by E. E. Giorgi
Too late to be sorry now, you asshole.
“Why people do the things they do, escapes my mind. This guy was a perv. He did it all: he paid to watch his wife get fucked, made money selling genetically modified embryos, and hired an assassin to get rid of whomever came in his way.”
“And this assassin you say is still at large?” I nodded. “What do we have on this guy?”
What do we have? I asked myself. A nickname and a smell, refuted by DNA evidence. I brought both hands to my head and paced. My pulse was finally slowing down, yet my frustration still simmered.
Across from the bed was a bookcase filled with trophies and photo frames. I picked up a small picture—a young woman, beautiful, smiling at the camera.
She was still Lizzy back then.
I put it back, and a second photo frame caught my attention, towards the back of the shelf. Somebody had scribbled in one corner, Palm Springs Shooting Range, July 2008. Two men stood next to each other, grinning, one holding a rifle, the other a smaller caliber pistol, a Smith & Wesson, maybe—the photo was too small to tell for sure. It wasn’t too small for me to recognize the faces of the two men, though.
Shit.
I turned to Satish. Expectations disguise the obvious, he’d said days earlier. It should have been obvious. To me, at least.
“Where’s Diane?” I demanded. We’d talked on the phone briefly as I was driving to the Medford residence. Cox confirms it, Track. Elizabeth Medford is on anticonvulsants, she told me. Where are going you now?
To meet a murderer.
She’d spoken a few words of silence, and then: Don’t get killed. I want you back.
Satish winced, taken aback by my sudden alarm. “I thought you saw her last.”
“Did she come with the Field Unit team outside?”
“I haven’t seen her, but I was up here—Track! You can’t leave!”
I stopped at the door and slammed my fist against the wall.
Nelson stared at me wide-eyed. “By now the FID guys have a poster with the word ‘WANTED’ stamped across your face.”
The FID, damn it. I’d fired my gun again, and even though the victim had killed herself with her own pistol, I still had to surrender my weapon and respond to the investigation. I couldn’t afford to waste more time. I swallowed my rage and offered a pleading face. Satish echoed it with a grimace of his own—the “What the hell am I going to do with you, Track?” face. “You have your back-up?” he asked, stretching out a hand. I slid my gun out of the holster and let him have it.
“I got another Glock,” I said. “They kept the revolver. You’ll cover for me, won’t you?”
“As long as you come out clean. I’m not wiping no ass of yours.”
I grinned and left. I heard Nelson mutter, “They’re going to add ‘Dead or Alive’ to the poster with your face on it.”
I ran down the hallway and leaped through the stairway. The EMTs had covered the body of the housekeeper, and a swarm of crime investigators and officers had spread throughout the first floor of the house. I glimpsed a few familiar faces outside by the front porch—Carolyn Ling, Peter Hanes—yet Diane was nowhere to be seen. I dropped a hand on Carolyn’s shoulder, making her flinch. “Did Diane come with you guys?”
She nodded. “She was here a minute ago.”
I whirled my head, inhaled, and scanned the air, seeking the wake of her scent. The driveway was a jam of vehicles, all with the bar lights throbbing. A cacophony of radios barked over different frequencies. The medical stretcher rattled up the doorsteps.
The FID officers are on their way. I wasn’t going to let those losers hold me hostage again.
“Detective—”
“I need to get something from my vehicle.” I ducked under the yellow tape the officer was unrolling, ran to my car, unlocked it, slumped behind the wheel, and screeched away. My cell phone went off almost immediately. I turned it off and tossed it on the passenger’s seat. They can look for me later.
CHAPTER 42
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Friday, October 24
Diane’s phone rings. She stares at the display absent-mindedly, a lock of hair coiled around her finger. She bites her lip. Voices reverberate from the house: officers coming and going, EMTs wheeling out a stretcher, crime scene investigators gathering up their tools of the trade. It’s over, she thinks with a sigh of relief. Though her heart won’t stop pounding.
She flips open the phone and drawls a tired “Hello” into the receiver.
“Where did you spend the night?” Rhesus jumps at her.
