CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (2 page)

CHAPTER
3

___________

Tuesday, October 7

The night casts a black shroud over the mountains. Soft sounds bud out like blossoms: the rustling of the trees, a rodent running away in a bush, a woodrat scuttling along a boulder and diving into a crack beneath a rock.

A handful of gravel tumbling down the incline.

She taps her nails against the steering wheel and squints through the windshield. Eyes glow in the distance. They bob and grow larger: the headlights she’s been waiting for. She flicks her own lights then turns the engine off. On the other side of the road, the vehicle pulls to the curb and waits.

The air is brisk, she notices, getting out of the car. Her high heels make a few pebbles skitter off the rough edge of the asphalt. The vehicle waiting by the curb is not the one she had expected. The headlights flicker impatiently. She sighs, opens the passenger’s door, and slides inside.

“What happened to your car?”

Rhesus leans forward and brushes the back of his hand along her neck, his hand cold on her skin. “Contingencies,” he says.

The car lurches, muffled cries come from the back.
That kind of contingencies
, she thinks. Her eyes harden. “Why do you always make things so difficult?” She opens her purse and produces a gun, black metal against the stark white of her hands. “For you, my love,” she purrs, her gaze soft again.

Rhesus stares at the pistol. He wavers, for no more than a second, then snags the weapon and storms out of the car. She drops her head against the headrest, closes her eyes, and smiles. As the trunk pops, a long groan spills out. Then silence.
Get on with it
. The bang. And then another, and another, while she idly examines her nails.
Enough
. As though he heard her, Rhesus slams the trunk shut and returns inside the car. He is sweating heavily, dizzy from the rush. Intoxicated. His face is sprayed with blood and gunpowder, so are his clothes. The reek of a new initiation, the aspersion of a blasphemous baptism. She is pleased. Is she proud of him? Or is it the realization of the power she has on him that’s making her smile?

“The gun,” she says, extending an open palm.

The grip is slippery with sweat. She drops the weapon back into her purse, then lays a hand on his chest. His breathing is still uneven. Her voice is mellow, comforting, as she whispers in his ear, “You did good,” and then nibbles his earlobe. He beams, his pulse once again quickening. Adrenaline careens through his body, making his heart pump faster, fiercer.

“Are we doing it here?” he asks, as her hand slides into his waistband.

“Yes,” she replies, warm breath lingering on wet lips. “I want privacy tonight.”

CHAPTER 4

___________

Thursday, October 9

“So. The shoe polish.”

“What about it?”

“You never figured that one out, did you, Track?”

“You knew it was your day to go to hell, so you figured you’d better go with clean shoes.”

Satish laughed, I chortled. It was good to have him back at the Glass House.

Thinner, and a little whiter at the temples, he didn’t look too healthy, but he didn’t look too sick either—just happily hanging in between. Not bad for somebody whose right lung had been pierced through and through by a full metal jacket only six weeks earlier.

Detective Satish Cooper and I had been partners since I’d joined RHD, the Robbery Homicide Division of the LAPD, five years earlier. The first day on the job together we stood six hours under the sun plucking fibers off a stiff a wino had found sprawled across his cardboard home at the back of a Walmart. The wino wanted his home back, the Field Unit wanted a pay raise, the removal crew wanted a whole body and this one only came in half, and the lieutenant wanted to know who the hell the stiff was. Bodies don’t come with tags, and this one looked particularly lonely and forlorn. At the end of the long day, Satish shook his head sideways and said, “I don’t drink and I don’t smoke and after a day like this all I wanna do is sit down and eat. What do you think of Angus steak and a glass of Merlot?”

“I thought you said you didn’t drink.”

He rocked on his heels and smiled. “Did I? Well, then, I must’ve meant water.”

Over the five years we’d been together, I’d never seen him boss around, patronize, or raise his voice—save the half a dozen “assholes” he’d spit out from time to time, but a cop who never says asshole is like a Bloody Mary without vodka.

We saluted the officers on duty at the front desk and walked past the metal detector to the elevators at the back.

“Such a waste,” Satish complained. He looked down at his feet. “Had to buy a new pair of shoes. The other ones got soaked in blood.”

I clicked my tongue. “Should’ve used blood-repellant shoe polish.”

The elevator chimed, the doors slid open. Satish stepped inside, then turned to hold the doors for me. I stared at the crammed elevator car and didn’t move. 

