MOSAICS: A Thriller (27 page)

Satish and I were silent for a few seconds.

“Why the attitude, then?” I objected.

Viktor didn’t seem impressed.
“Computer programmer attitude—it’s all over the map.”

That was easy to believe. Still.

I shook my head. “Haven’t you worked long enough with us cops, Vik? Guy leaves no trace, he’s automatically flagged.”

“Fine,” Viktor said. “I’ll PM him on the board. What do you want me to say?”

Satish crossed his arms. “How about a blunt: ‘Did you write the code?’”

I raised an ey
ebrow. “And what do we hope to accomplish with that?”

“Stroke his ego. If he wrote it, he wants us
to know. He thinks he’s safe, armored behind—what did you call it? A vault, and a fluke IP address.”

Viktor bobbed his head in approval. “Yeah. Stroking egos is good in this field. Let’s see what he comes up with.”

“He might tease us just for the hell of it.”

“Worth a try. He wouldn’t leave these clues if he didn’t want some of the crumbs to get to him. He wants to talk to us. And we’re giving him the opportunity.” Satish peered at me through dark eyes. “This ain’t the BTK killer, Track. He’s as evil, but way savvier.”

TWENTY-SIX

____________

The sky was heavy with layers of evening heat. The trail of vehicles along the One-Ten was a headless snake of boxed humanities. Dave Brubeck in the car stereo wasn’t helping this time. The rhythm of
Take Five
is best enjoyed with either a woman or a Bloody Mary. I had neither with me, so I turned the stereo off.

The brake lights of
the cars ahead of me blinked. My impatience simmered in the afternoon heat.

Diane called, the usual note of disappointment in her voice. “I thought we had plans for tonight.”

“I’m stuck in traffic.”

She pouted.

“Go ahead and eat,” I said. “I’ll call you when I’m off the Two.”

There was a pause of silence heavier than a drowning man—the drowning man being me. “Fine,” she said at last. “But do come. There’s something important I need to tell you.”

She hung up. I pulled down the window and stuck a hand outside, just to feel the air. Heat sweltered from the pavement and crawled inside the car. The back of my shirt melted against my skin. I closed the window. The left lane toward the conjunction with the Five was clogged. I came to a complete stop, cursed, and swung the car out of the lane, causing a trail of loud honks to follow me downstream. I honked back, forced my way to the right lane and took the Solano exit.

I drove through North Broadway and then turned onto Elysian Drive
, the whole time thinking about the investigation. I had four murders—Charlie Callahan, Amy Liu, Laura Lyons, and Courtney Henkins. I had six unidentified infants killed sometime between the ’eighties and the ’nineties. I had two sets of hairs, one from Amy, and one from Laura, both identical. They fluoresced and didn’t match any known type of hair except for some weird disease that may or may not exist. I had seven tiles, four found next to Amy’s body, and three next to Laura’s, and the last three were marked with some XYPlot code at the back that nobody knew what it was useful for.

That covered bodies and evidence.

As for suspects, that was a whole different yarn to disentangle. The killer, or killers, didn’t fit any standard profile I could think of. The victims ranged in gender, sexual orientation, racial and socioeconomic background. The scalp and skin harvesting were sophisticated trophies. Could be the usual drive to amputate the victim, or could be something else. The tiles, on the other hand, pointed to something completely different. An artist, I’d thought at first, except now we had a code and a possible suspect roaming a board for computer geeks.

Lyons was in this up to his neck. Could
’ve been the killer, could’ve been, like he claimed, the next victim. He didn’t strike me as a cop killer, though. How did Henkins fit in all this? Henkins’s mouth had to be shut because of Charlie Callahan. The more I thought about it, the more I realized Charlie Callahan’s death held the key to everything.

I wandered. My Charger wandered with me. The hills of Ascot Park unfolded on my right, yellow, dry, and thirsty. Dusk fell, pink tainted the sky. Tired silhouettes of palm trees bowed to the sunset.

I found myself back in El Sereno, cruising the winding road to the water cistern. I pulled to the curb and rolled down the window. The air had the dull scent of hot summer nights.

Downtown twinkled in the distance.

I pondered. The engine idled.

