MOSAICS: A Thriller (17 page)

“You looked right in my direction. I waved at you
.

“I can’t see that far away
.

“
Then you should've stopped
, I yell.

“Why would I stop if I didn’t see you
! he yells back.”

I laughed. “Guess you couldn’t argue, huh?”

Satish dipped his hand in his pocket and fished out his car keys. “Think about it, Track. You can’t argue with denial. People are much better at correcting others than they are at correcting themselves.” He opened the driver’s door. “Are you driving or riding?”

“Driving,” I said. “I’m heading home once we’re done at the bank, hoping to beat rush hour.”
It’d been a long day since I’d awakened on my bedroom floor in a pool of sweat.

He nodded, slid behind the wheel and started the car.

I wiped the smile off my face and climbed into my Dodge.

You can’t argue with denial
.

Can you, Ulysses
? Said a voice inside my head.

“I’m fine,” I replied to the voice. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel
just
fine.”

THIRTEEN

____________

The dark chrysalis on the white wall hits him like a punch in the face.

A spit of black on his pristine walls.

He puts a hand on the doorframe, then slowly slides his fingers closer, without touching it. He can’t get himself to touch the hairy thing.

He stares, pondering.

A dark shell of exoskeleton, with a head, a thorax, two antennae encased inside. And soft, whispery wings waiting to come out.

He could squash it in one swift movement. The thought of the yellowish blotch it would leave on the white wall disgusts him, though.

“Hector! Close the damn door, it’s blowing a draft.”

He moves his hand away, closes the door. It’ll be a few more days before the moth ecloses, he muses, taking his shoes off. He dusts off the tip of his loafers, sprays them, places them in their box, and then the box on the top shelf of the shoe rack by the entrance. He retrieves his slippers.

The pupa can stay one more day. He’ll decide later when to get rid of it.

“You’re late. Rachel left an hour ago. Where the hell have you been?”

He keeps thinking
about the gypsy moth chrysalis as he thoroughly washes his hands, rinses, then washes them one more time, lathering under scorching hot water. Gypsy moths are diurnal. It’ll pupate in one-to-two weeks, he figures.

“I was supposed to have Bonefos half an hour ago. But of course, you had to be late. What do you care about your mama
anyway, huh? I’m stuck in bed for the rest of my life, and you don’t give a fucking shit.”

The kitchen is too hot.
The sun’s been filtering through the tall windows all day and now it feels like a balmy greenhouse. He draws the curtains and cranks up the air conditioning.

“Did you just turn the AC on? How many times do I have to tell you it gives me a headache? How can I have a headache on top of everything else, huh?”

Gypsy moths sometimes lay their eggs in shoes and clothing. He’ll have to check all closets, maybe drop a few balls of camphor here and there, even though he hates the smell.

He
starts the kitchen faucet and lets the water run as he lines up syringes, spoons, and a bowl on the countertop. The pantry shelves are filled with boxes of latex gloves, paper towels, cans of formula and protein powder, sterile gauzes and feeding bags—everything sorted by expiration date. Makes it easier to find things. He gloves up, pours two cups of formula and one of protein powder in the bowl, adds warm water, one spoonful of sugar, then stirs. He rips open the wrapping of a feeding bag, pours the brownish batter inside, places the bag onto a tray together with the syringe, more gloves, a roll of gauze, the bottle of Roxanol.

“There you are, you scoundrel. You look well fed, you do.”

The smell is revolting. The sweet stench of decay and urine, purulent bedsores whose reek can’t be covered by any amount of hydrogen peroxide, bleach, or disinfectant.

“Why are you late again? Oh, forget it. You’ll never tell me.”

He stoops by the bed, pulls up the covers. The urine bag feels warm even through the gloves. He snaps it off, replaces it with a fresh one, caps the full one and seals it away in the medical waste bin in the bathroom. When he comes back, he’s wearing a new set of gloves.

