MOSAICS: A Thriller (26 page)

“Quarter to three,” I said.

He tore the wrap open and tapped the packet on his wrist to produce a cig. “How long were you there?”

“About forty-five minutes.”

Sakovich reached for the lighter in his breast pocket. “What did you talk about?”

I looked at the pillar behind him. “There’s a sign behind you that forbids you to smoke.”

He grinned around the cigarette butt. “It’s Sunday,” he said, clicking the lighter. “We don’t follow rules on Sundays. Go on, we’re all ears.”

“You already know why I wanted to talk to Henkins. It’s been all over the news.”

Sakovich held the cigarette between two fingers with the grace of an Adonis. He blew smoke at me and I held my breath and kept my face straight and pretended I was inhaling Diane’s hair instead. “The Callahan case,” he said.

“Correct.”

“Share that conversation, if you please.”

“I don’t.”

Lang tossed the empty bottle of Dr. Pepper into the bin. “You don’t what?”

“I don’t please.”

Sakovich’s smile was as heartfelt as the welcome greeting on an ATM screen. He made a high-pitched sound to go with it, something between the screech of a jay and the whistle of a parakeet. When he was done, he popped the cig out of his lips and said, “Presius, you do realize that you’re withholding information relevant to a murder investigation and your refusal translates into insubordination—a firing offense.”

A plume of menthol smoke curled
up from his cigarette.

“I do realize,” I said. “I also realize that my conversation with Henkins did not pertain to
your
murder investigation, it pertained to mine.”

“Until I hear it I’m not sure I believe it.”

Lang slid forward in his chair and crossed his arms. The tight sleeves of his polo strangled his bulging biceps. “Why did you go to her house on a Saturday? Why not talk to her at the station? Why not go with your partner? You better have a very good answer each of these questions.”

Sakovich sucked wistfully on his cig. “You have two options, Presius,” he said. “You can stand by the Fifth Amendment and go find yourself another job, or you can take the Lybarger admonishment and run with it. Me, I’d have no second thoughts.”

The Lybarger rule was a California State ruling from the Michael Lybarger case, an officer with the Vice Unit who, under investigation for false arrest and bribery, refused to cooperate and was fired for insubordination. It boiled down to what Sakovich had just told me: I could choose to keep my mouth shut, in which case I’d face insubordination charges and lose my badge. Or, I could spill the beans and, under the Lybarger rule anything I’d say would not be used to incriminate me. Which is bullshit because any cop with a bit of gray matter in his mind knows that if the brass decides he has to go down, they will simply find some other ballast to make him go down. 

Given the circumstances, I de
cided to spill some of the beans, choosing my beans very carefully. By the time I was done, Sakovich had smoked two cigarettes and was tapping a third one, still unlit, on the chair armrest. “You think Callahan was killed by the same person who killed Amy Liu and Laura Lyons?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Did you ask Henkins?”

“Henkins told me I was nuts to still be looking into this. She said to
give it a rest because Olsen whacked Callahan and we were all wasting our time.”

I stared at him. If somebody overheard my conversation with Henkins, my lie was out. But here’s the thing. There was only one person who could’ve overheard our conversation—the killer. Sometimes it’s a good thing to share a secret with a killer.

The officer who’d done the ballistics returned my guns and declared them clean. I tucked them back into my holsters without a word.

Lang
got up from his chair and stretched his legs. Sakovich curled his lips and pondered. I stared at the wall clock. It was close to four p.m. The hefty detective in the corner had long stopped typing. The door to the captain’s office was still ajar. I pushed my chair backwards and got up.

“I’m not convinced, Presius,” Sakovich said.

“That’s my statement,” I replied. “You’ve got a fellow detective dead and a cop killer on the loose, Sakovich. I suggest you start working on this case.” I turned around and walked to the Captain’s office.

Lang
shot to his feet. “Where the hell d’you think you’re going?”

I sprang the Captain’s door open without knocking. A sad little man looked at me with sad little eyes. He stood up and was no longer little and his eyes weren’t that sad either. They glared from above the rim of red reading glasses.

He took the glasses off, rested them on the table, and asked, “And you are…?” His gesture had purpose, his voice entitlement. The frames on the wall behind him told me he was a family man and a decorated officer. The look on his face told me I wasn’t welcome.

