MOSAICS: A Thriller (20 page)

EIGHTEEN

____________

Thursday, July 15

Dr. Cohen pointed the surgical lamp to my face. “What did you die of, Track?”

I squinted at the light. “I don’t know, Doc. I thought it was
your
job to find out.”

Cohen laughed his bubbly little laughter. It trailed off as quickly as a New Year’s Eve toast. Water ran from one of the faucets by the wall. The air smelled of formaldehyde, bleach, and cytological stains. It smelled aseptic and cold, a metallic tang
that clung to the air like a hangover. It smelled of death.

“This is going to be fun,” Cohen said, hovering over me with the Stryker saw.

It didn’t look promising. It didn’t look fun, either.

“It’s the first time I get to actually talk to one of my patients.
If
you can call them patients, that is.” Cohen laughed and dug the saw into my breastbone. If the water of the Styx had a sound, it had to be that of a Stryker saw. Blood and warm chunks of flesh spattered on my face. I licked my lips. They tasted salty and rusty.

The hedge clippers came next. They cracked through my ribs like nutcrackers. Cohen’s puffy face pearled with sweat. “Sheesh, Track. You always loved to give me a hard time.”

I thought of apologizing but didn’t quite see the point.

He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his sleeve and stared into the hole he’d dug in
to my chest. It occurred to me then that he wasn’t wearing a facemask. “Now, that’s interesting,” he said.

I felt a little apprehension. When it comes to doctors, I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be as dull and boring as a Sunday mass recited in Latin.

Watanabe emerged through the darkness of the backlight. His face was yellow and grave and didn’t look too healthy either. He stared at the hole Cohen had dug through my chest and pursed his thin lips.

“Where’s his heart?” he asked.

Cohen craned his head. “I can see only some of it.”

“Makes sense,” Watanabe replied. “His antinuclear antibodies were off the chart. His immune system started attacking his heart until it eventually destroyed it.”

“A-ha,” Cohen said. He shoved his gloved hands inside my ribcage and pulled out a bloody mass. It was still pulsating, though slowly, its red walls rising and falling in long, tired sighs. “Well, of course. Look at that, it’s half-eaten. Why didn’t you tell me before, Track?”

“Tell you what?” I asked.

“It’s in V-Tach,” Watanabe said.

“That’s too bad,” Cohen sighed. “A strong heart. Strong indeed.”

“Tell you what?” I yelled.

Cohen tipped his head. “You didn’t have a human heart. You had a predator’s heart.”

A predator’s heart
.

A predator’s
…

I sprang my eyes open. A faint light crawled through the curtains and
wavered on the ceiling. I inhaled. Sweat, my own. Carpet, dust, wood.
My
dust,
my
wood. A jay screeched outside. A neighbor rolled the trash bin down the driveway.

I brought a hand to my chest. It felt smooth—intact skin, a few hairs, no hole. My heart was still there, thumping against the breastbone.

My heart.

A predator’s heart
.

The autopsy was a nightmare, but the conversation at Watanabe’s house had been real.

The blood work I’d done the week before had come back positive for some autoimmune disorder I didn’t understand.

“Does it matter, Doc?” I’d joked. “That my DNA was screwed up we knew already.”

“No, Ulysses, not your DNA. You are an epigenetic chimera—you express genes that are normally not expressed in other humans.”

And, apparently, that was exactly the problem.

Homer’s Ulysses had gone down to Hades to find out his fate. My fate instead had always been within me. In my blood. My oracle, my blind Tiresias, a Japanese American doctor who could read DNA like Ella Fitzgerald read a music score, told me my immune system was going berserk, attacking my own heart because it expressed genes the rest of my body did not recognize. It seemed surreal, almost a joke, yet Watanabe didn’t share my humor when I laughed at the news.

So I thought of
something smart to ask. “How do we make it stop?”

“There’s only one way,” he’d replied. “We suppress the immune system.”

“What if we don’t make it stop?”

The absence of an answer was as hard as an untold sin. 

Right
, I thought, getting out of bed.
Don’t take the fucking medication and your heart goes. Take the fucking medication and your immune system goes
.

Watanabe’s prescription rested on my nightstand, unused.

Look at the bright side, Ulysses.

You get to pick your own ending
.

*  *  *

The door looked ominous. It was crossed in red “biohazard” tape. Pictures ripped off some manga comic book plastered the glass pane. Satish knocked.

“Why’s the door closed?” I objected. “Every other office here at Electronics is open.”

Satish gave me a look that meant, “Wait and see.”

The door opened a crack. Loud rock music and the mildew-y smell of chilled sweat spilled out. A face emerged from the darkness—gaunt, unshaved, with a dark birthmark that sprawled from his right temple down to the outer corner of the eye. Somewhere, a Halloween costume was missing its face.

“Hello, Viktor,” Satish said. “This is my partner, Detective Presius.”

Viktor regarded us carefully, not moving a muscle except for the twitching of his ash-colored pupils. “Right,” he said, pulled his face back into the darkness, and closed the door.

I smiled. “So. That went well.”

Unscathed, Satish rocked on his heels. “Just remember not to call him Vik,” he whispered. “Pisses him off.”

The door opened again. The loud music had been silenced, not the smell. “I only have one extra chair,” Viktor said, looking at me. “Grab one from Dan.”

“Who’s Dan?”

“Guy next door,” Satish replied.

I found a metal chair, folded and abandoned in the hallway, and was then left with the arduous task of finding a spot in Viktor’s office.

