CHIMERAS (Track Presius)

by E. E. Giorgi

  Julia Cox took a few more steps, then froze in the middle of the lobby, one hand poised in midair as if caught by an afterthought. She spun on her feet and walked back to her colleague.

  “Science?” she snarled, arms crossed and head cocked to the side. “Science has a cut-off of two thousand words—it’s hardly enough to present the data, let alone discuss our conclusions. Plus, the resubmission will take another four weeks, which will give Jim’s group plenty of time to publish their results and scoop us.” The pretension of her posture jacked up her height a couple of inches. A woman of intensity, I noted, the kind you don’t want to share your bed with. Her colleague opened his mouth as if about to object to something, his frown stuck somewhere in between concern and perplexity.

  “No. You listen to me, Dave,” Cox interjected, raising a finger and pressing it against his breastbone. “You know as well as I do who the second reviewer is. He’s been sitting on our manuscript for weeks, giving Jim plenty of time to clean up his data and submit after we did. Of course he was going to reject us, he—”

  “Julia, you’re reading too much into this stuff.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Dr. Cox?” She startled at the sound of my voice, as if suddenly realizing she’d been entertaining a work conversation in a public place. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I lied, flashing my badge.

  The man by the door straightened and blurted, “Oh, no interruption at all. We were just about done.”

  I grinned, not missing the relief in his voice. Cox frowned, dazzled by the sight of my tin. “Dave!” she called, though the man had already vanished behind the double doors. A disoriented look on her face, she brought a hand to her stethoscope and turned back to me. “What’s this about?” The tone of her voice betrayed a shrill of annoyance.

  “I’m told you’re missing a member of your research team,” I replied, sliding the badge wallet back into my pocket.

  She looked at me in a daze. “Missing? I thought she—” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the sentence. “Is this about Jennifer?”

  I confirmed it was about Jennifer. She ran a hand through her hair and gave one last glance at the closed doors. They held still and shut, her colleague by now probably two buildings away and still running.

  “Let’s go talk outside, if you don’t mind,” she murmured. As she strode by the reception desk, she brushed a hand along the mahogany countertop, and, without looking at anybody in particular, said, “Taking five.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” the receptionist with the tall hair replied, her voice echoed by the squeaks of her swivel chair. I glanced at the towering hairdo, my hands itching to catch it were it to fall off any instant.

  The pneumatic doors hissed open and the afternoon breeze yawned in my face. I slid my jacket off and inhaled. Despite the heat, the warm air lulled my senses, washing away the hospital tangs of medicine and antiseptic. An ambulance idled in front of the loading dock entrance, its lights throbbing for no apparent reason. Two EMTs shared a smoke on the sidewalk and casually discussed the previous night’s soccer game.

  “Let’s sit at one of the cafeteria’s tables,” Cox said, pointing to the green bistro tables scattered in front of the building across the street. We sat in the shade of a large willow tree, its scented boughs drawing wavering patterns of light on the ground.

  “You seem young to be a detective,” she commented, taking off her lab coat and flopping it at the back of the chair.

  “Job didn’t come with an age requirement,” I replied, realizing she’d been assessing me as much as I’d been her. I was thirty-eight and still looked younger than most dicks in my squad. Not an advantage when rank and seniority are often mistaken for the same thing.

  She wearily flopped on the chair, raised her hands to her head, and collected her frizzy hair into a small bun. It sat precariously at the side of her neck and nodded along with each movement of her head. An outdoor sports lover, I noticed from the golden hue of her tan and the nice curve of her biceps. Her breath smelled of Arabic coffee, her scrub Tee of old bloodstains resilient to the harshest detergents, and her hands and arms—lightly peppered by freckles—of antibacterial soap. So far she had not spoken a word about Jennifer. Not a hint of surprise at her disappearance, not a trace of worry. If she was concerned, she was good at hiding it.

  Once she was done fixing up her hair, she leaned back, crossed her arms and stared at me, a silent “So?” hanging from her cozy lips.

