Genesys X

by B. J. Graf

  Head lowered, I examined the cracks in the pavement. This wasn’t the time to tell Ruth Frank’s death wasn’t an accident.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Shin lingered with me in the shade of the church parking lot as the mourners departed. He waited until Jo headed to the ladies’ room before speaking.

  “Eddie,” Shin said, “wasn’t that Gabriel Lee’s kid? What was he doing here?”

  “He wanted a look at his Dad’s killer.” I pointed my thumb in towards my chest.

  “Shit,” Shin said. “Kids.” He mopped away the beads of perspiration strung along his brow.

  Even in the shade the sun was hot enough to melt tarmac. I felt sweat trickle down between my shoulder blades.

  “Captain Tatum called again this morning.” Shin kicked the tarmac with his toe. “Lee’s fingerprint was enough for her to reopen the Devonshire case as a suspicious death, but we need more in the way of solid evidence to prove you’re right.”

  I filled him in on what the pathologist had said about Lee’s microbial cloud. It was one more piece.

  “How’s your Korean?” I said.

  Shin cocked his head and shot me a quizzical look. “Better than my Japanese, if you believe my mother.” Shin’s marriage to his Korean-American wife Ahn had been a sore spot with both families initially. “Why?”

  As I filled him in on Lee’s last words, I cued up the footage Frank had recorded while surveilling the now dead scientist and played the argument between Lee and his wife for Shin.

  A slight frown replaced Shin’s habitual smile as he watched the scene that ended with Mrs. Lee pummeling her husband in the driveway of Lee’s Clara Vista rental. Shin replayed it, this time with the volume up as he leaned close to the phone.

  “What did Mrs. Lee say? The translator app was a little vague.”

  Shin winced. “She hammers him. Lee’s a bad husband, and a bad father. He gambled away their retirement and the money for Ray’s senior year of college. Now this. Something else about the son I couldn’t totally make out.”

  “What?” My thoughts raced back to Lee’s last words – father, 333-1110. “Could you get any of it?”

  “How it was all Lee’s fault,” Shin said, shifting his weight back and forth between right and left foot. “But she doesn’t say what.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He’s selfish. Brought shame on the family and put them in danger,” Shin said. “Can’t say I entirely blame her about that.”

  “What’s Lee say?”

  Shin replayed the section where Lee fired back at his wife. “Says she’s happy to spend the money when he has it. She knew what he was doing all along.”

  “Then she starts to speak with her fists,” I said. “Could go to motive.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “What if Gabriel Lee didn’t kill Britney? What if somebody who knew they were involved took them both out?”

  Shin stared at me as I filled him in on the leak and Lee’s last words. “Somebody worked hard to make both deaths look accidental.”

  “Somebody like Mrs. Lee?” Shin’s tone was skeptical.

  “Mrs. Lee was an anesthesiologist,” I said. “She’d know her way around drugs and needles. Her son’s up here with her. He’s an engineering student. He could finesse some sort of detonator for his mom. The tape you just translated goes to motive.”

  “You know I’ll go to the mat for you,” Shin said. “And not just because I owe you. But you’re pushing air here. It was Gabriel Lee’s print and microbial cloud we found at the Devonshire girl’s place, not his wife’s. Do you have anything solid to back this up?”

  “Not yet.” I told him about Gomez doing another check on Lee’s car and the security footage from the casino parking lot. “And don’t forget the surveillance video on the accident itself.”

  Shin’s expression stayed skeptical. “I put in for a search warrant on the Lees’ Palisades house as soon as we found his print in Britney’s place. We should be able to prove the Devonshire girl blackmailed him. Let’s see what pops.”

  “I’ll go through the security footage for the casino parking lot.”

  “Okay.” Shin dug the toe of his shoe into the tarmac. “But keep this between us. You can’t be spinning wild conjectures now, Eddie. Promise me you’ll be smart and keep your head down through the IAC hearing.”

  “Who’s asking, Shin? You? Or Tatum? Did she ask you to tell me that too?” It stung that they might have been talking about me behind my back.

  “You know you can be a real asswipe sometimes,” Shin replied.

