MOSAICS: A Thriller (33 page)

THIRTY-THREE

____________

“Damn you, Medina. You almost fucked up everything.”

A door slid open. Medina’s smell came in full view. More rotten and more sour. He was scared, now. “You k-killed him?”

“You think I’m nuts? He’s a cop!”

I groaned. A few of my nerves went on shaking on their own. The rest of me refused to move.

I smelled Lyons hovering over me. Then I felt his cold touch.

“Got a good blow to the head,” he said. “He’s tough, though. He’ll come back soon.”

He went right back at it with the Taser, the bastard. Five more seconds of hell. This time I didn’t even bother groaning. I figured I was pathetic enough. He dropped the Taser, stooped down again, and slid my Glock out of the holster.

Medina’s heavy breathing, approaching from the other side. A fist took ahold of a chunk of my hair. It pulled. “You know, his DNA—”

“Forget it.” Lyons’s steps, brisk, business like, moving away.

Medina let go of my hair and stood up. “Where are you going?”

Lyons’s voice, from a different room. “Keep an eye on him!”

Water rushing—a bathroom. The tip of my fingers tingled.

Medina’s steps, softer than Lyons’s, tentative. More noises, clinking of glasses, rolling of drawers. Cabinet doors slamming closed.

“What are you doing?” Medina whispered.

Funny how he was no longer stuttering.

“I’m doing what I should’ve done all along. Potassium chloride. He’s going to have a heart attack, nice and smooth. We’ll call nine-one-one, and by the time he gets to the hospital he’ll be happily knocking at heaven’s gates.”

“What? Waste him like that? Don’t you get it? I saw his expression levels
, from some blood tests he had done a few weeks ago. It’s amazing! I’ve never seen anything like that. His sense of smell, his eyesight, everything. The number of pseudogenes expressed in his tissues is comparable to that of a—”

“I don’t give a fucking shit, Medina!” Lyons’s leather soles tapped out of the bathroom. “I’m done playing your games.”

“They’re
not
games. My HIV vaccine—”

“
Your
vaccine, Medina? Yours?” The voice turned, sharply. “You fool. You’re nothing without my money and my name, Medina. Nothing. Your ideas are worth two cents without the money to implement them.”

A sharp air intake.
The acrid smell of rage. A snap—latex gloves.

The tingling spread to my arms. I rushed it and moved a muscle. He saw it and zapped me again. Ten seconds, this time. Ironically, I was getting used to it. And I learned my lesson.

They stood, watching me cringe. Like they watched Amy and Laura.

“We could still use him,” Medina said. “Let me have some hair sam—”

“Shut up!” A smack vibrated in the air like a strung cord. A thump, the drag of furniture. “I don’t give a shit about his genes, okay? I should’ve used potassium chloride all along. You and your stupid super-human ideas. You had to harvest your fucking samples.” Lyons walked away then came back. “Let’s make it look like a wacko did this,” he said, in a falsetto voice. “Nobody will suspect accomplished medical professionals! Look where it got us. All I wanted was to shut their mouths, and the potassium would’ve done that. A poke and we were done.”

“You’re deluding yourself.” Medina, his voice low, near the ground. “The M.E. would’ve found the poke.”

Lyons laughed. An evil, perverse laughter. “You’re so naïve, Medina. You wanted hair? I’ll tell you what you do with hair. You hide the poke, you fool. A nice, tiny poke at the base of the skull.” His steps came toward me.

“The tox results will find it!”

The voice’s temperature dropped below freezing. “How the hell did I ever think you were so smart, Medina? Potassium chloride is naturally found in the blood, that’s anatomy one-oh-one, you stupid fool.”

A pause. Soft, unidentified noises, like nameless colors. Then Lyons’s voice, again. “Check your watch. We’ll call the parameds ten minutes after the shot.”

Lyons walked around me to the wet bar. His shoes came into view, shifting by the sink, as if he were rinsing something. No water was running, though. Behind me, Medina didn’t move. He whined like a little boy. “I could’ve used his bones. His hair at least, the lining of his nose for the olfactory receptors…”

No more noises. Only Medina’s relentless whine. “His heart, his muscle tissue. The brain, imagine what we would’ve found in his brain…”

Lyons’s feet turned and spread apart. After that, they stopped moving. A subtle click.

“Every neuron would’ve been—what are you doing?”

“You’re annoying me, Medina. You’re a genius but too much of a whiner.”

The pop was loud
. A second one followed, then deafening silence and the smell of gunfire. Medina wasn’t whining anymore.

“There, you traitor. For planting Amy’s photo in my kitchen.”

