Chimera

by David Wellington

  He was led down the stairs and back into the kitchen. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through lace curtains and gave the room a yellow glow. There were cops everywhere, most of them just standing around in black uniforms or suit jackets. In the middle of this tableau, sitting at the kitchen table, was a woman in her early thirties wearing a white lab coat. Her eyes were smeared with half-melted makeup, and a teardrop had gathered on the point of her chin. She had fiery red hair that fell to her shoulders, and under the lab coat she was wearing jeans and a black sweater, with a single strand of pearls around her neck.

  A cop with a notepad was trying to talk to her, but Julia Taggart just kept shaking her head. The cop wanted to clarify some details of her story, but Julia could only mutter short responses. She was clearly devastated by her mother’s death.

  This isn’t going to be easy, Chapel thought. But he had to ask her some questions before he moved on. “Miss Taggart?” he said. The cops parted to let him through. “Julia? My name is Chapel. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  She looked up at him with hopeful eyes. Like maybe he was going to come tell her that her mom wasn’t really dead, that it had all been a terrible mistake.

  Chapel had seen that look before. When he’d got back from Afghanistan, he had visited the family of every one of the Rangers who died the day he lost his arm. He had thought he could bring them some comfort, at least let them know their sons or brothers or husbands had died for a good cause.

  Every time he’d been completely stalled—flummoxed—by that same look. That look of final, unthinking hope in the face of utter desolation.

  Chapel wanted to run away. He wanted to do anything in the world except talk to this woman, now. What could he possibly tell her? I’m so sorry, but your mother is dead and you can never know who did it, or why they did it, and even if I do catch them, I can’t even tell you that. All because the CIA didn’t want its secrets getting out.

  He bit his lip, hard, and sat down next to her.

  “We’ll get this guy,” he told her. It was all he was allowed to say—the only shred of comfort he was legally allowed to give. He hated his job sometimes. “Maybe you can help me get him. I just need to know a few things.”

  She looked away, her eyes darting from his face. He hadn’t told her what she wanted to hear. “I’ve already answered all your questions,” she said.

  Chapel didn’t doubt the police had asked her a million things already, all the usual questions you asked in an investigation like this. He had a few he was pretty sure she hadn’t heard before. He glanced at the cop with the notepad, though. He definitely didn’t want what he was going to say written down.

  “Maybe I can take you somewhere and buy you a cup of coffee,” he told her. “Maybe getting away from this house will help jog your memory.”

  “I just . . . want to go home, now,” she said, looking right into his eyes. “Can I go home? Please?”

  Chapel turned to look for the detective—the man he assumed was in charge here.

  “Sure,” the detective said. “You want me to call a patrol unit to take her there?”

  Angel spoke in his ear. “I’ll have a cab out front by the time you get out the door.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Chapel told the detective. “I’ll make sure she gets home okay. Do you need to sign her out or anything?”

  The detective shrugged. “We’ve got her information.”

  Chapel got up from the table and offered Julia a hand getting up. She shook him off and rose on her own, though she looked a little wobbly. She followed Chapel out of the house and down to the sidewalk where, as promised, a cab was waiting for them.

  Julia stared at the cab as if she’d never seen one before. She was in shock, of course, but she pulled herself together visibly and said, “I live on—”

  “Woodbine Street. Don’t worry,” Chapel said. Angel had already given him the address. “I’ve got this taken care of.”

  He opened her door for her and offered his arm as she started to climb in. Too late he realized he’d given her his left arm. Her hand brushed his silicone fingers and stopped there. Without getting into the cab, she stopped and lifted his artificial hand and peered at it like she was looking at a specimen through a microscope.

  “Oh,” she said. “This is really lifelike. I didn’t even notice until just now. What is this, a DEKA Luke arm? I’ve read about these.”

  Chapel frowned. “It’s the most recent version. Technically it’s still just a prototype, but—”

  “Typically they only give these to soldiers who have lost limbs in combat,” she said. She’d had one leg inside the cab. Now she removed it and put her foot down firmly on the sidewalk. “Mr. Chapel,” she said, “you’re clearly not a policeman. I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me exactly what’s going on here.”

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:31

  “This one’s sharp. Watch out, honey,” Angel said.

  Chapel set his jaw. “Miss Taggart—”

  “It’s Dr. Taggart. I’m a vet,” the woman told him.

  Chapel’s eyes went wide. “Really?” That surprised him—she hadn’t seemed the type. “Which branch of service?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Were you in the army, the navy, the air force?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m a veterinarian. Okay, I think we’re done. I’ll get my own cab, thanks.” She turned and started to walk away.

  “Dr. Taggart,” he said, putting a little iron in his voice. The tone they’d taught him to use in officer training.

