Chimera (9 page)

“I'm receiving you loud and clear.”

“Good. And, sweetie, you don't have to shout. Just
talk normally and I'll hear you. In fact, I'll hear everything you do, so I can
give you advice on the fly. Your car is waiting at the entrance to the heliport.
We'll get you to Dr. Bryant's place right away. In the meantime, I'll walk you
through the process of migrating all your data from your old phone. I can do
most of that for you from here.”

What was it Top had told him about living in George
Jetson land?

“Okay,” Chapel said, as he jogged out of the
chain-link gate of the heliport. A black car—a Crown Victoria, just like the one
Laughing Boy drove—was waiting for him. He had an appointment with a dead
woman.

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:12

Neptune Avenue was lined with modest houses
and convenience stores, pizza parlors and medical clinics. The air smelled of
the ocean and pasta sauce and was filled with the noise of cars and thumping
radios. Dr. Bryant's house was a simple two-story structure with bars over its
windows and a steel-core reinforced door.

“Looks like she was worried about security,” Chapel
said. “Not that it helped.”

“That's pretty standard for New York,” Angel told
him. “Police records say she's had a couple break-ins before, as well. People
who saw her name on the door—saw she was a doctor—and broke in looking for
drugs.”

“Does she keep an office here?” Chapel asked.

“No, this was just her home. Her office and her lab
are a few blocks away. This is kind of a run-down area for somebody like her. I
guess she wanted to live near her patients. By the looks of things, they were
mostly Russian immigrants.”

“You have access to her medical records?”

“Nothing privileged, though I could probably get
that without too much trouble if you need it,” Angel told him. “I don't see
anything that stands out, right now. I don't see anything that would have made
her any enemies.”

“One was enough,” Chapel said. He gritted his teeth
and walked up to the door. A single strand of yellow police tape crossed the
opening, and a uniformed police officer was standing just inside. She stared at
his ID with a skeptical eye, but she let him through. Angel had already talked
to the local cops and let them know he was coming.

The house was dark inside, and it took a while for
his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw the place was full of police
photographers and detectives drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. He would have
preferred to visit the scene alone, but that wasn't an option.

He heard someone crying loudly in the back of the
house—probably a kitchen back there; he could see the side of a refrigerator
through an open door. The last thing he wanted at that moment was to be
questioned by a grieving relative, so he headed up the stairs instead—that was
where Angel told him Dr. Bryant had been discovered.

“I'm getting some preliminary reports now; they
were just filed by the detectives on the scene,” Angel said in his ear. “Chapel,
this isn't going to be pretty. It sounds like she was beaten to death in her
bedroom.”

“I've seen dead people before,” he told her.

A detective in a cheap suit, wearing a police
laminate on a lanyard around his neck, looked up and stared at Chapel. “Who the
hell are you?” he demanded.

Chapel flashed his ID again, but the detective
shook his head.

“How about you just tell me, instead of making me
read the fine print on that thing? I figure you have a right to be here or we
would have turned you away at the door. But you're no cop. I'm guessing
. . . military?”

Chapel bit his lip, but said nothing.

The detective scratched at the stubble on his chin.
He looked like a tough old bastard. He looked like a drill instructor Chapel had
known in basic training, frankly. He looked like the kind of guy who was used to
being lied to and didn't like it at all.

“I can't answer your questions,” Chapel said. “I
can't tell you anything. This murder is of interest to—”

“DHS,” Angel whispered in his ear.

“The Department of Homeland Security,” Chapel said.
It was a lie, but it wasn't a ridiculous one.

The detective's eyes went wide. “Yeah, okay. I know
that score.” He stepped aside and let Chapel past.

“That was too easy,” Chapel said under his
breath.

“This is New York, sweetie. This is where 9/11
happened. They understand terrorism here—and nobody will bother a DHS
agent.”

“Good thinking, Angel.” Chapel stepped through
another doorway and walked into the crime scene proper.

He may have seen dead bodies before. He had seen
the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan. This was different, though,
and his breath caught in his throat.

Dr. Helen Bryant was lying on the floor, twisted
into an unnatural shape. She'd been thrown into a mirror and pieces of broken
glass were everywhere, a shoal of them covering part of her face. That was a
small mercy. She was an elderly woman. A little old lady. No little old lady
should ever have this happen to them. It was just so . . . wrong.

One of the detainees had done this. Chapel suddenly
wanted very much to kill the son of a bitch. He wanted to make the guy
suffer.

