Impossible
.

“Genetic screening?” I asked, reading off the pamphlet. “What for?”

The engine of Diane’s old VW coughed, whined, and finally barked to life. She screeched out of the parking lot and whipped into the street, letting the first gear roar in anguish before switching to the second and third.
Get an automatic for God’s sake
, my inner voice screamed. But I learned a long time ago not to ever comment on a woman’s driving. It always backfires.

“It’s very popular among the rich and famous, apparently,” Diane replied, ignoring the afflictions of her engine. “Together with a healthy diet, mindful use of caffeine and alcohol, abstinence from nicotine, and supplemental folic acid, when a couple considers having a child nowadays they’re recommended genetic screening. Elizabeth Medford even promised me a special price should I think
about it some day.”

I smiled. “Did you tell her you’re neither rich nor famous?”

Diane frowned. “How rude of you, Track! What do you know? I could still join the crowds of high society. I could always marry a rich litigation lawyer or a fancy plastic surgeon.”

She smiled, but somehow I was no longer amused.

*  *  *

It was a lady’s shoulder bag with a leather strap, zipped across the top. And it was sitting on a chair next to my desk. I inhaled.
Still away
. The long hand on the wall clock hit the number twelve and the short one aligned with the number four. A couple of murder books snapped closed with a loud click. Chairs were dragged on the floor and jackets were slipped back on.

“You workin’ late, Track?” a detective asked, his lips hugging the butt of an unlit cigarette.

“Gotta hit the trail when it’s hot,” I replied.

“Nail the dumb director,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “And make us proud.”

I stared at the empty desks. A phone rang but I didn’t get up to answer.  Up on the ceiling, the fan swooshed. My eyes strayed back to the purse. If Diane truly was my key to Huxley’s assassin, nothing was going to stop me from finding out. I inhaled again. How long can a lady be gone powdering her nose? Her scent was nowhere close. The smell of bleach and floor detergent coming from the hallway told me the restrooms on our floor had been closed for evening cleaning, which bought me another couple of minutes. I snatched the purse, unzipped it, and went straight for the wallet. Credit cards, no cash, a UCLA alumni card, and finally the one item I sought: the driver’s license. I barely had the time to peek at the address, when her scent gently wafted into range. By the time her heels clacked back into the squad room, the shoulder purse lay untouched on the chair, and my hands where in the evidence box on my desk. It contained all the papers and documents we had seized from Huxley’s office.

“Where do you want me to sit?” Diane asked, the furrow between her eyebrows addressing the degenerate state of my working place. Damn, she smelled good.