Genesys X

by B. J. Graf

  Genesys X

  By

  B.J. Graf

  Word Count: 88,000

  Represented by

  Sandy Lu

  L. Perkins Agency

  5800 Arlington Ave

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  Tel: 718-710-3662

  sandy@lperkinsagency.com

  DEDICATION

  In memory of my parents Henry and Anna and my friend and sensei, Shinsuke Yatomi

  GENESYS X

  By B.J. Graf

  BOOK ONE

  The meaning of life is that it ends.

  – Franz Kafka

  CHAPTER ONE

  2041 Los Angeles, California

  Ordinarily a stripper’s fatal overdose wouldn’t have landed in our laps. LAPD’s Homicide-Special Division, a select downtown unit with citywide jurisdiction stretching from the Ventura County Line to Orange County, handled only the city’s most complex, brutal and high-profile murders. But that first Thursday in October my Handy pinged and the tired face of Lieutenant Rodriquez appeared, floating in the L-shaped space of the glove phone, between my thumb and forefinger.

  “Sorry, detectives,” Rodriguez said. “Looks like another hype offed herself.” His sigh underlined what all us cops knew. Drug overdoses and gang-related homicides were at an all-time high in the city. “If NOHO didn’t have every detective out on call already, I wouldn’t make you guys do the drive. But you know the area, Piedmont.”

  I nodded. Before I got bumped up to Homicide Special downtown, I’d done a tour in North Hollywood.

  So, two hours after the dead woman had been found in her tub, my partner Shin Miyaguchi and I were inching north off the 170 Freeway onto the Magnolia Boulevard exit in North Hollywood.

  “No wonder the city’s so screwed up,” Shin said, shaking his shaved head as he watched a stoner prophet preach to the Jaguars and Lexuses waiting to leap ahead at the green.

  “What, the addicts?” I said. “Or the apocalypse?” I jerked my chin at the homeless guy wearing a mood tee shirt that flashed “It is written. The end is near. Prey.”

  “The part about it being written.” Shin flashed me his gap-toothed grin. “God should have streamed a visual if he wanted people to catch on.”

  Minutes later, we were slamming the car doors shut in front of a boxy high rise near the Red Line Metro station on Lankershim.

  Only one slack-jawed teen wandered down the street, aimless as a broken toy, that vacant stare of the plague-stricken in his eyes. Nobody knew why Alzheimer’s suddenly started to hit the young. All we knew is that about five years back, it did. And while Alz-X isn’t contagious, there’s no treatment for it either, let alone a cure.

  But every intersection was a sea of green crosses promising relief. The acrid smell of burning sage and ganja hit my nose hard.

  “Don’t you know?” Shin said. “Burning skunk-weed’s supposed to purify the spirit or something, Eddie.”

  “Purification stinks.” I grinned.

  Inside the building security cameras loomed from on high in the hallway corners–cheap units put in to scare away low-rent burglars.

  Outside unit 313 black letters on yellow holo-crime-scene-tape screamed Keep Out in four languages, Spanish and English chasing Chinese and Korean characters round and round.

  “Detectives Piedmont and Miyaguchi,” I said, badging the uniform as we walked through the tape. The warning rippled and vanished, reassembling as soon as we passed.

  “Robbery-Homicide?” As soon as he’d spotted our grey suits on the perimeter, first officer on site Jesus Velazquez had scurried over, the green light of his helmet-cam twinkling.

  “What do we have?” Shin asked the P-1, groaning as he leaned over to slip paper booties on over his size ten brogues.

  “Looks like accidental overdose.” Velazquez cocked his head towards the bathroom opposite. “No sign of forced entry. DB’s in the bathtub. Britney Devonshire, twenty-seven, one prior for soliciting.” With squat fingers, he handed me the plastic bag holding the dead woman’s California driver’s license. “No family. Mother was an addict. Died from Covid-19 during the 2020 pandemic. No father or siblings on record.”

  I stared at the holo-photo. Britney Devonshire’s skin was white as rice paper. Her big brown anime eyes, framed by hair like a red flame, stared back at me. “Another system kid?”

