by E. E. Giorgi
No time for pain either.
The Pain didn’t listen and spread its icy tentacles around my shoulders.
The Volvo blur spun to a ninety-degree turn on San Pablo and crashed through lowered rail crossing bars. My Charger followed. Red lights flashed. A loud whistle shrieked in my ears—the Pain, no, something bigger. I spun over debris, tires skittering, then regained control. The train, the Pain, the Charger.
I lost control.
My fingers remained tightly clasped around the wheel, but the wheel now had a mind of its own. The train hit the back of the Charger. The vehicle spun and toppled. My face hit the airbag, the windshield spidered. Shards of glass rained over me.
I saw red.
Red oozed all over my face, warm, with its soothing, metallic tang. I smelled something else, too.
Gasoline burning.
Shit.
Clicking the buckle release and whamming the door open came all in one reflex.
I dove out of the car onto hard concrete, rolled, tried to get up, staggered, rolled farther away.
The blast illuminated the night. The palm tree I’d hit lit up like a torch, flames whipping high into the sky. Chunks of tree trunk flew in all directions. One bounced inches away from my face, smoldering.
The train was no longer in sight, nor was the Volvo.
I heard a distant siren and felt a strange sense of relief.
It’s over. They sent a patrol car. It’s over.
Seconds slogged by. They felt like weeks, months, years.
I fought the urge to pass out.
The Pain had made me numb to smells, sights, everything.
Only the metallic tang of my own blood stuck to my palate.
The siren came to a stop. Boots crunched the gravel. A radio crackled. I recognized the call for an ambulance. The voice I didn’t recognize.
“Are you all right, sir?”
He crouched over. I saw myself reflected in the shine of his helmet.
A CHiP. Brilliant.
At that point, I figured I might as well pass out.
TWENTY-SEVEN
____________
The room was full of nothing. A view-box window, a retractable surgical light, biohazard bins, racks, cabinets, monitors. A TV screen. A gaudy curtain disclosed a slice of brightly lit hall where voices came and went like ocean waves. Next to a defibrillator, a box of tissues looked innocent and rather unsophisticated. Above it, a dull painting in dull colors depicted a dull mountain.
I smelled the gray flatness of the linoleum floors and the apathy of the walls. The cloying scent of cumin and saffron from Satish’s Indian-spiced perspiration hummed softly in the background. He sat quietly in a chair by the wall, staring at the ceiling as if it were a starred night. “Nice hospital,” he said. “Good thinking to crash half a mile away.”
“They gave me the within-mile special rate when I checked in,” I mumbled, unconvincingly.
Satish jingled something in his pocket and looked at me rather pitifully. “Tell me again how you got yourself pursuing a guy you had absolutely nothing on.”
“I did not—”
I held an icepack against my right temple and looked emptily at the mint green walls. The mint green walls looked back and said nothing. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling did all the talking. They hummed at the syncopated rhythm of the Waters of March.
I got to the end of the road all right.
I closed my eyes and squeezed the bridge of my nose. “It was an Internet café,” I said, very slowly and very carefully. “And it was the only Internet café within a two-mile radius from the water cistern. Same neighborhood. Viktor said Internet cafés—”
“Do you know how many people use laptops in those places?”
I kept my eyes closed. “There were coins. Next to him. Aligned. Just like I saw at Amy’s house and in Lyons’s kitchen.”
This time Satish said nothing.
And there was that smell. On him.
The sweet and rotten smell mixed with nitrile gloves.
“I sat at the table next to him. I wanted to take a peek at his computer screen.” I swallowed. My tongue felt like a dead piece of meat in my mouth.
“Did you manage to?”
“I dropped my coffee cup so I could lean close enough to see. As soon as I did, the guy shut the laptop closed and jumped to his feet.”
“So the guy was staring at porn.”
I sprang my eyes open. Shit.
The possibility hadn’t even occurred to me.
“That would explain why he ran,” Sat went on.
“Sat, you know the drill. Guy runs, cops chase.”
