MOSAICS: A Thriller (21 page)

“Good. Then as soon as we get the warrants
, post the code from one tile. You pick the one. Every answer you get, you retrace the IP address, user name, and every bit of information you can get. Especially people in SoCal. Try to engage them in a conversation. We need to find out not only what the hell the code means, but also as much as possible from the responders.”

Satish inhaled deeply. “Track, what are the odds?”

“Hey, if this guy is like the BTK killer Dennis Rader, that’s exactly what he wants us to do. That’s why he left us the code, so we can communicate. The code doesn’t need a key, the code
is
the key.”

Viktor rubbed his birthmark again. “Dennis Rader got caught because he did something stupid. He was playing w
ith dolls and floppy disks. Our guy here is more advanced. He fiddles with computer code.”

“Dennis Rader wasn’t stupid,” Satish said. “He just wanted to get caught. They all do, eventually. Road Runner has no fun if Wile
E. Coyote stops chasing him.” He sighed, got to his feet. “Let’s do this.”

*  *  *

A bartender in a tight, pinstriped vest stirred a Martini with wet, clinking sounds. He reached for a lemon with a well-rehearsed sweep of his arm, cut it in half, and squeezed it with both hands. The zesty scent of citrus reached my nose. It mingled with the fruity aroma of vermouth, the various melodies of human perspiration, the cantabile of kitchen smells.

A lady with brimming lipstick and a wreath of plastic beads around her neck sat at the other end of the bar, her party dress too old to be cheerful, and her glass too small to fit her sorrows. A couple flirted at a dimly lit table. They fit all possible clichés you can think of on couples flirting in a bar. He kept his fat wallet next to his plate. She eyed it from above the rim of her glass, while taking small, calculated sips. Three flat screen TVs hanging from the ceiling showed Quinteros from the Houston Astros homered to center. The L.A. half of the Dodger stadium looked disappointed. A couple of guys at the bar booed.

Satish talked. I nodded without paying attention.

I glazed over
, and the meeting from the day before with Watanabe replayed in my head.

Take the prescription
medication, Track. We need to stop your antibodies before it’s too late.

What the hell is
that
supposed to mean?

Is it
gonna kill me?

Please
. A cougar attack followed by encephalitis didn’t kill me when I was six. One month of juvi hadn’t killed me when I was sixteen, two bullets in the chest a few years ago hadn’t killed me either.

I’m tough, Doc
.

A waiter with a thin mustache, feminine brows, and lips as tight as his posture stood in front of us. He described the specials on the menu l
ike a doctor explains sex to his teenage kid.

Satish closed his menu with a loud slap. “Philly burger with fries.”

The waiter nodded, scribbled, and then turned his supercilious stare on me.

“I’ll have a—er, salad—a
steak
salad,” I said. I almost choked on the words but managed quite well, all things considered.

The waiter scribbled, turned on his heels and left. Satish let out a shriek. “A salad? You ordered a salad in a place like this? That’s like asking for a tie in a kurta shop!”

I shrugged. The TV screens panned over Rodriguez flying out to the right. The Astro crowd stood up in ecstasy. I squeezed the lime into my Corona and took a swig. “What d’you know, Sat? I might even turn vegetarian, one of these days. It’s supposed to make you live longer, isn’t it?”

Satish’s fac
e hung up in horror. “Salad ain’t gonna make you live a minute longer. It’ll just
feel
longer.”

I
tapped the Corona logo embossed on the bottle.

Satish’s phone rang.

“You think too much,” Satish said.

“Maybe.”

He wobbled his head. “It’s okay. You think too much, you screw your own life. You think too little, you screw everybody else’s life.”

“What a philosopher you are, Satish.”

He grinned. His phone kept ringing.

“Sat.”

“What?”

“Answer the damn phone.”

He dropped his chin and looked at me. “It’s
your
damn phone, Track.”

“Huh.”

It was Thomas Ellis, from the county coroner’s office. “Detective! I didn’t see you at the cut today.”