Lyons’s shoes walked toward me. He stooped down, checked my pulse. I saw his knees, his crotch. I fantasized drilling a full-metal jacket in that crotch of his.

“Nice job, Detective,” he said. He wrapped my fingers carefully around the Glock’s butt. “You caught Medina
in flagrante
. You shot him, all right. And then you got so excited, you had a heart attack.” He clicked his tongue in pity, his face so close to my back I felt his breath down my neck. “Too bad, isn’t it?”

Lyons
made sure the gunfire from my Glock transferred to my hand, then slid it out of my fingers and took it away.

His shoes went back to the wet bar, then came back. His gloved hands held up a syringe. He grasped the hair at the crown of my head with his left hand. A drop of chilled liquid from the needle fell on my skin. I held my breath
.

It felt like haulin
g a rock, but it was just my arm. I swung my elbow in his nose—it wasn’t a hard blow, but the surprise effect covered where I lacked. I sent him rolling off, then slid the revolver out of my ankle holster, pulled the trigger and blew his face off. And then fired again.

“There,” I said. “Two for Medina, and two
for you. Next time remember that cops always carry a backup gun, you idiot.”

And then I collapsed backwards, tension washing off from my body like summer rains. My jaw started ch
attering. It was an eerie sound. Kinda funny, actually.
Idiot forgot to check for my backup
. I tittered. My teeth rattled.

I rolled on the floor and laughed my head off. And that’s how Satish found me.

How much later, I couldn’t tell.

THIRTY-FOUR

____________

Wednesday, July 22

There were two loud pops, then a thump, then the crackling of static.

It was more of a
rattling
rather than a crackling, but the recording was bad enough that nobody but me noticed. Which was good. 

Lieutenant Gomez pressed the STOP button, removed his reading glasses, and rubbed his bulging eyes. His pate shone under the fluorescent light. The little hair he had at the sides of his head stuck out. He smelled of chamomile and interrupted dreams.

A fan spun silently on the ceiling. From the top of a dented metal filing cabinet, the fax machine whirred and spit out the ad for a one-in-a-lifetime Hawaiian dream vacation.

Satish sat in the chair to my right, one leg bent, the other stretched ahead of him. He rested his chin on the L between his thumb and his index finger, so he could look straight ahead at the Lieu and not at me.

To my left, cozily settled in the two chairs against the wall, were my old pals, the FID officers—Force Investigation Division. They smelled of nicotine and doughnuts and convenience store shaving cream. I got to spend some quality time with them last year, over another couple of officer-involved shootings. They were my guardian angels. Every time I squeezed the trigger, they came down from heaven.

One sat with his arms hooked at the back of the chair, his legs crossed, and a sneer plastered on his face. He rocked slowly on the hind legs of the chair. The recording of the Taser clicking made his sneer widen. His pal took notes throughout the recording. From time to time he lifted his head, pointed his pencil and asked Gomez to rewind the tape. He had some issues when Lyons and Medina walked off to the bathroom. Their voices came and went in distant barks, so I had to repeat to him the conversation as best as I could recall it. He took notes, tapped his pencil, took more notes. 

At the end of the recording there was a moment of silence, after which Gomez swiveled back in his chair and inhaled. His wide and short hands clutched the edge of the desk. “The wire?” he said to me. “Good idea.”

I offered a smile.

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t smile back. “Confronting the suspect by yourself?” He leaned forward across the desk and locked his eyes into mine. “Fucking dumb.”

The FID dicks snickered. The taller one pushed the chair backwards and leaned it against the wall. He wasn’t wearing a tie, only an electric blue shirt, the collar unbuttoned to show a thick, bull-like neck that widened into flaps every time he flexed his muscles. Specks of dandruff glistened on the electric blue.

Gomez’s eyes shifted to Satish. My partner didn’t look at me. There comes a time when your partner is not allowed to cover your ass. Satish cleared his throat. “We had a—divergence of opinions.”

Gomez’s brow shot up in his bald forehead. “You advised your partner against this—” He waved his reading glasses at me. “—suicidal mission of his?”

“Correct.”

Gotta love my agency
. You can do a thousand things right, but if you make one mistake, sure as hell, it’s the one mistake they’ll never forget. I didn’t know what was worse, the FID dicks snickering behind my back, or my partner tale-telling me to the LT.

To hell with all of them
.

