CHIMERAS (Track Presius)

by E. E. Giorgi

  Silence is an unknown ghost to the Californian commuter.

  Huxley lived in a North Hollywood residential neighborhood made of postage-stamp yards with manicured lawns, dogs on leashes and their byproducts tucked away in stinky blue baggies, and I-mind-my-own-business neighbors who turned away as soon as they glimpsed me. A large magnolia tree shaded the condo’s white and gray façade—a double row of windows alternating to boxy balconies. The flaky paint had been concealed with crawling ivies, and the cracks in the stucco had been sloppily caulked. A lower middle class building with cheap management, I concluded. I parked my vehicle in the street and walked around the corner to door number three, careful not to step on the rolls of newspapers strewn by the doorstep. I donned latex gloves and protective booties, and unlocked the door with the key Jennifer’s mother had left us when she filed the missing persons.

  Inside, Huxley’s place was tidy and compulsively clean. The first thing I smelled—in every room—were detergents, antibacterial sprays, and a fruit basket of artificial fragrances. The walls, impeccably white, were decorated with impersonal pictures of flowers and landscapes, save for a small frame hanging by the console in the foyer. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” it read. Next to it, a birdhouse-shaped key holder held a lonely mailbox key.

  Nothing in the apartment was out of place, not even the usual mug on the coffee table or a hairbrush next to the bathroom sink, and nothing pointed to the woman having packed or prepared for an imminent departure. Among the items in her fridge were a wilted head of lettuce and half a gallon of milk gone sour. Everything was perfect. Her bed sheets were clean—no boyfriend detected there, no pills or condoms anywhere else in the bedroom. Her laundry basket contained two items—three, if you counted the T-shirt now in my possession—and the thin layer of dust on her shelves confirmed the few days since her disappearance.

  The answering machine was flashing with a fairly innocuous message, “Hey, it’s Kev. (Pause) Any chance we could talk?”—which the caller ID attributed to a Kevin Rutherford. No car keys to be seen anywhere, no vehicle sitting in the garage either. The absence of a wallet, cell phone or purse indicated that she had intentionally left home. If she had been abducted, it was not from her house.

  I sighed and walked back to the living room, the phrase “cold case” making its way through my lazy neurons. A closed laptop lay on the desk, next to a CD column with about a hundred disks organized alphabetically by artist’s name. I brushed a gloved hand along the back of the couch, and the fabric released the scent of an odor-eating spray.

  I was ready to call it quits, when I detected something else. Something vague, a few days old, though still lingering in the air. I kneeled by the cushions and sniffed. Masculine smell, a hint of tobacco, faint, yet enough to make me think cigar, not cigarette, wine drinker, not heavily though. And a distinctive cologne, European brand, not cheap. The guy sat on this couch, maybe shared a glass with the hostess. If I could still detect the smell, the encounter had to be pretty recent. Maybe the night before Huxley disappeared. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  On my way out I accidentally stepped on one of the newspapers on the walkway. I picked it up, and as the thin layer of plastic crinkled in my hand, something dawned on me. Two rolls, two papers, one dated Wednesday October 8, and the other one Thursday October 9, today. Jennifer Huxley had returned home the night of October 6 and never showed up for work the next day.

  A mailman’s van whirred by the post of condo mailboxes across the street. A rusty swing set groaned from a yard. Two driveways down, a plastic playhouse created a splash of color in the middle of a green lawn. The rest of the street, a few blocks from the bustling parts of town, seemed dormant: the windows held silent, the shutters were closed, and the doors still. A neighborhood of working families with school-age children. The only exception, an old rocking chair whining against the planks of the porch across the street, the face of the man sitting on it buried in a newspaper. I reached for my tin and walked over to the white picket fence outgrown by untamed rose bushes.

  “Sir,” I called from the sidewalk. The daily headlines rustled—the pages scrunched by long, bony fingers—and then lowered, revealing deep, blue eyes completely free of lashes. A fine web of purple capillaries lined the sides of a gaunt face with sandy cheeks. He folded the paper on his lap and without silencing the rhythmic whine of his chair, pointed his index finger at me.