  “Left Social Services at eighteen,” Velasquez confirmed with a nod. “She was an exotic dancer at the Sandy Beaches Gentleman’s Club for the past three years.”

  My turn to nod. I’d spent a year in the system myself. Not a pleasant memory, but I’d landed on my feet. Britney Devonshire hadn’t been so lucky.

  “Who called it in?” Shin said.

  “Next door neighbor. Name’s Ava Wu.” Officer Velazquez gestured towards the open door of the apartment. “She had a key. She’s got the vic’s cat too.”

  Directly across the hall stood a dazed Asian woman of indeterminate age cradling a morbidly obese cat in her arms. The cat’s talking collar kept repeating “Meow, I’m Cocoa Puff,” over and over, each time reciting a phone number that matched the number on the driver’s license. I guessed the recorded voice belonged to the victim too, a hollow echo of the now dead girl with no family.

  “Wu and the deceased traded off on cat care,” Officer Velazquez read from his notes. “Britney told Ms. Wu she was going on vacation last night. So the old lady stopped by around nine this morning to look after the cat. That’s when she found the body.”

  Through the open door I saw the neighbor across the hall absent-mindedly shaking her head. The cat’s yellow eyes flashed, and his tail swished a warning.

  Shin and I shared a glance. “Your call,” he said.

  “I’ll take the body.”

  “Why do I even ask?” Shin said. “I get the plump old neighbor. You get the girl.”

  “Dead girl,” I mumbled to Shin’s retreating back. He ambled off across the hall.

  “The log,” I said, turning back to Officer Velazquez. “You call SID and the coroner?”

  “Coroner’s on route,” Velazquez said, eyes suddenly locked on his toes.

  “Call SID,” I said as I walked the place. “Maybe it’s what it looks like. Maybe not. Don’t lock yourself into a theory till the facts are in, Officer Velazquez. You found her phone?”

  “Not yet.”

  That was odd. “Keep looking.”

  Britney Devonshire’s apartment was a one-room studio with thin walls and low ceilings. At 6’2” I felt the roof pressing down on us. There was a big open living area with a kitchenette and bath off to the side. No framed family photos, digital or old-school, no knick-knacks graced the shelves or countertops. The place was sparsely furnished. It read like Ms. Devonshire had been marking time, not really living there.

  And the place was very neat for a junkie. Too neat - no half-empty containers of peanut noodles or pizza boxes strewn about, no wreath of scum and mold in a sink piled high with dirty dishes.

  On the sofa bed opposite a wall-screen television, jeans and a green silk blouse were carefully draped over two little factory-issue throw pillows. A partially crumpled travel brochure announcing the launch of civilian trips to the moon next month stuck out from under an e-reader on the floor. Next to the brochure stood a pair of black ankle boots.

  “Nice boots, huh?” Velazquez said. “My girl would go for those, big time.”

  “Till she found out where they came from.” I popped my head into the bathroom. The sickly-sweet vanilla aroma rode the wave of voided bowel and bladder stench pooled in the cramped space like a fetid swamp.

  Nothing lies as still as the dead. Wearing only an untied green silk robe and a thong, the redhead lay on her back. Her legs jutted awkwardly half-out of the empty tub-a marionette d
ropped suddenly by a bored puppeteer. The belt, used to tie off her arm, was still knotted round her left bicep. One green satin slipper dangled off her motionless right foot.

  At first glance, the redhead’s body showed the perfection of a porn star, surgically sculpted and hairless.

  As I stared, however, the little imperfections beneath the artificial surface began to reveal themselves in death’s grisly striptease: the chipped peach-colored nail polish, chewed cuticles and callous on the middle finger of her left hand, the tiny pale worm of scar tissue circling the aureole of a breast.

  In life, Britney Devonshire had been beautiful, even if some of her attractions were manmade. Now her auburn hair already had that flat dull look of the dead.

  No sign of the identity barcode I expected to see tattooed on her wrist though, standard issue since Homeland Security made the embedded chips near tamper-proof in 2030. However, a flick of my blacklight pen revealed the barcode hiding in plain sight. She had the upgrade-invisible without ultraviolet light.

