CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (3 page)

CHAPTER
5

___________

Thursday, October 9

Established in 1969, the Robbery and Homicide Division saw its beginnings with the Manson Family investigation. The LAPD needed a special squad dedicated to the most debated and controversial cases—murders, robberies, rapes and serial killings that made it to the national headlines. Exceptional detectives were drafted uniquely for this unit, men notoriously sleek and engaging, able to schmooze with witnesses and suspects alike. Finding clues is only the beginning. Most cases are cracked sitting down face to face with your suspects. We’re the sleekest of predators. We coax, cajole, embrace our suspects with a safety net of trust until they make a false move and slip.

I was promoted to RHD on August 9, 2003, a blistering hot day. The lieutenant eyed me at my desk and summoned me to his office. I marched to his door with my chest puffed up, looking forward to my first case. Instead, I was sent home and forbidden to come back without dress shoes and tie.

“We’re elite, we dress like elite,” he told me.

It didn’t take too long for the other detectives to dub me the black sheep in the group. Unspoken, the Mendoza case, for which I was acquitted at age seventeen, weighed over me like a sword of Damocles. Only one of the older detectives openly mentioned it to me. He took me aside one day, squeezed my shoulder and said, “You were just a kid. And that’s what freaked everybody out. But to me—to me, you’ll always be a hero.”

He never spoke of it again, nor did anybody else at the Homicide table.

They all had their practical jokes and affable mannerisms, while I talked little and minded my business. They relied on luminol and polygraphs, whereas I had my sense of smell. Through chemicals released by the pituitary glands, I can detect fear, elation, deception. Human emotions are scents to me.

My first assignment was a five-year-old case that had baffled a team of four detectives, mostly retired by the time I got to it. I cleared it in three months, partnered with Satish, and nobody ever questioned again my MO—my
modus operandi
. They tell me I have a gift. I shrug and reply it’s in my genes. Nobody asks for an explanation, nor do I ever offer one.

Leaving the murky skyline of downtown, I took the One-Oh-One northbound and merged into the uniform flow of the Southern Californian traffic. Shiny Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches whipped by, flashes of wealth nurtured by blown up credits and a sense of entitlement. I passed a truck loaded with Toyotas, right as a sports Beemer materialized in my blind spot. Hair splayed by the wind, the cocky driver flattened the accelerator, then cut me to right-pass the slow poke clogging the fast lane.

Welcome back to L.A.
, I muttered to myself, as my mind lingered on the uncontaminated sheet of blue sky hanging over the Sierra Nevada. Up on the mountains, the fugitive line of the horizon is so wide you can watch the contour of a storm develop, mature, and dissipate in the distance. With a thud, the wheels of my Dodge Challenger entered a stretch of rugged cement, the vibration adding a new frequency to the roar of traffic embedded in my ears.

Silence is an unknown ghost to the Californian commuter.

Huxley lived in a North Hollywood residential neighborhood made of postage-stamp yards with manicured lawns, dogs on leashes and their byproducts tucked away in stinky blue baggies, and I-mind-my-own-business neighbors who turned away as soon as they glimpsed me. A large magnolia tree shaded the condo’s white and gray façade—a double row of windows alternating to boxy balconies. The flaky paint had been concealed with crawling ivies, and the cracks in the stucco had been sloppily caulked. A lower middle class building with cheap management, I concluded. I parked my vehicle in the street and walked around the corner to door number three, careful not to step on the rolls of newspapers strewn by the doorstep. I donned latex gloves and protective booties, and unlocked the door with the key Jennifer’s mother had left us when she filed the missing persons.

Inside, Huxley’s place was tidy and compulsively clean. The first thing I smelled—in every room—were detergents, antibacterial sprays, and a fruit basket of artificial fragrances. The walls, impeccably white, were decorated with impersonal pictures of flowers and landscapes, save for a small frame hanging by the console in the foyer. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” it read. Next to it, a birdhouse-shaped key holder held a lonely mailbox key.