  “When was the last time you saw Jennifer?” I asked.

  “This past Monday, here at work. Who called the police?” she shot right back at me, her voice defiant.

  “Her mother found it worrisome she couldn’t get a hold of her daughter for three days in a row. You don’t seem to share her concern.”

  She sighed, as if the whole conversation were a nuisance to her. “It’s not weird, you know,” she replied, her index finger tracing the relief design on the table.

  “What isn’t?”

  She reached for the stethoscope hanging from her neck, either to check it was still there, or maybe just out of habit. I do the same with my gun holster. “That she would suddenly not show up to work. She looked stressed, these past weeks. Always working late. This field is highly competitive, Detective. Especially for a woman. Some make it, others don’t.”

  I raised a brow. “Some just vanish in thin air?”

  She rested her brown eyes on me and flashed a bitter smile. “No. It would be a first. But some do burn out. That I’ve seen before.”

  “Is Jennifer the kind prone to burnout?”

  Her eyes slipped away. I sensed a change in her perspiration, her pituitary glands releasing a spike in adrenaline. “I don’t know her that well,” she said. “Personally, I mean. She’s extremely good at her job. I don’t have to spoon-feed her or breathe down her neck to get her to do her job. Whether or not she has personal issues, though, I wouldn’t know.”

  “You said she looked stressed lately.”

  “She’d call me late at night, sometimes. From the lab.”

  “About work?”

  She nodded. “I hope nothing bad happened to her. I really need her on this project.”

  My mouth twitched to a smile. “Wherever she is, Jennifer must be thinking exactly the same thing.”

  Cox received my sardonic comment with a blank stare. I pictured her in the examination room, interviewing patients with the detachment of a sphinx revealing her oracle.

  “What did Jennifer talk about the last time she called?”

  “It was work related. She mentioned additional data she was about to obtain.” Cox passed a hand through her hair and pursed her lips. I cleared my throat, stared at her, and waited. The woman didn’t yield.

  “I’d like to know more, Doctor,” I finally prodded.

  She exhaled and swung one foot back and forth underneath the table. Her movement had been so brusque her hair bun came loose and disarrayed curls flopped around her neck. “I have patients to attend to, Detective. What we discussed on the phone pertains to the leukemia study we’ve been working on—I don’t see how these technicalities can help you find her. I bet she just had a breakdown and fled to some hot place with a white beach and a five-star hotel.” Her voice spiked with a sudden harshness, an alertness I didn’t fail to miss. I rapped my fingers on the table, unwilling to hide my exasperation. Cops get snowed by hookers, pimps, lawyers, bankers, and all sort of thugs. At the bottom of every investigation there’s a good dose of joggling different shades of true and false until a fragment of consistency emerges through the chaos. The delusion of a truth, one of many.

  “You must be treating your employees really well, Dr. Cox, for them to be able to afford a white beach and a five star hotel.” I ignored her glare and prodded, “Would you mind elaborating on the additional data Jennifer wanted to discuss with you?”

  Cox sighed. “She just told me she was going to get additional data relevant to our study, but wouldn’t be more specific on the or
igin of it, so I told her no way.”

  “Why?”

  “More data means more plates on the Illumina, which cost a lot of money, Detective. Once I get a grant, I’m responsible for how and when the money gets spent. I can’t pocket the funds and then use it at my technician’s whim.”

  “Was it the first time she made such request?”

  “At some point she requested looking at different regions in the genome for a subset of patients.”

  “And I suppose you nixed that idea as well?”

  Cox sat upright and addressed me with a murderous glare. “It’s my study, Detective. I don’t have to justify what I do and how I do it. You have no idea how hard I have to fight to get money from the NIH. The competition is fierce. Despite all the big talk about equality you hear, the plain truth is that the scientific world is still men’s territory. Women have to work twice as hard to get the same credibility. One has to spend sleepless hours writing grants, preparing talks, and making sure people understand the relevance of what it is you’re trying to prove. My patients die in the most horrible ways and nobody seems to give a shit.”