  “So I’ve been told.” I walked him to his car. “Sorry, Shin,” I said, when he slammed the door shut. “But it’s not just wild conjecture. I saw that leak. Lee’s death wasn’t an accident. Who else wanted him dead?”

  He sighed. “Keep it to yourself for now. Let’s see what pops from the search. Otherwise you know what the IAC will say.”

  “I’m chasing ghosts.”

  Shin stared at me. “More than that. The real connection between these deaths is you. You’re tired, you let yourself get involved personally and you’re fucking up.”

  I balled my fists but nodded.

  Shin’s face brightened at my unaccustomed tractability. “I almost forgot,” he said, the corners of his mouth twitching with surpressed glee. “Did you need me to translate Raymond’s parting words to you?”

  “Chumonio?” I shook my head. Even my Korean was good enough to recognize the word for motherfucker.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Shin sped back south to Nokia PD. Jo was flying private back to Ciudad L.A. right after the funeral reception, so I drove her to the airport.

  “You worried about the hearing?” Jo said before we’d turned the corner away from the church.

  “Hmm.”

  “It’ll be fine.” She squeezed my knee. “I’ve hired your PR rep too. Sasha Gilels. She’s good. We do a fair amount of business with her at the firm.”

  “If you think it’s necessary.” The streets blurred as I accelerated.

  “I thought we already settled that.” Jo pushed her Raybans down on her nose as she gave me that appraising look.

  I nodded. She didn’t need to remind me that my name was already all over the news, and not in a good way. I updated Jo on my recent conversation with the PR woman at the television station, detailing the anonymous caller who was listed as having sent the crash footage.

  “We’ll find anonymous,” Jo said, smoothing a few wayward tendrils of blonde hair. “Don’t worry.”

  I knew ‘we’ included Craig, and I wasn’t too keen on owing him a favor, but Jo was family. Maybe it wasn’t all bad to have her brother around.

  I pulled some music down from the cloud for our drive: The Glass Leopards’ electro-version of Lou Reed’s Pale Blue Eyes. The original on vinyl had a home in my collection, and I liked it better. Reed’s flat, untrained, voice and the scratches on the vinyl gave the song about remembering an old love a rawer haunted quality. But this wasn’t bad.

  I dropped Jo at the airport and waited until her plane skimmed the sky. Then I turned the nose of my Porsche south toward C.L.A. I planned on going straight home and getting in gear for Monday’s IAC hearing, but I found myself driving past Gabriel Lee’s Clara Vista beach house.

  Lee’s body had been cremated with an ‘immediate family-only’funeral and no memorial service. That was unusual for Asian families and unfortunate for me. I’d wanted to pull a Raymond and see who else turned up at the scientist’s funeral. I especially wanted to keep a sharp eye on the grieving widow.

  Mrs. Lee was the only person of interest who’d had an obvious reason to want both her husband and Britney dead. And she’d lied when I’d questioned her earlier about Dr. Lee. She had opportunity and motive, but Shin was right. I had no hard evidence to connect her with either death.

  Still mouthing the song’s lyrics under my breath, I slowed outside Lee’s grey Craftsman style bungalow.
A ‘for lease’ sign had sprung up on the lawn overnight. Mrs. Lee’s Mercedes and Raymond’s Yamaha were gone. Stacks of neatly tied garbage bags were piled high on the curb next to overflowing trash bins set out for pick-up.

  Mrs. Lee had moved fast on closing out her husband’s life.

  A couple of hastily tied bags on the top of the pile of discards had spilled open, disgorging pops of color and shiny bits in the afternoon sun. Maybe Raymond had packed these.

  In any event, trash on the curb is public property.

  I parked and got out of my car to investigate. The first open bag held Dockers, a few outdated silk ties, button down shirts and toiletries. Another entire bag was crammed full of Berkeley and Genesys company tee shirts and New Balance sneakers in different stages of wear.

  Nothing that hinted at any relationship with Britney Devonshire.