Chapel forced himself to squat down and take a
closer look, much as he wanted to just turn away and shake his head. He made
himself look at the wounds on Dr. Bryant's body, the broken bones, the
lacerations. There were no gunshot wounds, and no sign that she'd been cut with
a knife.

The bastard had done this with his hands.

“Do you need us to move her?” someone asked from
behind him. It wasn't the detective who had questioned him. This was a
paramedic, or maybe somebody from the coroner's department. “We're almost done
taking fiber and hair samples. If you need something, just ask.”

Chapel looked up at the paramedic. She was black,
in her midthirties, and she looked like she was in awe of the DHS agent who had
graced her crime scene with his presence.

Damn,
Chapel thought.
Angel's ruse had gotten him this far, but now it might cause problems. If the
cops thought this case was somehow connected to terrorist activity, they might
start asking questions. Well, he decided, that was for Angel or Hollingshead to
take care of. He had tougher problems to solve.

He put his hands on his knees and started to
straighten up. Turning his face away from the body, he caught something out of
the corner of his eye. “What's that?” he asked.

The paramedic came over to stand next to him,
taking care not to step on any evidence as she did so. Together they looked at
the bedside table. A book of crossword puzzles and a pen lay on the floor next
to the bed, and just above them, on the wall, someone had scrawled a single
word.

Chapel moved closer. The letters were shaky and
hard to make out, as if they'd been written by someone with a broken arm,
someone in a panic, somebody who knew she was about to die. He had no doubt that
Dr. Bryant had written the word.

She must have been trying to leave some kind of
clue, maybe even to identify her killer.
She could have
been more clear about it,
Chapel thought, and then scolded himself
for thinking uncharitable thoughts about the dead. Still, he had no idea what
the message meant:

CHIMERA

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:20

“Angel,” Chapel said, “you ever heard of
something called Chimera?”

“Sounds familiar. Give me a second.” He heard the
faint sound of clacking keys and knew she must be looking it up on the Internet.
“Right . . . for one thing, you're saying it wrong, sweetie. It's
not ‘chim-ur-uh,' it's ‘kai-mare-uh.' It's a monster from Greek mythology—a lion
with a goat head coming out of its back and a snake for a tail.”

“I'm guessing Dr. Bryant wasn't killed by some kind
of weird lion creature,” Chapel told her. “It's got to be something else. Was
there a Project Chimera? Maybe something the CIA was involved in? Maybe that was
the name of the place where the detainees were held.”

“No, nothing like that is showing up. And I've got
access to some pretty weird databases, so I'd expect at least a footnote
somewhere.”

He glanced over his shoulder to see if the
paramedic was listening, but she had stepped out of the room, maybe to tell the
detective about the scrawled message on the wall. Chapel stood up straight,
ignoring his protesting knees.

“Maybe it's a person's name,” Angel suggested. “Or
at least an alias.”

“Maybe,” Chapel said. At the very least it was a
clue. Dr. Bryant had died to give him this information. It had to mean
something.

But it was going to have to wait. Dr. Bryant was
dead—there was nothing more he could do for her. There was one other name on the
kill list that was located in New York City. He needed to get moving.

At the door the detective was waiting for him.
“Anything you can share?” he asked.

Chapel shook his head and started to push past the
man.

“Maybe you should talk to the daughter,” the
detective told him.

“Daughter?”

The detective nodded. “You probably heard her on
your way in—she's in the kitchen, grieving pretty hard for her mom. She's the
one who found the body. They were supposed to have lunch together today.”

Chapel's heart went out to Dr. Bryant's daughter,
but it wasn't his job to console anyone. His job was to make sure nobody else's
kids had to mourn their parents today. “Did she give you anything you can use?
Did she see anybody running away from the house, or tell you about any enemies
Dr. Bryant might have had? Otherwise—”

The detective shrugged and pulled a notepad out of
his jacket pocket. “Julia Taggart, thirty-two, lives in Bushwick. No, nothing
like that. We liked her for this at first—the skinny is she and her mom had some
fights, just screaming matches. But I've seen what people look like after they
kill their moms and she ain't the type, she—”

“Taggart,” Chapel said, his eyes going wide.

“Yeah,” the detective said, “that's her name, does
that mean something to you?”

Angel's voice sounded in his ear. “It definitely
means something to me,” she said.

“Taggart—not Bryant,” Chapel said.

