CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (21 page)

CHAPTER 25

____________

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Rhesus leans over his woman’s naked breasts and inhales. They smell good. He watches the wave of goose bumps sweep her skin as air blows out of his nostrils. He kisses a nipple. She clutches his hand and moves it down her navel.

Her eyes are soft now, inviting. Yet they can be so harsh sometimes.

Rhesus yanks his hand away.

“What?”

The thought of those same eyes, a few hours ago. “You were supposed to get rid of her,” she had yelled. “Why didn’t you do it? Are you still in love with her?”

The question offended him.

He shifts away from her, the resentment still burning in his chest. Seated in a corner, the other man comes forward, his face emerging from the shade cast by a small table lamp. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

“I want to be paid more.”

The woman sits up on the bed. “What? Are you insane?”

“Not any more than you two.” Rhesus picks up his pants from the floor.

“Go to hell.” The woman flops back on the bed and pulls the sheets over her naked breasts.

The man raises a brow. He licks his lower lip, pondering. “How much more?”

One leg half through his pants, Rhesus freezes. And then he beams. He likes it when he gets things his way.

*  *  *

Monday, October 24, 2005

It’s almost dawn and the air is chilly. Rhesus parks his car and then walks away, briskly, despite not having a destination. Sex has helped some. They still want their final kill, though.

“You need to get rid of her,” the man told him, slowly counting the bills out of his wallet. The wad was thicker this time—his price tag heavier.

“Why?” Rhesus asked.

“She’s too close. She’ll find out.”

Who am I fooling
? Killing the first time had not been easy. It has become so. He thrived on the adrenaline rush. A killer has the power of life and death. It’s an orgasm. You become one with the victim, you force yourself in, the barrel of a gun instead of a phallus, a bullet instead of semen. And then you watch her wilt. The body you have taken is now yours: you have prevailed and deflowered. And the feeling is inebriating, addictive. Again and again you want take your victim’s life.

So then why, Rhesus wonders, why could he not deliver the kill this time?

CHAPTER 26

____________

Monday, October 20

“Still blurry,” I said.

“Have faith, Track. Always have faith.” Faith wasn’t a word I agreed with this morning, after spending the weekend mulling over Father Jonathan’s words.

Electronics guru Amit Banjaree let his fingers dance on the keyboard for a few minutes, conferring in an arcane lingo with a DOS window. His thick and wavy hair glistened with gel. Framing his dark lips, his black goatee smelled of curry, coconut, and lentils from the
appam
he had for breakfast. “There, take a look now.” He hit the return key. Thin lines dribbled down the screenshot I had originally deemed blurry, the image slowly coming together. I pulled my chair closer and gingerly leaned forward. Amit had a naturally loud voice, especially when he talked about the things he knew best: computers and baseball. Here in his kingdom—a windowless warehouse with a high ceiling poked by large air vent pipes—Amit could easily get enthralled over networks, encryptions, performance, and information retrieval. And when he did, his high-pitched voice rang in my ears with unnecessary decibels. I tried to keep a cautionary distance, and yet the inquiries for which I required his expertise often saw both of us crammed in front of a computer monitor.

“It’s coming,” he assured me, sensing my impatience in front of the lines painfully dripping down the screen. Around us, a cemetery of laptops, printers, and hard drives sat like antique relics on dusty metal shelving.

“Bingo,” I said when I finally made out Huxley’s license plate. On October 7, at five fifty-one in the morning, a Ford Focus pulled through the Chromo gate and gained access to the property after securing the correct passcode on the call box. Who gave her the secret number and why, still a blank in a poorly written screenplay. 

“Here’s what I need you to do now,” I told Amit, glimpsing the sparkle of anticipation in his eyes. “I want two freeze-frames side by side: incoming vehicle and outgoing vehicle, close up of the windshield.”

“Right away, sir.” The keyboard clacked under his fingers. The reflection from the streetlight reduced the features of the driver in either frame to a blur of sparkles. I moved closer to the screen.

“The two patterns are different,” I noted.

“The streetlight hits the windshield at two different angles in the two frames.”

“Yeah, but look at this twinkle, right here. Can you measure how far it is from the wheel?”

“Given the position of the steering wheel, it comes at about neck height.”

“A pendant. The golden cross—she was still wearing it when we found the body. Given its size, wouldn’t it still be visible in the other frame too?”

“If she were at the wheel, yes, especially considering that the vehicle pulled out of the Chromo property at six twenty-one, when the sun was starting to rise.”

“But it’s no longer visible when the car pulls out of the garage.”

