by E. E. Giorgi
I handed her the Corona she’d refused. “Here, it’ll make you feel better.” She took it, her eyes clinging on me like cobwebs. She walked to the couch, dropped on it, and brushed her hand along the spot where Will had slouched a minute earlier. Her fingers raked a clump of tawny colored hair. “You have a cat? I love cats.”
I sat on the recliner. “No, uh—It’s more of a cousin.”
Diane frowned. “A cousin with fur?”
I tittered and for a moment she joined in. Not for long, though. “Glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.” She wiped the smile off her face.
It wasn’t a joke.
She took a swig of Corona, my eyes drawn by the smooth line of her neck. She lowered the bottle and swallowed slowly, her thumb drawing circles along the wet glass. “So. Troy didn’t lie to us. They weren’t experimenting with human embryos.”
I shrugged. “They experimented with humans, though.”
She bobbed her head, gravely. “Then the humans had children, and the children paid the price for their parents’ vanity.”
“Udall is working on the search warrants for Chromo’s labs. Once we get a hold of all the embryos, do you think you can prove the gene therapy caused the leukemia mutations in the children’s DNA?”
Diane stroked the beer bottle with her thumb. “Yes, if we can show the therapy messed up the germline cells. If the embryos have the same mutations Huxley found, we can confirm her findings.”
Diane took another swig then set the bottle on the coffee table. “Did you hear about the slug?”
I nodded, she swallowed. “I can’t believe it. There must’ve been two of them, and one… killed the other.”
“Can you blame him?”
Hurt stung her eyes. “It’s not funny, Track!” She ran a hand through her hair and shook her head. “I’m—I’m so stressed out. I still can’t figure out how he got into my apartment. And why—what did he want from me? Rape me? Kill me?”
“Both.”
Diane scowled. “What?”
“I said both.”
“God, Track, that really, really helps.” She clonked the beer bottle on the coffee table, got to her feet and walked away.
Should I stop her? Or should I let her go?
I darted behind her. “I meant—”
She never got to the door. She spun on her feet and glared. “Do you at least wonder why I wanted to talk to you today or do you not give a shit?”
Funny how Gomez had yelled to my face the exact same way that morning and yet I had unflinchingly held back his gaze and pretended his breath smelled like rose petals.
Diane’s flushed skin was ambrosial, and the more upset she got, the spicier her scent became. I would’ve stopped breathing if I could. But I couldn’t. It was everywhere: on her skin, on her clothes, in her hair. The ancestral call of pheromones reeling me in, like the Sirens calling out to the sailors who dared cross their sea… I stepped back. Last night I would’ve taken her with my eyes closed. Last night I hadn’t killed an unarmed man for no other reason than revenge…
“I wanted to thank you,” she whispered. Softly, suddenly drained of all animosity. “For last night, Track, for risking your life for me. You kept avoiding me instead. Why? Do I disgust you?”
“No.” I swallowed. “Definitely not.”
She came closer and this time I didn’t move. All the what-if castles I kept building in my head eroded away, and all there was left to stare at and take in was her. Diane. The beast in me purred in contentment. Tamed.
“Do I scare you?”
“Scare me? No. I’m scared of me, Diane. Of what I might do to you.”
Was she intrigued when she tilted her head, stepped so close I felt the warmth of her breath on my mouth, and asked, “What might you do to me?”
My hands sought her, found fabric instead. I knew exactly what I’d do to her. “I might peel these clothes off you,” I whispered. Make my skin touch yours. I’d want to inhale you, let our scents mingle, let myself be part of you—
“Like this?” Her fingers snapped the top button of her shirt and my hand followed, tracing her skin as she went along freeing it. The sight of her cleavage made blood pulse in my head. I slid my hands down her shoulders, kissed her neck and then her lips. They were good lips to kiss—soft and embracing. Searching. Her shirt fell to the floor. I picked her up, brought her to my bed, licked the base of her throat and continued my way down. And then I froze. It was right there, on her bra. The smell, the bloody assassin’s scent. On her bra, damn it, of all places.
“What?”
I read desire in her eyes. The spicy zest of her skin, the pheromones, calling me in.
It’s not. Can’t be. Not the same person. The DNA didn’t match.
You’re wrong about the scent, Track. Wrong.
I unfastened her bra, tossed it away, and removed it from my thoughts. After that I drowned in her scent, sweet and sticky like honey.
“You feel good, Track,” she whispered in my ear. “You feel good.”
I couldn’t find the words to tell her how good she felt. I just purred. I rocked her and purred.
CHAPTER 34
____________
Friday, October 24
Diane was sleeping. I couldn’t. I had to check the bra again. And when I did, the surge of loath I felt scared me. I could kill because of that. I had already.
At three a.m. I banged on Hortensia’s door. “What happened?” She showed up in a white T-shirt and nothing else, neither over nor under. I stepped inside and slouched on her couch, even though she hadn’t invited me in.
“My place is taken.” I scanned with no interest the clutter of paint jars, brushes and canvases populating her studio.
“By whom?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll just lounge on your couch for the time being. Will be gone by morning, promise.” Or so I hoped.