  “I don’t need that to know you’re a cop, young man.”

  I shrugged and slid the badge back in my pocket. “Do you get the paper every day, sir?” I asked, motioning to the pages he had just folded on his lap.

  “Every day for the past seventeen years,” he lisped.

  “What time do you get the paper around here?”

  “This?” he said, flopping a hand on his lap and making the pages creak. “You could set your watch on it, ya know? Five-o-seven at this door, five-o-six at the building you just visited.”

  “Are you sure? Exactly the same every morning?”

  He gave me a full grin this time. Shiny gums on one side, golden crown on the other, next to the last two yellowish molars he had left. “Yes, sir. ‘Cause you see, ol’ Harold—house number five-six-six—he hates the paperboy. Bangs the thing at his door and wakes him up. The guy can’t sleep until three in the mornin’. And then the paper comes and he’s up again. Some kinda issue right here.” The man tapped his temple. “Those brain cells, he ain’t lubricated well enough, ya know?” He slapped both hands on the knees and guffawed. “Me, I’m up by four forty-five and wanna read my paper right away. And then I read it again. Makes me smarter. These brain cells of mine, they ain’t going nowhere.”

  He leaned back in his rocking chair and winked. I grinned and reciprocated the gesture. Because thanks to Mr. Number Five-six-zero who loved to keep his brain cells in good shape, I’d just learned when Jennifer Huxley had left her home on October 7: sometime between five-o-five and seven-thirty, when her mother initiated the first of numerous calls left unanswered.

  * * *

  As soon as I stepped out of my vehicle, a wave of hot air enveloped me. “It may be fall, but it won’t feel like fall,” the radio warned, announcing a high in the lower nineties and dry Santa Ana conditions. I sighed, found relief under the shade of a large oak, and studied the place. In the distance, the heart and lungs of metropolitan L.A. reminded me of their omnipresence in the roar of highway traffic, and the occasional dinging of a railroad crossing. Yet in front of me sprawled an oasis of green. The rustling of the trees muffled the city buzz, and the fragrance of the rose garden mellowed the lingering odor of gas exhaust. A private clinic and cancer research center, the Esperanza Medical Center gave the casual stroller the illusion of visiting a botanical garden. It’s a beauty meant to conceal the ugliness of the disease lurking behind the modern architecture and the glass façades. A mirage in the desert, an attempt to pamper the heart when a cure for the body doesn’t always exist.

  The guard at the entrance booth handed me a map of the campus on which he circled in bright red the location of the genetics building. “I can get you a driver on a cart, Detective.”

  Despite the heat, I declined the offer. Willows and cottonwoods shaded the campus, and the stroll would give me the chance to ponder over Huxley’s file, the growing number of Officer-Involved Shooting reports filed under my name, and where the hell I was at that point in my life.

  Another Ulysses searching for his way home.

  “Lerville Research Institute,” I read next to the main entrance of a gray building. There was no front desk in the lobby, so I walked straight to the first lab on the right, took a peek through the glass panes in the double doors, then entered brandishing my badge. The two ladies in the room—one bent over an optical microscope, and the other frowning at a computer screen—looked like they’d never seen a cop before.

  “Jennifer Huxley, you said?” the woman by the microscope asked, the lapels of her white coat freshly
sprayed with coffee spatters. “Do you recognize the name, Sam?”

  “Might be the Jen in Cox’s group,” the other replied. “Those people all have their offices upstairs.”

  “Mind showing me the way?”

  The woman sent a furtive glimpse to her colleague before proffering, “Sure,” in a lovely British accent. She led me out the door and up a flight of stairs. Plump, late-twenties, with the facial expression of a ten-year-old, Samantha Green smelled of rose deodorant and sugar glaze, the sticky kind you find on donuts.

  “I take it you didn’t know Jennifer personally?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’d say hi and all, of course.” Of cou’se. “But there’s five different research groups in this building alone, lots of people coming and going,” she explained, skipping the r’s and indulging me in the soporiferous cadence of the Oxfordshire accent.