Diane swallows. “At a friend’s.” His silence frightens her. “Look, I told you already. It’s over, okay? You’ve slipped out of my life. I’m tired. It’s over,” she repeats, after a pause. And as she says it, she feels lost. What does she have left, now?
Once again, her therapist’s voice rings in her ears. You have to break the cycle, Diane.
“How about we talk things over?” Rhesus cajoles, his voice strangely mellow. Forgiving.
She lets go of the lock she’s been playing with and runs a hand through her hair. What is there to save? “You’re coaxing me again. I know you won’t be there.”
“Tonight is different,” Rhesus says. “In half an hour, Diane. Be there.”
CHAPTER 43
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Friday, October 24
Engraving is the best of deceits, Satish had said. Expectations disguise the obvious. To me at least, it should’ve been obvious.
Richard Medford moved in the highest circles of society looking for clients, naïve victims for his company’s genetic experiments, and sexual partners for his wife.
A perverse game that gave him power and control.
It was for one of their threesomes that the Medfords hired a thug they met at a VIP shooting range in Palm Springs.
He goes by the name Rhesus.
The hoodlum satisfied both husband and wife and, given his dexterity with firearms, turned out to be a precious find when a glitch threatened the promising future of the Chromo corporation. A glitch named Jennifer Huxley. From paid sex to hired gunman, Rhesus climbed up the job ladder until he stumbled upon the last request. A kill he couldn’t fulfill, not even when he hired somebody else to do it. A job he was now determined to finish.
James Kowalski’s house was in Encino, in a cul-de-sac at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains. An old, one-story bungalow, it sat on a strip of lawn sandwiched by barren land, the golden hills behind it speckled with dwarf pine trees and sagebrush. A box hedge circled the house and sided the walkway. The grass could’ve used more watering but had gotten used to whatever it got. A couple of planters sat below the front windows. They looked like they’d wanted to bloom at some point but nobody encouraged them to.
There was only one building in the immediate vicinity, and it was under construction—a wooden frame draped in plastic sheets.
The next closest property was half a mile down the road: an unkempt house, with old paint peeling off the wood planks and dark windows gaping like black eyes. The landscaping amounted to a parched agave plant and a coiled yucca sprouting out of dried and yellow turf. Stuck by the curb, a “For Sale” sign groaned intermittently, like in a Western movie, when the sun is blaring and nothing ever happens except for the squeaking of an old board setting the cadence of boredom.
It looked like Kowalski did not appreciate loud and gaudy neighborhoods.
It was past six thirty when Diane pulled into the driveway. All windows inside the house were dark. From my Dodge, parked on the street a few yards back, I watched her turn off the engine and climb out of the car. She took a quick look around, hunched over the passenger’s seat to get her purse, closed the door, and locked the car. She tapped her heels to the doorstep while rummaging through her handbag. I slid the Glock out of the holster and got out of my vehicle.
The sun had set and the colors were fading, blurring into layers of blues and grays. It was the hour when my vision enhanced and
my senses sharpened. The hour when predators went out prowling for prey. I inhaled. He wasn’t here, yet.
Diane jammed the key into the lock, turned it, and then pushed the door open. I slid behind her and held it before she could close it again. Startled, she let out a shriek and staggered against the wall. “What are you—”
“When’s Kowalski coming? Did he tell you to come here?”
“What? Yes, I’m supposed to—Where the hell are you going?”
I entered the house and angrily wandered around, thirsty for his scent. His smell enveloped me. Strong and deceiving, as it had always been. Pungent sweat with a spice, burnt cilantro. Everywhere.
“Stop it, Track! What do you think you’re doing? You have no right to do that. You don’t have a search warrant—Track!”
I was possessed. I touched everything—tables, chairs, drawers—and searched everywhere. The foyer opened up to the living room. There was a small office to the left with a desk, a few chairs and various bookshelves. A desktop and a couple of laptops took over the working space.
