MOSAICS: A Thriller Read online

  “Are you sure—”

  “Ah, don’t worry, Ms. Kyle.” Cohen held up Laura’s arm and helped his assistant wrap a plastic bag around her hand. “She’s in good hands.” And then a smile sprawled across his large face. “In good hands! Get it? A pun,” he giggled as the assistant wrapped Laura’s hands.

  He shook his head, the smile quickly vanishing, and got back to his feet. “You guys do realize this completely ruins our Fourth, don’t you?”

  “It’s high priority, Doc. Serial killers don’t go on vacation.”

  “Sadly not.” He pulled up his schedule on his phone, and after he tapped through a few screens we had a date at the morgue for the next morning at eight a.m. “I’ll confirm after I get all the paperwork in. Something tells me the schedule’s still open for tomorrow.”

  He dropped the phone in his pocket and returned his attention to the body.

  I rose to my feet and looked around the room. It was a large home office, accessible only through the sliding door that led into the kitchen. A birch desk sat between the beige rug and a wide window. The window offered a nice view of Playa Del Rey, with the marina’s bobbing masts peeking through skinny palm tops.

  “I don’t like Lyons’s story,” Satish said. “He claims he and his wife got up around six a.m. He went to the pool for his morning swim, she came here to write. She’s also an MD, working on HIV, just like him. She was finishing up a grant, the deadline was next Monday.”

  “Was she working in the same clinic as Lyons?” I asked.

  “No. Different one, down in El Segundo,” Satish replied. “Lyons wasn’t involved in the grant, either.”

  “Still,” I wondered. “There’s a good chance she knew Amy Liu. And perhaps her killer, too.”

  I’d just learned from Ricky Vargas that Lyons had a relationship with Amy Liu. They’d been good at hiding it with some people—Ipanema Girl had sworn Amy wasn’t involved in any relationship, so had all of Amy’s friends and family members we had interviewed—but not all. What if Laura had found out?

  Satish flipped through his notebook and reported Lyons’s version of the events. “Lyons swims for half an hour—he’s sure about that because he times himself. Comes back in the house, showers, gets dressed, makes her coffee. When he delivers the coffee he finds her dead. Before that, he doesn’t hear or notice anything odd or out of place.”

  “What time was it when he found her?”

  “He wouldn’t say for sure. I’m figuring between seven thirty and eight, given the swim and the shower. Thing is, he didn’t call nine-one-one until it was almost nine.”

  “I just walked by the pool,” I said. “Anybody coming in would’ve walked the same way?”

  “No, there’s a second gate through the east wall. The intruder came through the front door, though. The back door was locked from the inside. Lyons didn’t bother locking the front door. Still, that doesn’t explain the gate. It opens with a combination. There’s a keypad by the gate and another one inside the house that opens it remotely.”

  “So the intruder either knew the combination or somebody let him in.”

  Satish lowered his voice. “If it was an intruder, yes.”

  I pondered. “What did Lyons sound like on the nine-one-one call?”

  Satish tweaked his chocolate lips in one of his wise smiles. “Don’t know. But our next stop is Electronics, and we can both listen to the tape very carefully.”

  “Smooth move.”

  Especially after Vargas picked Lyons out of a six-pack.

  I checked Laura’s desk. It was strewn with loose papers—pages and pages covered in red pen marks. A computer screen was snoozing in the middle of the chaos. I touched the mouse and it came back to life. It was open on a word document, densely typed with a very thin margin all around. The last sentence hung unfinished: To manufacture clinical lots of HIV proteins for efficacy evaluation of poxvirus/protein prime-boost regimes in

  The rest of the page was white, save for the very last line, which read, “THE END.”

  Diane came to look at it too. “Nobody finishes a grant with the words ‘THE END’,” she said.

  I sniffed the keyboard and mouse. “Are you saying she couldn’t have written those words herself?”

  It was fainter than on the tiles, but it was there—the killer’s smell. The Trace guys had done a good job flouring the computer and phone, but I already knew the answer to their efforts. Rubber gloves don’t leave fingerprints.

  Diane scooted in front of me and slid into the chair. “That’s easy to check. I’ll pull up the auto-recovery file.”

  Cohen picked up his tools and notes, snapped his bag closed and dismissed the photographer. His assistant brought in the tarp body bag and unfolded it on the floor next to the body.

  Diane typed on a terminal shell, her gloved fingers squeaking at every keystroke. “There,” she said, pointing to the screen. “This one was saved at six fifty-nine. It’s the auto-recovery file.”

