MOSAICS: A Thriller (18 page)

FIFTEEN

____________

The red ember of a cigarette breathed deep into the night then turned into ashes. Detective Ruben Ganzberg, from Hollenbeck Station, inhaled, a suspended look in his dark eyes, as if he were holding the woman of his dreams. He savored the cigarette in his mouth, laces of smoke curling up against the streetlight shafts.

I sat on the stairs
at the bottom of the trail and rapped a finger on my knee. The medical examiner on call had agreed to meet us here at the trailhead so we could all drive together to the water tank.

Will sat patiently next to me, his nuzzle nestled on my lap.

“And you said you came to investigate a missing persons?” Ganzberg asked.

I
nodded and waved to some indefinite point down the road. “Her car was found in this neighborhood.”

“Man.
Life’s a bitch,” he said and took another drag. He smoked the cig all the way to the butt, then tossed it on the ground and crushed it with the heel of his shoe.

I kept digging my nose in the collar of my shirt and smelling corpse wax even though I hadn’t touched any of the bags. I was ravenous and stinky, and I tend to be in a bad mood when I’m ravenous and stinky. A little
jazz in the background would’ve helped, but my car was too far and I doubted Ganzberg’s car stereo would’ve been equipped with anything different than Bruce Springsteen.

The headlights of a patrol unit washed on us. The driver’s window came down and a copper with a shaved head and a child’s face saluted us. “I brought the lights.”

“We’re still waiting for the coroner,” Ganzberg said.

The copper’s forehead corrugated. “Do you want me to radio the watch commander and try to locate him?”

“Hell no,” I said. It was no turf of mine, but I had no problem acting as if it was. “Listen to me, buddy. I want you to forget you even have that radio hooked to your belt, okay? The minute you touch it, the news hawks get here, and the minute the news hawks get here you can forget catching your perp.”

Ganzberg sucked in air. He let out a nice, complimentary swearword, and then a
dded, “I’ll wait until I see those bodies, Presius, if you don’t mind, before deciding we even have a perp on the lam. I’ve seen enough shit in my career.”

I showed him my teeth with no effort to smile. “I don’t mind at all. You’re the one on call tonight, not me. I counted six, by the way. I’m sure your super will be thrilled.”

His foot went looking for the cigarette butt on the ground and started playing with it. “Park the vehicle, officer,” he said. And then, when the copper was out of earshot, “You know what they say about you, Presius, in the divisional rows? They say you’re an asshole. You know what else they say about you? That you’re brilliant. A
brilliant
asshole. Now, I have no friggin’ clue how you got ahold of six bodies of—you say—infants. You say you were looking for a sixty-two-year-old lady, and that’s what got you to a part of town where bums set up their cardboard beds at night, whores get fucked, and junkies get fixed. You say she liked to hike, and that’s how she walked straight into a body dump, and you after her. Let’s say I believe you. I want to believe you, Presius. After all, life’s a bitch to every one, you and me alike. All I ask is that you talk to me alone. I’ve seen enough shit in my career. All colors of shit, you get me? You
do not
address my officers. This is
my
part of town and
I
give the orders around here, understood? That way we all get along nice and smooth, and I’ll reciprocate the courtesy when I’m loaned over to your part of town. How’s that for starters?”

I pondered his nice little speech. Well delivered, I considered. I never heard of this guy, and here he comes, calling me asshole.
Brilliant
asshole.

I loved it. I really did. I imagined a fellow cop coming over and saying, “Hey, that dick over there? He’s a brilliant asshole.” It makes me instantly smile and want to shake the guy’s hand. It takes a lot of butting heads with the brass to get that kind of reputation in the LAPD. I’d done my part well.

I grinned, nice and slow. “Ganzberg,” I said. “What do they call you, Ganz?”

“Gaz,” he replied, studying me.

“Gaz. Who ever dumped those bodies is going to come back, and when they do, they better not find a welcome mat of yellow tape and news crews, you agree?”

He nodded, his brows knitted together in an elaborate ripple of furrows.

“So, here’s what I’d do if I were you. I’d get there, remove the corpses, then cover up the pit, spread around dead leaves and twigs, and pretend we’ve never been there. Leave a well-hidden surveillance camera, maybe two, and station a couple of blue suits out here twenty-four-seven.”

