MOSAICS: A Thriller (32 page)

One of the uniformed officers appeared at the door, a red face on a boxer’s body. He shot a nervous glance at the two of us, cleared his throat,
and then mumbled, “The M.E. says he’s ready to bag the lady.”

“Coming.” Satish patted his brows aga
in, shoved the handkerchief in his pocket, and shuffled back to the door.

“I know the guy’s face,” I said. Satish froze, one foot on the doorstep, the other hanging behind. “
You saw him too, way back, when we interviewed Lyons. He was standing by the door. Tall, lanky stutterer? Do you remember him, now? Viktor said he’ll keep him talking. He’s using a disposable cell, and as long as the cell is on, he’s traceable. Viktor’s got signal from two towers. Our guy hasn’t been moving for the past twenty minutes. I can see him, just like the other night, sipping his coffee and browsing the Internet. He thinks he’s safe, the son of a bitch. I can spot him out of a million faces. I’ve got his face, his clothes, his damn smell. The blue suits ain’t got any of that.”

We looked at each other. Two cops, two partners, two dicks butting heads.

I turned around and walked to the car. I opened the door, slid behind the wheel, and jammed the key into the engine.

I let the engine roar, my last word on the matter. As I shifted the stick onto driving
, the passenger’s door opened.

“Viktor’s got the location right around the Hollywood Vine station,” Satish said. “Plenty of people, peak of the day, four cruisers patrolling. A needle in a haystack.
But
the signal’s loud and clear.”

He sent me a sideways glance. I grinned, put out the sirens and screeched into the street.

THIRTY-ONE

____________

Decked in sunglasses, mikes, radio earplugs and black formal suits, Sat and I strode along the Hollywood sidewalk looking like the Men in Black. I told Satish that if some dorky tourist was going to stop us for pictures I’d pull out the Glock. He laughed and replied they’d think we were shooting a movie.

Above us, one of the Air Division choppers was on a perimeter, ready for a possible chase. We had the cruisers on the street, Viktor on the radio, guns in holsters, and roughly thirty thousand people roaming the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I’d dragged Satish on a one-in-a-million mission. I was still sore from the car accident. My brains simmered in the heat. Awakened, the Pain stirred around my loins.

We walked briskly, westbound on Hollywood Boulevard, from Vine
toward the Kodak Theater. Past the shady smoke shops with loud rock music spilling out, past the drag queen store displays with whacky wigs and strip club costumes. Viktor’s voice crackled in my ear bud. “Got a somewhat longer message, this time. He’s definitely in the Hollywood and Highland area.”

“Getting there. What did he say?”

“I asked him about XYPlot and DNA. That got him going. He thinks he’s safe, the bastard, but the tower signal is pretty strong.”

“Can you get an exact location?”

“As long as he keeps the wi-fi connection open I get regular updates on his location from the cell tower. The minute he turns it off we lose him.”

“Shit, we’re so close. Keep ’im talkin’.” 

“Sure thing.”

The chopper’s blades swooshed above us. The buildings got gaudier and taller, the billboards larger. They portrayed per
fect smiles and fake lives. Right as we reached the escalators to the Hollywood Metro Station, Viktor croaked on the radio again. “I’ve got him within twenty feet from your location.”

I felt the excitement of the chase.
Twenty feet
. I spun around and inhaled. A cacophonic blend of smells hit my nose.

“Help!”

The crowd parted. A few rubberneckers stood ogling without uttering a word. One of the many fake Michael Jacksons froze in his walking robot pose.

“Help!”

Olive skin in a yellow summer dress, black hair tied up in a thick ponytail, well-shaped ankles balancing over high wedges, and dark eyebrows shot up in a high frown. Red lipstick matched the painted fingernails clutching anxiously to a pink teddy bear. The pink teddy bear didn’t match.

“My child!” She brought a hand to her forehead. “Somebody took my child! Please, help…”

Damn it
!

Satish shot his badge
in the air. “Who took your child, ma’am?”

“I don’t know—” She swallowed, turned around
toward the escalators and waved a hand in a vague direction. “We just got out of the metro. We were holding hands and then she suddenly squirmed away. Oh God, it all happened so fast—” She started hyperventilating. Satish grabbed her arm and walked her to a bench. I tuned the radio to our frequencies and flagged down a cruiser.

“Did you see somebody take your child?” Satish asked.

The woman squeezed the teddy bear on her lap and rocked back and forth. “Her hand slipped out of mine. I turned but she wasn’t there anymore. I barely saw her walking away, there was a man next to her, I think—I think the man was dragging her away, I tried to run, but… but… too many people, I just lost her! Oh God.” She broke into tears.