  Britney Devonshire’s once luminous skin now looked like sallow wax. Death bleeds light along with the breath from the living.

  “Hmm.” I peered at the single fresh needle mark on the woman’s left forearm just below the knotted belt and at the older tracks on her hips, peeking out from under her thong.

  On the rim of the sink next to a tube of extra-whitening toothpaste stood a glass holding a toothbrush and a set of weirdly-shaped scissors. There was a toilet wedged between the sink and tub.

  On the closed toilet lid a single e-cigarette lay in an ash tray crammed full of lipstick-stained empties. Vanilla Vapor. A set of works was propped up next to the ash tray – a pin prick of blood drawn up inside the syringe. Under the spike lay a sodden wad of Kleenex with greenish crystals tangled in the fibers.

  “Green ice,” I spat. The synthetic opioid was twice as potent as fentanyl, itself fifty times stronger than heroin. Manufactured in Mexico and China, dealers mixed the drug with heroin. The doses were erratic; fatalities weren’t. And green ice was flooding the streets of the city. I’d seen its epic-fail crashes first hand, courtesy of Eddie Piedmont Sr., another slave of the green angel, and not exactly my nominee for father of the year.

  Outside the door, the voice of the Coroner’s Assistant announced her arrival as she signed the e-log. A minute later Dr. Emily Bogardus was leaning over the tub beside me.

  “The belt left the only ligature mark,” the dark-haired Coroner’s Assistant said, echoing my own conclusions, as she knelt down by the lip of the tub and examined the body. “No obvious external trauma. Or sign of a struggle.”

  A skinny SID tech named Marcos signed in after Bogardus. He did a cursory recording of the scene with his Handy. The image of the dead redhead shimmered in the glove phone’s L-shaped space between his thumb and forefinger before vanishing. Marcos started in on evidence collection, bagging the set of works with long, latexed, fingers.

  “Check for prints on the tub too, plus the light switches here and at the door,” I said. “And get a reading on the microbial cloud before anybody else walks through.”

  Marcos arched his left eyebrow but nodded. Everyone who enters a space leaves telltale markers behind, a microbial fingerprint we can read. But departmental budgets are tight and overdoses common. A microbial reading isn’t the norm for an overdose.

  Shin was back from talking to the neighbors.

  “Here’s something,” he said. “According to Ms. Wu, the deceased just lost her job at the club where she danced.”

  “Fired?” I asked.

  Shin nodded. “But Ms. Wu said Britney wasn’t all that broken up about it.” Shin paused, cracking his knuckles.

  Really. I shot my partner a look then glanced back at the dead girl splayed out in the tub. Shin walked back to the living room and picked up Britney’s e-reader.

  “What about the hall security cameras?” Marcos said after a moment. “We haven’t checked the memory yet.”

  “Sham-cams,” I said, referring to the cheap fake hall units spotted on the way in. “We won’t get anything off them.”

  “Nothing from the canvass either,” Shin added. “Nobody knows anything. The cat’s talking collar said more than the neighbors.” He exhaled a long hiss of unsurprised disappointment.

  “Anything else you can tell us?” I asked Dr. Bogardus, the Coroner’s Assistant.

  “Tracks here too.” She directed my gaze from that single fresh needle mark to skin between the dead woman’s toes. “Old tracks.”

  As I crouched down beside the tub, face to face with Emily Bogardus, two bright red spots the size of Yakima apples appeared on her cheeks. They blazed a brighter shade of crimson as I held her gaze. She looked away, smiled, then glanced back at me, a sideways glance, head tilted.

  Emily was interested in more than her work. Before I met Jo, my live-in girlfriend, I would have gone for it. Now I just smiled politely.

  Emily pointed at the darkened skin on the underside of the corpse where blood had pooled. “From the livor I’m guessing she injected herself and fell backwards from her seat on the lip of the tub.” Emily’s voice was all business again. Her smile faded along with the opportunity. “We won’t know for sure till after the cut, but it sure looks like accidental overdose.”

  Shin nodded.

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “What then?” Emily’s eyes narrowed, her black brows drawing together like the wings of a crow. “Suicide?”