The living room was tersely furnished: a couch, a lounge chair, two recliners and a console, all outdated and non-matching. The only modern touch was the forty-two inch flat screen TV. To the back was the kitchen, separated from the dining room by a breakfast nook.
I wasn’t interested in the kitchen. I went straight to the master bedroom, yanked open the closet and peeked inside. I rummaged into drawers, upturned rugs, dug into storage boxes.
I pulled the sheets off the mattress, stopped and inhaled. Diane’s scent wafted out of the unmade bed and blew on my rage like wind feeding a fire.
Diane whimpered. “Track, you’re out of your mind. You scare me.”
I was scary, and I knew it, and I didn’t care. I found it, at last. The man hadn’t even worked too hard to conceal it: it was in a wooden box, at the back of a nightstand drawer. Huxley’s missing earring, the proof I needed. It was him, the man sleeping with the woman I wanted and the assassin. Same thing. Fate had played yet another trick on me, deceiving me with my own deception, only subtler. Like me, Rhesus was a chimera. Unlike me, Rhesus was born a chimera—a genetic chimera.
There are two types of chimerism, Watanabe had explained.
It was indeed Kowalski’s DNA on Huxley’s car, and Kowalski’s DNA, again, on the beer can I had retrieved from Diane’s house.
One person with two different DNAs.
A mosaic of two individuals fused into one.
Of all people, I should’ve known.
I moved to the bathroom, stuck my nose into the dirty laundry basket, pulled the shower curtain, and opened the cabinets. What I saw hit me with a spark of lucidity. I snagged the bottle, clutched Diane’s arm and pinned her against the wall. “Whose stuff is this?” I yelled, brandishing the medication inches away from her face.
She swallowed. Her skin exuded a ragged smell of fear. “Mine. I can’t sleep when I’m by myself. I need drugs.”
“This stuff is yours?” I repeated.
“Yes.” She closed her eyes.
“And what the hell did you think when you read in Huxley’s autopsy report this stuff had been used to put her out?”
She tried to wriggle away from my grasp. I closed my fist around her arm and held her against the wall. “A lot of people use it!”
“So what?” I yelled, despising her denial. Despising myself, my own denial, the beast of all deceits. “Don’t you get it? He’s been using you, Diane! The Tyvek covers, the perfect murder scene—he knew it all thanks to you!”
She opened her eyes and stared at me. Did she see it then, the animal lurking inside me?
“What? No, Jim’s—Jim’s not perfect, but he’s not a killer. You’re out of your mind, Track, you’re—” Her eyes clouded, her voice lowered. “Is that why you bailed out on me? Because you thought I was double game?”
“What?”
“Look at you! So sure of yourself, and yet you have no proof. You’re so full of hatred you don’t have a speck of heart left to love a stupid woman who’s fallen for you.”
I let go of her. I saw my reflection in her eyes, the dew of her tears cluttered on her lashes. All the words I’d been wasting, incapable of saying the ones that mattered the most: I love you. I was full of hatred. I was so enraged I’d shut off my senses. My nostrils didn’t detect the change in the air, the new, subtle whiff creeping into the rooms. My ears didn’t catch the hushed tweaking of the wood floors, or the rustling of silent fingers along the walls. And my eyes, my powerful eyes, have the typical Achilles’s heel all feline eyes have: once there’s a source of light, they can no longer see in the dark. It becomes the perfect hiding spot.
CHAPTER 44
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Friday, October 24
Rhesus glances at Diane’s VW parked in the driveway and smiles. A twinge of anticipation nibs at his fingers. He touches his gun holster. Today his revenge will be complete. He will have Diane, one last time, at gunpoint. He wants to see terror in her eyes. What they had no longer excites him. He needs more. There’s a new lady in his life, a dark queen whose heart still escapes him. Tonight Elizabeth Medford will have Diane’s head. I’ll kill her this time, he thinks. And then I’ll empty the rest of my magazine down the throat of that pimp husband of yours, Elizabeth. You’ll be mine, then. Just mine.
