CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (33 page)

CHAPTER
41

____________

The hedges needed pruning, the yucca plants wanted to be trimmed. The lawn was sad and pleaded to be mowed and weeded. Palm trees suffocated in beards of wilting fringes. The stucco had cracks, the awnings had tears, and the gutters sagged under the weight of dead leaves. I’d never seen such decay in an upscale neighborhood before. The door wasn’t locked. I touched it and it yielded. Somebody had buzzed it open.

I stepped inside.

Silence, at first, then a harrowing screech, followed by the unmistakable thunder of gunfire. I drew my Glock and ran into the hallway. “POLICE!”

Fingers of red stained the carpeted stairway, coming down like shadows at sunset. I ran up the stairs and crouched over the body. Young, dark eyes stared at me upside down, frozen in stupor. She lay with one hand unnaturally jerked behind the head, and the other clutching her white apron, a gargle of blood oozing from her chest. A maid, I guessed from her uniform. She was still warm, yet her carotid had stopped throbbing. I hissed a four-seventeen code in my radio.

I’ve come too late
.

Elizabeth Medford had called my cell phone and blurted pure nonsense into my answering machine, a random shuffle of words struggling to get through. I recognized it just the same: a plea for help, the aphasic phase preceding an epileptic seizure.

Cox confirmed she was taking anticonvulsants—Diane called me on my way there.

Elizabeth Medford was the mysterious epileptic woman at the Tarantino residence the night of the murder. She had waited downstairs while the hired killer finished the job. Was he now after her? To wrest her silence, once and for all? I’d gunned my Dodge through the freeway rushing to the Medford residence, while my mind considered all possible shootout scenarios. I’d come too late.

The silence following the gunshot unnerved me more than the overwhelming smell of blood.
More, from upstairs
. “Drop the gun!” I yelled, stepping around the body. I inhaled, thirsty for
his
smell, the assassin’s.

There was a long and dark corridor at the end of the stairway, the walls plastered with oak wood panels. I followed the scent of blood and fear, bitter, foul and unmistakable.

Somebody hanging between life and death.

It came from the last door at the end of the hallway. I edged around the corner and peeked inside. The signs of a struggle were everywhere: an overturned nightstand, strewn clothes, a gushed pillow.

A curtain rod hung to the wall from one end only, a white drape heaped on the floor like a kneeling angel. Blood soaked the king bed, where a body lay, eyes to the ceiling and arms above the head in a belated surrender.

A shadow skidded in and out of vision. Taking in the whiff of gun oil and ducking to dodge the bullet came in one swift reflex. I fired back, two rounds, aiming with my nose instead of my eyes. I heard a moan and saw the shooter leap behind an archway that
opened to a sitting room. Gun low and ready, I crept into the bedroom.

Medford lay on the bed, two holes weeping steadily from his stomach and soaking his white shirt. He stared at the ceiling with gray, bulging eyes. They were soft and clouded and sad. His hair, white and puffy, drew a halo around the head.
There
, I thought, bending over to feel a pulse.
Medford achieved beatification
. I sniffed the air. The husband was dead and the wife missing.
Where’s the asshole
—

“Put the gun down.
Please
.”

I flinched. The feminine scent. I’d overlooked it. I was after the assassin, not her.
She
was supposed to be the victim.

Elizabeth Medford emerged from behind the arch, a Beretta clutched in her right hand. She rested a hazy gaze on me, her pupils two black wells in a circular rim of blue. A red trickle wept down one of her legs—the aftermath of one of the two rounds I’d fired earlier. The left side of her head was matted with dried blood and her pale arms were scraped.
She had the seizure right after she called me
.

“Please put the gun down.” She pointed a shaky barrel at me, both hands wrapped around the grip as though it were a lifesaver.

I raised my Glock, slowly, without aiming, just to warn her. “Let’s not play this game, Lizzy.”

Her head hung to the side and her brows curled. A blue vein across her right temple pulsed. “Who are you?” Her eyes strayed away like the tails of a kite.  

Lizzy, the girl who’d run away from home decades earlier to come to the city, the girl who had already found happiness and yet had not recognized it. I’d pieced her story together researching old police records and tabloids, the same day I found out about Kowalski’s winning title at the Palm Springs Shooting Range.

Lizzy wanted more and found it one night at a party, when a distinguished man seduced her the old way, challenging her current lover with a rivalry over her beauty. The party went to the dogs, and the girl became famous.

Money and power embraced her, yet happiness never followed. Instead of dreams, she found herself chasing lies, betrayal, corruption, and money.

It had seemed just another story at the time, until I pieced it with Horowitz’s malicious sneer, when at the Tarantinos’ funeral he’d told me,
Everybody knows Elizabeth Medford, Detective.

What about her husband?
I’d asked.

He loves it.

It had taken me a while to grasp the meaning of the reply. Horowitz’s sneer had said it all. Oscar Guerra later confirmed it: voyeurism is a form of control over the sexual partner. Richard Medford sold his wife’s body for his own enjoyment and manipulated DNA for revenue. He had it all: control over money, sex, and life.

“Give me the gun, Lizzy.” I stretched out my left hand and edged closer. “He threatened you, didn’t he?” I pointed to the dead husband. “You shot him because of what he made you do.” She quivered but didn’t shift the aim of the barrel. “I can fix this for you, Lizzy. You had to kill him, so he would no longer hurt you. Give me your gun and I’ll fix it.”

I kept my voice low and steady, seeking her trust. I stepped closer.

“Stay away!” she screeched. The sirens of backup wailed from outside, startling her.

I could’ve shot her then. It would’ve been quick and risk free. But I needed the name of the killer, the man her husband hired to whack Huxley and the Tarantinos. She was the only way I could get to the man. She was wounded and frightened and I knew I was going to get the damned name out of her mouth.