The ripple in his forehead deepened. I could almost hear the electrical flickering of his neurons. “You said one body had gone to dust. That means the pit’s pretty old.”

“It looked untouched for a few months. But somebody’s been there more recently. Visiting.”

What if Katya
really
walked straight to the dump? What an excellent reason to make her vanish
…

A white van with the county coroner’s seal on the side pulled in front of us. The driver’s window came down, uncovering a familiar thirty-something face, unshaved, sleep-deprived, with blondish hair thinning at the temples. The face scanned us over, rested on me, and produced a thin sneer.

“Presius! What’s up with you and cadavers, eh? Is it you finding them or them finding you?”

I got up, walked around the vehicle, and opened the passenger’s door. “Shut up, Matt, or next time I’m gonna have you chase a zombie.” I let Will scramble to the back seat. “I hope you got AWD on this thing because we’re getting on a dirt road.”

*  *  *

The next four hours were hell. Empty
ing the cistern while leaving little traces was a pipe dream. Our first priority was to document everything and pull the remains out as intact as possible. I had to leave Will in Matt’s car—the mutt was sure to mess things up in the excitement of a concerto of reeks. We all got into the white LAPD coveralls and each one of us worked one side of the burial site. It was like walking on eggshells.

The stench
was nauseating.

Ganzberg kept a handkerchief over
his mouth whenever he could and held his breath every time he couldn’t. I stopped counting the times he’d muttered, “Life’s a bitch” under his breath.

Awakened by the lights and smells, crows came to watch the show. Perched on high branches, they cawed and bickered for the best view. Moths fluttered in
our faces. Beetles crawled over the plastic bags, every flash from the photographer’s camera sending them in frenzied circles.

Matt kneeled by the cistern and unrolled his measuring tape. “Never apply to a job ad that says, ‘Enjoyable outdoor working conditions,’ Track. There’s always a catch when they say that. This side is three feet, four inches.”

Ganzberg jotted down the information on his notepad, sketching the shape and location of the cistern.

I shone a flashlight on the tiny hand poking out of one of the bags and
we all fell silent.

“Oh, shit,” Matt said.

“Life’s such a bitch,” Ganzberg felt the need to add.

The torn plastic bag was still there, on top of the others.
I retrieved the stick I’d used earlier, fished it out of the pit, and let Matt vacuum the handful of dirt left inside.

“Now, here’s the thing with corpse wax,” Matt said, lying on his stomach
by the edge of the tank. “Babies have enough fat that, given the right conditions, they easily turn into adipocere—what we commonly call soap, or corpse wax. To have a whole body turned into soap, though, is pretty rare. Most I’ve seen is body parts. Legs, arms. One time a whole torso and head.”

He
used tongs to delicately pull the first bag onto an extended plastic pan attached to a long wooden rod.

“That must’ve been pleasant,” I said.

“It’s really like looking at a wax statue. The thing that gets you is the stench.”

Matt set the pan on the ground and pulled the edges of the bag apart with
the tip of the tongs.

Ganzberg swallowed hard and took a deep breath as if about to go underwater. “Can you tell how old they are?” He gulped down air and covered his face again.

“That’s up for the examiner to say,” Matt replied. “I’m just an assistant. Problem is, corpse wax stops the tissue from decaying. The biological clock stops and there’s no way to tell how long they’ve been there. The process can take from months to years. Let’s see what we’ve got.” Matt cut through the polythene—two sealed bags, one inside the other—and for a moment I closed my eyes to let the wave of foul smell wash away. When I reopened them the sight wasn’t any more pleasant than the smell.

“It’s turned into soap, all right,” Matt said. “Which is good news, the internal organs should all be intact.”

The flash flared over the small body. We held our breaths, not for the reek this time, but rather taken by that sort of stupefied reverence you feel when in front of something sacred.

The body in the bag was perfectly preserved except for one thing.

There was no head.

Ganzberg’s shadow loomed over the corpse. I craned my head back and yelled at the officer, “
Can you move the lamp closer?”

The light shifted and washed over the remains. The body was covered in a gray, waxy cast, with a round, pear-shaped belly and tiny legs still bent in a fetal position. If it weren’t for the smell, I would’ve said it was a broken doll a child had tossed away.