And then the
Charger roared again and I left the narrow winding road and drove back downhill. Lampposts pooled yellow light onto the blue hour sky. Silent homes with dimly lit porches gave way to spread-out parking lots and blinking neon lights advertising psychic reads, twenty-four-hour drug stores, and booze shops.

I stopped at the red light between Valley and Eastern.
To my right I spotted a grayish banner that said, “Café Allegro Espresso Bar,” under a kinky gutter that leaked old tears of rust. The brick wall had layers of gas exhaust and pollution, and the door stood half-hidden and unnoticed in a little alcove beneath a white sign bearing the picture of an espresso cup and the writing, “Free Wi-Fi.”

Free wi-fi two miles away from the cister
n—a public hotspot.

What are the odds
?

Just
outside the café, an old bum in a green, frayed sweater sat on a bench. He flashed me a one-toothed smile and pointed. I ignored the smile and the pointing. He did it again. The car behind me honked. The bum laughed.

The light had turned green.

I screeched out of the intersection, whipped the car in one of the parking spots by the street, and grabbed my cell phone. It was past working hours, yet Viktor picked up immediately. When I asked him if he could locate all Internet cafés within a two-mile radius from the cistern, the man didn’t utter a word. All I heard was the clacking of an unmarked keyboard. Thirty seconds later came the verdict: “The cistern is up in an isolated area, Detective. All I see is an old joint called Café—”

“Al
legro,” I interrupted him.

“That’s exactly the place.”

I thanked him and hung up.

The bum
was still on the bench, smiling. Beer and urine had brewed a soup of ancestral smells on his skin. I gave him a dollar and pushed the door open.

It was warm inside, the air laden with a fog of cigarette smoke and caffeine. A kid with a guitar sang from a stool in a corner. The song was soft and melancholy and I didn’t know anything about it except that it was soft and melancholy and it made me think of Diane having dinner by herself.

By the window, a fragile-looking man with ruffled ash-blonde hair was hunched over a laptop. The wall behind him was plastered with a decade worth of flyers: theater plays, yoga classes, music classes, rentals, sales, lost pets, wanted. At the back of the counter, a blackboard displayed a range of espresso drinks, sodas, smoothies, and their prices. The melancholy song came to an end and the kid with the guitar bowed his head. The man at the table in front of him clapped his hands. Nobody else took notice.

A
weathered dame with heavy eyelids and skeptical eyebrows came to the counter to ask for my order. Her hair sat quizzically at the top of her head and came down at the sides of her neck in little static question marks. She was as true a blonde as the Italian sodas she sold were true Italian.

“A single shot espresso,” I said. “In a
ceramic cup.”

The heavy lids came down a notch. The skeptical eyebrows remained skeptical. “All our cups are
ceramic, hon. But I’ve shut down the espresso machine for the night. I got drip.” She pointed a hard chin toward the pot and then, to show me how much she cared, she took a rag from her apron and started wiping the counter.

“Not my lucky night.”

The lids rolled up a bit and gave me a look-over. “That could change,” she said, and her lips tweaked into the flash of a smile, so quick it looked like a nervous tic. Not even the eyes joined in.

I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

I thanked her, walked away, and fished another dollar for the kid with the guitar. My eyes fell on the hunched back with the ash-blonde hair. The tall paper cup next to his laptop smelled of coffee polluted with some sugary syrup. Something shone on the table next to the cup. Something round and silvery, change, aligned in a perfect row of one quarter, three nickels, and two dimes.

Coins aligned in a perfect row
.

Just like in Lyons’s kitchen, just like on Amy Liu’s console.

I inhaled. I could only smell coffee, cigarette smoke, and heavy breathing. The air was stale and saturated.

Damn it
.

The Italian soda blond had already left the counter. I walked back and rattled my knuck
les on the empty display case awakening sugary scents of long gone pastries. The blonde took her sweet time to come back.

“What roast is it tonight?”

“Guatemalan, Hawaiian, or Spanish.”

I dropped a five-buck not
e on the counter. “Spanish. In one of your ceramic cups.”

The tic flew over her lips again.

“I don’t drink in paper,” I added, for whose benefit I don’t know.

