MOSAICS: A Thriller (4 page)

THREE

____________

Monday, June 21

The air was heavy with the smell of rain—an unexpected change from the usual bouquet of smog and wildfires. Crows sat quietly on high branches and waited. The treetops swayed and the boughs groaned. The first drop hit me in the face as I unlocked the Charger. By the time I got on the freeway, the storm was pounding.

There’s something omi
nous about rain in Southern California. Black, fat clouds fill the sky and mock the all-year-round flip-flop crowds. They hover over posh hairdos, convertibles, and the sports car fanatics who wash and wax their vehicles every other day. News reporters with a sadistic eye for meteorological catastrophes gain more airtime than infomercials.

Chaos spreads. Highways jam. Traffic lights flash. Honk
ing horns trail off.

After all, we
are
Southern Californians. We’re prepared for earthquakes, fires, and flash floods. We’re
not
prepared for rain.

Red brake lights blurred across my windshield, the wiper
s squeaking with the rhythm of a nighttime lullaby. Mozart would’ve written a symphony out of that. The pavement turned into slosh. A trailer truck passed me on the left and gave me a free shower.

A siren wailed. Traffic stopped. Red and blue bar-lights flickered ahead in the weaving stream of tai
llights, courtesy of the usual idiot who forgot that brake distances increase on slick roads. Like toads and slugs, they’re a subspecies of drivers that comes out with every storm.

I slowed down and smiled.

I’d peed in the fucking cup, tomorrow I was getting my LAPD badge back, and Dave Brubeck was playing on my car stereo.

As far as I was concerned, the world could stop for a few drops of rain.

*  *  *

By the time I got to South Oak Knoll, in Pasadena, the rain had tapered off. Faces braved the sidewalks of Lake and Colorado again. The clouds
had dissipated, and a bright sun poked through a canopy of dripping oaks. I entered a long driveway that parted the front lawn of a two-story colonial house, inclusive of all accessories: white portico, white pillars, white stucco all around, and gray shingle roof just so it wouldn’t look like a bridal cake. I parked my Charger under the carport, next to a well-preserved W140. Mercedes cars are like divas from the Fifties—they never fade.

The sodden lawn shimmered in the sun. Different scents of dampness mingled in the air: grass, bark, soil, cobblestone.

A little anxiety
.

Oh, come on, Ulysses
.

This was where all
the fine lines blurred together: killer, cop, predator. Patient.
Privileged
patient, who got to see his doctor in the comfort of his home office, chatting over genetics and DNA as if they were some abstract philosophical concept.

As if it weren’t my life
. 

I rapped on
the door.

What if the Byzantine
Strangler can’t help himself?

Hell, I could. I made a choice.

But you still kill, Ulysses, don’t you?

Dr. Watanabe’s office would’ve been a decent size if only he hadn’t crowded it with a mismatched assortment of furniture. His wife poured us
sake
in small cups while I sniffed books. One by one, I slid them out, flipped through the pages and inhaled. Some smelled too old, some smelled too new, and some smelled just perfect.

Watanabe’s wife dismissed herself with a bow. Being at least two decades younger than her I should’ve bowed lower, but I’d come to the conclusion a while ago that Japanese customs had not been invented for people over six feet tall. So I smiled and waved my hand.

Watanabe handed me a cup. “Have a seat.”

I didn’t. I stood by the window and sipped the
sake
. It was strong and pungent and I figured it was going to help.

Watanabe was a small man with puffy eyes, saggy jowls, and the shiny black hair of a child despite
his sixty-something years. His skin had the creamy color of a glass of Baileys and the vaguely foreign scent of a wine whose origin you can’t quite pin down. He drank his
sake
in small sips, smiling through his eyes. When he was done, he got out of his chair and reached for the Newton’s pendulum sitting on top of a file cabinet. He propped the pendulum on the desk and then flicked the first ball to set it in motion. The balls start clicking. Watanabe sat with his hands laced across his stomach and a wide, lipless grin sprawled across his face. The metal balls clicked against each other, the first and last ones rocking back and forth at alternate times.

“What do you know about pendulums, Ulysses?”

I licked the last drop of
sake
and wished Japanese cups came in larger sizes. “Is this going to be a physics lecture?”

He scratched a thin brow. “It would’ve worked better with a traditional pendulum, but this is the closest
thing I could find in the house. You see, I just happened to remember that these cute gadgets have two points of equilibrium, not one.” He touched the balls and stopped them. “One’s stable, and the other’s not.” He held the first ball out and rotated it around the fulcrum until it reached its highest point, vertically above the others. “According to Newton’s law, if you give it exactly the right amount of energy, the ball will swing all the way up and stop at its highest point. However, it will fall again at the minimum perturbation.” He let go, the ball swung back down and hit the other ones. The ticktack of five balls hitting one another resumed.