  She scrolled all the way to the bottom of the document. There were only blank pages after the last unfinished sentence. The words ‘THE END’ weren’t there.

  I turned to Satish. “What’s the exact time on Lyons’s nine-one-one?”

  He checked his notes. “Eight fifty-two.”

  My eyes strayed to the body, her non-face frozen in Munch’s silent scream. “Lyons swims thirty minutes, gets back into the house, showers, gets dressed, makes coffee. Claims he doesn’t notice or hear a thing until he comes to her office to bring her coffee. He doesn’t spill a drop of coffee, doesn’t scream or panic. In fact, we have no friggin’ clue what the man does for over forty minutes, until he calls nine-one-one.”

  Either the man had nerves of steel or he was full of it.

  Diane swiveled away from the computer. “What if Laura died after eight thirty and the killer fiddled with her computer to let us believe she died earlier?”

  “That’s a question for Electronics,” Satish said.

  She rose from the chair. “I’ll talk to the Field Unit guys. If they pack this up, I can bring it to Piper Tech.”

  Two more assistants from the coroner’s office came into the room with a stretcher. They lifted Laura’s tarp cocoon and carried it away.

  A scream came from the kitchen as they left the room. Sat and I ran.

  Lyons was standing by the breakfast counter. He was tall and imposing and the space seemed to bend around him. His hair was tousled, his face colorless. He kept his palms up and blood trickled down one of his wrists, soaking the cuff of his shirt.

  Glass shards were scattered on the countertop and on the floor.

  He tried to slit his wrists, my first thought.

  “What the hell happened?” I yelled.

  The uniformed officer pulled a wad of Kleenex out of a box on the kitchen counter and offered it to Lyons. “The glass,” the officer said. “It just popped in his hand.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that, you know?”

  “Call Cohen,” Satish ordered him.

  Lyons stared at his palms. His lips moved without making any sound.

  Satish grabbed a kitchen towel hanging by the stove and wrapped it around Lyons’s bleeding hand. I stood behind him, ready to either flip him if he became too aggressive or hold him if he fainted on us.

  He did neither. He flopped like jello, leaned against the counter top, and cried like a baby.

  Still holding the stretcher with Laura’s body, the two coroner assistants stood frozen in the middle of the living room, looking dull and clueless like statues at the park.

  I frowned at them. “Don’t you have a first aid kit you can go grab from your van?”

  The chubbier of the two shrugged. “Don’t need one of those for the dead!”

  He signaled to his partner, and the two carried on with their task, the stretcher wobbling between them.

  Cohen walked into the kitchen and set his clipboard on the countertop. I thought he too was going to make one of his tacky jokes about not do
ing the living, instead he remained quite composed and asked Lyons whether he thought he needed stitches. Lyons mouthed a feeble no. The officer came back with some bandages and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide he’d found in one of the bathrooms. Cohen helped Lyons to the kitchen sink, had him thoroughly wash his hands and then disinfected the cuts. He agreed they weren’t deep enough to need stitches.

  Satish’s shoes crunched over the glass shards. “Dr. Lyons, maybe it would be better if you came—”

  “No. I wanted to stay. I wanted to see her one more time. I—”

  We settled him on the white couch in front of the two-sided fireplace, and he folded onto himself like a book too heavy to stay open. All his certainties had burst on the floor like the glass of water he’d just popped.

  “Would you like a drink, Doctor?” I asked.

  He unconvincingly shook his head.

  Satish said, “Dr. Lyons, we can go somewhere else to talk. Some place where you would be more comfortable…”

  I kept my ears perked and walked to the wet bar to fix the man a drink. Had I not been on duty, I would’ve fixed one for myself too. The statue of Venus stood by the wet bar, impassible and imperturbable. Shadows of palm tree fringes danced on her face. She looked as if she winked at me.

  Hell, I’d fix her a drink too.

  Ironically, she and the family dog were the only witnesses we had so far.