He scratched his chin with one finger and shot his eyes up at the starry ceiling. I did the same and all I saw was scraped panes and fluorescent lights. Still humming, still Waters of March.
“I glimpsed some kind of graph on his screen.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“What the hell, Sat. Fine, say he was peeping porn. You’re right, could’ve been child porn, given the way he fled. Guy runs, cops chase. It’s the way things are. And it’s never wrong.”
He kept on scratching his chin. It made a soft, whispery sound that laced nicely with the tune in my head. “You know, once in a graveyard shift we stopped a guy carrying a large duffel bag in a residential neighborhood. The guy ran, and—”
“And the duffel bag was full of empty cans. Yes, you told me the story, Sat. This is not the same thing. It was his computer he was nervous about. You gotta admit, a computer can hold a lot more interesting stuff than a duffel bag.”
“Did you show him your badge, or could he claim he was running away from a lunatic stalking him?”
“He saw the badge all right. And he heard the siren once I blasted it. He never stopped.”
Satish bobbed his head and jingled coins in his pocket. His phone started buzzing. He checked his watch. “How much longer are they going to keep you?”
The throb in my head pulsed faster. My car had turned into a cube of melted metal. I’d suffered a concussion, won two stitches on my right brow, and the net result of all this was that my suspect was still on the loose. I’d been stuck in this hospital room for over two hours now, with a short field trip to the lab to have an MRI taken. Once they’d established I was low priority, I’d fallen in the forgotten category.
“Let’s see,” I said. “I got three people ogling at me when I got here. One to check scratches and bruises, one to stitch my brow, one to come back and stick a Band-Aid on my face. I could’ve read War and Peace in between their visits.”
Satish was no longer listening. He answered the phone with a corrugated look on his face.
A nurse pulled the curtain all the way and sent a glacial stare to Satish and the phone screwed into his ear. “Please take the call out to the lobby, sir,” she said, with a deliberately strained voice. “No cell phones allowed in the ER.”
Satish briskly nodded and went out.
We stared at each other, the nurse and I.
She walked over, set the tray she’d been carrying on a cart by my stretcher, then propped a pair of hands on her wide hips and looked down on me, her thick eyelids fluttering over me with the grace of windshield wipers. “How we doin’, hon?”
I lay back and smiled real nice. “Can’t speak for you, but I’m kinda bored.”
She took the icepack from my hand. “I’m never bored here, hon. Let’s liven up your night with a tetanus shot, then doc’s gonna talk to you about your MRI, then you go home.”
She delivered the shot with chilling precision, gave me a fresh icepack, and when she was done, she pointed an opinionated chin to the cart next to my stretcher. “That’s your dose of Ibuprofen. You better drink it.”
My head throbbed. “How about the Margarita I’d ordered?”
Her codfish eyes didn’t blink. The windshield wipers fluttered a few times. “Sorry, handsome. We went through the last bottle of tequila after a patient puked barbequed ribs all ove
r the OR table.” She laughed, her coarse voice sounding bitter rather than amused.
She wiped all humor off her face and asked me sternly: “How’s your neck, hon? Can you move it all right?”
“Of course. Why would I want to move it, though?” I lifted the small plastic cup, said, “Cheers,” and gulped it down.
The nurse dusted her lips with the hint of a chortle, smacked a clipboard on her round hips, and flashed a condescending smile to Satish, who emerged right then from behind the curtain. “Is he always this charming?”
“Oh, no,” Satish said. “That’s the concussion. The asshole part, instead? That’s him.”
She took the medicine cup from my hand and the stainless steel tray from the cart. “The doctor will be with you shortly.”
I’d been in hospitals often enough to know that “shortly” had a completely new meaning in a place like that. Her clogs squeaked away, and the curtain rod rattled its farewell.
Satish dropped in the chair by the wall.
“I could really use some booze, pal,” I said, holding the fresh ice pack to my head. “Johnny Walker cures all maladies.”
Satish didn’t reply. He casually tapped the cellphone on his thigh, as trying to catch an afterthought.