“What’s that?” she yelled.

“The ambulance. They’re here to help.”

“Tell them to go away! Tell them or—” She bent her arms and pointed the gun at her throat. She pressed so hard the barrel sunk in her white neck.

“Don’t shoot.” I reached for the radio with my left hand. Slowly, so she could see what I was doing. “I’ll tell them to wait. You be good, Lizzy, okay? You’ve got to be good, now.” She nodded, yet her index finger remained hooked around the trigger. I radioed a ten-forty-seven code, armed and dangerous
. Stay ready but let me try and handle this.
A name, damn it. I just needed one name out of her mouth. “They won’t be coming, Lizzy. You can relax. It’s just you and me, now.”

Her hand shook, the mouth of the barrel still glued to her neck. “How do you know my name?” Her voice came from far away, as though searching for its way back.

“I know a lot about you. I know you hated him.” I pointed to Medford, on the bed between us. “He made you do stuff you never even dreamt of doing. You shot him to make him stop.”

Her eyes jumped from me to her husband, then back to me. Even dead, Medford controlled her. “You needed help, Lizzy, and you called me.”

She frowned. “I called you?”

The reaction enraged me. I had to swallow and inhale.
Don’t lose it, Ulysses
. What the hell happened, then? Huxley’s killer, the ghost I’d been chasing from the beginning, the gunman Medford had hired so he didn’t have to get his hands dirty himself, was still missing. Where was
he
?

“You were in danger, Lizzy, and you called me. You had a seizure. Isn’t that how you injured yourself? Why were you scared, Lizzy? Was it your husband? Or was it the other man, the one who killed Tamara and Robert Tarantino?”

“It was you then—” She sucked in short puffs of air. I inhaled her: fear, disgust, rage, confusion. Fear again. Wild, ancestral. “You never opened the door.” Her voice was raw, guttural. “You hid her from me. You hid her inside your house. I wanted to shoot her. I wanted to see her die.”

I frowned, struggling to understand. Elizabeth Medford—Lizzy—was at my house. Why? “Who was it you wanted to see dead?”

“That woman,” she screeched, the weapon dangerously shaking in her hands. “The woman he loves! She came to your house. I followed her and waited, but she never left that night.
You
hid her from me.”

I felt the adrenaline shoot down my spine.
Diane
came to my house and never left. She wanted to kill Diane. I swallowed. “Who loved her? Your husband?” Rage polluted my voice.
Don’t lose it
.

Lizzy swayed her head backwards. “Why would I care who my husband loved?”

Not her husband. Another man. The assassin.
Il sicario
, the hired killer.
The name. I need his name
. “Who loved her then? Tell me!” I raised my voice, quickly losing control. It was a mistake. She returned the barrel to her throat. I winced. “Put the gun down, Lizzy. Put it down and then tell me the name. Everything will be fixed. Your husband can no longer hurt you.”

“Mom used to call me Lizzy… Nobody has called me Lizzy in a long time…”

Her eyes wandered off, hazed by the ghosts of past memories. I took another step towards her and held out a hand. “Give me the gun.”

“Stay back. You think you’re good just because you guessed my name, huh? You know nothing, you stupid cop, nothing!”

She smelled like a wounded animal. Threatened, desperate, and with nothing left to lose. I was walking on a tight rope, carefully calibrating every movement, every word.
One mistake and I fall in the void. The wrong reaction and the trigger goes off, the bullet fired. After that, everything is irreversible
.

“I do know about you, Lizzy.”

A nerve in her temple twitched. My words resonated in her ears like a tape played underwater.

“You’ll do great things in life, Lizzy, Mom used to say.”

Her dilated pupils jumped from me to other points in the room, as if she were in front of an audience, invisible faces around her nodding and listening.

She smiled from time to time, a mere twitch of her lips. Her speech faltered, switching from snarls of rage to whimpers of self-
commiseration, and with each mood swing the barrel of the gun jerked and trembled, sending spikes of adrenaline through my veins.

Active shooter
, my body told me, and the instinct in such a situation was to shoot back. Head or chest, whatever is easier, shoot to kill. I resisted the impulse. I didn’t want her to take her life. Not before she had told me exactly how things had unfolded.
The killer
, I kept thinking. I just want his name.

When I thought she had calmed down, I prodded again, “What happened to Robert and Tamara Tarantino? Who killed them?”

She jerked her head backwards and started crying. “That Huxley woman kept pestering him, appealing to his conscience and all the church bullshit. And he was falling for it, the stupid fool. They’re all wimps, they are.”

She inhaled, swallowed, and lowered her voice. “Rob said he had no idea it would come to this. He’d done it for a better humanity, like the professor had said. Instead, the Huxley woman convinced him that all the kids were sick. They were dying. She said,
If you have a conscience you have to turn yourself in
.”

It was coming together. Huxley had spoken to Robert Tarantino, and Robert had faltered. He’d realized the genetic experiments had been a major screw up, that the children they had “created” were all dying. Medford had seen the danger.

If Tarantino spoke out about the experiments and admitted the company’s failure, it would have marked the end of the Chromo corporation. There was no other choice but kill him—and Huxley with him.

Lizzy made a dark, guttural sound that rose in pitch and became a scratching laughter. “A conscience, she said. Look at me, cop. Do I look like I still have a conscience?
He
took it from me.” She swayed the gun towards Medford’s body and then whirled it back to her throat. “I don’t have a conscience because of him. He sucked it out of me and made me dirty, so dirty...”

She was getting dangerously close to the point of breakdown.

I opened my left hand and motioned to her gun.