MOSAICS: A Thriller (10 page)

“Since this is your first appointment,” she explained
, wrapping a sphygmomanometer cuff around my right arm, “Dr. Swanson will do a physical first.” Her hands were cold and smelled of pineapple lotion, her breath of watermelon. The girl was a fruit basket.

“
Actually, I’m not here for an appointment.” I fished out my badge wallet with my left hand and flipped it open. “Presius, LAPD Homicide.”

Her smile evaporated like rain from a dry storm.
Her lips tightened. She said nothing and kept pumping air into the cuff until it was about to pop. My fingers went numb from lack of blood flow.

“Your BP’s too high,” she
finally sentenced, before removing the cuff from my arm. “You could’ve told me. Now I have to go find the
real
Mr. Cress.” She flopped on the chair across from me and sighed. Her scent drifted my way, now spiced with the staccato of her adrenaline.

The girl’s musical
and
vengeful
. 

She
shook her head and bit hard on her lower lip. “It’s about Amy, isn’t it?”

I nodded, put away my badge and gave her a minute. Her name—Leilani—
was embroidered on the front pocket of her coat.

She pulled a tissue from a box on the countertop and crumpled it in her hands.
“Amy was so nice,” she whispered. “What happened to her is chilling. Gives me nightmares. How could this happen… Everybody loved her here at work.
Everybody
.”

The pen
she’d left by the clipboard rolled off the countertop and on the floor. She considered picking it up, then bit her lip again and didn’t move.

“Did anybody love her a little too much?”

Leilani wrung the tissue in her hands. “You mean romantically? No.” She shook her head, her hair releasing a cantabile of fragrances. João Gilberto started humming again in my head.

“Are you sure about that?”

She gave me the “women-know-better” look. “Amy was gorgeous. I’m sure she had her suitors. But she once told me she got her life back after her divorce. She loved her independence and wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. Her life was divided between the lab and her patients. We’re the busiest HIV clinic in L.A. county.”

“What kind of lab work did she do?”

Her eyes widened. “You don’t know about Dr. Lyons’s vaccine?”

“I tend to be more up-to-date on murders than vaccines,” I said.

She tilted her head and looked at me with a mix of pity and disappointment. “Dr. Lyons is the director of the clinic. He patented a revolutionary vaccine to cure HIV. It took him years to get it tested. The FDA wouldn’t give him the approval until—I think it was two years ago—he made the news by injecting himself at Vaccine International, a yearly world conference on vaccines. It was all over the news.” She paused, searched my face for some kind of recognition. It didn’t come. “We started recruiting patients and high-risk subjects for phase one trials ten months ago.”

“Patients
? Aren’t patients
already
HIV-positive?”

“
Yes, but that’s the point. We want to see if the vaccine can cure them from AIDS.” 

I considered. One
doctor, a revolutionary vaccine, two murders.

“Did you ever meet a patient named Charlie Callahan?”

Leilani’s dark eyes narrowed. “No. But I heard what happened to him. There’s no words, really.” Her lips curled. By then, the tissue in her hands had disintegrated.

“I hear
d he was a patient of Dr. Liu’s,” I said.

She tilted her head. “Amy’s? No, I would’ve seen him personally
—just like I should’ve seen Mr. Cress.” She served me a long, stern glance. I thought of how she’d cut the blood flow in my arm with the sphygmomanometer and figured she wasn’t one to argue with. “I’m not sure who was seeing Charlie Callahan, here at the clinic, but I know he had enrolled in our clinical trial. Patty said she recognized the name.”

“Who’s Patty?”

“Patty Roberts. She’s in charge of enrolling patients in the study—when they agree, that is. She explains everything to them, does the paperwork, and hands them the questionnaires. Everybody here at the clinic was outraged when we learned he’d been killed by a homophobic. We all have friends, family members or patients who are gay.”

I cro
ssed my arms. “What did Patty tell you exactly?”

“That she remembered him because he told her he’d come in to see Dr. Lyons
, but Dr. Lyons no longer accepts new patients. Callahan ended up seeing a different doctor.”

“Do you know who?”

She shook her head. “Could’ve been either Dr. Swanson or Dr. Thompson.”

Thompson
, I thought. I remembered the name from one of the other prescription bottles in Callahan’s evidence boxes.

“Could
Amy have signed one of Callahan’s prescriptions even though he wasn’t her patient? Don’t doctors in the same clinic sign prescriptions for one another when one’s not available?”

She shrugged in the loveliest way. “That’s possible.”

I switched subjects. “Did Amy get along well with Dr. Lyons?”