Rhesus walks up the steps to his house fogged with excitement, imagining the scent of Diane’s blood and the auburn lock he’ll steal from her. The door’s not locked, though. And the voice he hears from inside is not Diane’s. Somebody’s yelling. “He’s been using you, Diane!” the voice says.
A fucking cop. Rhesus creeps closer, enough to spot the two of them arguing. It’s over. The cop knows about him. He touches the gun. His head is reeling. He could risk it all and shoot now. Quite the prize to kill an officer. Diane’s lock and the sleuth’s police badge.
No. Too risky.
The draft makes the front door click closed. Diane startles. “Did you hear that?” she says. But when she peeks into the hallway, she finds it deserted.
CHAPTER 45
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Friday, October 24
I ran into the living room. “He was here, damn it!”
“Who? Jim? My God, Track. Please don’t—”
Tires screeched outside. I leaped to the window, cursing to the fool I was. I drew my gun and yanked the curtains open, ready to fire on the fleeing car. Rhesus’s black Lexus SUV wasn’t running away, though. It was gunned towards the house.
My eyes darted to Diane: she had just come out of the bedroom and was heading to the front door.
Outside, the car flattened the box hedge, knocked over the planters, and skidded on the grass.
Accelerating madly, it spun to the side and aimed at the west corner of the house. I grabbed Diane by the waist and hurled her back against the opposite wall. The ground shook. Glass exploded and shattered into pieces. Debris and chunks of masonry rained on us from the ceiling. And when all other sounds ebbed off, the car engine went on roaring. Inside.
“What the hell was that?” Diane cried. “It came from the office!”
“Don’t move.”
I inched forward and peeked around the corner. The SUV had come full force through the external wall to the office. The black hood jutted across the gaping wall like a stranded orca. Splintered studs and fringed wallboard sprawled over the tinted windshield. A rattling noise came from the vehicle, an intermittent clack followed by muffled thuds. I stepped closer. The SUV gave a jolt. A noise followed, of a door slamming closed and steps running away. The asshole’s making a break. I spun around, springing for the door, but something stopped me. A hiss. Accompanied by a distinctive smell, sulfur, maybe—
“Diane!” I dragged her down as she came towards me. We fell against the foot of the sofa, and on impact, my gun slid out of my hand and skidded across the floor. For a moment, Diane wriggled and bucked. I held her down and buried my face in her hair. There was n
o time to explain. The blast was thunderous. The house groaned and whined and more rubble rained on us. Diane froze, clasped my hand, and squeezed it. Everything crushed and the inferno enveloped us. I felt the heat wave scorch the skin on my back. Thick, black smoke followed, creeping into my mouth and nostrils.
“Back door,” I hissed into Diane’s ear. “Cover face—crawl.”
“What happened?” she wheezed. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her from the floor.
“Gas line—hit, exploded. Save breath.”
I crawled behind her to the kitchen, our hands groping over glass shards and debris. I reached for my radio but the damned thing only gave me static, the LCD display dying before my eyes. Fuck. I must’ve hit it when I landed on the floor. Behind us, the fire crackled and hissed and leaped forward in consecutive bursts. We got to the back door. I helped Diane to her feet and made sure she got out. “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled when she saw me going back.
“I need my gun. Go, Diane, move!”
I covered my mouth, kept low, and retraced my steps into the inferno. A new explosion shook the house. By now the SUV had turned into a skeleton of wilted metal.
Smoke was everywhere, black and thick. It felt like I had a yarn of steel wool stuck down my throat. The gun. Get the gun and run. I crawled behind the sofa, groping over singed carpet and rubble. The house gave a jerk, the ceiling creaked, and flecks of burning debris hissed against my face.
I needed the gun. I held the collar of my shirt against my mouth and nose and crept closer to the flames groping like a madman, my rage smoldering wilder than the fire. I found it at last, stuck underneath an upholstered recliner whose fabric glimmered with swirls of red embers. The grip of the pistol scalded my fingers, yet I clasped it and rolled away. I slammed against something hard, I couldn’t tell what. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I coughed, got on my knees, coughed again. Out. Get. Out. I crawled until I hit a wall, spun around and hit a second wall.