She shrugged and turned the bolt. “Whatever. You smell different, though.” She shuffled back to her bedroom and slammed the door closed.
Smells, I thought. What the hell does she know about smells?
* * *
The first thing I inhaled when I woke up was turpentine and oil paints. The sun had just risen. It poked through the slats of the blinds and blinked in my eyes. I was cranky and exhausted.
“Gary was a doll yesterday,” Hortensia chirped half an hour later as I dragged myself into her kitchen.
“Hmm.”
She gaped at me. “What the hell happened to you?”
I must’ve looked pretty bad for her to notice. “Diane Kyle showed up.”
Hortensia clonked the coffee grinder on the counter. “Oh. Who?”
I retrieved two mugs from the cupboard, sat at the kitchen island, and waved a hand. “She’s…” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We’re investigating this case together.”
“Ooh.” She clicked her tongue. “No wonder you smelled different. How closely have you two been investigating?”
I glared but said nothing. Hortensia went back on the attack. “Did you kiss her?”
“Worse. I slept with her.”
This time she pulled her lips together and sucked in air. “Oh my!” And then she laughed and nudged me on the shoulder. “Are you going to make me jealous, my Ulysses lost at sea?”
I was lost at sea. Ulysses—Homer’s one—had tied himself to the mast of his boat not to fall prey to the Sirens’ chants. What was I to tie myself to?
Hortensia’s laughter faded pretty quickly. She filled the coffee filter and asked, “So, what are you doing here?”
I stared at her hair. It draped her shoulders in a fan of red and golden threads, wavering back and forth as if they possessed a mind of their own. As if each sway were a chorus of— “You’re disappointing, Track.”
Hortensia’s question fell unanswered. “Gee, Track. I didn’t know you were so typical.”
I clutched one of the mugs and squeezed it. “Typical?”
“She came to
your house?”
I squeezed harder and nodded.
“And she made a move on you?”
Damn it, I wasn’t going to share that much. “Hort—”
She left the coffee maker and leaned across the kitchen island. “You’re such a typical representative of your gender, Mr. Presius. A lady comes onto you and you feel your masculinity suddenly threatened because she made the move instead of you. So, what do you do? You leave. Congratulations, Track. Turns out, you’re just like everybody else.”
“That’s not why I left.”
She turned the coffee maker on and opened the fridge. “Why’d you leave, then?”
I twirled the coffee mug.
“Track?”
“Hell, Hort. Her bra smelled like the killer I’m after, okay? Do you wanna know what size it was, now?”
The half a gallon of milk in her right hand froze in mid-air. “Are you serious?”
I nodded. From the bottom of the mug, a distorted reflection of my right eye looked back at me and scowled. Hortensia propped the milk carton in front of me. “How did this happen, Track? How did you let her fool you like this?”
I bristled. “So now I’m a fool. A typical fool, right, Hort?” I slammed the mug on the countertop so hard the handle came off.
Hortensia was relentless. “Well, yeah! She came to your house and seduced you.”
“It’s not her!” I shouted. “It’s her damn boyfriend!” Hortensia gave me one of her looks. I hunched over the kitchen island and squeezed my temples between the heels of my hands. “Or a sibling of her boyfriend’s, or some other fucking bastard who needs to rot in jail,” I growled.
Kowalski has no siblings, Ulysses. You’ve looked into it.
“Whose smell was on the woman you slept with?”
And who ran the DNA analyses.
What was I supposed to say? It didn’t make any sense, and yet there was no way I could stay away from the woman. In fact, I was already regretting leaving her in the middle of the night. I wanted to run back to her. Maybe she hasn’t awakened yet, maybe it’s not too late…
“A man tried to kill her two nights ago,” I blurted out in the mist of my denial.
“He didn’t though, did he? I bet the idea was to ambush and kill you,” Hortensia replied. It was the final stab to my already wounded ego. She shook her head. “That’s what happens when you get personally involved in these things. You lose lucidity.”
I could no longer listen to her. I slammed my hand on the table, got up and left.
“I hope she won’t kill you,” she called after me. “It’s hard to say ‘I told you so’ when you’re dead.”
Could I really be such an idiot? Fall for a woman on the trail of a scent, like a bug flying right into the honey jar and drowning. Sweet death, I thought, Diane’s inebriating scent still clinging to my skin. Sweet death.
* * *
By the third cup I started feeling the caffeine jitter. I hated drip coffee. And I hated it even more when it came in a Styrofoam cup. It was like getting drunk with malt beer in a Chianti cellar. I crushed the cup, tossed it in the trash, then opened the blue murder book on my desk. My eyes glazed over.
Diane’s exposed throat, a pearly offering to my searching mouth. Diane’s navel, arching under my touch. The more I tried to run away from them, the more those images came back, haunting me. A movie in slow motion gradually accelerating and finally screeching to a halt. Diane, in my bed, a stroke of light from the window brushing her hair. How long until she realizes I’m not there? Until she calls my name and she understands no answer will come? She gets out of bed, her fragrance trailing behind her. If I were still there, I’d cherish the warmth of her body on my sheets. I chose to leave, instead. How much longer until she feels betrayed? Abandoned, maybe. Or maybe just used.