I walked to his desk and offered my hand. “Presius,” I said, as if he didn’t know already. “My sincere condolences. You lost one of your best officers.”

We shook hands. His were knotty and cold despite the room temperature. He smelled of nicotine, a different brand than Sakovich. Dunhill, I guessed.

He let go of my hand and dropped back in his chair. “Thank you,” he said, in a dismissive way. He picked up the reading glasses he’d left on the desk and perched them back on his nose. A famous logo at the side of the frames had the only function to let me know that those glasses alone cost as much as my weekly salary. 

I agreed that was no place for me and left. I bumped into Lang’s biceps on my way out of the Captain’s office.

“We’ve got your prints in her apartment.”

I smiled and walked away.

“You can’t leave,” Sakovich yelled after me.

“Of course I can,” I replied. “It’s Sunday. We don’t follow rules on Sundays, remember?”

They didn’t stop me. They didn’t offer the ride back they’d promised either. I didn’t care. I had enough of their company. I walked through the exit gate and read once more the writing on the mosaic. “Through these gates pass great officers.”

I shoved both hand in my pockets, walked through, and whistled. I’d just been promoted to great officer.

TWENTY-FIVE

____________

Monday, July 20

“Hmm. That would explain the smell,” Satish said.

“What smell?”

“All the shit you’ve been wading through. I mean, shit happens, but somehow it seems to happen to you more.” 

We exited the restaurant on Ramirez Street. A couple of black and white Crown Vics were parked in the lot across the street, the flyover from the One-Oh-One swooping above with its steady flow of vehicles. Downtown loomed on the right, wrapped in a blanket of haze.

Over lunch, I’d recounted the highlights of my conceited week-end: the meeting with David Lebeaux and the photograph of Charlie Callahan he’d given me, my conversation with Courtney Henkins and the planted prescription bottle, the piece of information on Amy Liu’s request of Callahan postmortem samples and how the request had vanished, and finally my lovely acquaintance with John Sakovich and Chris Lang from Pacific Station.

On Saturday I’d despised Henkins for resolving to subtle means to send us a message instead of stepping forward. Now that she was dead
, she’d suddenly turned into a hero. Death can do things like that.

“How did you get home from Venice?”

“I flagged a patrol car and had them drop me off at Diane’s—my Charger was still there. When I finally got home, I found my house ramped. Will was at the neighbor’s, unharmed. My neighbor feeds the mutt every time I don’t show up at night.”

We crossed the street and waved our badges at the guard behind the entrance booth of Piper Tech, a red and gray building made of brick and cement
. It housed the Electronics Unit and the Hooper Memorial Heliport. To access the labs you had to walk to the back of the building through the loading docks. I wasn’t quite done recounting the events of the weekend, so we sat in the shade, over yellow metal stairs, behind a pillar where somebody had painted he words “Loading only”.

“So they searched your place,” Satish said. “That’s to be expected. They’re not gonna trust you and you shouldn’t trust them. Are you sure they didn’t plant anything while they were there?”

“Unless they’re stupid, if they want to fuck me that bad they won’t plant anything in my house. Too obvious, somebody would smell a rat. They checked my vehicle when they picked me up. They wanted to nose into Diane’s house, too, but she told them to fuck off.”

A helicopter—the third in the last hour—took off from the roof of the building. The swooshing roared in our ears and then ebbed off.   

“Did you tell Gomez everything?”

“No. I told
him what I told Sakovich and Lang.”

Satish regarded me with small chocolate eyes. “That means you won’t even try to make Henkins’s case.”

I fiddled with the restaurant receipt. “Look,” I said. “This is a jam.”

“It’s called shit.”

“Fine. Let’s call it shit. We’re sinking deeper and deeper in it. If the brass comes down to tell Henkins the Callahan case is closed, some big fish is dipping. Big fishes and serial killers don’t usually go hand in hand, so I’m starting to think the serial killer thing is all bullshit shoved in our face to cover somebody’s ass.”

“Just to remain within topic.”