Nothing in the apartment was out of place, not even the usual mug on the coffee table or a hairbrush next to the bathroom sink, and nothing pointed to the woman having packed or prepared for an imminent departure. Among the items in her fridge were a wilted head of lettuce and half a gallon of milk gone sour. Everything was perfect. Her bed sheets were clean—no boyfriend detected there, no pills or condoms anywhere else in the bedroom. Her laundry basket contained two items—three, if you counted the T-shirt now in my possession—and the thin layer of dust on her shelves confirmed the few days since her disappearance.

The answering machine was flashing with a fairly innocuous message, “Hey, it’s Kev. (Pause) Any chance we could talk?”—which the caller ID attributed to a Kevin Rutherford. No car keys to be seen anywhere, no vehicle sitting in the garage either. The absence of a wallet, cell phone or purse indicated that she had intentionally left home. If she had been abducted, it was not from her house.

I sighed and walked back to the living room, the phrase “cold case” making its way through my lazy neurons. A closed laptop lay on the desk, next to a CD column with about a hundred disks organized alphabetically by artist’s name. I brushed a gloved hand along the back of the couch, and the fabric released the scent of an odor-eating spray.

I was ready to call it quits, when I detected something else. Something vague, a few days old, though still lingering in the air. I kneeled by the cushions and sniffed. Masculine smell, a hint of tobacco, faint, yet enough to make me think cigar, not cigarette, wine drinker, not heavily though. And a distinctive cologne, European brand, not cheap. The guy sat on this couch, maybe shared a glass with the hostess. If I could still detect the smell, the encounter had to be pretty recent. Maybe the night before Huxley disappeared. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

On my way out I accidentally stepped on one of the newspapers on the walkway. I picked it up, and as the thin layer of plastic crinkled in my hand, something dawned on me. Two rolls, two papers, one dated Wednesday October 8, and the other one Thursday October 9, today. Jennifer Huxley had returned home the night of October 6 and never showed up for work the next day.

A mailman’s van whirred by the post of condo mailboxes across the street. A rusty swing set groaned from a yard. Two driveways down, a plastic playhouse created a splash of color in the middle of a green lawn. The rest of the street, a few blocks from the bustling parts of town, seemed dormant: the windows held silent, the shutters were closed, and the doors still. A neighborhood of
working families with school-age children. The only exception, an old rocking chair whining against the planks of the porch across the street, the face of the man sitting on it buried in a newspaper. I reached for my tin and walked over to the white picket fence outgrown by untamed rose bushes.

“Sir,” I called from the sidewalk. The daily headlines rustled—the pages scrunched by long, bony fingers—and then lowered, revealing deep, blue eyes completely free of lashes. A fine web of purple capillaries lined the sides of a gaunt face with sandy cheeks. He folded the paper on his lap and without silencing the rhythmic whine of his chair, pointed his index finger at me.

“I don’t need
that
to know you’re a cop, young man.”

I shrugged and slid the badge back in my pocket. “Do you get the paper every day, sir?” I asked, motioning to the pages he had just folded on his lap.

“Every day for the past seventeen years,” he lisped.

“What time do you get the paper around here?”

“This?” he said, flopping a hand on his lap and making the pages creak. “You could set your watch on it, ya know? Five-o-seven at this door, five-o-six at the building you just visited.”

“Are you sure? Exactly the same every morning?”

He gave me a full grin this time. Shiny gums on one side, golden crown on the other, next to the last two yellowish molars he had left. “Yes, sir. ‘Cause you see, ol’ Harold—house number five-six-six—he hates the paperboy. Bangs the thing at his door and wakes him up. The guy can’t sleep until three in the mornin’. And then the paper comes and he’s up again. Some kinda issue right here.” The man tapped his temple. “Those brain cells, he ain’t lubricated well enough, ya know?” He slapped both hands on the knees and guffawed. “Me, I’m up by four forty-five and wanna read my paper right away. And then I read it again. Makes me smarter. These brain cells of mine, they ain’t going nowhere.”

He leaned back in his rocking chair and winked. I grinned and reciprocated the gesture. Because thanks to Mr. Number Five-six-zero who loved to keep his brain cells in good shape, I’d just
learned when Jennifer Huxley had left her home on October 7: sometime between five-o-five and seven-thirty, when her mother initiated the first of numerous calls left unanswered.