The detective nodded. “Sure. The deceased and her
husband split up back in the late nineties, nothing weird about it, just a
divorce. Dr. Bryant went back to using her maiden name, but the daughter kept
her dad's.”

“Number seven on the kill list is Dr. William
Taggart,” Angel said. “He lives in Alaska.”

Chapel had already made that connection. “Yeah. I
definitely want to talk to her,” he told the detective.

He was led down the stairs and back into the
kitchen. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through lace curtains and gave the room
a yellow glow. There were cops everywhere, most of them just standing around in
black uniforms or suit jackets. In the middle of this tableau, sitting at the
kitchen table, was a woman in her early thirties wearing a white lab coat. Her
eyes were smeared with half-melted makeup, and a teardrop had gathered on the
point of her chin. She had fiery red hair that fell to her shoulders, and under
the lab coat she was wearing jeans and a black sweater, with a single strand of
pearls around her neck.

A cop with a notepad was trying to talk to her, but
Julia Taggart just kept shaking her head. The cop wanted to clarify some details
of her story, but Julia could only mutter short responses. She was clearly
devastated by her mother's death.

This isn't going to be
easy,
Chapel thought. But he had to ask her some questions before he
moved on. “Miss Taggart?” he said. The cops parted to let him through. “Julia?
My name is Chapel. I'm so sorry for your loss.”

She looked up at him with hopeful eyes. Like maybe
he was going to come tell her that her mom wasn't really dead, that it had all
been a terrible mistake.

Chapel had seen that look before. When he'd got
back from Afghanistan, he had visited the family of every one of the Rangers who
died the day he lost his arm. He had thought he could bring them some comfort,
at least let them know their sons or brothers or husbands had died for a good
cause.

Every time he'd been completely
stalled—flummoxed—by that same look. That look of final, unthinking hope in the
face of utter desolation.

Chapel wanted to run away. He wanted to do anything
in the world except talk to this woman, now. What could he possibly tell her?
I'm so sorry, but your mother is dead and you can never
know who did it, or why they did it, and even if I do catch them, I can't
even tell you that.
All because the CIA didn't want its secrets
getting out.

He bit his lip, hard, and sat down next to her.

“We'll get this guy,” he told her. It was all he
was allowed to say—the only shred of comfort he was legally allowed to give. He
hated his job sometimes. “Maybe you can help me get him. I just need to know a
few things.”

She looked away, her eyes darting from his face. He
hadn't told her what she wanted to hear. “I've already answered all your
questions,” she said.

Chapel didn't doubt the police had asked her a
million things already, all the usual questions you asked in an investigation
like this. He had a few he was pretty sure she hadn't heard before. He glanced
at the cop with the notepad, though. He definitely didn't want what he was going
to say written down.

“Maybe I can take you somewhere and buy you a cup
of coffee,” he told her. “Maybe getting away from this house will help jog your
memory.”

“I just . . . want to go home, now,” she
said, looking right into his eyes. “Can I go home? Please?”

Chapel turned to look for the detective—the man he
assumed was in charge here.

“Sure,” the detective said. “You want me to call a
patrol unit to take her there?”

Angel spoke in his ear. “I'll have a cab out front
by the time you get out the door.”

“That won't be necessary,” Chapel told the
detective. “I'll make sure she gets home okay. Do you need to sign her out or
anything?”

The detective shrugged. “We've got her
information.”

Chapel got up from the table and offered Julia a
hand getting up. She shook him off and rose on her own, though she looked a
little wobbly. She followed Chapel out of the house and down to the sidewalk
where, as promised, a cab was waiting for them.

Julia stared at the cab as if she'd never seen one
before. She was in shock, of course, but she pulled herself together visibly and
said, “I live on—”

“Woodbine Street. Don't worry,” Chapel said. Angel
had already given him the address. “I've got this taken care of.”

He opened her door for her and offered his arm as
she started to climb in. Too late he realized he'd given her his left arm. Her
hand brushed his silicone fingers and stopped there. Without getting into the
cab, she stopped and lifted his artificial hand and peered at it like she was
looking at a specimen through a microscope.

“Oh,” she said. “This is really lifelike. I didn't
even notice until just now. What is this, a DEKA Luke arm? I've read about
these.”

Chapel frowned. “It's the most recent version.
Technically it's still just a prototype, but—”

“Typically they only give these to soldiers who
have lost limbs in combat,” she said. She'd had one leg inside the cab. Now she
removed it and put her foot down firmly on the sidewalk. “Mr. Chapel,” she said,
“you're clearly not a policeman. I'm not going anywhere with you until you tell
me exactly what's going on here.”