“Like I said, Amy was very nice to everybody.”

“What about Dr. Lyons? Is he nice to everybody?”

Leilani squirmed out of her chair
and decided to pick up the pen from the floor right then. “Of course,” she said, sitting up again.

“
Right,” I said
. Like I didn’t register the spike in adrenaline in her scent.

She ran her fingers along the back of her neck and studied me carefully. It was a nice neck, long and slender. “Look.
Mr. Cress
,” she teased. “Dr. Lyons is known for making medical students cry. That’s just who he is. But he’s a good person. He fought really hard for his vaccine to be a success.”

“Did he ever make Amy cry?”

Her shoulders drooped. She sighed and looked away.

I leaned forward, her scent singing in my nostrils. “Leilani. Whatever you just thought of, you need to tell me.”

“It probably has nothing to do with anything.”

“If that’s the case then I’ll forget right after you’ve told me.”

She looked down at the shredded tissue in her hands. “Okay. But please don’t say I told you this.”

I grinned.
“I’m a cop, Leilani. I can keep a secret.”

“Amy and Dr. Lyons had
a heated argument the week she was killed. I don’t know what it was about. All I know is that Amy was upset. She stormed out of his office and asked me to wait a few minutes before sending in her next patient. She needed time by herself.”

Now the girl was talking. “She didn’t say anything about the subject of their discussion?”

Leilani shook her head. “No, but I’m guessing it must’ve been about the vaccine trial. Like I said, it had become her priority. We’re one of six clinics in town recruiting people and handing out consent forms. Especially after the conference two years ago, we’ve had volunteers pouring into the clinic. Amy cared very much about the study, and Dr. Lyons...” She brought a hand to her earlobe and fiddled with a long earring. “Dr. Lyons has a strong persona but a generous heart. I’m sure whatever disagreement Amy and he had, it was probably nothing. It’s a—”

“Look who I
found roaming in the hallway.”

A nurse in floral scrubs and
pink clogs stood by the door. She smelled of soda pops and latex gloves and she tried to look sociable but didn’t try too hard. Behind her was a fragile looking little man a hundred and ten years old, give or take a month.

“Mr. Cress went to the loo and couldn’t find his way back,” the nurse explained. She then looked down on me, scrunched her fine brows together, swayed a large hip to the r
ight and said, “And if this is Mr. Cress—who are you?”

SEVEN

____________

“Heated argument? What heated argument? We brainstormed over the next budget report, that’s all. Who gave you that kind of misinformation?”

“We prefer to ask the questions, Doctor,” Satish replied.

Dr. Fredrick Lyons walked fast and in long strides.
A gaudy Hawaiian tie and the neon green of the reading glasses swinging from his neck intentionally clashed with his white-shirt, black-suit attire. He had longish gray locks, a short beard trimmed close to the jaw, and shrewd eyes that sized us up impatiently, yet found the time to linger over a nice pair of legs as we strode across the curving corridor back to the office suites. He looked too wealthy not to be opinionated, and too smart to be unpretentious.

“I already told you everything: I was the first one to leave the party that night. The other guests can confirm. I was home by midnight. No, I didn’t notice anything strange inside or outside her home. She was a pleasant host, cheerful and happy as always. I assume that’s what everybody else told you.”

“We’re not exactly looking for originality, here,” I replied. “Just plain old useful information will do.”

He stopped and gave me a long, condescending look. “If she and I had such a nasty disagreement the day before, why would I even show up at her party?”

I could think of about a dozen reasons but decided to keep them to myself for the time being.

Lyons shared
the front office with Amy Liu—a small corridor where a parched assistant with oversized glasses and a gray hair bun made an anachronistic mismatch with the computer, printer, fax machine and other electronic gadgets she was surrounded with. Her monitor bloomed with so many fingerprints it would’ve made the Trace lab guys ecstatic.

There was a tall and narrow window facing down on a lateral street. Next to the tall and narrow window were three upholstered chairs, the kind that come in a row, and if the guy sitting at one end has a twitch, you either join the twitch or you
go sit somewhere else.

The guy sitting at one end didn’t have a twitch, though. He didn’t have much of anything, really, he just sat there looking like somebody who’s been waiting for so long he’s forgotten the reason he got there.

Luckily, Lyons remembered. “What are you doing here, Medina?”

Medina raised his head slowly, almost lethargically. His eyes squinted as if staring into too much light then settled on the reading glasses dangling from Lyons’s chest. “I c—came to ask you about the new s—sequences, sir. They’re not a—aligned, and if I include them in the s—sample—”

“Of course they’re not aligned. That’s what I hired you for, to align sequences.” Lyons opened the door to his office. “Did you reply to the crap from reviewer number three?”