*  *  *

As soon as I stepped out of my vehicle, a wave of hot air enveloped me. “It may be fall, but it won’t feel like fall,” the radio warned, announcing a high in the lower nineties and dry Santa Ana conditions. I sighed, found relief under the shade of a large oak, and studied the place. In the distance, the heart and lungs of metropolitan L.A. reminded me of their omnipresence in the roar of highway traffic, and the occasional dinging of a railroad crossing. Yet in front of me sprawled an oasis of green. The rustling of the trees muffled the city buzz, and the fragrance of the rose garden mellowed the lingering odor of gas exhaust. A private clinic and cancer research center, the Esperanza Medical Center gave the casual stroller the illusion of visiting a botanical garden. It’s a beauty meant to conceal the ugliness of the disease lurking behind the modern architecture and the glass façades. A mirage in the desert, an attempt to pamper the heart when a cure for the body doesn’t always exist.

The guard at the entrance booth handed me a map of the campus on which he circled in bright red the location of the genetics building. “I can get you a driver on a cart, Detective.”

Despite the heat, I declined the offer. Willows and cottonwoods shaded the campus, and the stroll would give me the chance to ponder over Huxley’s file, the growing number of Officer-Involved Shooting reports filed under my name, and where the hell I was at that point in my life.

Another Ulysses searching for his way home
.

“Lerville Research Institute,” I read next to the main entrance of a gray building. There was no front desk in the lobby, so I walked straight to the first lab on the right, took a peek through the glass panes in the double doors, then entered brandishing my badge. The
two ladies in the room—one bent over an optical microscope, and the other frowning at a computer screen—looked like they’d never seen a cop before.

“Jennifer Huxley, you said?” the woman by the microscope asked, the lapels of her white coat freshly sprayed with coffee spatters. “Do you recognize the name, Sam?”

“Might be the Jen in Cox’s group,” the other replied. “Those people all have their offices upstairs.”

“Mind showing me the way?”

The woman sent a furtive glimpse to her colleague before proffering, “Sure,” in a
lovely
British accent. She led me out the door and up a flight of stairs. Plump, late-twenties, with the facial expression of a ten-year-old, Samantha Green smelled of rose deodorant and sugar glaze, the sticky kind you find on donuts.

“I take it you didn’t know Jennifer personally?” I asked.

“Oh, we’d say hi and all, of course.”
Of cou’se
. “But there’s five different research groups in this building alone, lots of people coming and going,” she explained, skipping the r’s and indulging me in the soporiferous cadence of the Oxfordshire accent.

The hallway upstairs was dark, the walls lined with metal cabinets. The last door on the right bore Huxley’s nametag. Samantha pointed to it and then stared at me with large blue eyes begging for gossip. “Has something happened to her?”

“No idea. When was last time you saw her, do you remember?”

Samantha shrugged. “I wouldn’t recall… Definitely not yesterday or the day before, because I’d remember… She seems sort of quiet and always keeps to herself. Are you guys looking for her? But she wouldn’t vanish like that, would she? I mean—she seems such a nice person and all… You know, we’re all
lab rats
, but Jen beats us all. Never seen her outside or at the cafeteria. Just here, sitting at her desk or in the genetics lab. Sometimes I wonder if she’s got a life at all.”

In the five minutes I spent with her, Samantha managed to ask a dozen questions for every query of mine she left unanswered. I finally dismissed her with a curt thank you—her face hung with the
disappointed look of a child who’s just been denied candy—and worked my way around the office: small, crammed by two long desks, each one with a computer, a chair, a file cabinet standing by the door, and no space to move your legs around. It smelled musty, of old, molding wood. Despite the claustrophobic environment, Huxley’s workspace was just as neat and tidy as her home. Her pens and pencils were all in a jar, grouped in three different compartments; her papers were stacked in color-coded folders on one corner of the desk, and her paperclips stored away in the drawer and sorted by size.
What a freak
.