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:31

“This one's sharp. Watch out, honey,” Angel
said.

Chapel set his jaw. “Miss Taggart—”

“It's Dr. Taggart. I'm a vet,” the woman told
him.

Chapel's eyes went wide. “Really?” That surprised
him—she hadn't seemed the type. “Which branch of service?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Were you in the army, the navy, the air
force?”

She rolled her eyes. “I'm a veterinarian. Okay, I
think we're done. I'll get my own cab, thanks.” She turned and started to walk
away.

“Dr. Taggart,” he said, putting a little iron in
his voice. The tone they'd taught him to use in officer training.

She stopped, but she didn't turn around.

“Your mother's dead, and her killer is still at
large. Your father is William Taggart, right? He's in danger, too. A lot of
people are in danger, and I'm trying to save them.”

“My father is on the other side of the continent,”
she said, whirling around to glare at him. “This was just some random act of
violence. Get your story straight.”

“Your mother wasn't killed by some crazy drug
addict looking for a fix,” he told her. Even saying that much was risking his
mission, but he needed to convince her of the urgency of things. “She was
targeted. Singled out.”

She didn't reply. She didn't walk away, either.

“If I'm going to stop what happened to your mother
from happening again, I need some answers, and I need them now.”

She walked toward him, coming close enough to get
right up in his face. “My whole life people have kept secrets from me. I don't
enjoy it. Are you going to tell me the truth, Mr. Chapel?”

“It's Captain Chapel. That's one true thing,” he
replied.

Her eyes took very careful measure of his face. He
felt like he was being dissected in a laboratory. She shook her head—but then
she got into the cab.

He climbed in beside her. The cabdriver turned and
looked back at them. “You know you've been on the meter this whole time,
right?”

BROOKLYN, NEW
YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:37

As the cab crawled through Brooklyn traffic,
Chapel watched the city go by. It seemed to take forever to pass each house,
each little corner store. Time was ticking away and there was no way to get the
minutes back. Chapel thought about what Angel had told him—in New York City, the
subway was apparently the only way to get anywhere in a timely fashion. He
should have listened to her.

“I really am sorry for your loss,” he told the
woman sitting beside him. “That was true, too. It's got to be . . .
tough.” He reached for more words of sympathy but they were hard to find. “I
didn't know Dr. Bryant, but by all accounts she was a good person.”

“Thanks. I guess,” she said. “Yeah. She was a real
saint. As long as you weren't her daughter.”

“The two of you didn't get along?” The detective
had said so, but he wanted to hear it from her own lips.

“We fought. I was a disappointment to her, and she
never let me forget it. She wanted me to go into the family business and I
didn't.”

“She wanted you to become a genetic counselor?”

Julia shrugged. “Not specifically, not necessarily.
But she and Dad were both scientists,
real
scientists, as she would say. They were geneticists. They met in grad school, at
Oxford. He was working on a second doctorate while she got her first.” She
rubbed at her eyes and then stared at her hands when they came away covered in
melted eye shadow. “Ugh. Do you want to know how he convinced her to marry him?
He drew a Punnett square. That's a chart you make, it matches up the genes two
organisms have and shows how likely their offspring are to have a certain trait.
He showed Mom that if they had kids, there was a statistically significant
probability they would have red hair.”

“I guess it worked,” Chapel said.

She grabbed a strand of her hair and pulled it
around toward her eyes as if she were checking what color it was. Letting it go,
she said, “Too bad he couldn't predict how they would actually get along. He
left us when I was a teenager. Most of what I remember of them is the two of
them shouting at each other.”

“Why did they split up?”

“Like I said, people keep secrets from me. Mom
would never explain—she just said it was a disagreement over ethics. Which could
mean he slept around, or it could mean they differed on their views of stem cell
research. Either way I'd believe it. She made him sound like the worst man on
earth.”

“What about you? Do you get along with him?”

“I haven't spoken to him in years,” she said. “And
then it was just on the phone.”

Chapel tapped on the window with his real fingers.
This wasn't going anywhere. He needed to get back on track. “Did your mother
have an interest in mythology?” he asked.

“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”
She had taken a tissue from her purse and was angrily wiping the makeup from
around her eyes. When he didn't reply, she threw herself back in the cab seat
and sighed. “No. I don't remember her ever talking about mythology.”