MOSAICS: A Thriller (35 page)

I slid off the latex gloves and
plucked my cell phone out of my arm strap.

“You still there?”

I’d dialed Satish’s number one second before pounding on Sakovich. I had no idea if he’d picked up, no idea if he’d stayed on the line the whole time. I squeezed the phone against my ear, heart thumping in my chest, and only heard static.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

“I’m here,” Satish finally replied.

I exhaled. “Did you hear everything?”

“I did.”

I breathed heavily, pain coiling around my lower back.
“Then my task is done,” I said, and hung up. I left it up to Satish to call the Force Investigation Division and turn me in.

Once a killer, always a killer,
I thought, bitterly.

Maybe the shrink was right after all.

I heard the dogs howl in the distance. The sun had finally come out, and the golden light of sunrise twinkled through the leaves and whispered in the breeze.

The piece of scum had killed a fellow cop. He didn’t deserve to live another day. He didn’t deserve to live another hour, another minute.

I didn’t look back. I just left.

THIRTY-SIX

____________

Diane’s breath had the intoxicating aroma of the Barolo I’d served over dinner. A shaft of yellow streetlight sneaked through a crack in the curtains and pooled over her face. She was beautiful, her hair spread over the pillow and her eyes tainted with a note of sadness. I sipped her lips and inhaled her breasts, my hands on a mission to untangle the bra clasp. One by one, I undid the front buttons of her shirt and kissed her skin as I uncovered it, little waves of goose bumps rising and falling along my path.

“You sure you don’t want to go with me?” she whispered.

Traitor of a bra clasp bit my finger. “Where?”

She turned and looked away. “You know where. To Boston. To help me look for a new place.”

It was midnight. Her flight was leaving in six hours.

“I’m not an East Coast kinda guy.”

She sighed and slid a hand down my chest. “What kind of guy are you, Track Presius?”

“The kind that doesn’t like to talk while making love.”

I kissed her and she kissed me back and we stopped talking and made love instead.

We didn’t talk while she made coffee, four hours later, or when she closed her suitcase. We didn’t talk much along the drive to LAX, either. Small talk. The weather, how expensive it was to rent a place in Boston, where she was going to start looking. Cambridge, most likely. I nodded and said nothing. I walked her to the terminal just so I could kiss her one more time.

“Are you going back home?” she asked.

“No. There’s something I need to take care of.”

She got
in the security line and turned one more time to smile before she disappeared in the midst of people, deodorants, morning breaths, and badly assorted fragrances. I left the airport with the odd feeling that there was another life I could’ve lived as an East Coast kinda guy and I would’ve enjoyed it and been happy, but the other life had closed its door and all I was left with was my West Coast kinda life.

*  *  *

Ricardo José Vargas’s gravestone lay in an uneven patch of overgrown grass, underneath the wide shadow of a sycamore that looked old and wise the way some old and wise sycamores do. The gravestone was a rather inconspicuous piece of white marble with a plain cross and the dates 1990-2009 engraved underneath the name. It smelled peaceful and earthly. There were fresh flowers on it, carnations and white roses that the shade of the tree had kept away from the August sun. All around, scattered with no apparent order, were other gravestones, some as inconspicuous, and some as tacky as they come, sharing company with angels and Maries, and blue-eyed Jesuses.

Not even in death there’
s equality.

The expanse was partly enclosed by a two-foot-tall black metal railing that ran behind the tree and stopped at the top of a green mound with no apparent reason. From there, the green slope tumbled all the way down to a row of dogwoods covered in white blooms. A fat crow was having its morning breakfast with the berries scattered on the ground. Nobody else was around. It was just me, the crow, and the dead.

Quite a nice crowd.

I kneeled by the stone, took out my penknife, and traced a small square in the ground a little off to the right. I dug along the edge and cut the grass below the roots, removing the square as a whole. I looked over my shoulder and inhaled. The crow cawed. The wind carried no scent other than the grass and the sycamore leaves and the dogwood blooms. And the scent of the dead, which was probably in my head only, but I could smell it nonetheless. From my pocket, I took out a white handkerchief, unfolded it, took Sakovich’s police badge, dropped it in the hole in the ground, and covered the hole again with the patch of grass.

I’m sorry, Ricky. I promised your uncle I would protect you, instead I failed you.

Ricky Vargas had made his first gang kill at age fifteen to prove he was a man. I looked at my life, at all the second chances I’d had
, and now, standing in front of Ricky’s tombstone, all I felt was regrets.

I should’ve helped you get a second chance too.

The wind changed and brought new scents. New and familiar at the same time. I heard Satish’s steps approaching a few seconds later. He stood next to me, held his hands together behind his back, and didn’t utter a word. I kept my eyes on Ricky’s tombstone.

“
FID looking for me?” I asked.

The
Force Investigation Division was going to have a blast with me this time.

Satish
rocked on his heels, his perspiration coming and going in gentle waves. “No.”

I pondered.
“What about Sakovich?”

Satish
looked down at the tombstone. “Suicide.” His mouth was straight, his eyes hard, and yet I swear the man was smiling.