I ran both hands through my hair and left them there, mulling over the two frames on the monitor, the grainy consistency of the images tricking the eyes into the illusion of a subtle motion. “Huxley drives her car into the Chromo campus at five fifty-one and somebody else drives her car out at six twenty-one,” I concluded.

I smelled him a minute before he stepped into the room. “Chromo seems to be the crime scene of choice lately,” Satish said, rapping his knuckles at the doorjamb.

“Hey Sat. Guess where one can find glass with traces of perlite on it?”

“Besides the hands of a cadaver?”

“Besides that. It turns out you can find it in cryogenic tanks. And here’s the best part: Chromo has lots of such tanks stored in its labs.”

“What are you getting at, Track?”

“Somebody lured Huxley onto the Chromo premises on the empty promise of some specimens. She withdrew five hundred bucks the night before she disappeared. The amount is ridiculous, but I’m guessing she wouldn’t have been able to afford more. Whomever she spoke to, they wanted to make sure she agreed to the deal.”

“She was
buying
specimens from Chromo?”

I nodded. “Specimens she needed for the leukemia study. Whether they really existed or not, they had to be delivered in a cryogenic tank. She was attacked, the tank broke—probably shattered by a bullet—hence the glass shards and perlite.”

“What kind of specimens can be stored in a cryogenic tank?”

“My question precisely, Sat.”

“We can brood on our way to the morgue.”

I groaned. Something I was
not
looking forward to. I dropped my hand on Amit’s shoulder. “Thanks, man.”

“What do you want me to do with all those e-mails?” Amit
asked.

“Print them. All of them, and have them delivered to our squad room.”

“Will do.”

“What e-mails?” Satish asked.

“Huxley’s. The only thing Cox didn’t think of encrypting. Amit’s decrypting software is still running on the machine, trying about one million keys per minute. Turns out, even at that rate infinitely many possibilities is an awful lot to cover.”

*  *  *

“Well, you certainly don’t see something like this every day.”  Garbed in blue surgical mask, protective glasses, surgical scrubs, and nitrile gloves, medical examiner Dr. Ellis stared at the corpse in front of him. Nathan Kim—age twenty-six, laboratory technician II, found dead on the Chromo premises among a bunch of raving monkeys—lay naked and completely deprived of dignity on the autopsy table. A medical assistant—anonymous eyes framed by the lower rim of the cap and the upper one of the facemask—held a surgical gown for me to don. I grimaced, the reek of formalin closing a knot around my stomach.

“Would you rather bring a souvenir of the vic home, graciously pinned to your tie?” Satish quipped. I inserted my arms through the sleeves, let the assistant tie the gown behind my back, and then watched him repeat the procedure with Satish.

The smell of fresh blood is enticing. It’s life, warmth, excitement. The morgue, though, smells of
old
blood, of cold flesh stored in refrigerated chambers. It smells of death. AC vents blow down from the high ceiling onto the autopsy tables, yet they never wash off the reek that saturates the air. The walls are lined with stainless steel countertops, sinks, and dimly lit view-boxes, black and white X-rays of dented bones clipped to the glass.

Nathan Kim was not a pleasant sight. Round, blood-filled boils covered his face and body, the largest of which sat precariously at
the right corner of his mouth. His lips and eyelids were swollen, and his hands looked like blown-up gloves. I pulled up the facemask, secured it behind my ears, and surrendered to the morbidity of the procedure.

“Hemorrhagic cutaneous abscesses present all over the subject, most numerous on the face, arms, and chest,” Ellis noted, as the assistant held a recorder close to his face. The medical examiner poked the boil on the mouth, bled it on a small pad, and then stored the sample in a plastic bag, which he tossed on a cart with all other evidence collected from the body: swabs, hair, nail trimmings—all souvenirs to be later delivered to the lab. Ellis then focused on the one and only wound found on the corpse: two symmetrical arches marked Kim’s left shoulder, the lines slightly jagged, and the tips darker, where sharp incisors had sunk deeper into the flesh.

“Circular erythema, four-point-two centimeters in diameter, surrounds the bite wound and the contusion area on the subject’s left upper arm,” he dictated to the recorder. “This over here,” he then translated for our benefit, circling his finger over the ring-shaped rash around the bite marks, “indicates a subsequent infection.”

“Is it common after a monkey bite?” Satish asked.

Ellis looked at the body in front of him. “The subject shows clear signs of angioedema—see how his face and hands are swollen? The scenario described by the paramedics performing the CPR is consistent with vasodilation of arterioles and constriction of bronchioles. Of course, it doesn’t mean much until we cut him open and take a peek inside, but everything we have so far seems to indicate our subject died of anaphylactic shock.”

