CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (23 page)

“That’s all your parents told you? That it was the measles?”

“Look. My parents hated doctors.” I scratched my brow, trying to remember. “Mom said when I was little a doctor wanted to drill a hole in my head—her words, not mine. Apparently, the doctor was convinced I wasn’t going
to live another six months.” I laughed. My laughter vaporized under Watanabe’s hard stare.

“Nothing personal, Doc. I like you,” I joked.

Still, the man wouldn’t budge. He rolled the pen between his fingers, his silence as heavy as a next-day hangover.

“You had a brain tumor, Ulysses. When you were five.”

He let the words chill out on me, then reached for the brown envelope in his drawer. It looked fatter than last time. He pushed it towards me and let it hang at the edge of the desk. “It’s all in there. Two signed referrals from pediatricians, one recommendation for surgery from an oncologist. I made a copy of your CT scan. ‘Grade two juvenile astrocytoma’—that was your diagnosis. It’s still visible, despite the image being over twenty years old—a mass about half-centimeter in diameter in the left cerebellar hemisphere.”

I looked at the image in disbelief. “Oh, come on.” I made a face. “Look at me, Doc. I’m thirty-eight and pretty healt
hy, save a moderate addiction to ethanol and caffeine. Those docs,” I waved a hand at the brown envelope. “They
had
to be wrong.”

He shook his head.

I forced laughter out of my throat. “Really, Doc. I’d be dead by now.”

“Something saved your life. A virus, precisely.” Watanabe pulled a bunch of papers out of the brown envelope. They were photocopies of old documents, some handwritten, some typed on yellowed hospital letterhead. None I recognized. “You changed after that. Your vision, your acute olfactory senses, your—aggressiveness. You weren’t born a chimera, you became one.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You said—I couldn’t be a chimera.”

“Not a genetic one, no. You’re an
epigenetic
chimera, the most extraordinary kind. The measles killed the brain tumor but turned on ancestral genes that are normally off in most individuals.”

Watanabe forked his reading glasses and flipped through the papers. “Visit dates, temperature, BP—ah, here it is. You were hospitalized in April 1976—you’d just turned six. You were running a fever of one-oh-four and having seizures. A doctor named Frank Haynes saw you, one of the two pediatricians who had made the tumor diagnosis six months earlier. He concluded you had contracted encephalitis as a complication from the measles. You were in a coma for about a week. They treated you with anti-infl
ammatory drugs and analgesic. You had to undergo physical therapy for about three months afterwards.” He raised his eyes above the rim of his glasses. “You have no recollection of that?”

It all sounded distant, as if he were telling me somebody else’s story, not mine. “Of the hospital? Yes. I hated it. Brain tumors? No. Look. I wasn’t the brightest kid in school, okay? And I was ridiculously clumsy in PE—
that
I remember. But I outgrew it.” 

“Exactly.” Watanabe flipped through the papers. “Dr. Haynes actually saw you again—for the last time—one year later. Your symptoms were gone: no more headaches, dizziness, or fainting
. He checked your balance, movements, etc. Everything looked normal except—”

“Except?”

“Haynes found your vision and sense of olfaction to be dramatically enhanced: ‘Exceptionally fast reflexes, enhanced vision and sense of olfaction. Mild irritability.’ He suggested a new CT scan but your parents declined.”

I let out a snort. “Of course. By then they realized the brain tumor had never existed, and my mother was right to be pissed.”

“And how do you explain the changes after the encephalitis?”

I laced my hands together and leaned forward. “I told you the story a million times, Doc. You still refuse to believe me. We were camping, Dad and I.
I got too far from the campground and was attacked by a cougar. I was still in kindergarten.” I sank back in my chair. “I never was the same after that.”

“How did you survive a cougar attack?”

“I don’t know. It roared at me. I screamed and froze. Then it—” I swallowed. I could still see its amber eyes flash before my face. “It barely scratched me with its fangs and left.” I shook my head, smiling without meaning to. “My parents didn’t believe me either. Said I’d gotten the scratches from tree branches.”

Watanabe didn’t blink, his face as flat as a board. He stuck a hand inside the brown envelope and fished out one last paper. “Your recent MRI. Take a look.” He handed it to me across the desk and pointed to the middle of the skull. “That’s your cerebellum. And see the tiny white blob on the right side of the image? You have to know it’s there to see it.” He stood up, leaned across the desk, and tapped the MRI scan in my hands. “Right there. See?”