I set my cup on one end of the desk, dropped in
to one of the armchairs, and smiled a what-the-heck smile. Granted, I’d had Dave Brubeck keeping me company all the way to Pasadena, but I hadn’t braved a flooded freeway to watch some balls rock back and forth.

“Fascinating,” I lied, scratching
my chin.

A satisfied chortle escaped his throat. He picked up the pendulum and delivered it back to the file cabinet. “I believe the same holds in genetics.” He sat back at his desk, donned a pair of reading glasses, and slid a hand inside a yellow Manila folder. “Most variation
s can only push us this far from our stable equilibrium point. We swing and come back.”

“Or we die,” I interject
ed.

He pressed his lips together, considering. “Hmm. Yes, some phenotypic changes can be lethal.” He pulled a long printout from the folder and carefully flattened his hands over it. “But once in a million, maybe a billion times, something extraordinary happens.” He was peering at me
over the rim of his lenses. “The ball will hit that one point up there and, almost miraculously, will stop there. Waiting.”

Ha. I cocked my head and gave him
a half smile. The other half I kept for myself. “Waiting to crash?”

Watanabe heaved the slightest
of sighs. “Not necessarily.” He grabbed a pen and pointed it at me. “
You
are extraordinary, Ulysses.”

“I don’t take credit for that.”

My wit washed off Watanabe’s face like waves on wet sand. “You survived a deadly brain tumor when you were only six years of age. The virus that killed the tumor turned on chimeric genes that now coexist within your DNA in
chouwa
—harmony. Together, they form the balance that allows you to exist.”

“And
you’re now telling me this balance is unstable.”

He passed me the lab printout from the yellow folder, his small eyes scrutinizing me as I stared at the list of acronyms and numbers.

“I don’t know what these mean, Doc.”

“Your anti
nuclear antibody levels are off the chart.”

“What the hell are those? W
eapons of mass destruction?”

He gave out a shrill little laugh that died as quickly as my sense of humor. “No. They are antibodies that bind specifically to components inside the cell nucleus. We all have them in low conc
entrations, but when they get past a certain threshold they start to draw concern. That’s why I want you to stop by the lab one of these mornings and do another draw. I just submitted a standing order in your name.” The pen wagged at me. “Have you been feeling well, Ulysses?”

I frowned. “Of course!”

I was fit, reasonably young, and moderately addicted to caffeine and ethanol, but hell, who isn’t?

I stretched my lips in a lo
psided smile. “I’m great, Doc. Really,” I insisted.

Watanabe w
asn’t impressed. “No joint pain? Fatigue? Rashes?”

I leaned an elbow on the armrest and scratched my jaw. “Doc. You didn’t call me to your home just to tell me about some screwed up blood count.”

A blade of sun poked through the curtains and glinted on his jet-ink hair. He leaned forward on his elbows, hands steepled together. “The way your chimeric genes coexist with the rest of your DNA is remarkable. We need to keep an eye on it, understand the mechanism. Make sure the balance that allows you to exist—”

“Doesn’t break.” I finished the sentence for him.

He stared at me for the longest time.

And then he nodded.

FOUR

____________

Thursday, June 25

“Oh, come on, Track. It’s like smelling raw chicken.”

“I don’t
smell
raw chicken. I grill it.”

Satish looked comical all garbed in
an oversized surgical gown, paper cap, and facemask. He shook a couple of booties out of a dispenser and leaned against the wall to slip them over his shoes. “Don’t want no souvenirs on my shoes this time.”

I tied the
laces of the gown behind my back. “Don’t tell me you get in there—“ I pumped my thumb at the autopsy room behind us “—and all you smell is chicken.”

He shook
his head sideways. “I’m odor blind.”

“
Odor
blind?”

He s
tepped in front of the mirror and adjusted the paper cap on his head as if it were some sort of military beret. “You go to India once, inhale, and when you come back you’re odor blind. The streets in Kolkata smell of gasoline, fish fry, betel leaves, sweat, monkeys, mangoes and chutney.” He patted me in the back and shouldered through the doors to the autopsy room. “Not for the faint of heart—I mean
nose
. You wouldn’t survive a day.”

I took a deep breath, pulled up the facemask, and followed
.

A chrome faucet dripped
in one of the sinks. Air vents hummed gently from the ceiling. The body was draped, an anonymous hump on a stainless steel table. An assistant pushed a cart of instruments to the table and lined up the tools for the cut. Clipped against the glass of a view box were Amy Liu’s dental records and a couple of pictures from the other victim, Charlie Callahan, found strangled six months earlier outside his home in Silver Lake. His face had also been marred with sulfuric acid, though in his case the damage had been inflicted postmortem.

“I don’t believe it! Detective Presius!”