My neurons skipped a synapsis.
What cut
? The only one still fresh in my head was
my
cut… from the nightmare I had this morning. “Unless you were planning on cutting
me
, I didn’t have any autopsy scheduled for this morning.”

He laughed. Glad
he
found it funny. “No, sir, not you. The infant corpses you found.”

The infant
corpses
.

“I believe they were born full-term and alive,” he added.

I felt a shiver swoop down my spine.

It wasn’t a shrine. It was a dumpster
.

“Dr. Ellis, that wasn’t my jurisdiction. I notified the divisional detective on call, and—”

“Ganzberg. Yes, he was here for the autopsy. Well, I still think you’d be interested in seeing this. How about you stop by tomorrow morning?”

Diane had called me earlier to tell me she’d found something interesting on the fibers. “Can’t in the morning—what’s your schedule like in the afternoon?”

He checked. “I have a cut at one p.m. Come at four, then. You and your partner.”

I hung up and told Satish. “That’s perfect,” he said. “
We can swing by the shop before the meeting.”

“The coroner office shop? What d’you need to stop there for?”

He grinned. “I’m getting one of their barbecue aprons for my brother’s birthday. The front says, ‘The L.A. county coroner has spare hands and spare ribs.’ My brother loves ribs.”

“That’s tacky.”

“Tacky? He loves that kinda stuff. You have to see the T-shirt I got him last year.”

“What did it say?”

“The L.A. County Coroner is dying for your business.” He chuckled. “Get it?
Dying
?”

“What a loving brother you are, Sat.”

“I am, aren’t I? I never forget a birthday.”

The waiter delivered the mouth-watering burger to Satish—pinky raised, straight face and all—and flopped a heap of green, wilted leaves in front of me.

“What the hell is this?” I said.

The straight face wrinkled at the corners. “Your steak salad, sir.”

I couldn’t even see the steak part.

Sat smirked from behind his double burger.

I pushed the salad away. “Feed it to the chickens. I’m having rib eye. One pounder, rare, whole black pepper. Add a skewer of grilled shrimp and we’re buddies.”

One of the brows in the straight face rose about half an inch. It considered me very carefully, then slid back into place. “Very well, sir.”

The steak salad departed. The Dodgers kept losing to the Astros: Loney singled to center; Hudson doubled to deep left center, Loney to third; Wolf grounded out to second. Satish squirted a blob of ketchup in his plate, dipped his fries, then stuck them one by one inside the big, fat bun.

“You think too much,” he reiterated with his mouth full and his cheeks content. “You think too much.”

NINETEEN

____________

She looks like a gypsy bride. Black mars her wings like tracks of a tarred ocean on a white beach. She doesn’t move. Her mate, smaller and darker, zigzags his serenade on the windowsill, nervously flicking his antennae.

Yellow light from the street pools inside the bedroom and casts long beams on the walls.

I should kill them
, he thinks
. I should kill them both
.

He waited too long, though. The cocoon was empty when he got home tonight. And now they’re everywhere.

Gypsy moths mate in July. They lay hundreds of eggs, wrapped in a wispy nest of silk.

The sounds of
the city drone in the distance—the wailing of sirens, the swooshing of helicopters. Sounds he’s gotten used to. That’s not what’s keeping him awake at two in the morning. It’s the tingling, again. His feet are tingling. He rubs them against the sheets, but the tingling doesn’t go away.

The male moth crawls up the wall. The female holds still and waits.

He tosses and turns, wishing he had no feet, wishing for a body with removable parts that he could wear on and off as needed, like pieces of clothing.

The
soles of his feet sting. He bends his legs to his chest and slides a tentative hand down his calf, fingers creeping along his ankle, slowly brushing the side of his foot.

He holds his breath. He doesn’t want to know. He just wants the tingling to go away.

He just wants…

There’s a lump under his foot, and it’s swollen and hairy. It’s disgusting. He cups his hand around it, and the lump creeps between his fingers, wriggling away.

“Shit!”

