MOSAICS: A Thriller (15 page)

Lyons didn’t reply. He rubbed his eyes until they were bloodshot. “What time is it?” he drawled.

“Time to take this conversation downtown,” I replied, holding up the picture I’d just found.

TWELVE

____________

“It was planted.”

“There’s a date and place in the back. It’s in your handwriting, Dr. Lyons.”

“So? It was planted.”

I rapped my fingers on the table. The guy had more certainties than the Pope.

After being in Lyons’s refrigerated house for over four hours, the squad room felt like a furnace. Satish loosened his tie knot. I undid the damn thing all together and let the tie hang around my neck.

Lyons hunched over the table in the interview cubicle and played with a Styrofoam cup filled with black coffee. After the latest developments, I’d changed my mind on the whiskey.

A greasy pizza box lay open on the table, Lyons’s two slices still untouched. A stubborn fly stalked the pepperoni. Satish shooed it off, just out of habit. Unconcerned, the fly came back, just out of habit.

Lyons didn’t move. His nose was stuck up in the air and his eyes were
scrutinizing us, either pitying us or despising us, I couldn’t decide which. I dropped my hand on the picture for the tenth time. It showed Amy Liu in a bikini and a sexy pose. Her face had been scribbled over with a pen, but it was her all right. And the fact that, of all things, her face had been scribbled over would’ve made any shrink like Washburn prickle with excitement.

Planted my ass
.

Vargas put Lyons at Amy’s house the night Amy had been killed.
The kid was ready to testify that the two were romantically involved. The picture I’d found was drenched in Laura Lyons’s perfume. What if Laura had found out about the affair?

I tried to get a whiff of nitrile gloves from Lyons, but
any smell his hands may have carried earlier had been washed out after Cohen helped him clean his hands and cuts earlier at the house. All I could sense now was blood and hydrogen peroxide.

“Look, Doc,” I said. “We wanna believe you, ’kay? But you’ve got to help us out. There’s a bunch of holes in your story and we need to fill ’em up or else our boss is going to come after us. And if he comes after us, we have no choice but come after
you
.”

Lyons said nothing.

Sat indulged in his broad, reassuring smile. It fell unnoticed. “
Numero uno
,” he said. “We know you had an affair with Amy Liu. We have a witness who puts you at her house. He says you two were intimate.”

I thought the news would surprise him. Instead, the man didn’t even flinch. He looked down at the pen, bent the clip backwards and started twisting it. Swarms of freckles netted the back of his hands. They were interesting freckles, the kind that form patterns, and the more you stare the more patterns you see. Somehow I found it fascinating.

I didn’t smell fear or sorrow. I smelled annoyance, impatience, regret. I smelled a life of overachieving and giving orders, of Harvard degrees and Ivy League recognition, of important handshakes and well-orchestrated battles of egos.

I tapped Amy’s face in the picture, what was still visible
of it through the inflicted scribbles. “You know what I’m thinking, Doc? I’m thinking Laura did this.” Lyons flinched at his wife’s name. “She found out about the affair and confronted you. You went alone to Amy’s party the night she was killed—was it because Laura had a reason to hold a grudge against Amy? Did Laura kill Amy or did you? And then things got out of hand—”

“Stop talking about my dead wife like that,” he snapped. “Laura didn’t need to find out about Amy. Laura
knew
about Amy.”

There was a pause.
Satish and I stared at one another.

A
crack as thin as ice came to Lyons’s voice. “You don’t get it, do you?”

I
spoke nicely. “Help us get it.”

“We f
iled for divorce two months ago. You can ask Laura’s lawyer. It was a mutual agreement, and we were in friendly terms. Laura was working on the grant proposal—the grant was all she’d been doing for the past four weeks. That’s why she hadn’t started looking for her own place yet. We’d agreed I’d pay her half and she’d move out as soon as time allowed.” He swallowed. “The grant deadline is next Monday, and—”

He gave me one of those looks that you feel like washing off your face like spit. “You don’t understand. I still loved my wife.”

Satish leaned back in his chair. His smile was understanding and embracing and it wisely spread to a grin. “As a matter of fact we do, Doctor. Especially us cops. We love our wives so much we feel the need to have three or four at least. Ask my partner. How many wives does a cop have on average, Track?”

I got out of the chair and started pacing. “Two and a half. The half comes from people like me who’d rather exchange beds than wedding vows.”

Lyons didn’t register any of the words we’d said. He stared into his coffee cup, by now as lukewarm as the room. “You’ve got it all wrong. They’re after me. Laura… oh god, this is despicable. First Amy, then Laura. Don’t you see? They’re after me. They want to kill
me
.”

Satish and I exchanged a long glance.

I dropped back in the chair. “Why d’you think you’re the target?”

Lyons straightened his back and put on a face like I’d just asked why he was wearing pants. “They’ve been after me since
my research focused on the origin of HIV.”

We welcomed the statement with a long, thoughtful silence.

After the long, thoughtful silence, Satish spoke. “Why would anyone be upset over a disease?”

Lyons’s thin lips stretched. It was a sad, bitter smile. “We’re scholars, right? You’d think research would be respected, whether it’s stem cell research or gene therapy or disease epidemiology. You’d think we’d civilly discuss things among ourselves.” He shook his head. “There’s always somebody who knows bet
ter.” He tapped the pen with the bandaged hand and twirled the Styrofoam cup with the other. “Have you heard of HIV/AIDS
denialism
?”

We hadn’t.

“When the HIV virus was first isolated, back in the ‘eighties, a bunch of colleagues were skeptical. Their position was—still is—that drugs and certain behaviors cause AIDS, not HIV. Since so many years pass between the HIV infection and the onset of AIDS, for a while these claims found quite some support in the scientific community. Robert Wilner, an MD from North Carolina, went as far as to inject himself with blood from an HIV-positive patient to prove his conviction. He never got AIDS, by the way. He died of a heart attack one year later.”