Robed in green, Dr. Russ Cohen looked like a giant M&M rolling toward me. He pulled down his facemask and shook my gloved hand a little too enthusiastically. “Where I grew up they say, ‘Only the dead don’t come back.’ Of course that’s not true in my line of work, is it?”

He
slapped me on the shoulder and roared with laughter. “I see you’re well prepared this time—paper cap and booties, too. ‘Cuz you know,
If you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem
.” He winked and nudged me in the ribs.

I stret
ched my lips and faked a smile without putting too much effort into it.

Satish leaned closer and whispered, “Seinfeld joke, Track. You forgot all about that, didn’t you?”

“Gladly,” I replied.

Cohen
wiped the grin off his face and cleared his throat. “So. We’ve all had our share of mutilated bodies.”
He waved at the assistant and she lifted the drape off the body. “But I confess this is a first for me.”

T
he room fell silent.

The crime scene pics had not prepared me for the sight of
Amy Liu’s disfigured features. Her face had peeled off the skull. In its liquid path, sulfuric acid had etched grooves along her cheeks and simmered in her orbs.

All bodies are naked. Yet, deprived of a face, Amy Liu felt more than unclad
to me: she was bare, exposed, stripped of her persona.

The killer
wants to erase his victims’ faces
.

In my whole career, I could only remember one case that offered a worse sight—a John Doe found on the street. He’d loaded up with semi-jacketed hollow points and eaten his gun. 

Cohen walked to the cart and picked up a magnifying glass. “Let’s start from the feet.” He stood at the end of the table and moved the surgical light to the victim’s feet. Bending the toes all the way back he pointed the beam at the right foot plantar.

“
See these? Multiple lacerations, one-to-two centimeters long, only a few millimeters deep. You’d think he’d tortured her, but—”

“But there are no signs of restrain
ts on the body,” I said.

“The cuts were inflicted postmortem,” Satish concluded.

Cohen nodded, his eyes grave. “They’re not deep enough to think he was attempting to mutilate her. Still. They don’t seem to serve any purpose.” He leaned closer and examined the whole plantar under the magnifying glass. “Was she wearing socks?”

Satish
dipped a hand under the surgical gown and retrieved pen and notepad. “No. Sheer stockings.”

“Black?”

“No, Doc. Skin colored.”

“Interesting.” Cohen traded the magnifying
glass for a pair of tweezers and retrieved a fine, black and curly filament from the edge of one of the cuts. He held the tweezers against the light and we all squinted at the filament.

Satish
slid the tip of the pen under his paper cap and scratched his head. “Hard to tell if it’s a hair or a fiber.”

Cohen turned
the tweezers until he’d examined all sides of the filament. “Right. I’m not seeing a root. The lab will be able to tell us.” He carefully passed the specimen to the assistant and added, “Did you see what he did to her scalp?”

We all
walked to the other end of the table. Cohen turned Amy’s neck all the way to the right and exposed the scalped area behind her left ear.

“See this? This is
a meticulous job. Shallow incision behind the ear and transversal to the back of the neck, forming a V.”

Satish took notes
.

“He
peeled the skin off starting from the lower edge, up along the temporal bone, and severed a triangular flap.”

Around the scalped area, bits of dried blood and tissue hung to the skull like red crumbs.

Satish leaned closer. “Have you ever seen something like this before, Doc?”

“Other than
old Western movies, that is,” I added.

Cohen turned Amy’s head the other way, looking for more lesions. “Actually, the movies had it all wrong, you
know? They made it look like scalping was a Native American custom, but it turns out, the white settlers were scalping even more than the Indians.” He checked the back of Amy’s head then reached for the laryngoscope. “Anyway, the answer to your question is no. The only case on my table happened by accident. A worker from a Santa Monica manufacturing plant got her left scalp ripped off by a the rotating bar of a spinning lathe. Couldn’t pull her out of the machine fast enough.”

I swallowed. “Now that’s a happy image.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t pretty.” Cohen sighed, waited for the assistant to return to the table and then pressed the record button on his handheld voice recorder. “Ok, let’s get started. Victim’s name is Amy Fang Liu, five-foot-two-inches long and weighs one hundred and five pounds. Asian descent, age thirty-four. Small tattoo, one and a half centimeters long, on the right shoulder near the collar bone. Red birthmark on left breast, adjacent to the areola. No evidence of sexual assault and no defensive wounds.” The M.E. dictated the general appearance of the corpse, describing the gory details of her facial injuries and the numerous lacerations on the soles of her feet. He handed the recorder to the assistant and proceeded to insert the laryngoscope down Amy’s throat.

“The tissue inside the oral cavity is abraded. Vocal cords are seared.” He waved
, and the assistant paused the recorder. “We’ll examine closely the bronchi and esophagus for confirmation, but it looks like she swallowed the acid. Probably inhaled it, too.” He pointed a penlight down her throat. “In a way, he spared her a lot of pain by strangling her. I’m guessing he surprised her with a first splash, then poured more once she was dead.”