“It’s not that girl again, is it? You can’t marry her, Hector. You just can’t. She’s such a spoiled bitch, that one. How is she ever going to take care of me, huh? You need somebody who’s loving. And car
ing. Not like Rachel, who sits here all day doing crossword puzzles and blabbering over her phone. You gotta fire her. And you gotta come home earlier, ‘cause she doesn’t care if you’re back or not. She just leaves. Ouch, gentle there, now.”

He
ctor stares at his mother’s taut stomach, riddled by raised, purple veins. Everywhere else, her skin is a papery, transparent film over brittle bones. As if the sarcoma sucked all the flesh and collected it on the lower abdomen, making it swell up like a ripe watermelon. A J-peg feeding tube sticks out of her side like a long, misplaced phallus. He soaks some gauze with disinfectant and cleans the skin around the port, before applying dabs of antibacterial ointment.

“I said gentle, do
you hear me when I speak? Or do you simply not care? Stuck to a hospital bed for the rest of my life, and my own son doesn’t give a fucking shit.”

He fills the syringe with a dose of Roxanol and squirts it down the tube. By reflex, she starts sucking on her gums, making little smacking sounds like a baby.

“What’s it gonna be tonight, Hector? Cannelloni or lasagna?”

The bloated stomach quivers with the spasms of forlorn laughter. It rattles into a cough and then ebbs off. He flushes water down the tube, hangs the feeding bag on the IV pole, and connects it to the J-peg. He tosses the syringe and gloves in the bin,
then hauls the trash bag to the dumpster outside. When he comes back, he lathers and rinses his hands three times.

“Do you remember the lasagna your mama used to make, Hector? Ah, those were the days. The house would fill with the aroma of simmering ragú and onions. Nobody makes lasagna the way I did. I bet you miss it, Hector, don’t you? Hey! Hector! Where the hell are you going now?”

The office is the coolest room in the house. That’s where he keeps the computer. It chimes as he boots it, his thoughts drifting again to the moth pupating on the wall. How did he miss the larva crawling around the house? Disgusting creatures, all covered in hairs.

“Hector! I’d told you to turn off the damn AC! Why don’t you ever listen to me, huh? You cursed me, that’s what you did. You cursed me to this fucking bed hoping you’d get rid of me, but you’re wrong. You hear me? You’re dead wrong!”

He inserts his jump drive into the USB port, clicks on the icon and waits, excitement prickling at his fingers.

“You’re a fool if you think I’m gonna die this easily. I’m gonna make your life a living hell. I’m gonna die… long and… slow, I’m… gonna… Fool.”

The house is silent now, save for the soft whirring of the computer and the crackling snores drifting from the bedroom. He stares at the monitor and beams. Thin lines of colors and gaps crowd the screen, so densely spaced together the eyes get lost and feel jarred.

Not Hector’
s eyes, though.

To his eyes, every line is a code to decipher, a new language with
which he can dominate the world. It’s his newly found key to glory, fame, and, finally, revenge.

A long awaited revenge.

FOURTEEN

____________

We had three more tiles. They were identical to the old ones, except for the code at the back. Same shape, same color, same subtle smell—rotten sweet, like a sugary fruit starting to ferment.

It was past six when I got home. I found the usual note at my door—my still unresolved missing persons—but no
lahmajoun
this time (the Armenian pizza), only the words, “Please find her.”

Something edible would’ve been nice too
.

I guess I’d slacked on my P.I. job and no longer deserved provisions.

I tossed the note on the couch, opened the fridge, took out the largemouth fillets I’d left to marinate, and turned the oven on. I fed Will and The King, then walked to the bedroom, removed my holsters, guns, cell phone, handcuffs, and all the paraphernalia I carry around my waist, and dumped it all on the bed.

I stripped off my clothes and stepped into the shower.

The tiles kept nagging me.

Aquamarine, green, and red. Why not orange this time?

Maybe he just ran out of those
. 