“I was right about Lyons,” I said. “And Medina
was
the Volvo driver I’d chased down Valley. I’m sure when our people will crack Medina’s computer at the hospital, they’ll find—”

“Two men down, Track!” Gomez’s face turned the color of red beets. “You could’ve been one of them!” He swallowed, slid on his reading glasses, then took them off again, pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes closed. “Will you ever—
ever
—be able to close a case following the usual police procedural, Detective Presius?”

I opened my jaw then closed it again. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

The tall FID dick stopped leaning backwards and the chair’s front leg came to the floor with a loud thud. “That’s how cowboys conduct investigations,” he said.

Gomez’s sense of humor was si
gnificantly impaired at two in the morning. Not that it was much better during the day.

I didn’t care either way. In a little over twenty-four hours I’d slammed my car into a tree and torched it, found one and a half cadavers—plus bits and pieces here and there—got slammed to the floor by a faithful replica of the Venus of Milo, been Tased three times, and got this close to be poked with a lethal injection.

My sense of humor was so primed I could feel myself dropping on the floor and rolling in laughter all over again any minute, just out of sheer joy for being alive.

Gomez pushed his chair backwards and got up. Four sets of eyes rose wit
h him. He scratched his bald head, looked down on his desk, found nothing of interest, pulled the chair back behind his ass and sat down again. Four sets of eyes lowered.

The FID
’s pencil resumed squeaking on paper.

Gomez grabbed a pen and rolled it between his fingers. “We’ve got two medical prof
essionals down,” he said. “Together, they cooked up a serial killer M.O. and perpetrated heinous crimes.” He paused, swallowed, rolled the pen. “Medina was a sociopath. The body parts found in the freezer of his mother’s house fit the bill. Lyons, though—Lyons was a big shot. A recipient of the National Medal of Science. The press is going to howl at us. And all we have on him is—this.” He tapped the handheld recorder I’d worn inside my shirt.

I shifted forward in the chair and clutched my knees. “And the paper draft,” I said.

“What paper draft?”

“The paper that Medina wrote and Amy penciled all over because it was wrong.”

The paper missing from Amy Liu’s home office, the one I’d later found in Lyons’s office, and then again in Medina’s shrine. I couldn’t understand Amy’s corrections, but I knew exactly who could.
Diane
.

“Amy Liu was a young MD in Lyons’s group. She also happened to be his lover, but that’s a different story. People like Lyons use sex like us dicks use cigarettes.
Anyway, Amy was collecting data for a vaccine trial, a vaccine that Lyons had patented based on ideas spurred from the sick, yet brilliant mind of Hector Medina. The two sold the patent to a company named Jank Biologicals. The vaccine yielded terrific results in monkeys, yet the FDA wouldn’t approve the vaccine until Lyons made the brave move of injecting himself and attracting a lot of attention. The vaccine was finally approved and Jank started producing it for the clinical trials. The patent money barely scraped the surface. Lyons and Medina were in for the big bucks—shares. Lyons had become a hero, his study was featured all over the media. Jank shares soared. Lyons was finally collecting.”

I looked around me. They were all listening, so I went on. “Phase I went smooth—all they had to show was the vaccine was safe, which they knew already. I think the problems started with phase II. The pilot study showed that the vaccine wasn’t working—that’s what Amy found out when she reviewed the data in Medina’s draft.”

The FID taking notes raised his pencil. “Was the vaccine harmful?”

I knew the answer because Diane had explained it to me. “No. They would
’ve halted the study if that were the case. It wasn’t harmful, but it wasn’t working either. Amy tried to prove it, when she requested Callahan’s samples—she wanted to see what went wrong in his case. She confronted Lyons with the data in her hands. Lyons, though, had other plans. He’d started selling Jank’s stocks. He had already made millions, but he wasn’t quite happy yet. He’d bought a house in Malibu and a bunch of luxury cars—the expenses were adding up. He wanted more money, money that he knew he could squeeze out of the Jank’s stocks—which kept soaring—for a little bit longer, at least until the truth about the vaccine came out.”

“So Callahan’s death tipped Amy Liu?” Satish asked.

“No, Amy found out on her own. She needed samples from Callahan to prove it, and she used them to confront Medina and Lyons. Lyons of course had no doubt on what needed to be done: shut Amy’s mouth for good. Medina, though, had his own ambitious plans. The freak wanted to apply the same powerful idea behind the HIV vaccine to human genetics. He wanted to create a super-human by tiling together DNAs from different individuals. So, instead of wasting cadavers, why not enact a lunatic serial killer and get some experimental samples while they’re at it? Two pigeons with one stone. In fact, as we’ll find out a little later in the story, Medina’s had a little practice of his own already.”