“Who’d you talk to?”
“Gomez. He says hi, by the way. And that you’re an asshole.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Mixed news. Air Support is patrolling the area. They’ve got one aircraft on a perimeter with the FLIR, and one checking the river bottom for car dumps. They’ve got your description of the suspect, assuming you were lucid enough to get his clothes right.”
“Course I did! You think I’d forget a guy that sends my Charger flying at an intersection? How long did it take for the chopper to pick up the chase?”
Satish sighed. “The problem is that you lost precious seconds with the radio. Had you initiated the call—”
“Hell, Sat, I’m fully aware of what went wrong, okay? Do you or do you not have some good news to report?”
“Yes and no. The bad news is that even though it’s night, this time of the year the FLIR is not as efficient as in the fall or winter when temperatures cool off. The good news is that they picked a ‘hot’ vehicle in an almost empty parking lot here on campus, one block away from your car accident.”
The FLIR was the Forward Looking Infrared, a special camera that converts heating sources into images. They’re so sharp they can pick a man hiding under a vehicle or a marijuana crop growing in a garden.
“And?” I prodded.
“And we’ve got campus security checking it out. No word on the make yet, but Gomez said he was going to call back as soon as he’d find out.” Satish shrugged, ran his tongue carefully over his teeth. “Could be some doc working a night shift.”
“Don’t they have designated parking? Why would the lot be almost empty?”
“It’s not too close to the hospital.”
Out in the hallway, the background level of voices went up a notch. Clogs squeaked, heels tapped with a nervous beat. A familiar spice wrapped its fingers around my nose. It was tainted with tiredness, anger, frustration, and it had the melancholy sex appeal of Billie Holiday’s singing.
Diane pulled the curtain all the way to the wall and stood there, catching her breath. “What happened?” Her voice was a couple tonalities off-key. “Last time I talked to you, you were on the One-Ten about to merge into the Five!”
From his chair, Satish straightened up.
I cleared my throat. Even the throbbing in my head quieted down. “I uh—had a couple detours. Unplanned detours.”
Her eyes blinked over me. They flickered around my head, pondered over the bandages, slid down my scraped chin, took in the whole me—not very dignified in my underwear, but the parameds had taken my guns and clothes when I was too weak to protest.
Her pursed lips loosened up and tweaked down at the corners. Her brows rotated a few degrees outwards. Her walk lost all of its gall as she came to me, flopped on the edge of the stretcher and touched my stitched brow with the tip of her fingers. “Goodness! Are you in pain?”
I swallowed. “A little,” I said. Given the circumstances, it felt appropriate to complain. And I liked the hint of worry in her voice. It had a mellowness I could easily get used to.
Satish cleared his throat a little too harshly to sound spontaneous. He shoved both hands in his pockets, not sure what to do with himself, and jingled whatever it was that was jingling in his pockets. “Track’s fine,” he said after a little while. “He just needed a new car and decided to play cops and robbers with the first guy he found. The guy happened to be dumb enough to run.”
Diane looked at him then back at me.
“We think the killer’s a computer pro,” I said.
She squinted. “Who? The Byzantine Strangler?”
Satish started pacing. “Yes. But we still don’t know the meaning of the code he left behind the tiles.”
“Right. And wasting time here doesn’t get us any closer to finding the truth.” I tossed the ice pack at the foot of the bed and got up. When the wave of dizziness and nausea passed, I grabbed my shirt from the rack where an intern had left it, and slid it on.
Diane stood up and squeezed her purse. “What programming code is it?”
Satish shrugged. “Something called XY—”
“Plot,” I said. “XY—fucking—plot.”
Her lips repeated the name, minus the French. “Sounds familiar…”
I buttoned my shirt, then pulled on my pants.
“Of course!” Diane squealed. She yanked open her purse and fished out her phone. “I got back the mtDNA results today,” she said. “And I was looking for some easy viewing tool to compare the babies’ DNA to the one from the fibers.”
She tapped her iPhone and pulled up the browser.
