by E. E. Giorgi
Sprinklers going off in the middle of a spring storm are not only useless.
They’re wasteful.
CHAPTER 17
____________
Wednesday, October 15
Rhesus’s phone chimes. Trickles of sweat drip down his unshaved jaw and shirt. He looks in the rearview mirror. Nobody’s following. That was close, he thinks. The phone keeps ringing. Damn it. He pulls to the curb, heaves a deep breath, and picks up.
“Hey honey,” a voice greets him. “Are you working?”
“I was jogging,” he replies, his breath still short. “I’m going back to work after dinner.” The silence at the other end of the line is laden with disappointment. “Look, baby—”
“I know. It’s only for a few more months.” She sighs. “I had a really tiring day.”
He coaxes her, smooches a little, and then hangs up and dials another number. Another woman, another voice.
“I couldn’t find a damn thing,” he blurts.
“Did you get the computer?”
He thinks before replying. Should he tell her about the incident? He decides not to. “I dropped it in the shower.”
“What? Are you stupid?”
“It’s gone. The computer’s gone, get it?”
She doesn’t reply.
“What are you doing tonight?” he asks, his tone different.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Rhesus frowns. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing tonight and something has to be wrong?”
“Relax, I’m just asking. I thought we could—you know.”
“You thought wrong, Rhes. I’m not in the mood.”
A sudden notion crosses his mind. Childish, yet he can’t help but voice it out loud. “You’re not seeing somebody, are you?”
A guffaw follows, loud and mocking. Offensive.
“Stop it,” he warns, but she doesn’t listen.
“Oh, Rhesus,” she finally says. “And what is it to you if I’m seeing somebody?”
Stupid! he thinks hanging up. He swerves back into the street and drives off. He can’t concentrate, though. He’s pissed at the way she laughed at him. He pulls over again, grabs the cell phone and dials a new number. “Hey, guess what? My deadline got postponed. I don’t have to go back to work tonight.”
“I can’t wait to see you,” she says, a smile tingling in her voice.
CHAPTER 18
____________
Wednesday, October 15
“Can you see it?” She had pulled the curtains and turned all lights off. She raised her arms, collected her hair, and tilted her head to expose her throat and shoulder. A tattooed butterfly with curly tails spread its wings across her collarbone. “Can you really see it, even in the dark?”
“Hmm,” I replied, distracted by her nakedness. Sparse tufts of red hair softened her armpits and sprouted below the smiling bay of her lower abdomen. Everything else was pearly white, like a Galatea awakened to life.
“You like it? I designed it myself.”
Hortensia’s breasts smelled of cherry blossoms, and her nipples tasted sandy and salty, like seashells washed to the shore. After what had happened at Huxley’s condo, I was so damn pissed at myself I needed a distraction. I spent an hour explaining to the responding officers what had happened. A guy from forensics looked pitifully at the soaked laptop, then sealed the scene and told me nothing could be done until the next day. I went home, showered and shaved, had a bite, and then appeared at Hortensia’s door with a bottle of wine. Hortensia never asks a question unless it concerns her personally, mostly because she’s too focused on herself to wonder what’s going on in other people’s lives. It works for me, and it’s all I care. Tonight, she opened her door, took the wine from my hands and kissed me.
Later in bed, she fussed over her new tattoo to the point of irritation. I reluctantly let go of her nipple and pressed my thumb over her lips. “I can see the damn butterfly, Hort. I can see everything in pitch dark, okay?”
She giggled and moved my hand away from her face. “I can only see your eyes. They glow, like vampires’ eyes. I think your doctor’s wrong, Track. You’re not a chimera. You’re a vampire.”
She tilted her head backwards and laughed.
“He didn’t say I’m a chimera,” I said, brushing my tongue down her cleavage and squeezing her nipple between my lips. “He said he needed to find out more about me.”
She pulled me closer, bit my earlobe and whispered, “Then be a vampire. Just for me, just for tonight.”
“Bullshit.” I sunk my face in her navel and slid my hands up her thighs. She moaned, closed her eyes, and so did I.