  The hallway upstairs was dark, the walls lined with metal cabinets. The last door on the right bore Huxley’s nametag. Samantha pointed to it and then stared at me with large blue eyes begging for gossip. “Has something happened to her?”

  “No idea. When was last time you saw her, do you remember?”

  Samantha shrugged. “I wouldn’t recall… Definitely not yesterday or the day before, because I’d remember… She seems sort of quiet and always keeps to herself. Are you guys looking for her? But she wouldn’t vanish like that, would she? I mean—she seems such a nice person and all… You know, we’re all lab rats, but Jen beats us all. Never seen her outside or at the cafeteria. Just here, sitting at her desk or in the genetics lab. Sometimes I wonder if she’s got a life at all.”

  In the five minutes I spent with her, Samantha managed to ask a dozen questions for every query of mine she left unanswered. I finally dismissed her with a curt thank you—her face hung with the disappointed look of a child who’s just been denied candy—and worked my way around the office: small, crammed by two long desks, each one with a computer, a chair, a file cabinet standing by the door, and no space to move your legs around. It smelled musty, of old, molding wood. Despite the claustrophobic environment, Huxley’s workspace was just as neat and tidy as her home. Her pens and pencils were all in a jar, grouped in three different compartments; her papers were stacked in color-coded folders on one corner of the desk, and her paperclips stored away in the drawer and sorted by size. What a freak.

  I sat on the swivel chair and touched the mouse of the computer. The screen flicked to life and asked for username and password. I picked up the folder at the top of the pile on the desk, labeled “Leukemia Study,” and opened it. There were several sets of stapled papers, the first of which looked like a drafted manuscript, with penciled corrections in two different calligraphies. “Incidence of leukemia in children under twelve in LA County, a preliminary study,” the title read. A list of authors followed: Huxley was the first one, and the last one was a J.A. Cox, MD, PhD, listed as corresponding author. I attempted some educational reading while flipping through the pages, but typically got lost after the third word in each sentence. As I closed the folder and placed it back where it belonged, a bright pink sticky note fell out. Handwritten in capital letters, it read, “GN WHITE, AGE 8, CHROMO.”

  I puzzled over the note, didn’t understand it, and the fact that I couldn’t understand it made it interesting enough to copy the information on my notepad. Satisfied, I got back on my feet.

  The Watson and Crick Laboratory for Genetic Studies was located at the very end of the building’s west wing. This was where Huxley spent most of her days, according to Samantha Green. A pale light seeped through the frosted glass of two high windows and shimmered against rows of glassware of all sizes and shapes. Stacks of boxes filled the shelves between the windows, some pried open and their contents exposed: latex gloves, pipettes and pipette holders, tweezers, glass tubes, sheets of packed swabs. The air was acidic, thick with reeks of alcohol, antiseptic liquids, gels, biological solutions—all combined in one acrid odor. Pungent in an unpleasant way. A large fridge hummed at the back, a piece of paper taped to its door warning it did not contain food.

  Like the stink wasn’t enough of a warning already.

  More signs decorated the cabinets hanging all around the walls, some pleading for their contents to be returned at the end of the day, others boring me with an endless list of vials and lot numbers stored within. Beneath the cabinets, a variety of instruments cluttered the scratched Formica countertops: optical microscopes, centrifuges, precision scales—all familiar but one. A sleek copy machine, I would’ve guessed, although it lacked a lid and had only few subtle buttons on the front.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” a voice behind me said. It came with a whiff of caffeine, a badly digested lunch, and fabric that reeked of chemical reagents—a lab technician.

  “Yeah,” I agreed without having a clue to what exactly we were talking about. “What the hell is it?”

  “An Illumina Beadstation,” the man replied, his voice betraying disappointment in my question. I bobbed my head and humbly submitted my ignorance to his judgment.

  “What does it do?”

  “SNP genotyping.”

  It must have been my lucky day: I kept running into the most useful people. I slid the badge out of my pocket and flashed it in front of the man’s nose. “I’m looking for Jennifer Huxley,” I said. “I’m told she usually works here.”

