CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (32 page)

A pudgy nanny emerged behind the child. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Horowitz. She really wanted to see you. Her knees hurt.”

Vanessa’s legs were as white and thin as the alabaster dancer’s. She ran towards us and sunk her face in her mother’s lap. A mesh of purple capillaries netted the inside of her knees, and small, round bruises bloomed all over her arms. I scowled, my LE training quickly surmising child abuse.

Jenna Horowitz gently pushed the child back to the nanny. “It’s too cold for shorts, honey,” she said, her voice as motherly as a GPS recalculating the route. “Dorothy, please bring her upstairs to change.”

Dorothy came to grab Vanessa’s hand. I asked, “Where exactly does it hurt, Vanessa?”

The girl turned and stared at me, the faintest brows hanging above her blue eyes. “Here,” she said, pointing to her right knee. “And here. And here. And here.” When there were no more joints to point at, she wrapped her small fingers around the glimmering heart hanging from her neck and said, “Do you like it? Aunt Gracie gave it to me for my birthday.”

Jenna Horowitz shot to her feet, closed her hands around her child’s shoulders, and turned her to the nanny. “We took her to the doctor last week, Detective. Vanessa is perfectly fine. These are just growing pains.”

“Did you have the doctor check those bruises?” I prodded.

“My wife told you already.” Dan Horowitz got up from his seat. “Dorothy, take the child upstairs. And you two get out of my house. We’re through talking.”

C
HAPTER 39

____________

Friday, October 24

She lies on the ground with her eyes closed. Her cheek is pressed against a hard surface, scratchy, cement, most likely, pebbles painfully poking her skin. She tries to stir. Each fiber in her body throbs.
Get up
. She opens her eyes. Everything is blurry. Her head feels heavy, her tongue pasted and sore. She tastes blood.

It happened again
.

Slowly things come back into focus. A lawn, a few feet away from her, three steps, a door. Unfamiliar.
Where am I
? And then she remembers. She raises her head, the movement too brusque, it makes her nauseated. The sun is pounding on her, and the cement underneath scalds her knees and hands. And yet she’s shivering cold.

She sits up, at last, and stares at the house in front of her.
The doorbell. Nobody was there. I rang and rang and nobody ever came. Nobody
. She feels threatened, scared, defeated.

She remembers walking up those three steps and pressing the doorbell,
lightheartedly at first, assuming somebody would come to the door. Nothing happened. The curtains remained drawn, the place held still and silent. Her plan fell apart. She recalls the smell of camphor invading her nostrils, the odor of her grandmother’s clothes at every turn of the season. Her fingers started to tingle, as numbness oozed up her arms and legs, and her mouth filled up, thin threads of saliva drooling down her chin. And then came the familiar taste of bitter almonds flooding her palate, the memory flashing before her eyes. She’s a child again. She climbs up the almond tree and plucks off the green nuts, when they are still fresh and tender. She breaks them open and eats the inside, soft and crispy at the same time. She suddenly feels deceived, as the one she just popped into her mouth is horribly bitter. She grimaces and spits it, staring incredulously at the broken shell in her hand.

“What happened, Lizzy?” her brothers call from a tree nearby. “Did the ogre come eat your bum?” They laugh.

Horrified, she gazes at the little worm crawling out of the cracked nut in her palm. “I just ate a worm,” she squeals over her brothers’ guffaws. The more she screeches, the more they sneer.

That memory never left her, nor the bitterness. It had become the ill omen of her disease, the premonition of the storm to come. She recalls feeling the surge, quickly gnawing at her.
Who knows how much time I’ve been here,
she thinks, staring at the driveway. Familiar blotches of maroon decorate the spot where she’s been lying. She touches her head, prodding, feeling the tenderness where she hit falling down. Her hair is hot, heated by an unmerciful sun, and her hands and arms are scraped, from the thrashing. Her tongue is swollen and sore, the taste of blood fresh in her mouth.

She looks around, dazed. A crumpled piece of paper and her open cell phone strewn a few feet away. Crawling, she collects them both.
I’ve called the number
, she realizes, staring at the display. She’d brought with her the scribbled address and phone number and then called, one last resort when nobody answered the door.