Viktor’s office was dark, windowless, and filled with dust and the peculiar smell of old computers. Two long and narrow desks faced opposite walls, their surfaces completely buried with stuff. The only light came from a dim table lamp and the two side-by-side monitors that emerged above a general chaos of DVD cases, dirty mugs, programming books, and random pieces of electronics. Overhead lockers were open and stuffed with keyboards, laptop bags, and cases of Gatorades. I squeezed between the tables, unfolded the chair in the only free corner of the room, and sat down.

Viktor squinted at the code dribbling down his two screens, then turned to us, his smile as thin as paper. “You guys want the short answer or the long one?”

His voice seemed to brew somewhere at the bottom of his throat before coming out. It gargled in a shady, yet fluid way.

“Both,” Satish replied.

He nodded. “’Kay. Short: it’s not a language I recognize.”

I chortled without being amused. Every
thing about the Byzantine Strangler was an enigma: the ligature was a mystery, the fibers he shed unidentifiable, the origin of the tiles unknown, and now Viktor from the Electronic Unit, was telling us that the code printed at the back of the tiles found next to Laura’s body was yet another puzzle.

“I hope the long answer’s going to be a bit more helpful,” I said.

The thin paper smile evaporated. Computer experts can be as dogmatic as the Church and as obscure as the assembly instructions that come with Swedish furniture.

“I could elaborate,” he magnanimously offered.

“Please do,” Satish said.

“’Kay. It’s not a high-level language. One—could be some kind of micro-code, which runs inside the CPU or control code. Two—could be a cipher text, an encrypted message. Could be a plain encrypte
d code or have something hidden, like steganography. Or both. The feds have the best tools to crack these guys. I’d contact the RCFL in Orange.”

“The fibbies take their sweet-ass time
with our evidence,” Satish grumbled. “That’s why we came to you instead.”

Viktor ignored him
with the smoothness of a polished floor. “If it’s encrypted, there’s not much anybody can do unless the guy is stupid. So let’s assume it’s something else for now. The characters remind me of the output of a disassembler between a high-level language and a receiving device. Like the old HP 42 plotter.”

He pointed to a window on the screen, where he’d typed the symbols found at the back of the tiles. “This one, for example: #g 3 could stand for command group three, #cs .5 for a point-five character skew, and #lw would be setting the width. Problem is, those codes are no longer used. Today’s machines have switched to G-code.”

The hell of a long answer. He could’ve delivered it in Japanese, as far as I was concerned.

My partner
scratched the white stubble under his chin. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Does this help us in any way?”

Viktor’s computer started hyperventilating. It sounded like an airplane about to take off. “It helps some,” he said, while typing. “It tells us our man feels comfortable around computers. Perps usually leave messages behind because they want them to be deciphered. So, either we find the key or, eventually, he’s going to give us the key.”

I snorted. “That’ll work. How many murders do you think he’ll need in order to hand it to us?”

The paper-t
hin smile resurfaced. “It’s the reality of things.”

Viktor’s computer beeped.

I scooted closer. “Did it just exhale its last breath?”

“No, the machine’s fine. It didn’t find anything on last vic’s hard drive, though.”

“Laura Lyons?” Satish asked. “What was it supposed to find?”

Viktor paused the typing for a moment, then resumed. “The receiving device. I was looking for some kind of HPGL visualizer, like Visual Basic or similar. If I’m right, and this is the output of a high-level language, we should be able to find the receiving device
. The obvious place to look would be the victims’ computers, but so far no luck.”

Satish leaned forward and stared at the screen. “I assume you looked at Amy’s hard drive as well?”

“Yes. Both work and home.”

“So, what now?”

Viktor’s hands dropped from the keyboard. His eyes remained on the screen. The birthmark sprawling from his temple down to the corner of his eye was dark brown with lighter lines inside. It looked like a computer chip, really, which was sort of ironic. 

“There
is
something,” he said, at last.

“What?”

He pulled up the Internet browser and typed in a new URL. “This.
CoreProgramming.com,
a discussion board for programmers of all backgrounds. I’m pretty sure if I post the code somebody will recognize it.”

Satish leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. “If our man is familiar with this kind of programming, chances are he knows the board.”

Viktor nodded. “’Course. There’s a good chance he’s one of the users.”

“Well, then, if he’s on, he’ll recognize the code.”

I thought about that. And then I thought it was brilliant. And Satish must’ve thought the same—which happens a lot more than you’d think—because he looked at me and beamed.

“Is the board public or private?”
he asked.

“Private. A guy based in Albany, NY, owns it. It checks.”

“Good. That excludes him from being our man.”

“It also means we’ll need warrants,” I said.

“It’ll take a few days,” Satish said. “We won’t post anything until we have the warrants.”

Viktor scratched his birthmark with the tip of one finger. “
So, theoretically, we can throw our bait on the board and see what kind of fish we net through the IP addresses. But I’m ready to bet our guy’s not going to use a static address. He’s gonna use at least one proxy, and he’ll do it anonymously.”

Satish pondered. “Sounds far fetched.”

Viktor shrugged. “Our man may not take the bait, but I’m pretty sure those guys will pin point what language this is. If it is some language.” 

“So that’s at least one bird,” I said. “As for the second bird—our man taking the bait—anybody who’ll recognize the code and lives in the L.A. area is worth a close look at.
I assume you already have an account that’s untraceable to us?”

Viktor dropped his chin and looked at me like a Boston terrier. “
’Course.”