  “If she offed herself on purpose, Eddie,” Shin said, rifling through Britney’s e-reader, “why lay out that outfit on the bed? Not exactly funeral clothes.”

  I pointed to the tracks under her thong. “Why would a stripper who’s careful to shoot up between her toes or anywhere else it won’t show, put the spike in her arm all of a sudden?”

  “Junkies will do anything for a high,” Shin said. “She just lost her job. Poor kid was looking for a way out. She found it.”

  “But this hype was left-handed.” I pointed to the weirdly-shaped pair of scissors on the sink and the callous on her left middle finger. “So why didn’t she shoot up her right arm?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t find a vein,” Shin said, peering at the dead woman’s arms. Looking for the collapsed veins, a commonplace of the addict’s life.

  “Then we should see recent tracks on her right arm,” I said.

  That now-yellowing skin was clean.

  “Well, Insta-tox tests positive,” Marcos said, holding up the little disposable scanner to the light. “She has a ton of green ice in her.”

  “When’s the cut?” I asked.

  Emily Bogardus shrugged. “Monday. There were four bodies ahead of yours cooling in the fridge this morning–courtesy of the Zetas.” Her tone was cool too. “Help me move her, will you, Marcos?”

  As Marcos helped shift the body forward, the dead girl’s silk robe fell to the side.

  “Hold it,” I said.

  A fresh tattoo nestled just below the small of Britney’s back-so fresh little scabs of clotted blood dotted the vivid green and indigo design like a macabre cartoon in a graphic novel. Her tramp-stamp featured strands of silk twisting round a lotus flower and the letters L and E.

  “What’s that?” Marcos asked. “Gang? Or a cult tat?” He leaned in and captured a close up on his glove phone.

  “A derma ad,” I said. “Ms. Devonshire’s been selling her skin in more ways than one.”

  Emily Bogardus nodded. “Lotus Eaters. It’s a pot shop. Boutique, not your typical low rent place.”

  “Yeah?” I grinned at her.

  “So I’ve heard,” Bogardus said with an answering grin.

  Once the deceased was loaded onto the gurney headed for the morgue, I followed Shin’s shaved head out to the street.

  “I’ll file the report now,” Shin said. “Cause of death, OD, accidental or suicidal, pending the coroner’s report.”

  And one more system kid is tossed out like a piece of used Kleenex. />
  “Not so fast.”

  Shin glanced at me. “Eddie, no.”

  “C’mon. We’ll swing by Sandy Beaches first,” I said. “Be in and out in no time.”

  “The strip club…seriously?” Shin’s voice had that strained quality, a tone I’ve heard before, so I flashed him a reassuring smile.

  “Don’t you at least want to know why they canned the girl?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The calendar said October, but autumn hadn’t reached L.A. yet. A wet blanket of heat slapped us hard as we left the building’s air conditioning and walked back toward the car. The sun’s glare turned my contacts black before we’d taken two steps outside the dead woman’s apartment.

  Detective sedans are officially unmarked, but unofficially it’s a different story. The ad for Firestone tires ‘Firestone - Protection to serve you’ ran along the side of every sedan in the fleet: corporate tagging. The reflective ads made us as conspicuous as any black and white, but we were stuck with them. When overburdened taxpayers turned down another tax bump, Firestone had coughed up the cash for the city’s new police sedans.

  “Three o’clock,” Shin said, checking his glove phone. “Too early for headliners, but we might catch the boss minding the store.” He pursed his lips for a second. “Okay, ikimashoo.” Shin slid his darkened glasses down on his nose and peered at me. His black eyes twinkled. “But, Eddie…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You back me up when I tell the wife the strip club was all business.”

  I wagged my head and grinned.

  “I can’t wait till you’re married, you bastard.” Shin rubbed his hands together and laughed. “It’s gonna be payback–big time.”

  “You’ll have your revenge soon,” I said. “Picked up the ring yesterday. I’ll ask Jo tonight.”

  Jo, aka Jocelyn Sloan, was the woman who made me realize the hucksters behind those love at first sight clichés aren’t always lying.