What about the
lesions he inflicted on the victims: scalp and feet on Amy, scalp, feet, and hands on Laura.
I can see the violence escalating, moving up to mutilation
, Washburn had said. Was there a meaning for the feet and hands? Was there a reason why he wrote THE END at the bottom of Laura’s grant draft?

I let chilled water wash down my face.

Two victims, maybe three, plenty of traces, and still no clue.

I stopped the water and sat on the edge of the tub, naked and dripping.

The asshole is no idiot. He’s teasing us
.

I pulled on a shirt, a pair of shorts, and padded back into the kitchen. The oven was nice and hot, but somehow I felt a strange apathy inside, as if my head were in a different time zone than the rest of my body.

My eyes strayed to the table, overflowing with unread
Fish and Game
issues, unopened junk mail, and an elderly lady smiling from underneath a mop of silvery hair, next to a brown envelope, the one delivered a couple of weeks earlier together with another loaf of
lahmajoun
. I opened the envelope and fished out a black scarf, which I brought to my nose. I smelled the
lahmajoun
, of course.
Brilliant
. And then hairspray, talc, lavender.

Six weeks and I still hadn’t found the lady. I hadn’t put too much effort into it, either.

Damn it, some evenings are meant to make you feel a failure
.

How about you start over and try to do something right, Ulysses
?

I turned the oven off and placed the
fillets back into the fridge.

Will looked at me in dismay.

“Come on, buddy. We’re going for a ride.”

That was enough to make him
loll his tongue in contentment again. I grabbed the cell phone, the leftover
lahmajoun
from the day before, my Glock, and left.

It’s dinner on the freeway tonight
.

I still had a couple of hours of daylight and intended to use them.

*  *  *

When I
can’t solve a puzzle, I let it sit for a bit and muse over something else, possibly another conundrum I’ve set aside a while back. And my last unfinished puzzle was Katya Krikorian, the Armenian woman who’d vanished after visiting a friend in El Sereno. Katya’s car—an old Honda Civic from the early ’nineties—was found parked a few blocks away from her friend’s house, one mile south from Huntington Drive.

And that’s exactly where I left my Charger.

The friend Katya had just visited—Lyanne Norris, age fifty-nine—had terminal cancer and spent her days in bed. Her nurse had answered the door when I went to see her. She told me Lyanne was sleeping and confirmed that Katya used to visit her once or twice a month. She typically spent about an hour and then left.

When I asked Lyanne’s nurse if
she had any idea why Katya would leave her car one mile away from there she replied she’d overheard Lyanne recommend a good hiking trail up a set of stairs in that neighborhood. The police had already canvassed all trails within a two-mile radius from where Katya’s car had been found, before the case had gone cold and Katya’s brother had resolved to hire me.

Turns out, there are a lot of stairs in El Sereno.
The ones I’d found back in June led to no trailhead. I’d resolved to check out the rest in the next few days, but my resolution had been sidetracked by the Byzantine Strangler.

Tonight I was determined to find the trailhead.

Rows of trashcans were lined up against cracked stucco walls. Eucalyptus and palm trees poked out of the wavy landscape, and gray antenna dishes craned their faces from red shingle roofs.
For Lease
signs and rusty pick-up trucks were embedded in the bushes and had become part of the landscape. The air smelled of barbecue and fresh laundry tumbling in the dryer.

Dogs barked, kids screamed, a mower droned.

Will trotted ahead of me while I mused. Why would Katya park two miles away from her friend’s house?

I walked up the street, the hillside to my left a yellow incline overflowing from a concrete slab wall. The high-pitched laughter of a comedy show spilled out of an open window. Bearded palm tree
s drew long shadows on the pavement. The sky turned sunset orange. I found myself at the bottom of a steep staircase climbing up the hillside.

Golden sunrays shimmered down the steps, and up at the top all I could see was sky.

Another staircase to nowhere
.

It didn’t look familiar, so
I decided to check it out anyways. I whistled, Will doubled back and flew up the stairs skipping three steps at the time.