He palpated her neck and
examined the ligature mark. “See how close to the jaw the ligature came? We’re looking at somebody at least a foot taller than her.” Cohen applied pressure at the sides of the scar and pinched it. “Black ligature mark. Straight line with raised edges,” he dictated into the recorder. “Except for the indentation, the skin around it is smooth and clear. No discoid bruises. Gail, pass me a scalpel number four, please.”

While he waited for the blade, Cohen pointed to the fine cloud of dark specks above and around the ligature mark. “These are
petechiae
,” he said. “In death by strangulation you usually find them in the eyes, too—tiny bruises that form when the capillaries break. Too bad we don’t have much of the eyes left in this case.” He took the blade from the assistant and started making a transversal incision about a quarter of an inch above the ligature mark. As he cut deeper into the tissue, a gooey smell of rust and decay stuck to my palate and refused to let go.

“
First thing I always look at—fluid from the eyes. I can see everything through vit electrolytes. Time of death, general health, sexual orientation...” His eyes peered at us from behind his surgical goggles for a second to see if we’d caught on the last joke. He chuckled, we smiled politely. “Once I had a sudden death with no medical history. Young fella in his late thirties. Guess how I found what he’d died of?” He kept talking while smoothly working around the incision, carving out a triangle around the ligature mark on the left side of Amy’s neck.

“You asked?” I said.

Satish elbowed me in the ribs.

Cohen didn’t even notice.
“The eyes. Exactly. From the vitreous electrolytes it was clear he’d died of non-ketotic hyperosmolar diabetic coma. You wouldn’t believe how common undiagnosed diabetes is.” He dropped the skin section from the ligature mark into a new tissue cassette and pointed to the photo of Charlie Callahan’s neck clipped to the view box on the wall. In Callahan’s case the killer had poured the acid not only on the victim’s face, but also on the neck, burning away most of the ligature mark. Cohen drew our attention to little crescent-shaped incisions on the side of his neck spared by the acid.

“See those marks over there? They’re semicircular and one-to-two millimeters in length. Those are nail marks. Callahan tried to pry the ligature away from
his neck. No such marks on Amy Liu’s neck. No skin underneath her nails, either.”

Satish nodded. “What about telltales? I can’t see any to the naked eye.”

Cohen shook his head. “None whatsoever. Smooth indentation, blanched out at the bottom, with clear edges. No fibers, either.”

The assistant leaned forward
and measured the depth of the indentation with a probe. “One-point-five, Doctor,” she said.

Cohen ponder
ed the information. “One and a half millimeters. Shallow, compared to what a nylon string or wire would normally cut into, but deep compared to a scarf.” He frowned. “I can see bruising in the tissue, all the way down to the strap muscles of the neck.”

He
made a new incision starting from above the thyroid and running down across the ligature mark. He then came down to the side and cut out a triangular flap of skin, exposing the larynx in its full length. “It’s mind boggling, really. Usually one can pin it down to a group of ligatures, you know? Strings, ropes, scarves. This, however, has me scratching my head. Can’t be wire, as it would’ve cut through the tissue. You need something thicker to compress the carotids without severing them. A rope or a scarf will do, but those leave fibers and telltale marks. Ah, but see here?” He brushed his gloved finger along the U-shaped bone at the top of the larynx. It was cracked in the middle. “Fractured hyoid bone. There’s your cause of death—asphyxiation—and manner—strangulation.”

Satish
scribbled on the notepad and blew through his facemask. “Now we just need to figure out the mode.”

*  *  *

A telephone cord, a nylon scarf, a computer cable, shoelaces, a fishing line, a climbing rope—all used at some point as lethal weapons. Next to each one, Satish placed a sticky note with the description of the corresponding ligature: telltale marks, depth of indentation, type of bruising. Rumors of the puzzle spread quickly across the squad room, and soon a small crowd of detectives ringed around our desks. The fact that Presius was back after a six-month sabbatical also added to the general curiosity.

The heat enhanced the overhanging concerto of male sweat, testosterone, gun oil rubbing against leather holsters, and cheap Formica furniture. Two rows of desks faced one a
nother over old, linoleum tiles. All around, yellow walls were plastered with the ghastly faces of L.A.’s most wanted.

A smile dangling from his black mustache, Detective Oscar Guerra dragged a chair across the room, straddled it, and stared at the eclectic collection on Satish’s desk. He plucked a cigarette out of his breast pocket, stuck it between his lips, and spoke carefully around it. “What about a computer cable? Wo
uldn’t leave any telltale, would it?”

Satish clicked his tongue. “Too large.”

“A nylon string?”

I replied this time. “Too deep. We need something that
has no fibers, leaves a perfectly smooth indentation, but doesn’t get too deep into the flesh.”