  I pushed aside an old shirt with the toe of my shoe and felt my pulse race. I reached down for the discarded phablet peeking out from under the pile of clothes. The screen was smashed, but the phablet body was intact minus a few scratches. .

  My excitement evaporated when I saw the memory chip had been lifted. I tossed the phablet back on the pile and started to nose through some of the other discards on the off chance that the chip had fallen in there somewhere. It hadn’t.

  An old homeless scavenger at the end of the street caught my attention. The woman was dragging an overstuffed garbage bag toward an empty shopping cart somebody had upended and abandoned. Scars on the metal near the wheels showed where the pilfered carts’ GPS monitors had been knocked off.

  As I headed over, she stopped at the back of the cart and reached down to touch the metal. Then, still dragging the garbage bag, she circled round to the front of the cart and stopped again. She stared at the cart and reached out again, touching it like it was something she should know how to use but didn’t. Then she circled round again. The woman made two more rounds in the time it took me to close the distance. She was stuck in a loop of endless rotation.

  On approach it hit me the woman wasn’t old. She just moved with that hesitant shuffle you see on the elderly. Up close I could see her full lips and unlined skin. With a shock I revised my estimate of her age down to somewhere between late teens and early twenties.

  Which led to one depressing conclusion: Alzheimer’s X.

  Her grey sweat pants were stained, and her tangled black hair hadn’t been cut in a while. Makeup free, the woman wore a faded purple plaid shirt under a green Genesys tee that was two sizes too big. Discards from Lee most likely.

  “Hey, Miss, you alright?”

  She was mumbling something over and over. The girl looked at me. Confusion in her eyes gave way to fear and then a sudden expression of recognition.

  “Jesus, mi hermano!” she grabbed my arm like a drowning child clinging to a lifeline.

  I didn’t try to correct her. Better to play along than try to convince an Alz-X victim I wasn’t her brother, let alone the Lamb of God. Her stolen cart wasn’t the only thing without a tracker. Alzheimer’s robbed the brain of its GPS. Whoever she was, she was lost, and her fear was real.

  I had no sooner scanned the girls’ barcode into my phone to see if I could find a home address when a beat-up Buick scratched the curb as it came to a screeching halt. The car disgorged a forty-ish woman wearing a frantic expression.

  This woman had dark pouches under her worried coffee-colored eyes. Her black hair was streaked with silver like the tinsel on a discarded Christmas tree a week after the holidays ended.

  “Isobel,” she yelled, putting herself between me and the girl as Isobel dropped my arm.

  I already had my badge out.

  As the older woman looked from the gold badge to my face and back at the badge again, the muscles of her face relaxed. She closed her eyes and exhaled a deep breath that was more like a sigh.

  “Gracias,” she said, taking my left hand in both of hers and pressing her face to it.

  I felt the warm salt tears streaming down her face on my hand as she held it.

  “I work two jobs, officer,” the woman said. “Sometimes I get so tired. I fell asleep.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, patting her hand, and gently pulling back my own. “It’s okay.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It’s not. Isobel.” Her voice trembled on a higher note. She tenderly pushed a stray strand of tangled hair out of the girl’s face. Shifting her battered pleather purse onto her other shoulder, the mother started to peel her daughter’s hands off the shopping carts finger by finger.

  I stared at Isobel with her mismatched clothes and uncombed hair. The ghost of a pretty girl was just discernible in the frightened ruin that stood before me. God, I hated this plague.

  Grooming was one of the first things Alzheimer’s X patients forgot. Day by day the disease was stripping her of memory. She was forgetting what ordinary things like keys and phones and grocery carts were for. Soon she’d forget how to speak altogether, and finally how to swallow. Her personality would empty out with the memories and only the vacant husk of a ravaged body would be left behind. Most families prayed their loved ones caught pneumonia before the end game. It was a better death.

  I reached into my jacket pocket where I squirreled away contingency cash. I stuck a twenty into the mother’s purse as she helped her daughter into the Buick and drove away. They needed more than prayers and my twenty, but that’s all I had.