Satish stopped pacing. I tucked the shirt into my pants. It carried the reek of my own perspiration, sweat and adrenaline from the high-speed chase.
“There.” Diane turned the iPhone around and held it up. “See this? It’s a DNA viewing tool. Now, if I upload a sample—” She tapped some more. Sat and I flanked her like guardian angels. I squeezed a little closer and sunk my face in her hair. Her breasts would’ve been nicer but less appropriate. A graph appeared on the small screen, a bunch of horizontal lines with colored ticks.
And it clicked into place. I smacked a loud kiss on Diane’s head. “That’s exactly what I glimpsed on the turd’s laptop at the Internet café!”
“Wait, it gets better.” Diane scrolled to the bottom of the page, pointed to a button that said “XYPlot” and clicked on it. The link opened a window of code—line after line of jargon of which I only recognized one thing: the pattern of hashes, numbers and letters the Byzantine Strangler had left at the back of the last set of tiles.
Satish clicked his tongue, rocked on his heels for a bit, then resumed pacing. “Viktor said many scientists use the code for graphing.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “This is the kind of graph the guy was staring at when he shut his laptop and ran.”
Satish turned to me abruptly. “What was the guy’s name on the board?”
“G-cat.”
Diane’s eyes sparkled. “G, C, A, and T—the four DNA nucleotides. The guy’s a DNA freak.”
My girl was on fire. “You’re a genius, D.! And four-colored tiles,” I added.
“That was the first set. The second set only had three.”
“But four colors,” I insisted. It was clear. Suddenly, it all made perfect sense. The tiles, the coins, the guy’s ashen, almost sick face, as he stared at me for a split of a second and then ran.
“The guy is obsessed with DNA,” I said.
Satish pointed at the phone in Diane’s hands. “The graph. It’s got the same colors—green, red, orange and aquamarine.”
Diane drew in a sharp intake of air. “Oh my God, it’s the code! See? The color ticks in the gra
ph represent nucleotides. Green for A, red for T, orange for C, and aquamarine for T.”
Satish looked at me. “There’s your code. Cracked.”
I tried to smile but I wasn’t very convincing. “I found g-cat and let him run.”
* * *
The moon was a pale smile across a starless sky. The foothills rolled to our left, speckled by the occasional twinkle of a house or the looming silhouette of an antenna farm. To our right, downtown stood quietly and impassively.
You’re out there, you son of a bitch.
I’ll find you. I swear I’ll find you.
“Track.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you get it, now?”
“No.”
Diane clenched the wheel of her VW and sighed. A vehicle passed us on the right lane.
I felt small, weak, and mortal. Very mortal.
“What is it you don’t get?”
I brushed a finger along my stitches. The nylon threads poked out of my skin like whiskers.
“I don’t get any of it,” I said. “We established the hairs came from the killer. They fluoresce, and that’s how you figured the Byzantine Strangler has this weird condition—what’s it called again?”
“Morgellon’s disease.”
“Right.” I rapped the window with my knuckles. “And these hairs have DNA.”
“Mitochondrial DNA, Track. A very special kind of DNA.”
“Fine. They’ve got some DNA. And you compared it with the DNA from the kiddos.”
“That’s right.” Diane was going fifteen miles over the speed limit. She barreled up on the slow poke ahead of us and waited until she was five feet away from him before swerving into the left lane to pass him. I wanted to ask how much her insurance premium was, but there were more pressing matters.
“We found the hairs on the victims, yet you tell me the DNA nails them to the babies. The DNA from the hairs and the babies is a match, is that what you’re saying? Are the babies the ones with the disease, then? And how the hell did hairs from the babies end up on the victims? Hell, babies don’t even have hairs!”
The head concussion must’ve made me very stupid.
She whipped the VW back to the middle lane. “You keep missing the fact that it’s mitochondrial DNA, not the regular DNA from the nucleus. I told you before, mtDNA is not unique to one individual. Get it? Related individuals can have identical mitochondrial DNA.”