Medina rose from his chair and leaned against the wall. He was tall and lanky and kept blinking at the floor as if the light from the ceiling were too bright. “N—not yet. I n—need to include the new s—sequences to r—run the
additional tests he asked for.”

Lyons stood so close to Medina’s face their noses almost touched. “Then go—align—the sequences,” he hissed.

Medina blinked at the floor one more time then scuttled off.

Lyons motioned us inside his office. “The man only stutters when he’s nervous. Drives me up the wall.” He stepped inside and strode to his desk.

Lyons’s office was at least twice as large as Amy’s, with a hazed view of the San Gabriel Mountains. He retreated behind a curved mahogany desk that smelled as new and expensive as his clothes, and pretended not to be concerned while Satish and I took our time perusing the room.

The place was a bouquet of smells. It took me half a second to pin Lyons’s aftershave—poppy and fig fragrance, Italian brand, sixty bucks a bottle. Then came the secretary’s perfume, as antiquate
d as her hairdo. Several other scents weaved in, probably from daily meetings with staff and collaborators. And finally something totally new and foreign, a mix of dry soil and leather, of spiced perspiration and bags of rice…

Two djembe drums sat in one corner of the room. On the shelves, between the numerous books on virology, immunology, microbiology, and a bunch other -
ogy
’s, were wood statuettes of elephants, antelopes, and giraffes. From the wall, next to Lyons’s degrees and certifications, stared a row of black African masks, with slits instead of eyes, and long horns coming out of their heads. Woven baskets in vivid colors—bright yellow, red and blue—decorated the desk and coffee table.

The p
ictures on Lyons’s desk displayed images of African children playing barefoot in a dirt lot. In one of the photos, I recognized Lyons standing in front of a hut, next to a tall, skinny man. Half of the man’s teeth were missing, as well as most of his hair, yet that didn’t deter him from grinning from ear to ear. The next frame depicted a blonde woman in her early forties, heavily made up. She had plenty of hair and teeth, and yet her smile wasn’t even half as heartfelt as the grinning guy’s standing in front of the hut.

Hair and teeth don’t make happiness.

Go tell dentists and hair stylists
.

Satish took a seat in one of the leather armchairs. “We understand you and Dr. Li
u worked together and discussions came up all the time. We just want to know exactly what it was that you two discussed the day before she was killed.”

Lyons sh
ot both hands up in the air in mock surrender. “Fine, fine,” he said. “I’m easy, okay? I manage a lot of people and a lot of grant money and as you know, guys managing a lot of people and a lot of grant money don’t usually win popularity contests. I don’t care, okay? I’m not in this to win a popularity contest. I’m in this to stop a pandemic. So, yes, I’ll tell you what our conversation was about. Like I said, despite what you’ll hear elsewhere, I’m easy.”

I smiled and sat i
n the chair next to Satish. I had yet to find a witness who admitted to being difficult.

“It was about the vaccine trial.” Lyons brought a hand to his mouth and carefully brushed the corners of his goatee. “Amy wanted to change some of the wording on the informational packages we hand out at enrollment. A lot of people come in because they’ve heard of our study in the news. Amy was worried the wording wasn’t clear enough on what they were getting and
not
getting when they enrolled.”

Satish took notes.

I raised my opinionated brow. “Of course, injecting yourself in a room filled with paparazzi was a great move to make sure you g
ot a lot of coverage, Dr. Lyons.”

The man regarded me with contempt
. “Do you know how many years I’ve waited to see my vaccine finally tested on humans, Detective? Twelve. Twelve long years, during which the number of people living with HIV rose from twenty-five million to thirty-three million. My vaccine was created on a computer instead of harvested from somebody’s plasma. I had to perform dozens of tests to show that my strain was viable, stable, and safe.” He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and showed me the inside of his arm. “I poked myself. Yes, it generated a lot of buzz in the news. It was for a good cause.”

Satish raised his eyes
from his notebook. “Yet Amy was worried?”

“Cautious, I suppose. When people come in they get randomly assigned to either the control group or the study group. So they may or may not get the vaccine, but they’re not told what they get. Amy was worried that people
could be misled.”

Satish’s pen squeaked on the notepad. “Her request seems reasonable. Why the altercation, then?”

His right brow shot up. “We go out on a limb to make sure our volunteers get all the information they need. They sign a waiver clearly stating they may not get the vaccine but only a placebo, and even if they get the vaccine, it’s still an experimental trial and there’s no guarantee it will be protective. And it was not an altercation! We discussed, like we often did.”