  She stopped, but she didn’t turn around.

  “Your mother’s dead, and her killer is still at large. Your father is William Taggart, right? He’s in danger, too. A lot of people are in danger, and I’m trying to save them.”

  “My father is on the other side of the continent,” she said, whirling around to glare at him. “This was just some random act of violence. Get your story straight.”

  “Your mother wasn’t killed by some crazy drug addict looking for a fix,” he told her. Even saying that much was risking his mission, but he needed to convince her of the urgency of things. “She was targeted. Singled out.”

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t walk away, either.

  “If I’m going to stop what happened to your mother from happening again, I need some answers, and I need them now.”

  She walked toward him, coming close enough to get right up in his face. “My whole life people have kept secrets from me. I don’t enjoy it. Are you going to tell me the truth, Mr. Chapel?”

  “It’s Captain Chapel. That’s one true thing,” he replied.

  Her eyes took very careful measure of his face. He felt like he was being dissected in a laboratory. She shook her head—but then she got into the cab.

  He climbed in beside her. The cabdriver turned and looked back at them. “You know you’ve been on the meter this whole time, right?”

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:37

  As the cab crawled through Brooklyn traffic, Chapel watched the city go by. It seemed to take forever to pass each house, each little corner store. Time was ticking away and there was no way to get the minutes back. Chapel thought about what Angel had told him—in New York City, the subway was apparently the only way to get anywhere in a timely fashion. He should have listened to her.

  “I really am sorry for your loss,” he told the
woman sitting beside him. “That was true, too. It’s got to be . . . tough.” He reached for more words of sympathy but they were hard to find. “I didn’t know Dr. Bryant, but by all accounts she was a good person.”

  “Thanks. I guess,” she said. “Yeah. She was a real saint. As long as you weren’t her daughter.”

  “The two of you didn’t get along?” The detective had said so, but he wanted to hear it from her own lips.

  “We fought. I was a disappointment to her, and she never let me forget it. She wanted me to go into the family business and I didn’t.”

  “She wanted you to become a genetic counselor?”

  Julia shrugged. “Not specifically, not necessarily. But she and Dad were both scientists, real scientists, as she would say. They were geneticists. They met in grad school, at Oxford. He was working on a second doctorate while she got her first.” She rubbed at her eyes and then stared at her hands when they came away covered in melted eye shadow. “Ugh. Do you want to know how he convinced her to marry him? He drew a Punnett square. That’s a chart you make, it matches up the genes two organisms have and shows how likely their offspring are to have a certain trait. He showed Mom that if they had kids, there was a statistically significant probability they would have red hair.”

  “I guess it worked,” Chapel said.

  She grabbed a strand of her hair and pulled it around toward her eyes as if she were checking what color it was. Letting it go, she said, “Too bad he couldn’t predict how they would actually get along. He left us when I was a teenager. Most of what I remember of them is the two of them shouting at each other.”

  “Why did they split up?”

  “Like I said, people keep secrets from me. Mom would never explain—she just said it was a disagreement over ethics. Which could mean he slept around, or it could mean they differed on their views of stem cell research. Either way I’d believe it. She made him sound like the worst man on earth.”

  “What about you? Do you get along with him?”

  “I haven’t spoken to him in years,” she said. “And then it was just on the phone.”

  Chapel tapped on the window with his real fingers. This wasn’t going anywhere. He needed to get back on track. “Did your mother have an interest in mythology?” he asked.

  “What on earth does that have to do with anything?” She had taken a tissue from her purse and was angrily wiping the makeup from around her eyes. When he didn’t reply, she threw herself back in the cab seat and sighed. “No. I don’t remember her ever talking about mythology.”

  Chapel nodded. “Did she know any Greek people? Maybe someone who would wish her harm?”

  “Maybe the guy who runs the diner where she got breakfast.”

  “Cute, but not helpful, Dr. Taggart.”

  She sneered at him. “I have no reason to be either, so far. When are you going to start telling me what’s going on?”

  He could see in her eyes she was done answering questions until he gave her something. He tried to think of the best way to be evasive without sounding evasive. “The man who killed your mother had her name and address. He also had your father’s.”

  She stared at him as if he’d told her he was an alien and he’d just come from the moon. “My mother was assassinated?” she asked.

  “I know that’s going to come as a shock—”

  “But it’s been twenty years. Why now?”

  It was Chapel’s turn to be surprised. “I’m not sure I follow. What happened twenty years ago that would make your mother a target for assassination?”

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “She never told me any details. I just know that she and my father both used to work for the CIA, back when we lived up in the Catskills.”

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:48

  The Catskills. That was where the DoD facility was located, the one where the detainees had been held. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Chapel felt like he was looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and two of them had just fit together for the first time.

