CHIMERAS (Track Presius) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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