I sighed. A truck turned into the driveway, stopped, and then backed into the loading deck. The beep hammered in my ears. We got up and shuffled to the elevators, hands in our pockets, shoulders slouching, and hearts as heavy as a morning hangover.

*  *  *

“What the hell happened in here?” The blades of a standing fan swallowed my voice and digested it. The fan was swooshing, the AC was hissing, and the computers were whirring. I counted three on Viktor’s desk alone, with monitors lined up one next to the other. There were more on the floor. Even the tiny spot for my folding chair was taken. We had to crowd around the monitors and stand.

“This is what I’d call a cyber warfare,” Satish said.

Viktor’s desk looked like a Tower of Hanoi of computer screens, each displaying its different jargon of white code over a black background. Hunched over the laptop, Viktor waved a busy hand. “Never mind the mess. Just watch your step. Some bogus Internet business in Orange County got pinched for Internet fraud. The bunco squad delivered the hardware this morning.”

I tried to watch my step but the cables were in the way.

The birthmark on Viktor’s face looked more ominous today. “So,” he said.

“Let me guess,” I ventured, looking over my shoulder to make sure that whatever I was leaning against wasn’t going to cause a domino fall of computer towers. “You’ve got short answers and long answers and neither will make any sense to us.”

Viktor’s gray eyes looked at me vacantly.

Satish leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. “In which case, let’s hear the short answer first.”

Viktor swiveled his chair around and surveyed all computer screens at once. “The code at the back of the tiles are snippets in a language called XYPlot. It’s a graphing program, no longer supported.”

Satish smiled nice and wide. “And what exactly are we talking about?”

Viktor grabbed the laptop, set it on his lap, and swiveled next to Satish moving his legs like oars. Funny how easily we forget we can walk once we’re on wheels. “XYPlot is a source language. People use it to create graphs. It’s an old generation tool, so our guy is either not fresh out of college or not up to date with his software.”

“Or maybe he just likes to mu
ddle things up,” I added. I kicked away the cables on the floor, unfolded an old metal chair that stood abandoned against the wall, and saddled it.

“Killers tend to do that,” Satish said. “What’s the long answer?”

Viktor scratched the back of his shaved head. “Well,” he said, dragging the word a second longer. “As soon as I posted the inquiry on the board, the answers came in pretty quickly.” He typed the URL on the laptop and pressed enter. I noticed then that the keyboard on his laptop had no letters.

“What happened to your letters?”

“What letters?”

“The ones usually found on keyboards?”

He shrugged. “They distract me. Had to make a special order to get a blank keyboard. They charged me extra.”

How inconsiderate
.

He pointed to
the screen. “See this? That’s my post, right there, and you can see all the replies in the order they were posted.” He scrolled down the screen. “This couple of guys here, linux_nerd and MacWiz are everywhere, even in forums they know nothing about. The usual big-mouthed egos—after a while on a board you learn to ignore them.”

“Wait. We shouldn’t be ignoring anybody here—”

“Relax. I’m tracking everybody, just ignoring the answers. I’m also tracking the page loads and keeping an eye on the rubberneckers. All dynamic IPs, but their providers, routers, and locations came in loud and clear. Comcast, Rogers Cable, Road Runner… A few from India, Singapore, Russia. Many from Europe. I store the IPs as they come in, here, see?” He clicked on an Excel sheet and showed us the table.

“We’re interested in California providers.”

“Assuming the one we’re after doesn’t use a proxy, that is. I got a few, mostly the lurkers. Let me show you the posters first. A lot of dudes love to fly by and sell smoke, so I had to filter the right answer from all the junk. Now, this guy here—he’s got the first crack at it, see? Here’s what he says: ‘Is this a full code? The way you wrote it makes no sense to me. Looks like XYPlot source code. It’s nearly extinct but a few dinosaurs still use it.’ I clicked on the link he added and it checked. These other users posted a few minutes later and confirmed it.”

I leaned forward and squinted at the screen. There were acronyms I did not understand, and a lot of the jargon only Viktor could understand. Some of it seemed to have sparked a flurry of aggressive responses. “Are they always this friendly?”

Viktor sneered. “This particular board tends to be a little testosterone-driven. A lot of trolls lurking. Some of the threads get so heated they turn into cock-fighting pits. There are moderators, but you never see them.”