* * *
Thursday, October 16
It was one a.m. when I got home. I hit the bed and felt restless. I couldn’t stop thinking of how close I’d come to catching Huxley’s killer and how foolishly I’d let him escape. The guy wasn’t just a suspect. He was the link between the murders: the reason why Huxley had disappeared and turned up dead in her own car, why Robert Tarantino had been shot while making love to his wife, and why Jerry White had ended Conrad’s life. Without that link, too many pieces of the puzzle were still missing. Huxley requested an appointment with Tarantino, to which he replied, “Sure, see you in four months.” But then he ended up on her couch sipping wine, if not the same night she disappeared, the previous one. Maybe she had some compelling argument to make him change his mind. Or perhaps some compelling curves, and the official business thing was an excuse for secret encounters. Could Proteus kids be some secret code the two had concocted for their rendezvous? It didn’t fit the picture of the workaholic woman I’d gathered, though. Somebody who worked like Huxley had no time for a lover. No, Huxley wanted to talk to Tarantino for different reasons. She was going to obtain additional data. Huxley wanted data from Robert Tarantino—data so crucial it cost three lives, maybe four.
The religious note left by Tamara Tarantino’s body bugged me. Huxley wore a golden cross and had a prayer framed in her foyer. Was it really her who drove to the Tarantinos’ home that night? To deliver a religious message? Or was she already dead by then?
The killers kept eluding me. A man and a woman were at the Tarantino residence when the homeowners had been executed, and a man and a woman were in Huxley’s car. Was it the same man and woman? Her smell was elusive, and every time I tried to capture it I felt like I was running after a concept I couldn’t quite grasp. His smell, instead, I finally had, now clearly impressed in my head: musty, sweaty, tangy like burnt cilantro, and yet not completely foreign. It had a hint of familiarity, a component I felt I’d encountered before, though in this new mixture, I failed to recognize it.
I tossed and turned for most of the night, going round in loops, thinking of one hypothesis, excluding it, and then reconsidering and starting all over again. When at five fifty-five the phone rang, I felt like I’d just closed my eyes.
“We have an identity on the body.”
“Fuck off, Satish. I had an identity yesterday, too.”
“Good morning to you too, Track. You no longer sound eager to go get a hold of Huxley’s computer.”
Of course I was. I told him to come get me in twenty minutes—the time I needed to brew two Mokas’ worth of coffee. We made an additional stop to pick up the computer forensics guy, and by the time we hit the Ten, the sun was just about to rise. A rim of red outlined the San Gabriel Mountains, broken by the fringed skyline of palm fronds and eucalyptus trees lining the freeway. The last stars twinkled and then vanished. Behind red brick walls draped in crawling ivies, a sea of shingle roofs marked neighborhoods of middle-income homes, their propane grills and manicured lawns setting the tone of suburban life.
We arrived at the Esperanza Medical Center—Huxley’s workplace—around seven thirty. A security guard accompanied us to the Lerville building and let us in. We followed his master key like the mice followed the magic flute. Except this time no magic was needed: Huxley�
��s office door was already open.
As soon as he saw us, Fabian Payanukis sprang to his feet, his hands frozen on the keyboard. The lab tech I’d met on my first visit to the Esperanza looked tired, pale, and quite shocked to see us. My eyes widened. “What do you think you’re doing, tampering with that computer?”
Payanukis winced. “Tampering? No—what—”
Satish squeezed my arm and took over. “Please step away from the computer, sir,” he said, as protocol dictated. “We’re executing a search warrant on all electronic files in this office.”
Payanukis stared at us as if we were wearing our pants inside out. “Does Dr. Cox know about this?”
“She’s been notified,” the guard confirmed. Our computer tech set his toolbox on the desk and took over Huxley’s keyboard, shoving a still stammering Payanukis to the side.