I examined the plastic bags. They were thick and sturdy trash bags, and while the outer one was faded, the one inside still had the
Glad
logo printed on it. The plastic looked ordinary polyethylene, black, thick and sturdy, with the usual wear and tear of time. Hard to tell how long it’d been dumped in there. I put the outer one in an evidence bag and labeled it for the Trace labs.

Ganzberg mumbled
, “You think it could’ve been born like this?”

Matt took out a measuring tape. “
Maybe. It reminds me of partial birth abortions, where they destroy the head in the uterus before delivering the fetus. Could be something like that. Or, it could be that only the lower body turned into wax and the bugs got the head.” He measured the length and girth of the body and wrote down the numbers on his clipboard. “If that’s the case we should be able to recover some of the cranial bones in the bag.”

Ganzb
erg and I looked inside the bag but there was nothing to the naked eye. Matt vacuumed the inside anyway and stored everything in evidence bags.

On
e by one, we took all six bodies out. They were all headless.

Like Matt had predicted, not all of them had completely saponified. Along the internal walls of the cistern, green lines of dried up mold accounted for past water levels, likely from flooding over the rainy season.

We tagged all bodies and zipped them up in blue bags that were too big for them. We placed the panel of corrugated metal back over the pit and covered up our tracks as best as we could. I made a few recommendations to my friend Gaz. He assured me he’d have a patrol unit on watch twenty-four-seven and issued a gag order for the press. He concluded reminding me, once again, what a bitch life was.

I rode with Matt back to my car, both our windows rolled all the way down. Cricke
ts chirped low, monotone songs. Under the light of a crescent moon, the hills weaved the landscape in a cantabile of arcs.

Matt put the headlights out.

I flinched. “What’d you do that for?”   

“Look at the moon, Track. Look at it.” He shook his head. “Those kids in the back, they’ll never see a moon like this.”

I inhaled and stared at the lights of downtown blinking in the distance. “They’ll never cry again, either.”

We wobbled down the rest of the dirt road at a lazy five miles per hour, neither of us speaking another word.

SIXTEEN

____________

Saturday, July 4

Two weeks earlier I had one missing person and one murder. Now I had one missing person, three murders, and six infanticides—possibly seven if Serology found DNA in the dust collected from the first, torn bag I’d pulled up.

I got home, dumped my clothes in the trash, and showered. It helped some.

There was no way to sleep. I tossed and turned but couldn’t get the image off my head—a headless corpse, folded onto itself in a fetal position. Defenseless.

At five the jays started screeching. At five thirty the first light of dawn crawled through the slats and reminded me I had a date with Cohen at 8 a.m.—Laura Lyons’s autopsy.

As if I hadn’t seen enough bodies in the past twenty-four hours.

I flung the bed sheets, pulled on some shirt and pants, shaved, and brewed two Mokas. I played Ahmad Jamal’s
Stolen Moments
on the car stereo as I drove to downtown while musing over all the stolen moments in my life. 

The Five was blissfully deserted.

I found Satish pacing under the modern portico in front of the autopsy suite building, his usual latte in one hand and jingling car keys in the other.

“You look like you hav
en’t slept in twenty-four hours,” he said.

“I haven’t.”

I told him about my sleepless night. “I chased a ghost, found zombies instead. Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”

“Oh no, the business is right. The approach is wrong. You’re collecting murders rather than solving them.”

“Very funny, Sat. Is any of Laura’s family members coming for the show?”

He drained the last bit of his
latte and tossed the cup in a trash bin. “Her sister’s coming down from Sacramento. I’m picking her up at the airport once we’re done here. Don’t think she’s interested in seeing the body, all she wanted to know was when she’d be released for the funeral.”

“That’s it? No father, mother, children?”

“She had no children. The father’s long gone and the mother’s paraplegic, lives up in Washington State.”

Laura Lyons’s autopsy wasn’t much different from Amy’s. Cohen found another fiber, on
the left hand this time, which was promptly labeled and shipped to Diane’s lab. The scalp and skin harvesting had the same appearance as the ones found on Amy’s body, and the laceration of the face and neck were again consistent with an attack while still alive, followed by strangulation from behind.

The funneling indentation on the left edge of the ligature mark had our attention for a good
ten minutes. Cohen measured its depth, width, shape—everything, and yet we couldn’t come up with anything that could possibly match it. A synthetic scarf with a brooch or large bead was our closest bet, though that would’ve likely left other telltale marks rather than a smooth indentation.