  I held her glare throughout the rant. I believed her. I also believed I had to do my job, which implied finding out what Huxley was up to before vanishing in thin air. And whether by any chance she might have hampered the project her friendly boss had worked so hard to get funded.

  “What about your data? Do they all come from patients of yours?”

  “Mine and my colleagues’ here at the clinic. The families that agree to participate.”

  I pulled the notepad out of my pocket and flopped it on the table, pointing to the name and age I’d copied earlier from the sticky note found in Huxley’s papers. “Do you recognize this name as one of the patients in your study?”

  Cox glimpsed at the note and then stared back at me. “I wouldn’t know, Detective. All patients’ personal information is protected under the HIPAA privacy act. The data we collect is labeled under a patient ID code, not a name.”

  I frowned. “What about the people who collect the data? They must keep record of the actual names.”

  “Yes, but they cannot share.”

  They meaning her and her fellow physicians. For some reason, I had a hard time picturing a clinician placing her stethoscope on the patient’s chest, and cheerfully pleading, “Now give me a big breath, LS543,” or whatever ID the child had been given. I sighed and rapped my fingers on the table. The breeze rose and momentarily alleviated the afternoon heat. Not my annoyance, though. “Dr. Cox, this name was on a note on Huxley’s desk, in a folder labeled ‘Leukemia Study.’”

  “Huxley is not supposed to know the names of our patients either. If she did, she broke the HIPAA agreement and could lose her job.”

  “Can you think of any reason why she could’ve obtained the information?”

  “Other than insanity? No.”

  A man and a woman dressed in surgical scrubs came out of the coffee shop and sat at a table nearby. The woman dug a finger into the gooey frosting of her muffin and brought it to her mouth. I tried not to think of where those same fingers might have been twenty minutes earlier. A lady briskly zigzagged between the tables, angrily tapping her heels on the cement until she disappeared inside the shop.

  I stared at the names I’d scribbled on my notepad. “What about the word ‘chromo,’” I asked. “Does it ring a bell?”

  “I can’t think of anything. Maybe she wanted to write chromosome?”

  Right. And play hangman while she was at it. “What if I really wanted to know if this eight-year-old child was at some point under your care, Dr. Cox?”

  For the first time throughout our conversation, her lips stretched into a smile. Her eyes sparkled, as if enjoying the fact that here I was, a law enforcement officer with nothing to enforce on her. “You’d have to get a warrant, Detective.”

  * * *

  The R’s rolled off their tongues like balls on a pool table. A fan swooshed on the ceiling, the cold meat slicer hummed behind the counter. The place was narrow and the shelves crammed with jars and boxes bearing unfamiliar names and smells—a curiosity to me, a home away from home to the other regulars. Exotic scents lingered in the air—garlic, paprika, marinated olives and cumin. The cadence of the background voices lulled my senses. I thought of the two hours spent at Parker Center trying to educate myself on leukemia. Google walked me through symptoms, possible causes, impossible cures, incidence, and a bunch of non-profit organizations asking for my credit card number. A quick search in the white pages under GN White yielded about a hundred hits in the metropolitan L.A. alone. Two hours very well spent indeed.

  “How about some pastrami with your gharsi, Detective?”

  “Not tonight, Areg,” I replied, taking the white bag he handed me across the counter. He exchanged a few more rolling R’s with his wife—a fake blonde with blood-red nails and full breasts with an attitude—and then added, “The kadaif’s on me, Detective. Those punks never bothered us again,” he added in a lower, conspiratorial tone.

  “You call me if they come back.” I smiled a thank you, paid cash just to watch the blood-red nails flip through the exact change of three dollars and fifty cents, and then walked out, the foreigner feeling following me down the streets of Citrus Grove, a Glendale neighborhood buzzing with Armenian shops. From there to my home in Chevy Chase was a five-minute drive, which I covered at a painfully slow speed. I drove watching the setting sun turn the hills gold and red and wondering how long until the jacaranda trees covered up in purple again.