He closes his fist around it and smashes it. His hand emerges from underneath the sheets, bloody slime and hairs plastered on his open palm.

“Argh!”

The tingling creeps up his legs and under his skin, hairy legs crawling all over his body. He shoots up, groping for the light. Bed sheets tumble on the floor.

A one-inch long larva pokes out of his belly button, its legs leaving a trail of blood on his skin. A handful of them squirms over his right breast, feeding off his flesh. He opens his mouth to scream, and larvae belch out of his throat. He yanks them out, and yet the more he pulls off his skin, the more they come out of every orifice in his body—his nostrils, his ears, his eyes…

The sirens ebb off, the helicopter fades in the distance.

The first rays of dawn sneak through the curtains, while up on the wall, the male moth finally reaches his white bride.

TWENTY

____________

Friday, July 17

The door was open. I knocked on
the jamb. Diane didn’t even lift her eyes from the computer screen. “Close the door and switch the lights off.”

I stood by the door and considered. “Right now? In the lab?
I’d love to, Diane, damn I would, but it just doesn’t feel private enough. People could walk in any time and—”

“Don’t be stupid, Track, it’s not funny.
” She tapped her heels across the room and closed the door. “Turn off the light, I have to show you something.”

I
obeyed and flipped the light switch. The lights and sounds from the hall ebbed off. In the dark, her scent wavered like a votive candle.

“You changed
shampoo brand,” I said.

She frowned. She didn’t know I could see her frown. “You don’t like it?”

“No. I mean, yes. I just happened to notice it’s different.”

Diane bit her lower lip, thoughtfully. She was holding something, but her lip was more attractive, so I kept my eyes on it. “You liked the other
brand better,” she said, half teasing.

“D. I don’t give a—What’s in your hand?”

“A slide.” She held it up for me to see. Flattened between the glass and the cover slip, two tiny filaments were coiled together, and they glowed like the Nokia Center at night. If the Nokia Center were made of tiny filaments squeezed in a microscope slide, that is. 

Diane smiled and her smile was clever and delicious at the same time. “So, tell me, Track: do you know any African animal—with fur—that glows like this at night?”

A-ha. Touché. I looked around, found a lab stool, and dropped my ass on it.

“Where’d you go?”

“Right here.”

Diane turned
toward my voice, disoriented—her eyes couldn’t see past the glowing filaments in her slide. She raised a hand and flipped the switches. The receding bulbs flickered and hummed back to life. The light washed down on the sleek workbenches, the microscopes, the centrifuges, the fridges, the biohazard bins, the trays of vials, the boxes of slides, and the stacks of empty tissue cassettes.

“What do you think?”

“I suppose that’s one of the mysterious fibers from the Byzantine Strangler?”

She grinned and nodded.

“You dyed them?”

“Uh-uh. They naturally fluoresce.” Her smile got cleverer. “So?”

“I think it’s fabulous,” I said. “All we gotta do is toss a few suspects in a room, turn the lights off, and pick the guy with the glowing hair.”

Diane expressed her disapproval with little staccatos of her ambrosial scent. “Very funny, Track.” She walked back to her chair, set the slide on the desk and tapped the computer mouse. The monitor flicked to life and asked for a username and password. “These aren’t hair fibers.”

I scoffed. “Fine. They’re not synthetic fibers, they’re not plant fibers, they’re not hairs. Are they alien fibers and that’s why they fluoresce?”

Diane logged on to the computer, double clicked, and pulled up a picture. “What do you think of this?”

I leaned closer. The first thing I saw was her scent—spicy, intriguing, and playing hard-to-get with my nostrils. Past her glaring scent was the computer monitor, and on the computer monitor was a picture—black background with a thin filament all curled up onto itself and glowing like a fluorescent light bulb.

“Where’s that from? Roswell, New Mexico?”

“No. From this website.”

“Morgellons’ Disease Association,” I read f
rom the screen. “The fiber’s a disease?”