  I stood there on the sidewalk long after they’d disappeared around the corner. Then I turned back to the abandoned garbage bag and started to rummage through the junk. Sure enough, Isobel had played magpie with the Lee discards. Under the pile of pilfered Genesys tee shirts and crockery, there were some of the scientist’s souvenirs from various casinos. I pushed aside a little blue and white ceramic clamshell. It rattled. I picked it up and turned it over, weighing it in my hand. There was a coin sided slit along one of the seams in the back. I shook the figurine and smiled when it rattled again.

  I dropped the clamshell on the tarmac and let it smash. There in the midst of the shattered bits of clay, a little silver disk shone bright as a mirror with an Apple logo. It was the flash-dot jacked from Lee’s phablet. Bending down, I pocketed the silver circle of memory.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  What had Gabriel Lee hidden on the flash-dot? I snapped the dot into my own phablet and glove phone. When neither worked, I tried the car’s computer. The files were unreadable. Either the memory chip was damaged or encrypted. I punched the starter button on my Porsche and headed back south towards L.A.

  By six p.m. I was pulling into the parking lot behind Vapor Time 3, the hookah lounge on Santa Monica Denver Lakshmi frequented after work. With any luck, the ex-Hacktavist could recover whaever information the scientist had squirreled away.

  In the parking lot, I stepped on a playing card, the queen of hearts. There was another card ten feet away. The parking attendant, who’d apparently been playing solitaire, scurried after them. The remaining cards were scattered all over the lot like a giant fortune cast to the wind.

  I made my way inside and headed past the low tables clustered in the front to the booths in the back. There was a digital sign announcing a special on Blue Lotus, the synthetic marijuana called spice. The air was heavy with the scent of cloves and cinnamon, and just enough of that telltale skunk underneath that told me I’d have a contact high if I stayed too long. A buzz of chatter mingled with the sound of water gurgling in the hookahs planted at each table. I spotted Denver’s hair first – big bubble gum pink stripes against the sea of black today.

  “Hey Security Princess.” I moved aside an expresso cup and plunked the flash-dot memory disk down on Denver’s table as I took a seat. “Fuentes, Fr. Fuentes, 333-1110, or just father,” I said. “See if you can find a reference to any of them in the dot.”

  “Father?” Denver said, grinning. “Like who’s your Daddy, or pervert priest?”

  “You tell me.”

  Denve
r was bubbling like a freshly uncorked bottle of champagne. Her pink streaked hair bobbed up and down.

  “You vaping purple haze now?” I said. “What’s got you so damn happy?”

  She held out her left hand with a flourish. The nails were painted to match her hair and a blinding sparkler weighed down the third digit. It was at least two carats bigger than the two carat stone I’d given Jo.

  “You recovered the iceberg that sank the Titanic?”

  “Diamond Dog just gave it to me last night,” she squealed. “I met him on Heavenly Matches.”

  “That psychic matchmaking site?”

  “Yeah. D-Dog and I, we’re engaged!”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Diamond Dog, huh?” I pictured some skanky alternative rock geek with hair like a gel-spiked dandelion. “Did your fiancé rob somebody for the bling ring?” The sparkler was seriously massive.

  “If he did, in three months I’ll make him an honest man. Clear your calendar. You’re giving me away.” Denver’s father had died of lung cancer five years ago.

  “Rushing things a little, aren’t you?” I said.

  “The heart wants what the heart wants.” Denver’s voice took on a dreamy air as she twirled a strand of fuchsia-colored hair on her finger. “Why wait?”

  I stifled the twenty reasons that immediately popped into my head. “I always wanted to be a Daddy,” I said, smiling. “I just pictured a smaller bundle of joy my first time out.”

  “Where’s my glove phone?” Denver searched through her bag and shoved aside a pile of napkins and the expresso cup and saucer on the table, looking for the phone. “I want your help.”

  I lifted her phone out of the bag’s open outer pocket and handed it back to her.

  She flipped me off as she took the phone and brought up a file displaying three wedding dresses in traditional white, Hindu red and Goth Black. “Which?” she said, holding each under her chin in turn so I could picture the bride.

  “I like this one.” I pointed to the white gown. “But my wardrobe works with any of them.”