  “You have no idea what they did for the CIA?”

  “None,” Julia said. “They were both pretty good at keeping their secrets. By the time I was old enough to ask—to even wonder about what my parents did for a living—we had already moved to New York City and they had moved on to other jobs. I may have asked about their time as spies once in a while, but they would just tell me to mind my own business and I guess eventually I got the point.”

  Spies—well, that was unlikely. Dr. Bryant hardly fit the profile. But the CIA wasn’t just spies; it employed thousands of civilians in all kinds of roles. All of whom were required by law never to talk about what they did. Even mentioning they had worked for the CIA, even to their own daughter, would be forbidden. “They actually said, ‘we used to work for the CIA,’ just like that?”

  “No, of course not. Nothing like that. I only knew about it because once a year a guy from the CIA would come to our house for dinner. After we ate, they would send me to my room and tell me to play my music loud so he could debrief them.”

  That was standard practice for the CIA, Chapel knew. Defectors from foreign countries and anyone who worked on projects involving national security were debriefed on a yearly basis to make sure no foreign spies had contacted them and they hadn’t accidentally revealed sensitive information.

  “Did you ever overhear anything you weren’t supposed to?” Chapel asked.

  “No, never. I was still trying to be a good kid back then. I thought it would make them like me more. Mom and Dad were both cold fish, and I was always trying to find some way to get their approval. I used to look forward to the CIA guy’s visits. It made me feel like my life was a little more exciting than other kids’. He was always nice to me, too. Nicer than my parents.”

  “Angel,” Chapel said, under his breath.

  “Already working on it, sugar,” the voice in his ear said. “Give me a sec.”

  Julia stared at him. More specifically, she stared at his ear. “Oh, God,” she said. “You’ve got a Bluetooth. What a nonsurprise.”

  He reached toward the hands-free set nestled in his ear, but he didn’t touch it. “I need to stay connected,” he told her.

  “The only people in New York who wear those things are bankers and finance types,” she said. “People who are rich enough that nobody dares tell them they look like douche bags. We all got pretty tired after a while of them walking around talking to invisible people all the time. It used to be you could tell if somebody was a crazy bum because he did that. Suddenly you had to take that kind of behavior seriously.”

  Chapel could only shrug. “Excuse me for one second,” he told her.

  “Whatever,” she said, and turned to look out her window.

  Angel eventually came back on the line. “This one took some digging. There are a lot of sealed records here . . . Helen Taggart née Bryant, William Taggart—they were both on somebody’s payroll, definitely, up until the mid-nineties. Tax records only show they worked for an unspecified government agency. That’s unusual—the IRS doesn’t mess around. The CIA should have been generating pay stubs and W-2 forms like anybody else.”

  “Sounds like they were being paid out of a black budget.”

  “Which is pretty much a brick wall when you’re trying to follow a money trail,” Angel agreed. “I did find one thing, though, that’s going to make you so proud of me. William Taggart is still working as a research s
cientist, and that means he depends on grant money that has to be accounted for scrupulously. In 2003, he got a grant from an anonymous donor, but the check was paid by a bank in Langley, Virginia.”

  Which was where the CIA had its headquarters.

  “That was some inspired detective work, absolutely,” Chapel said. Not for the first time he uttered silent thanks that Angel was on his side. What she’d uncovered wasn’t cast-iron proof that William Taggart had worked for the CIA, but it was pretty damning—and it was enough to confirm what his daughter had said.

  “One other thing,” Angel said, “I can definitely confirm that a William Taggart, a Helen Taggart, and a Julia Taggart all lived in Phoenicia, New York, until 1995. The elder Taggarts paid mortgage payments and property taxes there, and the woman you’re sitting next to was a student at the local elementary school.”

  “Now you’re just showing off,” Chapel said, with a chuckle. “I don’t suppose there are any military bases in that area? Maybe a detention facility?”

  “No likely suspects yet,” Angel said, “but I’m still looking and—”

  “Hey—that’s my house,” Julia said, rapping on the Plexiglas partition between them and the cab’s driver. “Slow down. You can let me off at the corner.”

  “Hold on, Angel,” Chapel said. Julia was reaching into her purse, but he put out a hand to stop her. “This is on me,” he told her.

  “Fine.” She closed her purse and reached for the door handle.

  “I still have some more questions,” Chapel said, before she could get out of the cab. “If you’ll just give me a little more of your time—”

  “I don’t think so,” she told him. “You’re definitely not coming inside, and I have to start planning my mother’s funeral.” Her face fell. Maybe she had been able to put aside her grief while she was talking to him, but he could see it had only been delayed. “It’s bad enough she’s dead. I didn’t need any of this. I really didn’t—”