“An allergic reaction to the monkey bite.”

“One would certainly think so, Track. Except, here’s the puzzle: according to the records we have from Chromo, all employees having contact with the animals are tested for possible allergies. Kim was not allergic to macaques’ fur or saliva, or else he couldn’t have held the position he had.”

Ellis rolled the corpse so we could take a better look at his
shoulder. “What puzzles me when I look at this trauma, is the spread and redness of the rash around the bite: it would be more consistent with an infection rather than anaphylaxis.”

“Would an infection explain the boils, then?” I asked.

The M.E. sighed—a cue he didn’t have an answer. He turned to the stainless steel tray by the table and let his fingers waver over the neatly arranged scalpels and dissecting knives. “You’ll have my report by tonight,” he said, placing the blade of choice below the corpse’s right clavicle. “My guess right now? Whichever monkey bit this young fellow passed him a deadly disease.”

*  *  *

I turned on the faucet and splashed chilled water in my face. It did not wash off the butcher warehouse smell stuck to my palate, or the gripping sound of the Stryker saw. When I returned to the autopsy room, red froth had collected between the corpse’s legs and trickled down the drain at the bottom of the table. A bloody heart had been casually flopped on the scale and its weight and color recorded on the log. One by one, Kim’s organs took a turn on the scale. At the end of the carousel we had a verdict on Kim’s death: “The right and left lungs, 550 and 580 grams respectively, show sign of massive edema in the bronchial mucosa resulting in bronchoconstriction. Swelling with diffuse
petechiae
hemorrhage is noted in the brain.”

Ellis placed sections of the victim’s lungs and pharynges on a metal tray. “I’m sending these to Histology: I want them to test for IgE antibodies and mast cells. My money so far goes on anaphylactic shock. As for what caused it—” He handed the tray to the assistant. “—you guys will have to wait for the tox results.”

Everything else in Nathan Kim’s body was
unremarkable
. A weird concept, which seems to imply that only strange and out of the ordinary things are worth medical attention. Health is dull. But red boils, golf-ball sized tumors, or a face as green as a British lawn will have the meds jumping up and down in excitement. 

“A healthy young man,” Ellis noted, wrapping up his examination. “His colon is as shiny and smooth as a baby’s.”

“I’m sure his mom will be thrilled to hear it,” Satish said.

“Somebody should mention it over the eulogy,” I added.

Neither of us smiled.

The biting monkey had been identified through the dental marks left on Kim’s shoulder, and the necropsy scheduled for the afternoon.

Gray skies and a fine drizzle welcomed us outside, casting the usual views of downtown under a drape of gloom. It shadowed the intertwining highway ramps and the rows of skinny palm trees whose frazzled tops drew sinuous lines in the sky. It blanketed the plain-looking buildings and the colorful strips of murals, the parking lots where bums pushed their junk-filled carts, and the sidewalks where teenagers with pants barely hanging to their butts showed off their monkey walk. Tiny drops of humidity clung to my face and hair as we walked back to our car.

Satish checked his watch. “Twelve-thirty. An hour most of the world associates with lunch.”

I unlocked my Dodge. “I’m in a different time zone today.”

Satish nodded and slid inside the vehicle. Autopsies are unkind to the toughest stomachs. My phone rang as I jammed the key into the ignition.

“Track. Where the hell are you? I’ve been waiting here at Annie’s since noon.”

“Oscar!” I’d completely forgotten about my lunch meeting with Detective Oscar Guerra. “Damn it, don’t move. I’ll be right over,” I tossed the phone onto Satish’s lap and swerved into the street.

Satish groaned. “Thank you, Track. I already felt like puking, I didn’t need the extra help.”

*  *  *

“Okay, gringo. Tell me what this is about.”

I chuckled. “I’m no gringo, pal. This is home.”

Guerra downed a good swig from his schooner, which he had ordered with a wink and a heartfelt “Hell, it’s not like I’m going back to work after lunch,” and laughed. “Uh-uh, bro. We were here first. You”—he pointed at me as a representative of a whole class of American invaders—“are gringo.”

Oscar Guerra—a sun-burnt face with shrewd eyes and a broad grin—was as American as I was but never forgot his Mexican origins. A face on which time had chiseled the furrows that come from embracing life in full: ten years in the military, thirteen as a cop, a couple of narrowly escaped shootouts, and hours of horseback riding at his family ranch in Oaxaca. He had a few exes and three or four children probably all with different spouses, something he had once commented with a rowdy, “What the hell, I’m fifty-eight!”