I squatted down next to her. “What man? Do y
ou remember him? Can you tell what he was wearing?”

She shoo
k her head. “Not too tall. Blond, I think—”

The radio crackled in my ear. “I lost him!” Viktor’s voice broke off. “I fucking lost him. He turned off the cell, the bastard!”

Jesus
.

I yanked the teddy bear off the woman’s hands and brought it to my nose.

“Sat,” I yelled, “Cover the metro!” And then I ran.

*  *  *

The Kodak Center is a labyrinth of smells, a haystack where the faint trace of a five-year-old is a very fine needle. I crouched and sniffed, searching for her scent. Kids brush their hands along walls, stair railings, posts. I smelled everything, the delicate scent of her palms still strong on the teddy bear I was holding.

The sun glared, the crowds packed the sidewalks. I swore, jostled
the German tourists in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops and the flocks of Japanese with twelve-inch-long camera lenses and flowery sun umbrellas. I found a trace on the railing of the Highland staircase and swam upstream against a tide of loud Italians drenched in expensive perfumes. I sauntered across the stands in the shopping plaza, looking for the trace. A young man with a putty crest offered me a cell phone. An artificial blonde in high heels and low skirt disapproved of my pink teddy bear.

The fountain jets swished up from the middle of the plaza and gargled. Kids in their bathing suits played tag with the water, shreds of laughter floating up like bubbles. Up on the walkways across the three-story archway, between the standing elephants of the Babylon set, tourists elbowed one another to take pictures of the Hollywood sign. I ran to the bottom of the stairs, sniffed, found no trace, came back, picked it up again in the alley down to the Grauman’s Chinese Theater. A tiny hand had brushed along the wall at about my waist’s height.

Down the stairs I went.      

Tourists buzzed like bees in a beehive. Heads, baseball caps, feet in sandals, jeweled arms, naked shoulders, too much cleavage, too little clothes.

A child’s face emerged and smiled at me.

Wrong scent. Her mother gave me a scornful look and pushed the child away.

The trace, damn it.

I lost the trace.

I peeked down the street but there was nothing to see or smell except gas exhaust and the scent of the flowers and candles people had left at Michael Jackson’s star.

I stood in the middle of the plaza, hands hooked on my belt, sweat pooling around the small of my back and trickling down my forehead. Panting. The sun glistened in my face, teasing. The Pain sneaked up on me, one short flare, and then it was gone. 

The airy voice of a flute soared from a corner, shyly at first, as if looking for its way through the crowds. It came with a faint, delicate scent.

A child’s scent
.

I craned my neck.

Sitting on a bamboo stool, between the white lion statue and the orange pillar, was a small man with a long, white beard, and a hat made of balloons on his head. A plastic flower poked out of the breast pocket of his long, linen blazer.

The girl was sitting
on the ground in front of him, mesmerized. She watched his fingers move up and down the flute keys, her lips slightly parted, her thin brows pinched with admiration, oblivious of her desperate mother, of the cops scattered around looking for her, of the world loudly spinning around her.

And right there, under the scorching sun, watching this little girl completely transported by the music, I had an epiphany. One of those moments that only happens once in a lifetime, when suddenly you see it all with such sharp clarity it hurts. The catharsis of the truth, after which emptiness sneaks up on you like a mugger, like the silence that comes after the last note of
Autumn Leaves
.

That’s when it hit me. Hard.

What a fool I’d been. A fool who’d been fooled so well. The solution had been in front of me all along and I’d failed to see it.

The music stopped, the man smiled and offered the girl a balloon.

I smelled my partner behind me a moment before he spoke. “That the girl?”

I nodded.

“No kidnapper?”

“Don’t think so. She probably got lost and started wandering on her own.” I gave him the teddy bear. “I’d double check on the clown just in case.”

Satish walked to the girl and stooped down. She took the teddy bear nodding her head up and down, big tears rolling down her cheeks. Satish picked her up and she wrapped her arms around him. As they turned, the man with the balloon hat waved at her. She waved back. Brave little kid.

An officer stayed with the man to
ask him some questions.

Satish walked past me.

“Sat,” I called.

He kept walking and didn’t reply.

“I know where to find him, Sat.”

He stopped, turned, and gave me a hard look. “I don’t care what you
think
you know, Track. We’re done chasing ghosts.”

THIRTY-TWO

____________

Moon rays blinked over the pool surface like pale smiles. All around, banana and eucalyptus trees whispered scents of cool summer nights. Water lapped with the monotony of silent prayers. The ocean echoed it with its distant roar.