I nodded.

“That’s the scar your childhood tumor left. A scar, nothing else. The measles virus destroyed the rest.”

I shot up my brows. “You’re not saying—the virus—how’s that even possible?”

“Viruses kill cells, Ulysses. Tumors are made of cells. There have been quite a few case reports of cancer remission after an unrelated viral infection. In fact, viruses are used in experimental anti-cancer treatments. The measles infection you got in 1976 got to your brain, causing the encephalitis, and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It killed the tumor, leaving a tiny scar.”

He stared at me.

I set the MRI back on the desk. “Let me get this straight
, Doc. A stupid virus I got when I was five saved me from dying of brain cancer but turned me into a monster?”

Watanabe smiled. “Not a monster, Ulysses. A
mezurashii
. A one in a million. The virus turned you into a chimera.”

“Don’t chimeras have two DNA’s?” I asked.

“
Genetic
chimeras have different DNA’s in different tissues. But you’re not a genetic chimera, Ulysses. You’re an
epigenetic
one.”

He started blabbering about pseudogenes and that word he liked so much, epigenetics; how genes turn on and off and the environment we are exposed to—diet, diseases, even traumas—can screw that whole “on/off” process. My brain was reeling. I got to my feet and walked to the window. The pale face of the moon filled the sky.

A virus.

A virus turned me into a chimera.

An
epigenetic
chimera—whatever that meant
.

“Ulysses? Are you listening to me? Do you understand, now, how the viral infection turned on the ancestral genes that control vision and olfaction?”

I swallowed. “It wasn’t the measles.”

“What?”

“That doctor—Haynes. He said it was the measles because the stuff was going around at the time. But it wasn’t. I—I’d been vaccinated against the measles.” I turned away from the window and stared at him, his face carved out of darkness by the yellow table lamp. “The virus was rabies.” 

CHAPTER 27

____________

Tuesday, October 21

I propped my feet on the desk and stuck a paperclip in my teeth. Roy, a young detective with a square neck and a flat head, tossed a paper airplane in the air and snickered. I caught it midair, crumpled it, and thrust it in the trash bin. They should forbid anybody with a flat head to wear a buzz cut. It’s disturbing.

Roy flashed a sheepish grin, which I ignored.

I spit out the paperclip and yawned. The weather was dull, the afternoon was dull, the mood was dull. Until a new spice gently rippled the air. I dropped my feet from the desk.

“Sat.”

“Hmm.”

“Was there a meeting I forgot about today?”

“No, why?”

“Diane’s here.”

*  *  *

“Sorry to barge in unannounced,” Diane told us, slightly out of breath. I unlocked the door to the captain’s office, which we use as a conference room whenever the boss is not around.

Satish pulled a chair and noisily flopped in it. “Track announced you, all right. About three minutes before you stepped into the squad room.”

Diane whirled her head and stared at me. “Really?” she asked, a flattered look dancing on her face.

She walked to the captain’s chair and slid off her short-sleeve jacket. She was wearing a sleeveless top that held her breasts in the most marvelous way, the balance between what it revealed and what it left to the imagination as poetic as a Shakespearean sonnet.

Something excited her. “I just got back from UCLA and couldn’t wait to show you guys.”

“UCLA?”

She opened a folder and spread its contents on the table. “I spent the whole day at the Electron Imaging Core, staring into a transmission electron microscope. It’s an amazing instrument: it can enlarge objects one thousand times smaller than the section of a human hair.”

I sent a sideways glance at Satish. “Imagine Gomez’s moles—how beautiful they’d look.”

He grinned. “Like the surface of Mars.”

Diane glared. “Anyway. I prepared a sample with the blood taken from one of the Chromo monkeys, and this is what I saw.” She flipped a picture in front of us. On cue, Satish and I leaned forward and peered at the photo, both feeling as clueless as chipmunks crossing the street.

“What are we staring at?”

“A virus. Nathan Kim’s killer.”

“I thought the Chromo lab tech died of anaphylactic shock,” Satish said.

“He did.” Diane tapped on the cluster of circular blobs depicted in the picture. “The virus got into his system through the monkey bite and triggered the massive release of histamine.”

I struggled to understand. “Diane, a virus can give you the flu, a cold, or hepatitis. I’ve never heard of a virus triggering anaphylaxis.”