“Why are you doing this? What happened to Jen?” The thick lenses of his glasses enlarged the puffiness beneath his eyes. He reeked of morning breath, of a sleepless night spent in front of a terminal, and consequent need of a shower. Satish and the security guard talked him into stepping out of the office, while I grabbed a chair and sat next to our technician.
“Tell me what the punk was doing logged onto this machine.”
The tech furrowed his eyebrows at the screen. He was wearing a nicotine drenched T-shirt sporting the formula E=mc2 on the front, and Einstein’s 1951 photo at the back, the one where he’s sticking out his tongue at the camera. That morning, it felt as if Albert were staring right at me, saying, I’m the genius, and you’re the dumbass.
“Hmm.” Einstein Shirt typed a few lines of incomprehensible jargon, at which the machine responded with a loud whir. Rows of arcane lingo dribbled down the black screen, the very last the only one I could comprehend: “ACCESS DENIED.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He exhaled and dropped his hands off the keyboard. “The answer to your question, Detective. The punk was encrypting the hard disk.”
* * *
“Am I under arrest?”
“No, Doctor,” Satish replied, his voice like hot cocoa after a snow fight. “We just need to have a chat, and it would be best if you could come with us to the station. You were one of the last people to talk to her.”
Julia Cox drew in a sharp breath and ran a nervous hand through her hair. “How did she die?”
“We can’t disclose anything yet.”
She knew Huxley was dead. I paced across the hospital conference room while studying her face and perspiration, the fine line drawn by her eyebrows, and the slight tremor of her hands. She’s scared. For the first time since I’d met her, Cox looked unnerved and fragile. Underneath the white coat, her scrubs were wrinkled and smelled of operating room. She crossed her legs and wedged a hand between her thighs, the plastic of her shoe covers rustling against the linoleum tiles. I winced. Blue shoe covers made of Tyvec, like all hospital protective clothing.
“Will I need a lawyer?” Cox asked, her voice tainted with a note of anxiety.
Satish stiffened. The minute a suspect asks for a lawyer our hands are tied. I pulled up a chair and sat across from her. Payanukis had told us earlier the order to encrypt Huxley’s hard drive had come from her. The only hope we had to retrieve Huxley’s data was to coax the decryption key out of her pretty lips.
“Are you hiding something from us, Doctor?” I asked.
She squinted and a hint of color returned to her cheeks. “Course not,” she replied, her voice as bold as a Colombian brew.
“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Her nostrils widened and her eyes glared. “Better be quick,” she said, getting up. “I have patients waiting.”
In the hallway she eyed a trash bin and stopped to remove her shoe covers. As she precariously balanced on one foot, I grasped her arm and held out a hand. “Here, let me take that for you.”
Cox flinched, taken aback by my sudden gallantry. Her skepticism resurfaced almost immediately. She pursed her lips, slid off the shoe cover, and shoved it in my hand. “Suit yourself,” she snarled, removed the second one as well, and then wriggled away from my grasp. I silenced Satish’s interrogative stare with a blank face, both shoe covers secured in the pocket of my jacket.
Satish held the backdoor of our vehicle open for her and seemed not to notice the lack of a thank you as she quietly slid inside. Through the side mirror, I watched her lean her elbow against the window and drop her head in her hand.
“Tired?” Satish asked, turning the engine on.
“I was in the OR most of the night.”
“In that case, I suggest a cup of our famous LAPD brew,” Satish quipped. “It tastes so bad it keeps bears from hibernating.”
During the drive back to the Glass House, Cox kept callously staring out the window. She didn’t bite on any of Satish’s numerous attempts to engage her in a casual conversation, and by the time we escorted her to one of the cubicles at the back of our squad room, she looked distressed, flustered, and eager to leave.
Out in the hallway, Satish clicked his tongue in frustration. “She’s been up all night. We can’t ask her to take a polygraph,” he said, filling a Styrofoam cup from the water fountain, the only drink Cox had agreed to. Apparently, she had taken Satish’s comments on the quality of our coffee quite literally.
“And what do you expect to milk out of a poly?” I replied. “It’ll tell you she’s hiding something, which we already know.”