An engine whirred noiselessly at the end of the road. Headlights bobbed up and down, vanished for a moment, then reappeared. A yellow light flashed, the gate opened. Tires tore up the driveway. The gate rattled and closed. The light at the gate stopped flashing.

The engine died and the headlights faded, their halo lingering in the night one moment longer.

A figure stepped out of the vehicle, locked it, walked over to the door. Decisive steps, a brisk, solid tap thrumming in the night. The tinkling of keys, the clicking of a lock. The moon pooled down the man’s head and shoulders in different shades of silver. The squeak of a door opening.

I stepped out of the shade. “Good to see you, Dr. Lyons.”

He jumped, the key bunch fell off his hands.

His
face squirmed. “Detective…” I smelled panic. A whiff, then it was gone and the cool Doctor Lyons was back. He kept his eyes on me as he stooped down to retrieve the keys. When he leveled me again he looked over his shoulder.

I smiled. “It’s just me, Doc. Didn’t bring company.”

“How did you get past the gate?” He didn’t sound angry. Just surprised.

I showed him the key. I wondered if he recognized it. “Unfortunately, you didn’t leave the door open for me, so I had to wait outside. I waited quite a while, in fact. Drink?”

He agreed because he didn’t have a choice.  

The house was cooler than I remembered. It looked emptier, too, even though all it appeared to be missing was a wife. Her things were still there, where I’d seen them last time. A
handful of women fiction books on otherwise empty shelves. A vase of wilted flowers. Sporadic knick-knacks of feminine taste. Her photographs.

Lyons flipped the light switches as he crossed the first living room, then the second, then the dining room with the see-through fireplace. Our images reflected off the glass panes, the pitch dark outside broken by an arch of garden lights and the lampposts looming behind the property wall. The face of the moon emerged from a thin shroud of clouds and glimmered over the fringes of the palm trees.

It was a peaceful sight.

Lyons swung his black briefcase on the kitchen countertop then stood there rolling up his sleeves while covertly examining me. “All I got is scotch,” he said, coldly.

“That’ll be fine.”

He studied my face—I held his gaze—then slowly walked to the wet bar. I watched him wash his hands, pull down the glasses, fill them with ice. The Venus replica watched him too, from her corner. She seemed to lean farther than last time, her stone eyes harder. Or maybe she was just t
rying to get away from the recessed light that beamed in her face. I gave her a sympathetic look. She didn’t reciprocate.

Lyons turned, two drinks in his hands.

We sat, he on the couch in front of the fireplace, I on the recliner at the other end.

He sipped
then asked, “What brings you here tonight, Detective?”

I clinked the ice in my glass. “We’re looking for a colleague of yours.”

He looked into his glass. “Medina. I’ve heard. His mother shot herself—is that so?”

I nodded—that was the story given to the press.

He took another swig, smacked his lips. It was good scotch. “Didn’t show up at work today. But that much you know already.” He scratched his temple. “It’s uh—a bit of a shock, really. Medina’s one of my best people. Associate researcher, I should say. He’s got a Ph.D.” He stared at me as if the information should’ve made a difference. I tried to look as if it made a difference. He sighed and leaned back on the couch, the glass of scotch snuggled in his hands. “I don’t understand why he’d vanish like that. Something really grave must’ve happened. I trust him.”

“Of course you do. He does all your dirty work.”

He dwindled for a moment then quickly regained his temper. A nervous titter surfaced between the sides of his goatee. “Yes,” he said. “Indeed. Sequencing and aligning DNA can be one of the dirtiest and most tedious tasks you can think of.”

I joined his titter like a good ol’ pal, drained my glass, then clinked the ice a bit more. “Seriously, Doc. You have no idea where he could be hiding?”

He frowned, all humor suddenly drained off his face. He cocked his head backwards. “Hiding? You think he’s implicated in his mother’s death? Medina was devoted to his mother. Her days were numbered, she was holding to a thin thread. I’m not surprised she killed herself, given the circumstances.”

I tapped a finger on the glass. “Maybe I sho
uld reword the question. Where are
you
hiding Hector Medina, Dr. Lyons?”

His brow
shot up. The rest of him remained still. I inhaled.
The spice of adrenaline
. Could be fear, could be deception. The same finger that had scratched his temple came down to the corner of his mouth and brushed the sides of his goatee. Slowly, thoughtfully. Then the leer came back, not fully, like a minute earlier, more cautiously, rather. Testing grounds.

“I see,” he said. “That’s why you came here. You think Medina came to me.” He brought the glass to his mouth, took a long drag, then cupped it with both hands and smiled a sad and thoughtful smile. “Why would I be
hiding
my lab assistant, Detective?”