“This was no ordinary virus, Track,” she said, flopping back in her chair and retrieving a second sheet of paper. It was a diagram this time. “I analyzed the genome of this particular virus and compared it to a flu strain.”

“Hold on,” Satish interrupted. “Does this mean the monkeys were sick?”

“Not quite. Look at this: the top diagram represents the genes of the flu virus, the bottom one represents the genes of the virus from the Chromo monkey. I put them together so you can see the similarities.”

“Similarities, huh?” I commented, staring at the diagrams. “This is what a color-blinded person feels when staring at a Chagall.”

Satish snorted, but Diane wasn’t amused. “Guys, you don’t understand.” She dropped back in her chair, a shade of frustration jagging her brow. “A virus is basically genetic material wrapped in a shell. When the virus attacks a cell, the shell opens up and the genetic material is delivered inside.” Diane paused. We remained silent this time. “Now look at these diagrams. This is the gene coding the outer shell of the virus. It’s pretty similar across the two species. Now, here”—she tapped to the right of the two diagrams—“is what each virus will inject inside the infected cell. And this is where the Chromo virus gets strikingly different from the flu strain.”

“How?” Satish asked.

“Because these right here are no ordinary genes. They’re
human
genes.”

The air in the captain’s office felt suddenly stale and hot. I rose, walked to the thermostat, and cranked up the AC. The Venetian blinds started tapping against the windowpane.

“How can a virus contain human genes?” Satish asked.

I knew the answer. I knew it too damn well.

We can do it in a lab
, Watanabe had told me last night.
We can now make chimeric viruses by mixing pieces of DNA from different organisms
.

“This is not just any virus,” Diane explained. “It’s been artificially engineered.”

“They’re called chimeras,” I said, in a low voice, the name—chimeras—such a new, intimate detail of my life it almost startled me to hear it coming out of my mouth.

Diane looked surprised. “They are, Track. How did you—”

“No,” I interrupted. “The question is
why
was Chromo making these viruses and injecting them into monkeys.”

Diane pulled a lock of her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know. I need to study these genes better, see what proteins they code. It might be part of some gene therapy experiment. Maybe they wanted to modify genes that cause genetic disorders.”

“Are you saying—?” Satish said.

“Exactly what you’re thinking: if a virus can be modified in a way that it still retains its ability to enter the cell but deliver the ‘right’ genes instead of its own, then you’ve got a way of replacing a defective gene with a healthy one.”

“Has it ever been done?”

Diane nodded. “A French group conducted a trial study to cure a defect on the X chromosome. The disease is called SCI, or Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. The study was halted in 2002, though.”

I walked back to the table. “Why?”

Diane tilted her head and winced before replying. The implication struck her as the answer came out of her mouth: “Two boys enrolled in the study developed leukemia.”

I banged my hand on the table. Hard. “This is what Huxley was onto.”

“We have no proof she knew any of this.”

“Because we still don’t have access to her computer!”

“You said we had her e-mails.”

I bit on my knuckles and nodded. I’d flipped through the printouts Amit had delivered to my desk. It was all scientific jargon.

I turned to Diane and flashed her a grin. “Yes. We have her e-mails and we have a scientist.”

*  *  *

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. Bedtime reads. Can’t be any worse than
War and Peace
, can it?”

Diane gave me a sullen look. “I love
War and Peace
.”

“Well, then chances are, you’ll love this stuff too.”

She stared at the ream of papers piled on my desk and bit the inside of her cheek. I wanted to bite the other side. “You haul it down to my car.” She spun around and headed out the door.

Satish sneered and walked to his desk while whistling Frishberg’s jazz tune
Peel Me a Grape
. I preferred it when Diana Krall sang it.

On the elevator, Diane gave me a supercilious look. “Just so you know, those e-mails are not the only thing on my agenda.”
Neither on mine
, I thought, basking in her scent. And then shamelessly said nothing. “We need to find out what Chromo was doing with those monkeys. I’ll search the literature, see if they published any scientific results in the past few years.”

“Medford mentioned gene therapy experiments when we talked to him. And a woman who supposedly confronted Tarantino about them.”

“Could’ve been Huxley.”

“It would explain a lot of things, including why she mailed him Gaya White’s funeral note. You know what I’m thinking? The pamphlet Elizabeth Medford gave you: what did it say?”

The elevator doors opened, we stepped out, and Diane’s scent dispersed. “It was about genetic screening and counseling for perspective parents.”