Diane shrugged, which was something she didn’t do very often, so that when she did, it became relevant. “A disease to some, a psychosis to others. And, to me,
a theory on the Byzantine Strangler.” She turned and looked at me the way women look at you when they want to see if you’re still part of the conversation.

“Go on,” I said. Her smile told me it was the right thing to say.

“Morgellons disease is a controversial condition. Patients report tingling and prickling of the skin, crawling sensations, rashes, and skin lesions. Some experience loss of concentration and fatigue. What’s common to all, though—and at the same time makes this condition so highly debated—is the presence of microscopic fibers that, apparently, come out of the skin lesions. Check it out, more pictures.”

She scrolled down the web page. The images showed enlargements of curly filaments, some black like the ones we had found on the victims, and some transparent and entangled with portions of skin. Despite coming in different colors and shapes, all fibers
shared one feature: they naturally fluoresced. 

I rapped
my fingers on the desk. “Can we compare our fibers with some taken from these patients?”

Diane shook her head. Her new shampoo wafted to my nostrils. I didn’t say anything this time. “See, depending on who you ask, they’ll tell you these fibers don’t even exist. The Board of Psychiatry claims the condition is completely delusional. In fact, some patients believe they see bugs coming out of their skin, besides the fibers, so whatever condition they have, gets treated as delusional parasitosis.”

“Somebody must think it’s real.”

“Patients do. And their families. They put up the website to spread the word.”

I looked at her. “What do
you
believe?”

She let go of the mouse, brought a hand to her mouth, and nibbled a cuticle on the side of her thumb. I wanted to nibble her lips instead.

“Track, the lesions these patients experience are most frequent around the mouth, on hand palms, and on the feet,” she said.

“Lesions on hands and feet. Interesting. Amy had lesions on her feet, Laura had them on
her hands, too. The Byzantine Strangler is reproducing the disease on his victim.”

She nodded.

“When are you getting the DNA results back?”

“
Mitochondrial
DNA,” she corrected me. She sighed, turned to the computer screen. “I called the lab earlier this morning. They told me it’s in the pipeline.”

I got to my feet. “Put pressure on them. Tell them we got a serial killer on the loose.”

“I call them every day.”

She walked to the door with me, then looked down and tipped her head to the side. “Maybe we should talk to Washburn.”

I stiffened. “Washburn? Why do you want talk to the shrink?”

She came closer, so close I could smell the warmth of her breath and it was as soothing as Aretha Franklin’s voice. “The only reason you don’t like Washburn is because you have to sit in his office every time you are in an OIS. And you tend to be in an OIS
a lot
. To everybody else, Washburn is one of the leading experts on criminal minds. If our guy has Morgellons, maybe Washburn can give us some hints on his next moves.”

I didn’t hear a word she said. Her lips moved, her eyelashes beat, her brows bent in the slightest frown. And all I heard was,
Damn it, Ulysses, kiss her. Kiss her now
.

She gave me a pale smile, one of those smiles you might consider putting on your lapel if you’re that kind of old fashioned guy. She leaned closer, brushed a finger along the front of my shirt. “You look stressed,” she pressed. 

A shade of melancholy blotted her eyes.

Orpheus crossed Hades to get his Eurydice back. Except in this game called life, I was the one with the one-way ticket to Hades.

*  *  *

Ellis hadn’t gained an ounce since last time I saw him. He was gaunt and lanky, with a face like a crow. He smoked like a chimney, and the smell of nicotine clung to his skin like glaze on doughnuts. It was almost refreshing in a place that reeked of cadavers and formaldehyde. He came out of the autopsy room, stripped
off his gown and surgical gear, washed his hands and face, donned a lab coat, and dragged us down the hallway into the histology lab.

“Nice and quiet place to have a chat,” he claimed.

The lab was indeed quiet, save the humming and tilling of the machines, milling around as if they had a life of their own. A technician stood in front of one of the benches, frowning at a microscope while jotting notes in his notebook.