  “Crappy day,” I said to myself, unlocking the door. “Crappy, crappy, day.” I said to Will as he ran to the door and slimed me, my face, and my legs with wet dog kisses. I slid the gun out of the holster, tossed the whole paraphernalia of gun holster, handcuffs, spare magazines and cell phone on the couch, and then rolled on the floor and played rough with my boy.

  From the windowsill, The King—yes, The King, the only cat in the neighborhood whose name was composed of two words, he deserved them both—looked down on us and regarded us with the detachment of his feline superiority.

  My half shepherd half Labrador mutt smelled of toyon and spruce trees.

  “The hell you been, huh?” I teased him, roughing him up around the neck. “Hunting again? That’s my boy!”

  Will yapped.

  “You hungry? Me too.”

  I set the Armenian take-out on the kitchen counter, went to the pantry and reached for a bottle of Sangiovese. The drawers disappointed me with the lack of a bottle opener.

  “Helluva crappy day.” I scuttled around the house trying to remember where I could’ve left the damned thing. The bedroom was unlikely, though my own entropy has often baffled me in the most creative ways. I brushed my fingers between the couch cushions and laid hands on a flattened box of condoms instead. On the bookshelf, behind the Bill Evans Trio Village Vanguard set, I found an old edition of a Pirandello play I’d forgotten I owned. I rummaged through the piles of Game and Fish magazines, the glass recycling bin in case I’d tossed the opener with the beer bottles, and the shelves of ramen noodles and tomato cans in the pantry. Until my eyes fell on something totally different: a glass jar, half-full with old keys and paperclips, a shiny object buried underneath.

  Will yapped, I ignored him.

  I grasped the container, plucked out all sorts of keys—old lockers, mailboxes I no longer owned, big keys, small keys, rusty keys—and groped for the little silver box sitting at the very bottom. I took it out slowly, as if made of paper instead of old, tarnished silver, brought it to my nose, sniffed it, and then opened it. A stern face glazed past me, her lips pursed, refusing to yield the smile the photographer had probably in vain prodded from her. Damn it. Of all things I could’ve plucked off Carmelo’s body after emptying my Glock on him, it had to be his deceased mother’s photograph. I thought of my own mother, whose photos I no longer had.

  There’s an invisible bond linking a predator to his prey. Even
the ones he didn’t choose himself.

  It’s been six weeks already. I snapped the box closed and dropped it in my pocket. Time to put it away with the others.

  Will looked at me with steak eyes.

  “No steak, tonight, buddy. Armenian is all we get.”

  I pulled down two cans of pet food and emptied them in the guys’ bowls.

  The King hopped on the countertop and watched me.

  “Fancy Armenian tonight, your majesty?”

  He gave me a snobbish mew of criticism and licked his paws.

  “Sorry,” I said, unwrapping the gharsi and lamjoun and transferring it all into a plate. “That’s all I have tonight, bud.”

  His amber eyes rested on my plate and disapproved of my dinner. He ate his can food, and when he was done, he trotted back to the living room and conquered my couch with the entitlement of somebody who’s claiming what belonged to him all along.

  Will licked his bowl all the way across the kitchen.

  I warmed up my dinner, turned the TV on, and settled to eat on the recliner by the couch, a can of coke the miser replacement of the Sangiovese I wasn’t going to have tonight.

  CHAPTER 7

  ___________

  Saturday, October 11

  The intercom buzzes and the woman shifts excitedly. A few bubbles spray on the glass of wine she is holding. “It’s her, finally!” she says, putting the glass down.

  Her husband drops lower into the tub, making the water gargle. “This late?”

  “She couldn’t make it earlier,” she replies, springing to her feet. For a second she stands naked in front of him, rivulets of water dripping down her body, bending around her curves, and insinuating in secluded crevices. The husband admires and, despite the familiarity of it, still finds the sight enjoyable. It’s not offered for too long, though. She hastily steps out of the tub and runs to answer the intercom.