“Yeah, right. Counseling my ass. They did a lot more.”

Diane sighed. “Whatever they did, they screwed up.”

She clacked her heels through the Glass House doors and across the San Pedro parking lot. I tagged along, nose and all. Mostly nose. Her lime-colored VW was wedged between two cruisers, and her parking would’ve been perfect had the white lines on the pavement been drawn along the opposite diagonal. She popped the trunk and then stepped aside. I stared at the inside of her car and had a moment of deep cerebral activity.

“Did a macho guy from Trace sell you those?”

She flinched. “Sell me what?”

“The box of Tyvek shoe covers,” I replied, dropping the ream of e-mail printouts next to the box I’d just noticed sitting in her trunk. “They’re very popular lately. Can be found in hospitals and at crime scenes.”

She didn’t get the irony. Or maybe she didn’t want to. “Of course they are. They’re mandatory for all Field Units. Speaking of which.” She opened the passenger’s door and retrieved a plastic evidence bag, which she held up to my nose. “Do you know anything about this?”

Ha. Do I know anything about an empty beer can, not-so-legally obtained from a privately owned trash can
? I scowled. “What’s it doing in your trunk? I left it at the Serology lab.”

“I know you did. I’m the DNA specialist, remember? It came across my technician’s desk together with the sample from Huxley’s car.”

“Yes. I wanted a comparative analysis.”

She tilted her head. My eyes tripped down her neckline. “Did you make up the log number, Track? It didn’t match anything from Huxley’s logs.” She wasn’t scolding. In fact, her voice was mellow, her half smile conspiratorial. I stared, she stared back. And then her lips twitched. Upwards. Darned cute.

“Non-kosher?” she asked.

“Plain view.” Still staring. Lips stretching further. “Sort of.”
Lips sneering. “Hell, D., it’s inadmissible, okay? I just need the DNA comparison to prove a hunch of mine.” Damn it, they should have women grill suspects in interrogation rooms.

She lowered the plastic bag and stared at the empty can inside. “Budweiser. Funny, it’s Jim’s favorite.” A high-pitched snort forced its way out of my mouth.

The hell of a coincidence
.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said with a sly grin. “You buy me lunch and I’ll tag it and log it for you.”

She gazed at me, her eyes sparkling. Waiting for me to play along.

“You’re letting me corrupt you, forensic scientist Kyle?”

“Only under very particular circumstances.”

I was doped. My eyes skimmed over the box of Tyvek shoe covers in the open trunk of her car, then back to the beer can in her hands. Diane. She smelled heavenly today. Not like last week. Last week was light-years away. Hell, last week could’ve dwelled in that limbo called imagination. I smiled. She smiled back, my non-kosher piece of evidence secured in her hands.

“Tomorrow,” her lips whispered.

“Tomorrow,” I replied, watching her slide behind the steering wheel.

You’re an asshole, Ulysses.

No, I’m not.
Diana Krall’s voice hummed in my head.
I saved the fuzz for her pillow.

*  *  *

“How about this one?”

“It’s good.”

She groaned and tossed it away. “I hate it.”

I shrugged and didn’t take it personally.

The place was warm and cozy. Hortensia instead was frenzied and jittery. She was going through her studio like a caged animal, picking up, tossing, hurdling, pushing away. A manager in Santa Barbara had approached her for a show in his gallery and requested ten of her paintings. From what she’d told me of the guy, I had an inkling the manager wanted to request her bra and panties too. Given the torpedo mood she was in, I kept the thought to myself. I sat on her sofa, sipped a glass of the Barolo I’d brought along, and nodded on cue whenever she lifted a canvas to prod my judgment. I can be a good puppy when I want.

Her large, rustic worktable was encrusted with dried spatters of paint and cluttered with jars, oil tubes, and diluents. Frazzled paintbrushes of all sizes sprouted from old cans on her shelves, and rolled canvases filled every corner of the room. Worn out aprons covered in a rainbow of stains hung from the wall next to a vintage tub sink. Two painted eyes stood on the easel and stared, begging for a face. The reek of turpentine mingled with the mouthwatering fragrance coming from the kitchen—pork ribs in barbeque sauce, heavenly roasting in the oven. 

Given the state she was in, Hortensia would’ve made me dizzy, had I not kept my mind occupied with other matters. It was finally coming together. Chromo offered genetic counseling to affluent and ambitious perspective parents. It wasn’t just a screening. It was an expensive promise.