I need an extra set
of legs
,
too
.

By the time I got to the last step I was drenched in sweat.

There was an unpaved, rutted road snaking through dry land covered in rock, yellow weeds, and the occasional oasis of dogwoods, oaks, and intricate shrubbery. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing there, but sometimes you feel like you’re part of some greater plan and you just need to play along.

Bullshit, I just needed to convince myself I was doing something useful. So I followed the ruts like Dorothy followed the yellow brick road.

The sun lowered on the horizon and shimmered with hues of pink and yellow. Evening came with its soft smells of grass, wild melon and eucalyptus leaves.

Will had a ball marking the trail with his stuff. Makes you wonder if dogs’ bowels
and bladders ever run dry. 

I could hear the drone of the Ten in the distance, and the humming of the million voices of the City of Angels. A snake swished across the weeds, next to an empty can of soda, a few cigarette butts, a flattened box of condoms, a slab of rock spray-painted in blue.

The place was far from abandoned.

Ulysses, you’re wasting your time. This is not where a sixty-two-year-old would hang out for a stroll.

Ulysses, shut up
.

The road narrowed to a trail and the vegetation started closing in. Vines of wild melons choked old pieces of junk: a rusty truck fender, a slashed tire, black shreds of tarp. No longer baked by the heat, the soil released new scents only I could sense. I stopped, crouched and inhaled.

A smell, distant, oily, earthly, vaguely reminiscent of molded cheese
.

Will stepped on his tracks and looked at me. I nodded, he took off.

I followed him, past a tree stump, past a pile of branches in a sea of weeds, and into an intricate jumble of shrubs. On the ground, three small rocks of the same size had been lined up in a row.

A mark
.

Next to the rocks,
low branches had been recently snapped. I crouched, pulled them apart and uncovered an opening through the canopy of twigs and dead leaves. I got to my hands and knees and crawled inside.

The smell peaked. It was strong and foul and I had to swallow several times not to gag.

By my side, Will whined impatiently. He smelled it, too.

I snapped branches, pulled out weeds and shoved away dead foliage until I exposed one end of an old sheet of corrugated metal. I grabbed it with
both hands and tried to pull, but it didn’t yield. No way to tell how deep underground it was buried. Will barked, the smell clearly doing a number on his senses. I brushed my hand along it and uncovered something that looked like a second mark—three painted tacks along the edge. 

I found
a splintered two-by-four nearby and used it to break the soil around the panel. I dug with my bare hands, prodding and tugging with the two-by-four until it yielded. An old, screeching smell of decay rushed to my face, so strong it made my eyes water.

Even Will retreated.

Corpse wax
.

I shoved the panel to the side and
sent it sprawling against the shrubs.

Buried in the dirt was an old concrete cistern, about two feet wide and six feet long, probably a remnant of back when this part of town was farmland.
The bottom was covered in black trash bags. One was torn open. Suddenly exposed to the light, from its gaping hole crawled out little creatures with multiple sets of legs: centipedes, beetles, spiders, scorpions. They ran in circles over the trash bags like a crowd of underage drinkers busted out of a bar.

“Party’s over, guys.”

I prodded the torn bag with a stick, but it felt empty. I shoved the stick in the hole and pulled. The bag came up offering no resistance, only a handful of dirt and sticks spilled from the hole. I prodded the other bags, and this time I felt something inside.

Katya got chopped up
, my first thought.

The pit looked old, though, older than six weeks, when Katya Krikorian
had disappeared.

I’d had enough experience with corpse wax to know that if it gets on your skin the ree
k will stay with you for days—corpse wax doesn’t wash off, you need to sweat it away. I gently poked a hole in the nearest bag and pried it open. What came out wasn’t a piece of sixty-two-year-old Katya. It was a charred little hand, no wider than an inch, one flimsy finger falling off right as I gently pulled it out of the bag.  

A hand no
wider than an inch
…
Damn it.