CHIMERAS (Track Presius)

by E. E. Giorgi

  My steps echoed in the wide hall. The silence was deep yet warm, lulled by the last rays of light filtering through the skylights. Wax, incense, and pinewood—my mother’s smell, the day she came to see me in juvie.

  Rows of concentric pews departed like rays from the altar. Two philodendrons flanked the tabernaculum, their lobed leaves drooping down like asking hands. The scent of incense and votive candles unearthed long lost memories.

  “Can I help you?” The smile was welcoming, chiseled in a surprisingly young face. “It’s okay,” he added softly as my answer failed to come. “We all falter before God.” He walked past me, a breeze of fresh smells swooshing behind—Marseille soap, laundry detergent, beeswax, incense, Luke’s favorite aftershave. He clambered up to the altar and blew out the candles. The pungent zest of burnt wax and paraffin coiled into little curls of smoke that took their time before wafting to my nose.

  “Father Jonathan?”

  “Yes?” Kind, watery eyes hidden behind round lenses.

  How old are you, thirty, maybe thirty-two?

  “When was the last time you saw Jennifer Huxley?”

  CHAPTER 23

  ____________

  Friday, October 17

  The key clicks into the lock and the door opens. Inside, the air smells stale and warm: the comforting familiarity of her own place. Diane Kyle steps inside, turns the dead bolt, and slides the security chain. She drops the keys into the woven basket on the console, kicks her shoes off, and heads to the kitchen, flipping on the light switches as she goes. It’s dark, it’s late, and she’s tired. She turns the radio on and pop music fills the air. The living room is scented with the fragrance from the air freshener plugged in a corner. It gives her a sense of home, and it makes it easier to pretend she doesn’t feel lonely at night.

  Darn it, the fridge is empty. She opens the freezer. It’ll have to be pizza. She retrieves the box, takes out the frozen pizza and tosses it in a pan. Oven on at 400 °F, she climbs the stairs while unbuttoning her shirt. Her thoughts drift to the long day and the weekend ahead.

  If only Jim didn’t work so much.

  She gets to the top of the stairs and sighs. If only.

  The thought makes her uneasy. Ex-boyfriends, wasted relationships, too many regrets. At her age, she should be married with a couple of kids in preschool. Her therapist laid it out in one sentence. You need to break the loop chain of abusive relationships, Diane.

  A sound, sharp and unfamiliar, makes her freeze.

  “Is anybody there?” she says, her voice shaking. The wind blows and a curtain rustles. Diane exhales. Silly me. She latches the bedroom window with slippery hands. It was just the draft, she realizes, heart throbbing. The job is stressing me out. She turns on the lights in the bathroom and starts the shower. The water pours out and billows of steam warm up the air. Humming softly, Diane slides her shirt off and unzips her pants. The door to the closet is ajar.

  Down to her underwear, she suddenly gasps. Did she just imagine that sound? Or was it really there, a sigh, or a groan maybe, barely audible, and yet unmistakably human. She bolts out of the bedroom and looks down the stairs.

  “Hello?” she calls. “Jim, is it you?” Maybe his meeting got canceled and he decided to surprise her. “Jim?” she calls once more. “It’s not funny, you know?” The question falls unanswered. She shakes her head and returns to the bedroom.

  Damn it, Rhesus thinks. He got too excited, craned his head to see better and hit a hanger. A belt fell with a soft clink. Crouched behind a long dress and concealed by the box of a voluminous comforter, he spies through the slit of the closet door. He enjoys the sight of Diane’s breasts wobbling like firm jell-o in her black bra. And when she removes her lingerie, Rhesus caresses the weapon in his holster and smiles. One more minute, he thinks. He wants to see more. Diane steps into the bathroom and under the shower. Now she will no longer hear. The water jetting out of the faucet and her loud off-key singing muffles all noises. Rhesus slides out of his hiding spot, the steam from the hot water disguising him. He can take her by surprise, and she won’t feel a thing. This is not how he wants to do it, though. He stares at her breasts rocking gently while she lathers the shampoo on her head, and at her hips, round and inviting, trickles of water bending around them and caressing her curves.

  He clutches the pistol. Cool, comforting. So easy to take her now. Would she still be beautiful frozen in the stupor of death, a trail of blood spilling on her white breasts? Would she scream or would she go peacefully, almost grateful for the quick end? He could take her then, like that. And then he’d steal a lock of her hair. Auburn has always been his favorite hair color.

  Next time, Rhesus thinks. And then leaves.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, wrapped in a pink bathrobe, Diane opens the oven and whispers little ow’s of discomfort as she pulls out the scalding pan with potholders too thin for the job. She tosses away the potholders, cuts out a slice, and drops it onto a plate. The shower calmed her down. Singing to herself, she walks to the couch with the plate in one hand and a glass of white chardonnay in the other. Her eyes fall on the door, making her tilt her head and frown. It’s weird, she thinks. I thought I left the security chain inserted. She puts the plate and glass down on the coffee table and walks to the door. A quick rush of adrenaline makes her heart jump. The chain she couldn’t swear, but the bolt—the bolt should have been turned. She always locks the door.