I stepped out of the autopsy suite to breathe in fresh air, yet the smell of corpse, now mingled with corpse wax, kept following
me. It filled my car when I slid behind the wheel, it lingered in my nostrils even when I rolled all the windows down and blasted the stereo to numb all my senses. I got home, started a new Moka, drank my espresso, then brewed another one. Which is
not
the equivalent of one mug of Americano.
Never
.

I was groggy and still in a bad mood. The fact that it was Saturday and, coincidentally, the Fourth of July, didn’t help.

I picked up the paper from the driveway and sat on the back porch waiting for the caffeine to percolate to my brains. Will wrapped himself around my legs and stared at me lovingly.

Every man needs an admirer. It’s an ego thing.

Caffeine or not, you try putting a warm, purring thing around your legs and, assuming you’ve had a really rough night, and a really rough day before that, count the seconds before you fall asleep…

…

Get the phone
.

The phone kept ringing
.

Get the damn phone
.

The phone quieted down. I dozed off again. Then it rang again, and the ring was louder and angrier. It made me jump.

“Damn it.” I opened my eyes. Will had vanished and left a cold spot on my lap. I wondered what time it was, but in order to find out I had to get the phone. Which was still ringing. I staggered out of the chaise and back inside.

“Yello?”

“You better have a good excuse, Track. You’re forty minutes late.”

Damn it. It
was Saturday, July Fourth, two forty p.m.

*  *  *

Diane Kyle wrapped her firing hand around the grip and lined her arms with the barrel. The sun glinted off her eyeshades. Her stance was solid, her knuckles too white.

Loosen up the grip
.

After she’d been attacked twice last year, her dad bou
ght her a Sig Sauer P226. A fine piece, but with a five-pound trigger squeeze and over two pounds on the waist when tucked into a holster, I could see how Diane was having a hard time falling in love with it.

She
inhaled, held her breath, and squeezed five rounds out.

Other than a light
breeze it was a fine day. Behind the steel targets, the hills of the Angeles Forest weaved against the backdrop of an evenly blue sky. The range wasn’t too crowded, given that it was a holiday: only two other folks shooting at the ten-yard line and a bunch of show-offs at the black and concrete benches.

I took
my binos and squinted at the silhouette. “You got two in the scoring ring,” I said, though she was unlikely to hear me through earplugs and earmuffs.

When I turned
, she’d put the gun down and was shoving her things back in her bag. “Break,” she mouthed. I yanked my earmuffs off.

“Where are you g
oing?”

“
It’s not my day,” she scoffed. She swung the bag across her shoulder and marched inside the lobby.

I gathered mags, ammos, a
nd guns, and followed her. She wasn’t in the lobby anymore. I stopped at the vending machine, got a couple of Cokes, and chased her scent. That wasn’t hard to do. Bears have no problem tracking down honey.

I found her sitting at one of the picnic tables outside. A tear of sweat wept down her cheek. It smelled salty. It smelled of all the things I wanted in life and couldn’t have. She br
ought a stainless steel bottle to her lips and I followed the rise and falls of her neckline as she chugged down the water.

“Drink this instead.
” I sat next to her and pushed the chilled can of Coke toward her.

It was a regular Coke, not diet. She looked at it
the way a vegan would’ve looked at pork chops. It didn’t discourage me from flipping the tab. I popped the can and took a long swig. 

“Last time I got all rounds on target. Twice,”
she complained.

“You’re out of practice.”

“I haven’t been shooting for a month—that’s not too long.”
She sighed, checked her watch. “It’s five twenty. I need to be home by six. Ellie invited me to a barbeque at her boyfriend’s. Wanna join us?” There was no particular expectation in her voice.

Ellie was Diane’s
feminazi
friend who could find testosterone-driven contempt in a handshake.

“I better go to bed early tonight,” I said.

She took a mouthful of water and almost choked on it. “Who? You? On the Fourth?”

“Flattered
. I didn’t sleep at all last night. I was dozing off in the backyard when you called.”

Diane took the unopened can and rolled it against her neck. Her skin raised in tiny goose bumps. “Friday night partying?”