Oh my God
, she gasps, touching her pocket. And then she exhales a sigh of relief. Still there. Safe, in her pocket. The storm has passed, the damage has been contained. Time to pick herself up and call a cab.
Plan B
, she thinks, staggering back to the street, her hand caressing the gun in her pocket. Plan B.

CHAPTER 40

____________

Friday, October 24

The tank stood on the counter. A display attached to its side monitored the internal temperature. Perched on a stool next to it, Diane nibbled the tip of her thumb and glared. A centrifuge hummed in the background. The rest of the lab was deserted, the weekend anticipated in the list of unfinished jobs hanging from the pin board.

I set the papers on the counter next to the cryogenic tank. “These are the logs with the IDs,” I said. “We can take out all the embryos but the Horowitzes’.”

I waited for a reaction but none came. Her eyes were as beautiful and stony as a Helmeted Athena’s. Silence clung to her lips like a drip to a faucet. Any second and it’d break loose.

“Can we discuss stuff later?” I offered.

“You trashed me.” The drip broke loose.

“I did not.”

“Then why did you leave? You could’ve left a note. You could’ve called to say, ‘hey.’ To say something,
anything
.”

Right. I could’ve said,
What the hell’s the assassin’s smell doing on your bra
? But I was greedy. I wanted her in my bed and the killer in handcuffs.

She’s the key to him
.

“There are things you don’t know about me, Diane.”

And things I don’t know about you
.

“You’re right,” she replied, her voice creamy and sour like yogurt. “I believed you were different. Instead, you’re just like everybody else. I know what you’re going to say. That you’re another no-commitment guy who freaks out the morning after.”

I banged my fist on the counter and turned away from her, seething. Not at her, at myself.

Diane’s eyes were shiny with tears. “I thought you were human, Track.”

“I’m less human than you could imagine.” It was a paradox. I’m not human and I’m not an animal. I’m both.

And yet it was me as a whole who longed
for her.

What kept me away was my human part, exactly the one she didn’t recognize as such.

Because the animal couldn’t care less. The beast just wanted her. Who feared for her safety to the point of denying himself—
that
was the human side of me.
I’m a killer and a predator. I have no control over my instincts
. How was I ever going to explain any of it to her?

I paced across the lab, while Diane nibbled her little thumb. Until Christopher Hopf’s eyes materialized through the anger fogging my mind.
Endurance
, they said. I froze. Who was I to damn my own existence when there was a child who didn’t even know if he was going to blow out one more candle on his birthday cake? I blew so many candles, Christopher. If I could go back, I’d pluck them off all those sugary cakes my mom made and give them all to you. If I could, Chris, I’d duel Clotho with my bare hands, yank my thread off her claws, and knot it to yours. Make yours longer. Make it last through the years of college, through your first kiss, through the scholarship flying you off to space one day, like you dream of when you close your eyes at night.
My own damned existence
I would give to you
.

I grabbed Diane, pulled her down from the stool she was stubbornly perched on, and squeezed her, burying my face in her hair. “I saw a terminally ill child today,” I said. “We need to stop this insanity. He’ll die anyways, but at least we can make it stop.”

Diane wrapped her hands around me and said nothing. Only when the catharsis was complete we let go of one another.

“Let’s get on with it,” I whispered. Diane nodded, her eyes averted.

The price of forgiveness.

She rested a hand on the tank, lifted the lid, and said, “I pick the canister, you pick the straw.” Like mermaid’s hair wavering in the currents, the vapors of liquid nitrogen billowed out, puffed upwards for a second, and then drooped down on the countertop. Diane pulled up one canister—a long, hollow tube with five sticks poking out at the top. “Pick one, quick,” she instructed, and as I complied, she briskly placed the canister back and closed the lid again. I held the straw from one end as if it were some sort of unidentified and suspicious object.

“Hold it in your closed fist.”

“What?”