That was an easy question to answer. “Because you still need him. Because you’re nobody without him. You don’t have a vaccine, you never had one. Medina did it all. I saw his lab notes. I saw more than I ever wanted to see.”

I watched him take the news, his body posture, the change in perspiration. He sat with his elbows propped on his knees, staring at the ice in his glass. His jaw twitched. Then, suddenly, his eyes darted to the wet bar.

I pressed on. “You had one brilliant idea, Doctor. Fifteen years ago. It made you famous. You finally proved what had been controversial for so many years. HIV caused AIDS. You had it. It was all yours. And then, after that, your muse dried up. Grant money shifted to other groups, your lab shrunk. Lyons wasn’t coming up with good research any more. The papers you published afterwards were flops.”

He listened quietly. “So?” he said. “Year after year the NIH has continued to cut funds. Every lab in this country experienced the hardship, not just mine.” He shot his eyes to the wet bar again, coupled with a spike in adrenaline. His hands tensed around the glass. His jaw twitched. He looked away from me, and, rolling the glass between his palms, asked, “What are you getting at with this?”

“I’m getting to a killer. More than one, in fact.”

He shot to his feet and so did I. “I need another drink,” he said, sharply.

Before he could come around the coffee table, I stepped in front of him and took the glass from his hands. “Let me do the honors,” I said. Whatever he’d eyed at the wet bar, I wasn’t going to wait and find out.

I didn’t fill the glasses. I set them on the edge of the sink, turned around, and kept my eyes on the man. He flopped back on the couch and rubbed his face. He didn’t make eye contact. He just sat there. Maybe he knew what was coming. 

“So, you teamed up, Medina and you,” I pressed. “He was the brains, you were the authority to endorse the ideas and make them happen.”

“What’s wrong with that?” he mumbled, without effort.

I thought I smelled something. Vaguely. I inhaled. It was gone. I focused on my speech. “Nothing’s wrong with that until it crosses paths with murder.”

His shoulders shook, his head with them. He was laughing, a sad, dry laughter that had long lost all its amusement. “It’s the second time you say that, Detective. I think I’ve made it clear that I’ve been the victim in all this. I lost a patient, a wife and a dear colleague.”

“That was the plan.” I leaned against the wet bar, right hand close to my holster. I knew he was unarmed but I also assessed him for a solid man, in good shape, and quite capable of
putting up a good fight. “If anything were to go wrong, you were going to play the victim and Medina was to take the blame. Of course, Medina didn’t know this.”

The smell came back. A fluttery, vaguely sweet, vaguely rotten wisp of a human scent.

Lyons stood up, shoved a hand in his pockets, and walked toward me. Casually, as if trying to think things over. “And this plan of mine, as you call it,” he said, one finger drawing a circle in the air. “Where exactly did it go wrong?”

My turn to leer. I bobbed my head. “Oh, it was perfect. The weapon, the set-up, the whacko killer motive. A French catheter—who would’ve thought of that? Strong, smooth, kills fast with virtually no telltale. Very clever, Doc.”

He looked amused. I’m sure, deep inside, his ego felt flattered. I could smell it. He stood close to the Venus replica and put a hand on her waist. It was a sensual gesture, as if he were about to invite her to dance.

“Very clever, Doc,” I repeated. “Almost perfect.”

The “almost” jarred him. His fingertips pressed hard around the marble of the statue and became white.

“It takes a strong, steady hand to strangle with a French catheter,” I said. “A hand Medina didn’t have.”

He kept his eyes on Venus’s feminine navel. He caressed it, softly. “No?”

“No. Medina has Morgellon’s disease, a mostly psychotic condition that causes his hands to bleed. He’s in constant pain. He wouldn’t have the strength to hold the ligature for so long. No, Doc. Medina didn’t strangle the victims.
You
did.”

The sound was almost imperceptible to human ears, but not to mine. The smell drifting to my nostrils—I finally recognized it. Medina had been hiding in Laura’s home office. The door opened a crack, enough to release his scent. I turned to face him, and it was a mistake. Lyons grabbed the Venus by her waist and shoved her
toward me. The statue hit the wet bar and split in half. The gracious goddess of love weighed a ton on me. I stumbled back and fell on the floor, my limbs still wacky and sore from last night’s car accident. I heard a noise, like a drawer slamming. I rolled the lady over, and as I pushed myself up there was a flash and then sharp pain shot up my spine and took hold of every nerve in my body. I coiled, my limbs as tense as wrung rope, and yet I couldn’t stop shaking, an invisible wire tied around me, squeezing.

Click, click, click, click, click
.

I flopped on my stomach like a curled leaf.

No, it wasn’t The Pain.

The fucker was hiding a Taser behind the wet bar.