I fiddled with the soda tab. “Yeah. You know who else came to the party? A detective from Hollenbeck, a county coroner assistant, an SID photographer, and six bodies. The bodies were too young to drink, so they just hung out in black plastic bags.”

Diane put down the soda can and drew in a sharp breath. “How young?”

“Infants.”

“Shit. Six
infants? Where?”

“Up in an undeveloped part of El Sereno. They were down at the bottom of a dried up water tank. One was completely soaped, the others only partly. And they were all headless.”

“Jesus. Stuff like that gives me the shivers. Are you and Satish going to investigate it?”

I shook my head. “Hollenbeck got the case. A guy named Ganzberg. He’s okay. Bit passive aggressive at first, but quieted down once he saw the bodies. Matt, the guy from the coroner’s office, said they could be partial birth abortions.”

Diane drank some more of her water then brought a thumb to her mouth and nibbled it. “Those are done in clinics. Clinics, whether illegal or not, are smart enough not to dump bodies in open spaces. Ganzberg should be looking at the households nearby the dump, instead.”

I
took a swig of Coke and considered. “It’s an isolated area. Not many houses around. Why do you say that?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Statistics. Mothers are the most likely perpetrators in infanticides. Wanet Hoyt killed five of her children. Marybeth Tinning killed nine. There was a recent case, a few years ago, in Germany. The woman hid the bodies in flowerpots in her garden.”

“Jeezus.”

Hard-boiled dicks like me have this mental image of serial killers as males. It’s how we’re wired. And yet, there was something even more disturbing than a faceless killer attacking his victims with sulfuric acid. And that’s a killer with a
familiar
face—the face of a parent.

The one who gives you life, takes your life.

The Spartans threw unfit newborns down Mount Taygetos. The Romans had the power of life or death over their children. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the gods, Orchamus had his daughter buried alive, Medea killed her two sons for revenge over their father. These weren’t just myths. Of all children murdered under the age of five, sixty percent are killed by one of the parents.

What I’d found wasn’t just a body dump. It was a shrine.

I drained the can and crushed it. “I’m hungry,” I said. “Wanna go grab a bite before I drop you off?”

Diane smiled for the first time since I’d picked her up from her house. “Only if you promise to keep both work and guns away from any conversation.”

Her cheeks were flushed, her hair tousled. Her scent was jazz for my nostrils, as thrilling and enticing as the drum solo in Dave Brubeck’s
Take Five
. I leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

Man, she was fast. She grabbed my chin and dug her nails in it. “I don’t want a one-night thing, Track, you understand?”

I nodded politely and she retracted her claws. She brushed her fingers against my stubble, gently this time, and briskly kissed me on the lips. “Let’s go, then. I need coffee.”

And so I followed. Again.

And no, there was no one-night thing.

There was no night at all.

I dropped her off at her place and went to Parker to review the murder books. I wasn’t sure what to look for, so I just picked aimlessly at Amy’s and Charlie’s last days: bank accounts, phone logs, friends’, neighbors’ and family’s statements. Charlie continued to cash his weekly five hundred bucks, give or take twenty, until the beginning of January. His family had estranged him eight years earlier. Neighbors claimed he was at home a lot more since he’d been laid off, but nobody had noticed any special visitor or anything weird in his lifestyle. He had dated for some time a man in the same complex, and they had remained on good terms, according to the same neighbors.

I wondered about
Olsen’s story—the black Alero that smelled of nail polish. Weird clue. If he were making that up he would’ve gone for something more sensible.

I read the hardware scan done on Callahan’s personal computer. A lot of activity on Facebook, social networks, and the lesbian-gay pages of Craigslist, where he hung out under the screen name “Code7.”

Interesting choice
. Code 7 is the police radio code for “lunch break.” A coincidence?

Nothing else raised a red flag.

Nothing particular in Amy’s lifestyle either, except for what I knew already—her relationship with Lyons. I found it hard to believe nobody else except for Laura Lyons knew about it. Somehow I couldn’t imagine a wife being quiet about her husband’s extra marital relationship. Somebody close to her must’ve offered a listening ear.

I went through the list of contact numbers on Laura’s cell phone, left
a half a dozen messages, got ahold of a couple of coworkers who knew very little about her, and finally found a gal on maternity leave who seemed eager to share a few thousand words. Most of the words got swallowed by the screeching and howling of what I guessed to be a brood of toddlers running and spinning around her.