Right behind Satish, a lady pulled the straps of her purse up her shoulder and glared. A uniformed officer crossed his arms, the radio hanging by his belt barking a four-fifteen code. His partner sneered. All there, waiting for me. The idea didn’t excite me, yet I had no choice but step inside and pitch in my own contribution of morning breath washed down with coffee and body perspiration concealed with dissonant brands of deodorant. To my nose, it was the equivalent of listening to Mahler played by strings out of tune.

The doors closed and the elevator chimed its way up.

Once on the third floor, the elevator gave a jolt, and the light flicked. The doors let out a tired groan and opened. We all filed out without taking notice. Completed fifty years earlier, Parker Center, or the Glass House, as we called it, would’ve never passed a safety inspection. The LAPD police administration building was old and outdated; the walls stunk, the floors whined, the elevators creaked. It had the familiar smell of things too old to forget. In the five years spent at the homicide table, I’d gotten used to the decay—the cracks in the walls, the battered look of the desks and cabinets, the stains on the peeling linoleum floors. It had become one of our favorite jokes, to die under a pile of rubble from one of the last non-seismic-compliant buildings in the city, after all the years spent risking our lives in the streets.

The squad room hadn’t changed much during my six-week leave. Dusty Venetian blinds teetered against the same chafed window trims, and the same stale draft seeped inside, lulled by the droning of the Santa Ana freeway. The musty tang of the walls mingled with the usual smells of aftershave, sweat, mildew from old plumbing leaks, burnt coffee grounds, a hurried breakfast wolfed down in front of a terminal.

“What are you up to today?” Satish asked.

My eyes strayed to the lieutenant’s office. “Gotta say hi to the boss and tell him I’m back. You?” I glanced over the reports strewn across his workspace. “Still tied up to the desk?”

He slumped in his chair and shrugged a shoulder. “You mean handcuffed. Doc’s supposed to clear me next week. Until then, I’m running background checks for the homicide table.” That was just about what “light duty” meant in cop jargon. He tipped his head backwards. “In fact, I’m the one who ran the lady on your desk.”

I blinked. Only my usual chaos reigned on my desk. “What lady?”

*  *  *

I rapped the glass pane of the lieutenant’s office, opened the
door, and poked my head in. “I’m back,” I said.

Lieutenant Al Gomez was on the phone. Late fifties, bald forehead, protruding eyes, and bulging upper lip, the Lieu had the dazed look of a toad. Unfortunately, no princess had ever kissed him, only an ex-wife of whom he talked very little and never in a pleasant way. As soon as he saw my face poking through the door, he wrapped a webbed hand on the phone. “Huxley file, on your desk. Give it a couple of days. If nothing happens, file a cold case. Yeah, I’m here,” he barked into the mouthpiece.

A couple of days
. A missing persons.
What the hell?

I didn’t leave. Gomez ignored me, his voice trailing off into a litany of complaints over lack of funds, unacceptable working conditions and understaffing, until his glare fell back on me. “I’ll call you back,” he mumbled and hung up. He rubbed the archipelago of pink moles on his wide forehead. “Look. Captain Hu called. They’re slammed at the DSV division and could use some help.”

He stared, I stared back.

He rolled his eyes and sighed. “It’s not a setback, Track.”

“A missing persons?” I said.

A fuse at the back of my head buzzed. Getting into RHD, the LAPD Robbery and Homicide Division, had been the dream of my life. We handle high-profile crimes, like the Brown-Goldman double murder, or the Grim Sleeper serial killings. We’re the cream of the crop. The competition to get in is fierce and for a guy like me with zero connections and a controversial acquittal at age seventeen the chances were close to zero. I made detective four years after entering the LAPD academy and was promoted into Narcotics three years later. For four years, I cleared all cases I was assigned and made it to RHD in 2003. At the time, I was the youngest detective on the team. And now the lieutenant tells me a missing persons is not a setback?

Gomez exhaled a ruthless whiff of halitosis. It made the fuse at the back of my head buzz louder. “Do you know how many rounds we tallied on Carmelo’s body?”

The fuse blew. “The son of a bitch opened fire on my partner. My only fault is that I let it happen. I should’ve protected my partner.”