  Fabian Payanukis had ghostly white complexion, a precociously hunched back, and long eyelashes hidden behind thick lenses. His outdated sweater smelled feminine, too flowery to be the scent of a girlfriend, a mother rather, the kind who calls three times a week and sends friendly reminders in the mail, lovingly tucked in pink, perfumed stationary. We each pulled a stool and sat at the corner of the working bench, in front of a compact centrifuge whose two dials kept eyeing me sternly.

  “Jennifer and I work together on the leukemia study,” he told me, grabbing an abandoned pipette bulb and pressing it between his index finger and thumb. His fingernails were polished and struck me as too long for a guy. “It’s kind of strange she hasn’t showed up for three days in a row,” he said in a low voice. “Maybe she had a family emergency?”

  “Tell me about this leukemia study you guys work on.”

  “The project is funded by an NIH grant. The recipient is Dr. Cox, my boss. The purpose of the study is to find possible genetic predispositions with the disease. We call them genetic markers: mutations along the genome that can predict the onset of leukemia. Genetic markers for breast cancer have already been published. Women who carry these mutations have a higher risk of developing breast cancer.” While he talked, Payanukis blinked often and rarely made eye contact. His voice was as flat as an ironing board—perfect for Sunday morning readings on public radio.

  “The Illumina we have in our lab is a million dollar baby,” Payanukis’s voice surfaced over my digressions. “It’s the state of the art for DNA sequencing.”

  An Asian guy with spiky hair stepped into the lab, acknowledged our presence with a brisk nod, and then sat by an optical microscope at the other end of the room, the sour smell of the fish-based lunch he’d just consumed trailing behind him.

  “What’s Jennifer’s role in all this?”

  “She prepares the samples to be genotyped and feeds them into the machine,” Payanukis replied. “Sounds simple, but the whole process is fairly complicated and takes hours of work.”

  I had no doubt. “How many hours a day does she spend here at the lab?”

  “It depends. Lately she’s been at her desk a lot, writing a manuscript. She’s always out of here by five, though.”

  I winced. Not quite the picture Samantha Green had depicted. “Are you sure?”

  Payanukis nodded. “We usually leave together. I work on a second project, at another lab on campus. I walk her to the parking lot every night.” He looked down while proffering the last bit. Beads of perspiration appeared over his brows. He fancies her.

  “And you’ve never seen her come back
here afterwards?”

  He paused for a moment and then pointed a bony index finger at me. “You know, come to think of it, once I forgot my notes, so I came back around half past six and found her here.”

  I imagined him walking by Jennifer’s side at the end of the day, living off her small smiles and polite nods, while her mind wandered elsewhere, racing ahead to the moment when she’d bid him goodbye, drive around the block, and then sneak back to the lab. Unseen, and away from spying eyes.

  “What was she doing?”

  “She was sitting at the computer station, the one connected to the Illumina, probably reading some output.”

  “Did she look tired, as if sleep deprived?”

  Payanukis shrugged. “I would say yes. But then again, we all do when there’s a deadline approaching.”

  I got off the stool and adjusted the holster on my waistband. “So, where do I find Dr. Cox?”

  CHAPTER 6

  ___________

  Thursday, October 9

  Julia Cox shouldered out of the double doors without bothering to hold them open for the man behind her. “Julia! Wait!” the man called. “There’s always Science—”

  Cox marched away with her nose stuck up in the air as if she were wading in high, stinky waters. The hems of her white coat billowed, and the stethoscope around her neck tapped against her chest pocket. The man stood by the door, waiting, a shade of weariness clouding his face. The outer corners of his brows came down a notch.

  Two women in green scrubs walked by, their heads focused on patient charts and medication trays, yet their eyes covertly staring at Cox’s prima donna scene. Sunk in her black swivel chair, a receptionist with a five-inch tall hairdo yawned and flipped through the pages of her magazine. Hanging from the ceiling, a muted TV broadcasted the animated face of a reporter, the numbers of the Dow Jones running in a banner at the bottom of the frame. The blue light of the screen washed down on the reception desk, next to a sign warning patients to have their insurance cards ready.