There was a tap. I turned, and the FID taking notes pointed his pencil at me. “Why fake data? That’s stupid if the vaccine turned out not to work.”

“The truth was going to come out eventually. Lyons would’ve had to admit that the vaccine wasn’t working. Things like that happen all the time: great results in monkeys that do not reproduce in humans. All Lyons wanted was more money from the Jank stocks. He wanted to push the trial longer so he could sell more stocks, at a higher price. He had Laura on his side—who’d borrowed money from her mother to buy shares—and he probably tried to convince Amy, too. Maybe he offered her money. Amy didn’t want to hear it, though. She wanted to halt the trial, start over with a new vaccine, one she’d designed herself.”

I paused, looked around. They were all quiet, staring at me. The pencil scribbled on the notepad. Gomez rolled the pen and bulged his eyes. The fan swooshed, the crack in the open window let the night breeze drift in, together with the distant snore of a half-asleep freeway. I resumed my account. “The night of Amy’s party Lyons leaves with all other guest. He then comes back. Amy’s waiting for him, waiting for her lover. Little she knows, she meets her assassin instead. Medina attacks her with the acid, Lyons finishes her by strangling with a French catheter—the perfect ligature, virtually leaves no telltale mark.”

“How do you know it was Lyons?” FID dick again. Had to keep up the pace for his notes.

“You heard it on tape. Medina had a skin condition called Morgellons’ disease. His hands and feet bled regularly. His lab notes were spotted with bloody fingerprints. His hands hurt, he wouldn’t have had the strength to strangle a woman. Lyons didn’t deny it when I confronted him.”

“He didn’t admit it, either.”

I held his gaze
and decided to ignore the remark. “Medina flees, Lyons has a change of heart and calls nine-one-one. Maybe he panics. Maybe it’s part of the plan because he’s such a die-hard macho he thinks he can tease us and never be caught. I thought of asking him but as you know things got out of hand. His voice is on tape. That word he uses—abraded—is his signature.”

“Why kill the wife
if she was in it too?” Gomez asked.

“
Laura freaked out after Amy died. She was in for the money, not for murder. Amy had left a message on Lyons’s voice mail about Medina’s paper, a message that Laura picked up instead of its intended recipient. I found out one night when I examined Amy’s phone logs. Of course, at the time I didn’t know the kind of message Amy had left on Lyons’s machine. When Amy was killed, Laura must’ve guessed that both Medina and her husband were behind the murder. So now there was another woman who needed to be shut up. By now, the show had been well rehearsed. Lyons steps out of the house to take his daily swim, leaving the front door open. Medina has both a key and the passcode to the property gate—same key I used to get through Lyons’s property gate. I found it in a drawer at his mother’s house. Medina attacks her with the acid, Lyons strangles her, then Medina does his sampling thing—something I believe he enjoys very much.”

Satish rapped his knuckles on the armchair.
“He kept all that stuff in his garage… why?”

“Because in his sick mind, Medina was a genius,” I said. “He wanted to create a genetic super-human by piecing together the genomes of all his victims. A
mosaic
of genomes, which is probably what gave him the idea of the mosaic tiles.”

And
that’s why he came after me
, I thought, but didn’t say out loud. Me, the chimera, the one who impersonated his genetic dream.

The best of trophies.

“What about the babies?” Gomez asked. “They also had been attacked with acid. By whom?”

“Right. The babies.” I looked at the wall clock ticking above Gomez’s shiny head. It was two thirty a.m. I was tired, very tired. My muscles felt numb from the Taser. I slowly got up, walked to the water fountain by the American and Californian flags, filled a paper cup, then returned to my chair. “So, now we get to Medina’s pathetic story and why he enjoyed playing the part of the whacko serial killer.”

The FID leaning back against the wall let go of the chair again and again the front legs hit the floor with a thud. “He
was
a serial killer.”  

“He had a good teacher—his mother. Lyanne Norris was a single mom when she had Medina. She gave him his dad’s last name, but the dad never came back to meet his son. Several other men came back instead, at various times, and enjoyed Lyanne’s company under the sheets. Maybe there were some regulars who lasted long term, I’ve no idea.
Lyanne got pregnant regularly, killed the babies, and dumped sulfuric acid on their faces. Medina must’ve assisted to some of the killings. I don’t know what that can do to a child’s brain—watching your mother kill your own siblings. He visited the dumpsite regularly. There were animal bones scattered around. I’m guessing he killed them, pets and wildlife, before he graduated to humans. Maybe that’s how he got the idea of killing his first victim, Gloria Weiss, a twelve-year-old run away gone missing two years ago.”