CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (18 page)

CHAPTER 21

____________

Friday, October 17

“
Macaca mulatta
, an Indian species, commonly known as rhesus macaque,” a bearded guy in a white coat told me, jotting down notes on a clipboard. “Sixteen of them. Two were already dead, and two we had to put down. The rest we drugged up for a long sleep.”

Blue, baby-sized shrouds had been lined up against the wall, each one with a white tag wrapped around it. I scowled, disgusted by the stench. “Monkeys? I get a four a.m. callout and all there’s to see is a bunch of dead monkeys?”

The guy raised his eyes from the clipboard. His receding hairline drew an M across the top of his head, and his Freudian beard was gray with rust-colored streaks at the corners of the mouth. He had no lips and no eyelashes, and he stared at me as if the Pope had just strolled in front of us and I’d failed to recognize him. “No, sir. The monkeys are
my
job,” he said, tapping the pen on his chest. “
Your
job”—pen pointed at me—“is the DOA who just got to the hospital forty minutes ago.” DOA, dead on arrival.

“This proves what I suspected all along, Track,” Satish told me as soon as I joined him in the basement of the Chromo building.

“Which is?”

“There’s some monkey business going on here at Chromo.” His eyes sparkled mischievously.

“Hats off to your brilliant intuition,” I said, bitterly. We crossed the corridor, the stench of urine and excrement getting stronger with every step.

“Cheer up, Track. You’ve been a cop long enough to know that shit happens. Besides, monkey shit is a good omen in some parts of India.”

“I hope you’re joking.”

“Not at all. In some villages they even consider it—”

“Holy shit!” I hollered stepping into the wrecked lab.

“Exactly,” Satish replied. “I guess you don’t wanna hear what they do with cow shit.”

“They lick it to show repentance.” Diane emerged from the metal wreckage of lab cages, the animal stench so strong I could hardly smell her. Behind her, Peter—the SID photographer—faithfully documented every smudge speckling the linoleum floors.

Satish stared at her with admiration for her knowledge of Indian trivia, and I with disgust. Diane ignored both and delved right into work talk. “These monkeys were part of Chromo’s genetic experiments. The victim was a lab technician. He’d come to bleed the animals.”

“Instead he had a change of heart and decided to free the little critters? And maybe take them for a ride down to skid row and buy them a drink?”

“He wasn’t the one who freed them, Track.”

“They have a surveillance camera at the main gate,” Satish said. “The lab guy came in at his usual time. Then a second figure followed, at two-fifteen a.m.”

“How did he get in?”

“He punched in the passcode.”

“How many know the passcode?”

“Security and a few others. Mostly lab people working night shifts.”

I started pacing. Sticky with urine and organic residue, the floor made annoying popping sounds underneath my shoes. One wall of the room was organized in Formica countertops, locked cabinets, and a couple of sinks. A computer monitor lay shattered on the ground. The stainless steel cages were on the opposite side of the room, grouped in two racks of eight pens each. The top row of the first rack had collapsed in a jumble of broken feeders, dented climbing poles, and overturned dishpans, their foul contents spilled all over the floor. Some of the wire mesh doors had come off their hinges and were sprawled several feet away.

“Any chance they got out by themselves?” I asked.

“No,” Diane replied. “The cell doors are locked with a spring bolt. These monkeys wouldn’t be strong enough to open them.”

“Is this where the guy was found?” Satish said, pointing at the area between two consecutive racks of cages, clearly marked in yellow tape on the floor. All around, different patterns of shoe soles and skid marks overlapped, a bi-dimensional projection of the frenzied rescue the EMTs had performed on the victim. 

Diane nodded.

“There’s no blood,” Satish commented. “What did he die of?”

“We don’t know. When our unit got here, the ambulance was already on its way to the hospital. One of the responding officers told us they put the guy on an Ambu bag because he was hardly breathing.”

“You think he walked in on the intruder and there was a fight?” I asked.

“Hard to tell in this mess. We recovered one of the victim’s sandals—”

“Let me see it.”

It was one of those German sandals with a thick rubber sole. Pretty ordinary, in fact. The sole smelled of monkey urine. I studied
the room. There were two doors: the one Satish and I had come from, which gave out into the hallway, and a second one at the back.

“Where does the back door lead to?” I asked.

“Another lab. For bench work, no animals in there,” Diane replied.

Satish walked to the back to check it out. I followed, sniffing. The second rack of cages was still hinged to the wall. I could smell the monkeys jumping from pen to pen, the scene forming in my head as their odors mingled and reached my nostrils. Panicky monkeys crying out, banging the cage doors. The smell of blood, one of their own. They’re scared. A new scent, an intruder. I stopped, went back, retraced it. The smell inside the sandal gave me the victim. I sensed his presence from the first door up to where he’d been found. Stop. For some reason he never made it beyond that point. But somebody else did. Somebody ran to the door at the back and—

“Track, Diane. Come over here.” Satish was crouching by the last cage on the bottom row, the closest to the back door. “This is not fingerprint powder, is it?” he asked, pointing to a fine cloud of white particles flouring one of the steel rods. I brushed it with the tip of my pinky and brought it to my nose.

“Track, we’re supposed to lift—”

“It’s talc,” I said. The cage, then the wall next to it.
The suspect tripped, the floor slippery with urine. He fell and slammed against the cage, then laid a hand on the wall to steady himself.

“Talc?”

“It makes sense, actually,” Diane interjected. “The stainless steel of these cages should have shown human fingerprints. Instead, all we could find were baby-sized ones, from the monkeys. No human prints. Both the lab guy and the intruder were wearing gloves. Lab gloves, most likely.”

“You’re thinking glove talc?” Satish asked.