“You knew he wasn’t going to turn himself in,” he said.

I nodded. “I saw it in his eyes when I mentioned Henkins’ name. He was going to bring me down on armed assault and hope to walk away with it.”

Satish bobbed his head. He licked his lips, thought of something smart to say and came up with nothing.

“Listen to the radio, when you get the chance,” he said at last. He saluted me, spun on his heels and walked away.

I
stood there and stared at the grave for a long time and after I’d stood and stared for a long time, I turned around and left. Somewhere up on Olympus, Nemesis, the ruthless goddess of divine retribution, looked down on me and smiled. I’d just given up my trophy. It made me feel uneasy and a little lightheaded but somewhat proud of what I’d just done. I wondered if it made me any less human than I already was. I came to the conclusion that I didn’t give a shit either way. Individuals like John Sokavich, Captain Zoltek, and Frederick Lyons weren’t any more human than I was, and neither one was more of a nemesis to me than myself.

Myself.

My true nemesis.

My own genes. Attacking me
. 

After all, there was an inner justice to the universe.

The One-Ten was crammed in both directions, but there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, and the haze was as good as it gets in August, and all together it made for a glorious day in the crowded City of Angels. Somewhere up in the San Gabriel Mountains the first fire of the season had set off, and the acrid smell of wildfires was just starting to tinge the air. I slugged along, my beautifully assembled Porsche engine useless in the morning commute traffic. Straight ahead, the glass and steel towers of Bunker Hill loomed like a modern Colossus of Rhodes. To my right careened the fifty-four-story scaffolding of the Marriott, next to the Nokia Plaza, the city’s attempt to bring life back to downtown. As if traffic wasn’t bad enough already. 

I turned on the dispatch radio and tuned in to the Hollenbeck radio frequency. I didn’t have to wait for too long. After the usual ten-twenty-sevens, a couple of disturbance calls, a
“flagged down for robbery and a domestic violence” call, Unit 4-A-53 tuned in for a Code Six in Santa Paula, followed by a Code Robert. Two officers from the Santa Paula PD had retrieved an H&K P-30 in the septic tank of a rural home just off Ojai Road. The watch commander told Unit 4-A-53 to follow procedure and bring the gun into LAPD custody as the anonymous call had connected it to the Henkins murder.

I grinned. The warrants had come in
pretty quickly, considering Satish made the call only twenty-four hours earlier. I wished they’d find Sakovich’s prints on the gun, but I knew the bastard had been smarter than that. At least they had the slug retrieved from Henkins’s skull and I was pretty sure they were going to match the ridges with the barrel. Hopefully, the fact that the Santa Paula home belonged to Sakovich’s brother-in-law was also going to raise some flags.

I tuned to KJazz and B
.B. King’s scratchy voice rasped my ears. An airplane roared over the skyline of downtown and I wondered if it was heading to Boston and if it was Diane’s plane.

B
.B. complained he needed some love so bad. His voice got lost in the morning traffic.

Thank you for reading MOSAICS.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

_______________

Just like with the first book in the Track Presius Mystery Series, for MOSAICS, too, I’m mostly indebted to my patient, smart, and supportive beta-readers: my heartfelt thanks go to Cristina Rinaudo, for putting up with me; Cindy Amrhein, for being there whenever I need you; Karen Alaniz, for being the first one to believe in my writing; Rowan Greene, for your constructive criticism; Nancy Matuszak, for patiently reading and supporting me; and to Heather Lazarus and Carolyn Fahm for being my faithful proof readers and copy editors.

Many thanks go to my team of experts: Christianne Lane, for escorting me around Los Angeles County; Elizabeth Lund, George Marquardt, and Michael Bunker for teaching me how to fish bass, even though only fictionally; Steven Halter, for help with programming languages and lingo; Michael Galassi, for tips on how to put together a Porsche engine; award winning author and cardiologist D.P. Lyle, to whom I owe the accuracy of my autopsy scenes; Deepa Nadiga, for useful conversations on psychiatry; and of course, a huge thank you to the one and only, retired officer Tim Bowen, who patiently walked me through all things LAPD, checked the police procedural, and whose memoir inspired Satish’s stories.

Many of the scientific topics discussed in this book arose from inspiring conversations with my amazing mentor, friend and role model, Bette Korber, the beautiful mind behind the mosaic vaccine, and with my dad Franco Giorgi, professor of developmental biology at the University of Pisa.

Finally, these acknowledgments would not be complete without mentioning my supportive family. My parents always knew I was restless, though I’m not sure they ever anticipated to what extent.
Grazie babbo e mamma
! My husband is my harshest reader and I love him to pieces for that. And to my kiddos I ask for forgiveness as for years they’ve been wondering what mom was doing tied to her laptop until the wee hours of the night. I love them to pieces, too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E.E. Giorgi is a scientist, a writer, and a photographer. She spends her days analyzing HIV data, her evenings chasing sunsets, and her nights pretending she's somebody else. 

BLOG
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GOODREADS
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