Lies come in all shapes and colors. Some lie open-mouthed, others through their teeth; some with a defiant look on their faces, others as if they’d just stepped on dog shit and needed to wipe it off their shoes. Some lie out of habit because their lives are too damned boring and need the extra kick; others lie through a mist of soap-opera delusion. Some lie earnestly, some because they’re entitled to, and some to cover their asses. All a polygraph tells you is a yes, no, maybe. It doesn’t tell you what, when, or why. As the old saying goes, the devil’s in the details.
Satish’s approach was to avoid any direct confrontation with Julia Cox. He asked generic questions about the leukemia study and her relationship with Huxley. Throughout the interview, Cox was as detached as a Greek Caryatid. I rapped my fingers on the table, until I finally lost my temper and bristled. “Dr. Cox, you had one of your lab technicians encrypt Huxley’s hard disk the very same day we learned she was dead.”
Cox flashed a miffed look. “You’re doing your job, and I’m doing mine,” she said sharply. “Jennifer was an exceptional asset for my group, and as much as this tragedy strikes me personally, it affects my job, too. The data on that computer has been obtained through my grant and is therefore my intellectual property. I’m entitled to keep it hidden until I’m ready to publish it. There’s a privacy act granting me the right to do so, Detective. I suggest you look it up.”
I could tell where her rage came from. It wasn’t just at me. It was at the gender class I represented. Over the years, she’d seen her career stepped over by men, whether they came in a uniform or in a white lab coat, whether they looked down on her or all over her, acknowledging her looks rather than her work. Her belligerence had become a form of survival: step over before you’re stepped on, blurring the lines of what’s admissible and what’s not. Which is why I felt no empathy. “Quit snowing me with all this privacy crap, Dr. Cox. How long do you think it took me to find out that Gaya White was one of your patients?”
She drew a hand to her chest, searching for the stethoscope she’d left at the hospital. When she didn’t find it, she fiddled with the lapels of her lab coat, the back of her hand flowered with light freckles. “I stand by the rules, Detective. It’s my job. And frankly, I don’t see how knowing Gaya was one of my patients can help find Jennifer’s killer.”
I raised a brow. “Not even if I told you Huxley found out why Gaya died?”
My bluff had the effect I’d been looking for. Cox’s face drained of all color. By my side, Sati
sh tensed. I knew what he was thinking and I didn’t care.
“Gaya died of leukemia,” she said, her voice low. “We did all we could possibly—”
“Her father doesn’t think so,” I interjected. “And I have reason to believe Huxley didn’t either. Have you ever heard of the expression Proteus kids?”
Cox’s eyes hardened. She wrapped her fingers around the empty Styrofoam cup, twirled it, then crushed it. “This interview is over,” she said coolly. “I won’t say another word until I talk to a lawyer.”
* * *
“Absolutely brilliant, Track,” Satish griped.
“You weren’t going anywhere either, okay?”
I was downright angry. Angry at the idiot who locked Huxley’s computer, angry at the bitch of a doctor for telling him to do so, and angry at the system because I should’ve gotten that computer days ago, when I started investigating the woman’s disappearance. Unscathed by any of my woes, Satish watched Cox climb onto the cruiser taking her back to the Esperanza while happily whistling Charlie Chaplin’s tune “Smile”—Nat King Cole’s version, for the record, because he’s that kind of a classy guy.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Sat?” I snapped.
“With me? What the hell is wrong with me? You’re the one who’s all revved up.”
“I have a thousand reasons for being mad. How are we supposed to find out why Huxley got killed without the data she was working on?”
“We’ve got smart people down at Electronics. They’ll figure out a way to get to those files.”
“It’ll take months. You should’ve listened to me yesterday. You knew as well as I did the stiff was Huxley.”
“Track, you’re a smart guy and yet you still fall for these things. They’re legal traps. Had we gotten the computer yesterday, before the medical examiner signed the death certificate with the right name on it, whatever we would’ve milked out of the hard disk would’ve been inadmissible. And you know it.”