Satish
said, “I would assume our guy—if he ever got into the discussion—would keep a low profile.”

Viktor nodded. “Right. Which is why, frankly, I don’t think any of these guys fits the bill. I’ve an
alyzed most of the IPs and only a couple track back to L.A. county.”

The la
ptop beeped and a window popped up on the screen.

“What’s that?”

Viktor frowned. “We just got a new response.”

Satish squeezed in, I pull
ed the chair closer.

“Hmm, that’s interesting.
I haven’t had responses in a few hours now. The thread’s activity has gone down once the question has been answered, and—”

The
new post came from a guy with screen name g-cat. Satish read it: “
Why ask
?” He scratched his chin. “That’s not very useful.”

“Hold on.” Viktor blindly typed on his unmarked keyboard. “Shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“This dude
is giving me a useless IP. Let me run it one more time.”

He opened a new window and typed. Code dribbled, chips crackled, detectives waited. Minutes went by, until Viktor shook his head and gave up. “See?” he said, as if we could actually see. “His IP is dynamic, class C, either resident
ial, a small business or a wi-fi hotspot. The MAC is untraceable, probably due to a security vault running on the originating computer or router. In other words, can’t get his footprint.”

“But the guy just posted, right? Is he online right now?” Satish asked.

Viktor switched back to the Internet browser. “He is.”

“Post something, then,” I said. “Anything. I don’t know, ‘Who the hell wants to know? Who the hell are you’—”

“Calm down, let’s think,” said Satish, the voice of wisdom. 

“Yeah, and while
you’re thinkin’ the guy’s gone,” I protested.

“Hold on,”
Viktor said. “ He started typing again.

Satish and I scooched closer.

Just curious about this code
, I read on the screen.
Why do U wanna know
?

“He’ll reply to that,” Viktor said. “I know these guys.”

I rapped my fingers on the back of the chair. The fan swooshed, the AC hissed, the computers on Viktor’s desk whirred. Detectives waited.

Then the laptop beeped.

Satish and I spoke almost at the same time.

“Did you get it this time?”

“What did he say?”

The frown across Viktor’s forehead didn’t look encouraging. “No, same bogus IP. He writes, ‘You asked a stupid question. A kindergartener can recognize XYPlot.’” Viktor shrugged. “Typical answer. At least he bothers to spell correctly. Most everybody else doesn’t.”

His fingers didn’t leave the keyboard.

“What are you doing now?”

“Looking up his profile on the board. Hmm. Not one of the regulars. He has only two other posts, totally unrelated to this. That’s strange, he’s a member since 2006. He probably lurks a lot.”

“
Can you Google his screen name?” Satish asked.

“Sure thing.”
Viktor’s fingers clacked on the keyboard.

I said, “Some of these guys are easily traceable. Hell, some of these people are everywhere—Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia—you name it.”

Satish chortled. “Hail to Zuckerberg for inventing a public outlet for rants and drivels.”

Viktor squinted at
the screen. “Hmm. Not this one. Screen name’s too common. I got a boat, a construction company, a videogame.” He clacked some more. “On Facebook I get studios, clothing, a singer—”

I exhaled in frustration. The constrictive space around us made me feel claustrophobic. I got out of the chair and started pacing in the hallway, just outside the door.

“There’s one gmail account under g-cat, but no public profile.”

“Can you send him an email?” Satish asked.

“No way to tell whether it’s the same guy. Damn it, he’s no longer online.”

There was a moment of mourning silence in which the blades of the fan seemed to snicker sadistically at the three of us.

“What are the odds he’ll be back?” I prodded.

“To lurk? Absolutely. To post again? Who knows. I can try and contact him privately on the board.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Satish held out a hand. “Let’s think this time before we jump into things, okay? Damn it, Track, let’s just take a breather and think. We need something smart, something to engage this guy to talk to us.”

Viktor’s lip hung low. “Since we’re doing some thinking, you do realize this may be a dead end? The packets connecting to the board came from some public hotspot. The info was hidden, but it doesn’t mean the guy’s got something to hide. He could’ve logged from a federal computer. This dude could be working for the feds, the government, or any private company with an umbrella policy of security vaults on all laptops.”