“In your closed fist, Track, like this.” She took my hand, placed the straw on my palm, and then closed it. She kept her hands over mine, closed her eyes and counted. I stared at her closed eyelids and thought of how enticing her lips tasted.

“…ten,” she whispered, opened my fist, took the straw, and placed it into a glass pan she had previously filled with liquid warmed to body temperature. “It’s thawing.” She touched the pockets of her lab coat. “Shoot, I forgot—You don’t happen to have a paper clip, do you?”

“Of course I have a paperclip.” I dug one out of my pocket. “It’s a little misshapen, but—”

“I need to stretch it anyways.”

She took it and straightened it into a wire. She removed the straw from its little tub, cut the two ends with a pair of scissors, inserted the paperclip through one end, then tilted the straw and transferred all its liquid into a small dish filled with biological solution.

“There,” she said, staring at the transparent liquid. “Our first baby, Track,” she joked without meaning to be funny. “Just woke up, ready to be killed.”

“Diane, please.”

She snorted. “You don’t think we’re killing babies, do you?”

“They’re no babies. They’re man-made creatures with a death sentence built into their genes.”

Diane sighed. “We’re all born with a built-in death sentence, aren’t we?”

Geez. Between her and Satish I was surrounded by philosophers.

“D.— ”

“Defrost the other ones just like we did for this one. I’ll prepare the PCR solutions.”

I was on my second straw, when Diane said, “There. I just killed a human being.”

“It’s a single cell, not a human being,” I replied, placing a new straw in its warm bath and lifting the tank lid to retrieve another one.

“How can you be so detached?”

I couldn’t tell her why. When you live the mistake, you can’t help but wonder: had I been given a choice—live as a monster or succumb to a brain tumor—would I have spared my own life?

Fully aware of the potential monster held within, would I have thrown the miscreation down Mount Taygetos, or would I have graced its life? And if I did let it live, would you have called it a grace or rather a curse?

My phone rang, putting an abrupt end to my digressions. “Detective, I have a Dan Horowitz on the other line,” the dispatcher said. “He said he needed to talk to you. Shall I pass him on?”

I pondered.
Horowitz. Quite unexpected
.

“Yes.” There was a moment of silence on the other line, too short to hang up, too long not to wonder whether the guy had played a prank on me.

“I’m calling you from the UCLA hospital, Detective,” I finally heard. And it was Dan Horowitz’s voice. The tone, though, was different. The waterfall had turned into a weeping trickle. “My daughter—” his voice broke. I waited. “The doctor had ordered some blood work at her last visit. The growing pains—they’re not what Jenna and I thought they were.” Another pause. Silence is the harshest judge. “They called us at home right after you guys left. She’s got it. Just like the other kids. And it’s advanced already.”

I inhaled. The bruises and the joint pain. I thought somebody was beating the crap out of the child. Instead, it was the disease spreading through her blood.
Shit
. I felt like puking. “I’m sorry,” was all I could pull out of my dried up mouth.

“Flush those fucking embryos down the toilet, Detective.”

“I’ll need you to fax me a consent with both your signatures.”

“Give me the number.”

When I hung up my cell phone kept blinking.
You have one new message
, the display informed me. I dialed the voice box. Crackling static. And then words. Random, shuffled. Not making much more sense than the static itself. A joke, maybe. Or maybe not. I called Luke. It took him one minute to associate a name to the number on my display. It puzzled me at first. And then it clicked into place.

“Diane!” I shouted, making her startle. “Call Julia Cox at the Esperanza Medical Center for me, will you? Beg her, plead with her, do whatever. There’s one fundamental piece of information I need. She’ll say it’s a breach of privacy. You tell her I’ll handcuff her if she doesn’t surrender it.”

“That’s not pleading.”

“Then use your charms. Tell her somebody’s life depends on it. Call me when you find out. I gotta go before it’s too late.”

She clutched the sleeve of my shirt. “Go where?” Diane stared at me. Beautiful, befuddled, and still very much hurt.
If only I could take it away
. A million words wouldn’t describe what I felt. I kissed her and she let me. And then she whispered, “You know I hate you, Track.”

“Yeah. You should.” And I kissed her again.