I looked over my shoulder. Half of the homicide table stared back at me. I stepped inside Gomez’s small office and slammed the door behind me. The blinds—a whimsical illusion of privacy granted only to the higher ranks—rattled against the doorframe. “BSS cleared me,” I snarled. “It was a clean shooting.”

“In his report Washburn strongly
recommends
a second session. And with your package—”

“I’ve been cleared for every fucking OIS on my package.” I was fuming. Each time I squeezed the trigger, the Behavioral Science people went through my file—or package, as us coppers call it—with a fine tooth comb and sent me to spend quality time with their shrink, Dr. Adam Washburn. I hated the man. He had the sadistic habit of fixing me through long stretches of silence while pinching the skin below his lower lip, probing for more: a tiny detail, or maybe a little vice of mine I thought I’d be excused from mentioning.

I’m not stupid, Doc. I know what to hide from you
.

Gomez looked like one of those stress-relief gadgets whose eyes bulge out when squeezed. “The Danny Mendoza case,” he said, very carefully.

I squashed my voice down to a hiss. “That was a long time ago.”

His features curled into a grimace. “We all make mistakes, Track. We bury them—some of us quite literally—and then move on. Somehow, your package seems unable to do that. It keeps popping up, and I’m getting quite sick of it. Huxley’s missing persons report is on your desk. Clear it, and then we can talk again.” He swiveled back to the phone, lifted the mouthpiece, and dialed.

I left his office and shuffled back to my desk. The piles of blue file folders, unread mail, and overdue reports contrasted with Satish’s bare desk—even when stuck to light duty he managed to be way neater than me. I opened the first drawer, grabbed a paper clip, bent one end, and stuck it in my mouth.

It helps me think.

The missing persons folder sat lopsided across my nameplate, ULYSSES M. PRESIUS. I know. Thank goodness everybody calls me Track.

Jennifer Huxley had been reported missing by her mother two days earlier. An enlargement of her driver’s license had been clipped to the first page of the report. Small, black eyes and a round face buried in a mop of dark curls. An anonymous face—although anybody looks anonymous to me without a smell, and photos only smell of paper and of the resins and polyesters they’re coated with. Five-foot-eight, one-twenty-five pounds. A graduate from UCSD—got an MS in molecular biology—she worked for a pharmaceutical company in La Jolla for two years, then moved to L.A. county where she landed a job as lab technician at the Esperanza Medical Center in Westwood.

A Ziploc materialized on my desk with a loud flop. Luke propped his ass on the only clear corner of my working surface and smirked the way some people do when they have nothing better to do. “Your usual piece of evidence, Track. Arrived as soon as Gomez assigned the case to you.”

Luke was still new in our office, transferred only a couple of months earlier. The rookie thought he was entitled to give me the ain’t-you-weird treatment. I plucked one corner of the clear bag he’d flopped in front of me, lifted it up, and stared at it. It contained a maize-yellow T-shirt. “It’s not washed, is it?” I asked.

“Straight from her dirty laundry basket,” Luke replied. He looked amused. “Would you have preferred a bra instead?”

Unprovoked, I stared back and sized him up. “You had eggs and sausage for breakfast, Luke. Washed it down with a double shot latte, hazelnut syrup. The sausage wasn’t your favorite kind, does a number on your stomach. You should try Italian, next time, a little kinder on halitosis.”

The lame smile faded from his face. He raised a hand to his mouth. “Do I—?”

I dropped the Ziploc and twisted one of my paperclips. “No, no,” I reassured him. “Your breath doesn’t stink too bad. It’s just me. You brushed good after breakfast. Colgate, right?” He nodded, his jaw dropping like the door of a glove compartment. “It’s the aftershave that bugs me, Luke. Aqua Fria. Man, I hate that brand. It’s damn cheap, you know?”

Luke sprung back to his feet. His mouth moved, as if about to say something, then closed again. I watched the tall drink of water shuffle away from my desk and shook my head. He didn’t find me any less weird than before, but he wasn’t likely to come bug me again any time soon either.

I opened the plastic bag he’d left and took a sniff inside. I inhaled the feminine smell that came with the T-shirt. I worked my way through deodorant and artificial fragrances, the nerves inside my nostrils alerted, scanning the human scent hidden within. This Huxley woman was either vegetarian or ate very little meat. She exercised regularly. If she had a boyfriend, she hadn’t seen him the day she wore the T-shirt. Enough for one sniff. I closed the Ziploc, got up and left.