“I suppose that could work too,” I commented.

Lyons didn’t take notice. “Conspiracy theorists claimed HIV had been engineered by the US military. Some theorized it came from the polio vaccine, others from the smallpox vaccine. In the meantime, HIV-positive people carried on with their lives, which included high-risk behaviors that caused the number of infections to rise. HIV-positive pregnant women in South Africa were denied anti-retroviral drugs that could’ve prevented their babies to become infected. All because of the denialist movement.” Lyons twisted the clip of the pen until it broke. “Ideas are powerful. They can give life and they can take it away.”

For a few minutes all we heard was the intermittent buzzing of the fly and the drone of traffic down North Los Angeles Street.

Satish shifted in his chair and made it squeak. “It’s been almost ten years, though.”

“And th
e conspiracy theory hasn’t died,” Lyons retorted.

“What conspiracy?” 

He sighed, his eyes hardened. “For some people it’s more feasible to believe in some genetically engineered disease mysteriously introduced in the environment than a fast mutating virus that jumped from monkeys to humans less than one hundred years ago. I’ve dedicated my entire life in proving them wrong. Denialists hate people like me. They send us threat letters and emails on a regular basis. I delete them and that’s the end of it.”

“You never filed a complain with the police?”

Lyons made a brisk gesture as if annoyed by the question. “Of course I did. I even hired a private bodyguard back in 2002. I was traveling a lot, giving talks and participating in board meetings. I don’t take chances with my life.”

The fly had finished its tour of all
the pepperoni slices. It crawled along the cardboard then flew on Lyons’s Styrofoam cup. He stared at it vacantly. It never occurred to him to shoo it away. There were a lot of things that had never occurred to him before.

I got up and looked out the window. The workday was coming to an end, and the One-Ten droned its evening commute. From the squad room, I heard chairs drag and murder books snap closed. Laughter, yawns, a pat on the shoulder. A “Hey, wanna grab a beer?” that tapped into a web of solitude we don’t always have the guts to face.

“You’re staying for dinner, Dr. Lyons, right?” I quipped.

The man considered the proposal while chewing on his lower lip. “Actually, I’d rather go home, now. It’s been a long day.”

His voice was plain, his manners calm. I no longer smelled adrenaline. The guy really wanted to go home and have a good night’s sleep. And maybe wake up tomorrow and find it was all a bad dream.

I gave him my best smile. “I understand, Doc. It’s been a lon
g day for me and my partner, too. You wanna know why? Because some people deny AIDS, others deny murder. That’s why.”

That put him right back on alert mode. He flattened his palms on the table and stared at us. I couldn’t tell if he was shocked or outraged by my remark. “I told you everything,” he said.

“Actually,” Satish said, “I never got to
numero dos
.”

“What?”
he said.

“You haven’t told us what you did when you found your dead wife in the study. At least forty minutes went by before you finally picked up the phone and called nine-one-one.”

If Lyons was feigning surprise, h
e was doing it remarkably well. “Forty minutes? What are you talking about? I saw her on the floor and I—I—” He swallowed, his hand lost in the air as if trying to weave back memories. Then he dropped it on the table. “I called nine-one-one. That’s all I did. I was in shock.”

So shocked he has the presence of mind to put the mug back in the sink and rinse it
.

Satish leaned forward and pushed the pizza box
toward him. “Have some food, Doctor. We’re gonna be here for a while.”

He
shook his head and put on a strained smile. “I thought of reviving her. She wasn’t breathing, and—and there was nowhere to blow air into. She just wasn’t there anymore. I—” He swallowed hard. “I had this patient, once, in my residency. He shot himself through the chin and missed the vital organs. He blew off his face, but he was still alive. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t talk. It was horrific to watch. The idiot couldn’t even kill himself. What were we supposed to do? Let him live with no face?” He stared at the fly then out of the blue shooed it away. His anger rippled the air and drifted to my nostrils.

He drew in a sharp breath and tuned down his voice. “Laura—when I saw her this morning—her face looked like that. But she wasn’t breathing. She didn’t have a pulse. And that—that was good. In a twisted way, but it was good.”

A thought occurred to me then. I felt goose bumps prickle at the back of my neck, and they brought my temperature down a few notches. “You didn’t—did you wait for her to die?”

His sharp, icy eyes felt like a burn on my skin.

“She wasn’t breathing,” he said. “There was no pulse.”

It was getting chilly. Or maybe it was all that snow in the middle of summer.

“Is that what you found out when you went back to Amy’s house the night she was killed?”

He bristled. “I—Why do you keep bringing back Amy? I’m here because my wife was murdered this morning!
” He lost it. He slammed a hand on the table—the one he hadn’t injured—and rose from the chair. “I did not go back to Amy’s house. Amy’s dead, and so is my wife. Now do your fucking job and catch the bastard who did this before he comes and kills me too!”

Satish’s eyes g
ave me the cue. We both rose. “Please sit down, Dr. Lyons,” Satish said.

Th
e man flopped back in the chair like a used magazine. That last spur had taken all his energy. I walked back to the squad room, grabbed the brown paper bag Katie had left on my desk, and returned to the interview cubicle.

Lyons’s eyes darted. “What’s that?”

I took the recorder out of the paper bag and put it on the table. “So you never went back to Amy’s house that night?”

Lyons straightened up and perched on the edge of the chair. Something was finally biting that cool ass of his. “No. I did not. Why? What’s this about?”

I pressed the play button. There was static, then the operator’s voice,

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

At the other end of the line someone breathed into the receiver. “I’m at 453 Santa Fe Terrace, in Montecito Heights.”