“It would make sense, wouldn’t it? The guy touches the rod and some talc spills out.”

“No.” I stood up, hooked both hands on my belt, and stared at the cage racks, all doors dangling with their spring bolts unlocked. “No, it makes no sense.”

Diane sprang to her feet and frowned. “Why not?” she challenged.

Proud lady. Her zeal came onto me in a deliciously zesty whiff, which momentarily covered the tangs surrounding us.

I showed her with my gloved hand. “Talc would’ve come out had he raised his arm, like this. But look.” I slid a finger inside the wrist of my glove. I hadn’t used talc and had to leave that bit to her imagination. “Whatever comes out when you raise your hand goes straight into shirt cuffs or arm. If you
lower
your hand instead, as he would’ve to touch the rod down there, no talc comes out. It stays in the glove.”

“Then maybe the talc was on him, from when he’d donned the gloves, and then he brushed his arm against the cage door.”

“The pattern would be different, as in a smear. That one’s a sprinkle. It couldn’t come from a glove.”

“Still—”

“Okay, you two.” Satish jumped in. “I think we ought to find out why the hell a man died in here.”

My brain was on a different frequency. I clung onto the intruder’s smell and followed it.
He ran out through the back door
. I left Satish and Diane discussing the philosophical differences between sprinkles and smears, and stepped into the adjacent lab. All surfaces were neat and shiny. Rows of glassware and identical tools filed like soldiers on the overhead shelves. Everything was as sterile and impersonal as a funeral home stripped out of flowers. The only exception, a metal cart sprawled on the floor: the intruder ran out in a hurry, knocked off the cart, then fled through a side door. I brought my pinky to my nose again, the tip still stained with a dab of talc. Vaguely perfumed, not a fragrance, soap rather.
Could the intruder be a woman
?

I perused the room looking for a new trace. I found something else instead. Six white tanks crammed on the bottom shelf of a
metal rack, their handles sticking out at the top like protruding ears. A blue label to the side of each container read, “Cryo-Cil, Nitrogen refrigerated unit.” A memory, five years earlier, in Watanabe’s lab.
Cryogenic tanks
, I realized, stepping closer to take a better look. Small size, most likely used for transportation, their contents shielded within an internal core, in a bubble of vacuum and
insulating
material. Sturdy, I considered, yet not immune to a semi-jacketed hollow point.

“Diane!” I darted back into the animal lab. “I want the recordings from the surveillance camera at the gate,” I said. “All the way back to October 6.”

Diane winced. “October 6? That far back?”

“Yes. That far back.”

*  *  *

I got home shortly after dawn. There was a moment along the freeway when the sky ripened, and a palette of burning reds and carmines seeped over the outline of the mountains. It lasted only a few ephemeral minutes, then the colors dissolved and a new day was born.

Once at home I showered and shaved. The bathroom mirror insisted on portraying a tired me with dark circles underneath my eyes.

I hate mirrors. They tend to have a mind of their own.

I ground two cups of coffee beans and got the Bialetti Moka out. For wine and coffee you gotta leave the Italians alone. I filled the bottom of the Bialetti with water—up to the valve, strictly, not above and not below—filled the filter, then placed it on the stove.

I keep a watchful eye on that baby as it brews my coffee. The gas must be turned off when the scent of coffee is just ripe, right in the middle of its aromatic gargles. A little too early, and not all the water has come out. A little too late and it gets a burnt aftertaste. It’s one of those things where perfection lies right between timing and precision. The point is not to get distracted.

I slouched on the recliner and watched the morning light draw long shades on the walls. A jay screeched outside, until the trash truck turned onto the street and the rattling and clonking of trash bins sent the jay away. I thought of coffee and dawn and how everything in life reaches an exact peak of perfection and then it’s gone. The Greeks had a name for it, but I couldn’t think of it. My thoughts seemed to follow the same pattern: they came and went in waves, and by the time I felt I had the right intuition, it was gone and I couldn’t get it back. At least dawns had existed for a few million years now, and as for coffee, I could always brew a new Moka.

There were six cryogenic tanks in the Chromo lab. Jennifer Huxley wanted new data. Jennifer Huxley is dead. How long has she been dead? Did she ever go to the Tarantino home that night or was it someone else driving her car? The religious note. It smelled foul
.

And on that last thought, I leaped out of the recliner and reached for the phone.

“Latent Prints,” I blurted with the scratchy voice of somebody who’d just come out of bed. I had to give my name and business. As if anybody other than a frustrated cop had an interest in calling Latent Prints at eight o’clock in the morning. Really.

“Hold on, please.”

I held on. Latent Prints picked up in the form of a Hispanic accent asking again for my name and business.

“Presius. I’ve got a job request sitting somewhere on your dusty shelves.” The accent didn’t like that I called her shelves dusty. I didn’t care.

“Hold on, please.”

I held on. Back in the kitchen the Bialetti started singing. I held on to that, too.

“Hello?” Low, baritone voice this time, as scratchy and annoyed as mine—somebody who probably wanted to use the phone and instead found it already in use.

“Presius—”

“Is somebody helping you out?”

“Not really.”

“Hold on.”

I held on for the third time. I was so damn pissed I forgot about the Bialetti and got there one second too late. I could smell the burnt coffee. “Fuck.”

“Ah, no, this is Lorenzo, sir.”

“Who?”

“Lorenzo Agavi. I believe I’ve been assigned your request.”

I gave him the case ID again. Just because he believed it, it didn’t mean
I
believed it.

“Yes, sir.” I heard him flip over papers. “I’ve got uh— A note found on the crime scene and an envelope, both filed under the name Tarantino. Correct?” I nodded but didn’t utter a word. “Well, I just got it, sir. They’re both on my desk as we speak.”