Wasn’t that the plan, Ulysses? To use her to get to the killer?
Turns out, she used you, instead.
Udall dropped by around ten. He shuffled to my desk and sat on Satish’s chair, the knot of his tie slightly skewed, and the black briefcase with the tattered corners swinging by his side. He laced his fingers across his stomach and stared at me smirking. Always smirking.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I did yesterday, Track?”
“You always do well, Mr. Udall.”
He crossed his legs and flashed a blue sock at me. It nicely matched his tie. “Jerry White got away with one count of voluntary manslaughter—five years on paper. He’ll do one if we’re lucky.” This time the smirk seemed out of place. Picture a dolphin crying.
I gulped down the lukewarm remains of my third coffee. “Between you and me, Mr. Udall: can you blame him for what he’s done?”
“Track, I’ve been doing this for quite some years now. I’ve learned to look at the one action and put it in its context. I can’t afford likes or dislikes towards the victim. All victims have equal right to justice. And murder is always murder.”
I shook my head. “Except this particular story doesn’t have one victim only, Mr. Udall. Gaya White was a victim, too. And the other children, whose parents were fool enough to believe in eternal youth.”
Udall exhaled. “Their parents made a stupid choice. They played with their own lives. Too bad it was the kids who ended up paying the price.”
I tapped the empty cup on the table and sighed. A little Satish-like wisdom came to me. “Some people have a hard time growing up. If you tell a five-year-old, ‘Give me your piggy bank, and I’ll give you the most gigantic lollipop on the face of the Earth,’ is he going to say no?”
“Naïveté is White’s crime, then?”
I shrugged. “Or too much faith. Some people believe in God, others believe in science.”
Udall nodded, the chain of his glasses bobbing in unison with his jowls. He slapped a hand on his knee, crouched to retrieve his briefcase, and then rose to his feet. “I’m glad you do your job and I do mine, Track.” So was I. He took a few steps and then turned around. “I almost forgot. Chromo does have more embryos. White and Kelson weren’t the only parents who opted for in vitro fertilization after the rejuvenating gene therapy. However, if you want those embryos, you better get a written consent from each one of the rightful owners.”
I raised a brow.
“The parents, Track. Or donors, or whatever you want to call them. When you go to Chromo, you must get a log with the info on what belongs to whom. You can seize the evidence, but you can’t look at the embryos’ genes without destroying them, and you can’t destroy them without the parents’ consents.”
“Every one of them? It’s crazy.”
“You know what’s crazy in this case? Think about it: who are the real parents?”
I watched him trot away, his briefcase swinging and his question ringing in my ears. It beat any of Satish’s best riddles.
CHAPTER 35
____________
Friday, October 24
“Where did you hide it?”
He frowns, startled by her sudden rage. “Where did I hide what?”
“The gun,” she hisses. She no longer cares to hide her feelings. She feels the danger, like claws drawing near and closing around her throat. She wakes up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. Her medications no longer work to quiet the erratic firing of her neurons. Everything is falling apart. The woman she dreaded, her rival, is still alive. She followed her car the night before. If the loser won’t do it, I will, she thought. Headlights off, she pulled behind her parked vehicle and waited. Nothing happened, though. The woman she was after never came out of the house. The bitch. She considered snatching the gun and walking in there. Recklessly. What the hell, everything is going to the dogs, anyways. At least the satisfaction of seeing her heart ripped open. But the glove compartment was empty. The weapon she’d left inside was gone.
Her husband stands in front of the dresser mirror and completes the half-Windsor knot of his necktie. He thrives on little details like this. She watches the nimble movement
s of his fingers as if hypnotized. Intimacy no longer means anything to her, and yet this part of his routine—the knotting of his necktie in the morning, as he checks that the dimple sits right at the center of the knot—feels like a private snippet of his life. Something she can still steal away from him. And make it hers.
“Where’s the gun?” she demands.
He turns, his eyes blankly staring past her. Oh, she hates him for belittling her in such subtle ways. You’re nothing to me, his eyes say. Nothing.
“You’re getting too emotional about this,” he replies coldly. “I don’t think a weapon in your hands would be a good idea right now.” He picks up his briefcase and walks down the stairs.
How can you do this to me? After all these years. She throws her arms around his back, shrieking. He clutches the banister and jerks backwards, sending her slamming against the wall. She hits her head and wilts on the carpeted stairs. A photo tumbles down from the wall.
“Don’t you ever do that again!”
“Madam?” a voice calls from downstairs.
“Everything is okay, Lucia, go back to work,” he says, adjusting his jacket.
He walks away. She hears the door downstairs close behind him, the garage open, the car pull out and vanish.
Tears run down her cheeks. Not pain. Humiliation.
How can he belittle me like this?
Cluttered by tears, her eyes rest on the fallen photo frame. Through the jagged line of a wounded glass, a girl beams in her glittery leotard. Azure, her favorite color, although you cannot tell from the black and white picture. Her arms are stretched out, her posture calculated and yet natural, perfectly at ease on the balance beam. She’s just completed her exercise and now she smiles confidently at the camera. Proud of herself.