Ellis pushed away a colorful stack of slide boxes, rolled over a couple of stools, and flopped a blue folder on the cytology bench, between a slide stainer and a tissue chopper. They both smelled suspicious to my sensitive nose.
Everything
smelled suspicious in that place.

“Mind you,” he started, opening the folder. “This is all preliminary. Frank Devore, the forensic anthropologist—you know him, right? He came to the autopsy this morning. Couldn’t tell us much, he needs to run more tests on the fetal bones. Some of his conclusions might be different than mine. I’m hoping he can help us date the remains.” He forked his reading glasses and gave us both a quick glance from above the rim, before scanning his notes. “Anyhow. Various degrees of adipocere in all
of the six corpses. The rest is completely skeletonized.” One by one, he took out the pictures of the baby corpses and lined them on the countertop. I recognized the one we’d plucked out first because it was the most intact. All others looked like doll parts with bones sticking out, held together by exsiccated cartilage and tissue: a pelvis with legs, an arm, a torso.

And never a head.

Ellis’s bony fingers swooped over the pictures. “You know the process, right? Because the bags were tightly tied, the anaerobic bacterial fauna turned body fat into what’s commonly known as corpse wax or adipocere.”

“I thought adipocere was quite rare,” Satish said.

“It is, but less so in children who tend to have more body fat than adults. It’s even likelier in infants. In my career I’ve seen it a handful of times. Now. The next thing you need, besides body fat, is water.”

“The cistern was dry,” I admitted.

“Yeah, but we can’t assume it’s always been dry, can we?” Ellis showed me his yellow teeth. It tempted me into offering a Listerine strip. “In fact…” One of his bony fingers pointed at me. “In fact, I think this can give us a clue to when these bodies were dumped.”

That perked my interest.

Ellis arched over the countertop and rearranged the pictures. “Your colleague, Ganzberg. He took nice sketches. Way better at drawing than you, Track.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“Not that I don’t teach, him,” Satish said.

“Thanks, Sat.”

“Okay.” Ellis stepped aside. “What do you think? I’ve rearranged the pictures according to the way they were found in the cistern. The adipocere corresponds to different levels of water. One level here,” he tapped, “and a second one here. Possibly a third, though for this one we only had an arm and part of the torso, and that’s hard to pin down.”

I remembered a detail that had escaped me before. “There were water level marks on the inside of the cistern.”

“Floods during rainy seasons?” Satish offered.

“El Niño,” I said. “
Brilliant, Sat. Last strong one was winter ’97-’98.”

Ellis bobbed his head. “That’s what I was thinking. ’91-’92 was the one before that, which could explain the second level. There might be a third one, if you look closely, dating back to the ’eighties.”

“Can you corroborate it by dating the corpses?” Satish asked.

Ellis took the reading glasses off his face and bit one of the tips. “That’s not going to be easy. The flip side with adipocere is that it stops t
he tissue from aging. All we have for a TOD are the bones, and they’re now in the hands of the anthropologist. We’ll see what he can come up with. From what I can tell you, the bones unaffected by adipocere were completely disarticulated, non-greasy, and free of soft tissue. But as you know, with the kind of weather we have out here, you can get a body completely skeletonized in a matter of weeks. The remains were sealed so well in the plastic bags that, except for the torn one, animals didn’t get to them, and soil erosion was minimal. We could be talking decades. All the clues we have are from the scene, like the El Nino hypothesis. I sent roots and dead vines that were interspersed with the trash bags to the lab. But foliage regrows every year, so don’t hold your breath on that. Another clue would’ve come from clothing, but there’s no trace of fabric in the bags, either.”

“They were buried naked?” Satish asked. “Any chance they were buried right after birth, then? As in still births?”

Ellis bobbed his head. Over his long neck it looked like a crow pecking. He set his glasses down and tapped the first picture with a yellow fingernail. “This was the most intact one. I opened it up and looked at the heart. Detectives, I can tell you that this little guy was born alive and breathed at least once in his short life. The foramen ovale, an opening in the fetal heart, was closed. It closes at birth but remains open in still births.”