“
Amy was quite upset after your ‘discussion’,” I interjected.

Lyons exhaled. “Look. I don’t know who you’ve been talking to. She didn’t look
upset to me. She didn’t like my answer, either—that was clear. Amy is—” He swallowed, inhaled, then tuned his voice down a notch. “Amy
was
a brilliant physician, but sometimes she wanted to do things her way. Well, I happen to be the principal investigator on this study, so she had to back off. I told her so, and we left it at that. No harm done. If she was upset, it wasn’t because of something I said.”

“And you’re pretty certain about that?”

“Absolutely.”

I laced my fingers across my lap and smiled my polite smile. I love folks like Lyons. Men who thrive on certainties, whose vocabulary is peppered with phrases like absolutely, most certainly, without any doubt; whose world is split between black and white, liberal and conservative, religious and agnostic, straight and gay. No shades in between.

One of the djembe drums was standing next to my chair so I gave it a little try with the ball of my thumb. It made a nice, round tone.

“Careful with that, Detective. It’s handmade.”

“You’ve got a lot of handmade stuff in here, Dr. Lyons.”

A proud smile grew on his face like a bad habit. “Souvenirs from my trips to Africa. The southern part of the continent has been hit hard by AIDS. Entire villages spread thin beca
use of the pandemic. Kids orphaned by HIV who are raised by her grandparents. Babies born HIV positive.”

“You travel often to Africa?” Satish asked.

“I wish I could go more often. Last time I was there was two years ago. I visited my colleagues in Johannesburg then toured around the villages. I go there thinking to give some hope and the people end up giving
me
hope. We can beat this. We
have
to.”

“What can you tell us about Charlie Callahan, Dr. Lyons?”

He blinked at me, pretending he hadn’t recognized the name.

“I believe he
enrolled in your study about a year ago?” I insisted. The hell he didn’t recognize the name.

“Oh. Mr. Callahan.” He took a glass paperweight from a stack of papers on his desk and passed it from one hand to the other. My eyes fell on the first paper on the stack. Somebody had scribbled comments all over the first page. One table in particular, had been circled numerous times, next to the word “NO,” followed by several exclamation marks. Interestingly, Amy was the first name in the list of authors, Lyons was the last.

Dr. Lyons is known to make medical students cry
.

“You have to understand,” Lyons said. “We don’t go by patient names, and—”

“I know. The usual HIPAA crap. I’m sure you were informed when Mr. Callahan became suddenly unavailable for your study?”

Satish shifted in his chair. “What my partner’s trying to say—”

“I get the question. Yes, when the news came out, I was informed about Mr. Callahan’s participation in the study, but just because of the way he died. Of course, I was shocked when I heard. We’re all quite sensitive about the subject. Homophobia is something we despise. Many of my patients tell me they’re scared. Under any other circumstance, participants remain anonymous. People drop out of studies all the time and we don’t keep track of where they end up or why they stopped showing up for samples—we have statistical tools to account for that.”

I shoved a hand in my pocket and fished out a paperclip.

“Do you think Amy may have died for the same reason? Homophobia?” Satish asked.

Lyons’s hand froze around the paperweight. His lower lip trembled, a nerve in his temple twitched. I blinked and the imperturbable, self-confident Dr. Lyons was back, no trace of hesitancy in his baritone voice as he said, “I’ve no idea. It’s something I—I
can’t even begin to comprehend. Amy was a great asset to our group. A fine scientist and a good—friend.” He choked out the last word.

There was a moment of silence, before the paperclip flew from my hand and skid
ded under the desk. I delved to retrieve it and on my way back I took a good sniff at the paper.

I smelled Amy on it. And something vaguely sweet, enough to perk my interest. I leaned forward for a second sniff, but our time was up. Lyons swiveled away from the desk and shot to his feet. “I’d love to chat more, but I’ve got a meeting in five minutes.”

He shook our hands as if we’d just sealed a million dollar deal.

As we walked to the door, I took one last peek at the children framed in Lyons’s photos. They were dressed in rags, playing with broken sticks and a deflated ball, and yet their smiles were happy and full.

They end up giving
me
hope
.

I turned and met his eyes. “Do you think you’ll nail it, Doctor?” I asked. “The vaccine—do you believe it’ll eventually stop the pandemic?”

He’d already lifted the receiver of his phone. He put it back down and gave me a condescending smile. “I’ve no doubt we will succeed. We owe it to those kids you’re staring at.”