  CHAPTER 24

  ____________

  Friday, October 17

  The tea bag plunged and then floated up again as hot water poured into the cup. Billows of steam rose from the surface, carrying the aroma of bergamot. The place was small: a single guy’s dwelling, only tidier. The only decorations displayed on the white walls were a crucifix above the door and a wall calendar hanging next to the fridge. The mismatched furniture fulfilled the sole purpose of functionality. On the table, a checkered tablecloth was spattered with old coffee stains. A pothos plant crept down from the top of a cupboard and brushed its leaves against the window fixtures. Like an alien from a different time, a desktop whirred on a small corner desk while unfolding geometric shapes on its screen—solitary witness of the current times in an unusually anachronistic space.

  “Honey?”

  “Sugar is fine, thank you.”

  Father Jonathan pushed the sugar bowl towards me and then dipped his spoon into the honey jar. He had feminine hands that showed cleanness and attention to detail. Somebody who dusted frequently and confessed regularly, whose attentive eyes could pick a devout follower from a repentant soul, and tell a liberal from a conservative just by looking at their body posture.

  “Do you believe in God, Detective?”

  “No.”

  He raised a brow. “Do you ever worry about the afterlife?”

  “No. I’ll be dead by then.”

  He stared at his tea and twirled the spoon. The clinking faded. “Well, I do. I worry about all my brothers’ and sisters’ afterlife. Including yours.”

  I thought of the blonde, blue-eyed Christs handed to me on the street over the years, together with cheap propaganda pamphlets and one-day-only sale advertisements. Some people beg for money, some for listening ears, some for new adepts to share their afterlife with. “You said Jennifer came to see you the day before she disappeared?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Last time I saw her was last Monday. She came here after work.”

  “Why did she come to see you?” I fished the tea bag out of the cup.

  “The same as most of my parishioners: confession.”

  Crap. Confession is to a priest as HIPAA is to an MD.

  “Jennifer was a brave woman. Up against evil.”

  I tinkled the spoon against the saucer. “An evil called Chromo?”

  He squinted. His head wanted to nod but somewhere in between changed its mind and ended up cocking to the side. A shaving rash flared on his neck and stood out against the blackness of his shirt neckband. He slid an inde
x finger along the inside of his clerical collar, easing for a moment the stiffness of the uniform. When he wrapped his hand around the cup again, the tip of his finger was floured in white. A soap-scented white.

  Interesting.

  “Those are nice looking sneakers you’re wearing, Father.”

  “Very comfortable,” he agreed. “They improve posture, and with all the hours I have to spend standing—”

  “I bet they came in handy last night when you had to run away from a crowd of screaming monkeys.”

  “Wha—I—”

  “You know what we found in one of the cages you opened, Father? This fine powder called talc.” I stared at him, my nostrils instantly detecting the rush of adrenaline that flushed his face. His left brow twitched. He brought the cup to his mouth with shaking hands, and a few drops of tea spilled and dripped on the tablecloth. “My colleague kept saying it was glove talc, but you see, I happen to have a different theory. I think it was the type of talc used by the clergy, men like you, to ease the discomfort of the starched collar your uniform imposes. I bet we can match what we found at the scene with—”

  “Stop.” His eyes flared. Do not mess with my God. My justice, I read in them. “You’re looking in the wrong place, Detective. The evil you’re after isn’t here. My conscience is clean.”

  I smiled. “Father, the standing of your conscience is something between you and your God. Me, unfortunately, I care about human law. Right now, you’re looking at trespassing and felony vandalism, and I’m not even counting the fellow who ended up on the coroner’s table because of this—”

  “I had nothing to do with that!” He banged a hand on the table, making the silverware rattle.

  I waited for his pulse to come down a notch, then said, “I don’t doubt your good intentions, Father. Whatever happened last night, you had your reasons. Here’s where I start to get edgy, though. Because you see, if you happen to know important information that could help me bring justice to Huxley’s death and you don’t disclose it, that’s what I find really immoral, whether in front of God or man.”

  He held my glare. “They’re playing God over there. With human life. Jennifer found out. They ruin young, innocent lives.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Those monkeys, they inject them with stuff for their experiments.”

  “Who gave you the passcode to enter the property?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “I can’t—”

  “We could be having this chat in downtown.”

  “You only have human power…”

  “Whatever I have, I’ll use it.”

  “Jennifer gave me the passcode.”

  “How did she get it?”

  He flattened his hands on the table. They were no longer shaking. “I don’t know. She was scared. She gave me the passcode and said if something was ever to happen to her, I had to try to stop them from carrying on with those experiments.”

  The statement, flat-out, made my blood boil. I raised my voice. “Something did happen, Father! And all you could come up with was to free a bunch of monkeys? How about come talk to us?”

  He stared at me as if I’d completely missed the obvious. “I just found out about her passing. Her mother called me a couple of hours ago to arrange the funeral. Until then, all I could do was pray. Jennifer told me everything under the secrecy of confession. What else could I do without violating the sanctity of reconciliation?”

  “It sounds to me you did a little more than praying, Father.”

  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 finger
s. 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.”