Her blood red nails went fumbling for a mug.
She turned, filled it, came back. “The pot’s fresh,” she said, handing me the change. “You bus when you’re done.”

The music resumed. A giggling pair of girls got out of their chairs and left the place. Now it was just me, the Italian soda blond
e, the guitar player and his lonely fan, and the ash-blond man with the aligned row of coins next to his open laptop. There were plenty of empty tables, but I took my mug and sat at the one next to him. I picked up a two-day-old newspaper, flung a leg over my knee, and sipped the drip coffee while swaying my foot. My eyes focused above the rim of the paper, my nose beyond the gasoline smell of the pages. I could see his profile, now. It looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Tall forehead, long and straight nose, the way Michelangelo liked to paint them, and ashen, borderline-sick complexion, studded with old acne scars. The hint of a pale stubble on his unshaved chin.

The guy seemed oblivious of my presence.
His nostrils widened slowly as one finger brushed the laptop pad in gentle strokes. Whatever he was staring at, it had his full attention.

Hard to percolate the thick scents of the place. Something vague came to me, as faint as a thread of cobweb—a dry, aseptic smell that reminded me of tired hospital rooms.

If only I could smell the coins
.

I swung
my foot faster, hit one of the table’s legs, bumped it, and spilled coffee on the floor.

“Damn it,” I shouted. “I’m so damn sorry.” I bent
forward, armed with napkin and wide-open nostrils. He was fast. He swept the coins in his pocket, shut the laptop closed, and jumped to his feet. Not a drop of coffee had reached him, and yet his eyes widened with the alarm of a drowning cat.

“It’s—okay.”

My nose was fast too. I caught a whiff of nitrile gloves, laced with the decaying sweetness of rotten flowers.

He was at the door before I could take a second sniff.

Italian Soda popped behind the counter like a silhouette at a carnival shooting game. “No refills for spilled coffee.”

I smacked the half-full mug on the counter in front of her. “You can spill the rest of it.”

It took a moment to readjust to the smells outside. The stale air, laden with coffee grounds and cigarette smoke, kept lingering in my nostrils. I whirled my head looking for the stranger with the nitrile glove smell. The bum sitting on the bench lifted his lids and his eye whites peered at me as if coming out of the brick wall. He grinned like the Cheshire cat and pointed to a lanky figure quickly disappearing in the wavering lights of the urban night, his back still hunched, and the laptop folded underneath his arm. 

I broke into a run, then thought better of it, and resolved to a quick pace. Deep inside my body, something complained. I told the something to shut up. My man reached an old station wagon Volvo, copper colored and dinged to the sides.

“Hey!” I yelled, fishing out my badge.

He didn’t even turn. He opened the front door, slid inside, and tore off.

I double-backed, ran for my Charger, whipped it into traffic, and gave chase. Somewhere between dodging incoming vehicles, flattening the gas pedal, and reaching for the radio, I remembered to turn on the siren.

Everything around me swirled into a blur. The southbound traffic on Va
lley spread apart and the dinged Volvo appeared about four hundred yards ahead of me, its dark shadow lit up intermittently by the streetlights.

The fucking license plate light was out.

The speedometer needle hit home. I reached for the radio mike as I entered the big bend on Valley. One hand on the wheel, tires screeching and smoking, and the radio jumped to the passenger floorboard.

Damn it.

No time to think.

No time to see, smell, react. No time to even shit myself, as I entered a tunnel of blurred lights and
Mach speed in which the sound of the siren wobbled and wavered struggling to keep up with me. I don’t care if that’s not even possible, it’s what you feel when you get sucked into high-speed pursuits.

The light at the North Soto crossing flickered above me.

Can’t stop
.

We both ran a red light, the Volvo and I. Then the Volvo, too, went into a blur. Pain shot up my arms.

No time for pain either
.

The Pain didn’t listen and spread its icy tentacles around my shoulders.

The Volvo blur spun to a ninety-degree turn on San Pablo and crashed through lowered rail crossing bars. My Charger followed. Red lights flashed. A loud whistle shrieked in my ears—the Pain, no, something bigger. I spun over debris, tires skittering, then regained control. The train, the Pain, the Charger.