  The wine cabinet had an interesting assortment of Cabernets, a couple of Brunellos, a few Chiantis. I figured Lyons would appreciate something with a stronger personality, so I closed the cabinet and went sniffing for whiskey. There was a half-full bottle up on the shelves, next to a grappa. I walked around the tall fireplace and back into the kitchen in search for a clean glass, careful not to step on the shards scattered all over the floor. There was an empty coffee mug in the sink. Could’ve been the one meant for Laura. The fluorescent bulbs beneath the kitchen cabinets were on, washing a cold light on the granite countertops. In a corner, between the coffee maker and a few kitchen appliances that looked like they’d just come out of the box, was a twelve-inch flat screen TV. It was showing a football game. It seemed surreal on mute. I reached for the remote and turned it off. My eyes fell on a bunch of coins next to the pedestal. They were just coins, smelled like coins, and yet I couldn’t take my eyes away from them. And then I realized why. They were aligned in a row. Three quarters, two nickels, five dimes.

  I’d already seen that. Where?

  Amy’s crime scene came back in a blur. Small details—wine glasses scattered around the house, a pile of dishes in the sink, trays of wontons and spring rolls. The smells, the chaos, the house: everything was so different compared to the cold, almost static crime scene I was staring at now—the shattered glass on the floor the only sign of entropy.

  Except for one detail.

  A row of perfectly aligned coins on Amy’s console by the door.

  That’s where I’d seen it before.

  I bent over and sniffed the money.

  Metal, sweat, gloves.

  Nitrile gloves.

  I whirled my head around. Of all places, why did the killer come back here? Did he bring the coins or did he see them lying around and felt the need—compulsion—to order them? I brushed a hand along the countertop, crouched, and examined the reflection against the fluorescent light. Lots of mug rings but no fingerprints, not even gloved ones. The smell of nitrile became stronger.

  I followed it.

  I stuck my fingers underneath the countertop, found a panel that covered the gap between the top of the dishwasher and the granite. It felt loose, I pulled it. It came off easily, leaving a smudge of detritus on my latex gloves. Another smear was already on the floor. I groped with two fingers inside the groove until I felt something slide under my touch.

  I pulled it out and brought it to my nose. It was drenched in Laura Lyons’s nauseatingly sweet fragrance.

  It was the picture of a woman, smiling, her face scribbled over with a pen.

  The woman wasn’t Laura Lyons, though.

  It was Amy Liu.

  “Dr. Lyons,” Satish was saying. “I understand this is a very distressful time for you. Like I said, if you’d rather go somewhere else to talk…”

  Lyons didn’t reply. He rubbed his eyes until they were bloodshot. “What time is it?” he drawled.

  “Time to take this conversation downtown,” I replied, holding up the picture I’d just found.

  TWELVE

  ____________

  “It was planted.”

  “There’s a date and place in the back. It’s in your handwriting, Dr. Lyons.”

  “So? It was planted.”

  I rapped my fingers on the table. The guy had more certainties than the Pope.

  After being in Lyons’s refrigerated house for over four hours, the squad room felt like a furnace. Satish loosened his tie knot. I undid the damn thing all together and let the tie hang around my neck.

  Lyons hunched over the table in the interview cubicle and played with a Styrofoam cup filled with black coffee. After the latest developments, I’d changed my mind on the whiskey.

  A greasy pizza box lay open on the table, Lyons’s two slices still untouched. A stubborn fly stalked the pepperoni. Satish shooed it off, just out of habit. Unconcerned, the fly came back, just out of habit.

  Lyons didn’t move. His nose was stuck up in the air and his eyes were scrutinizing us, either pitying us or despising us, I couldn’t decide which. I dropped my hand on the picture for the tenth time. It showed Amy Liu in a bikini and a sexy pose. Her face had been scribbled over with a pen, but it was her all right. And the fact that, of all things, her face had been scribbled over would’ve made any shrink like Washburn prickle with excitement.

  Planted my ass.

  Vargas put Lyons at Amy’s house the night Amy had been killed. The kid was ready to testify that the two were romantically involved. The picture I’d found was drenched in Laura Lyons’s perfume. What if Laura had found out about the affair?

  I tried to get a whiff of nitrile gloves from Lyons, but any smell his hands may have carried earlier had been washed out after Cohen helped him clean his hands and cuts earlier at the house. All I could sense now was blood and hydrogen peroxide.

  “Look, Doc,” I said. “We wanna believe you, ’kay? But you’ve got to help us out. There’s a bunch of holes in your story and we need to fill ’em up or else our boss is going to come after us. And if he comes after us, we have no choice but come after you.”

  Lyons said nothing.

  Sat indulged in his broad, reassuring smile. It fell unnoticed. “Numero uno,” he said. “We know you had an affair with Amy Liu. We have a witness who puts you at her house. He says you two were intimate.”

  I thought the news would surprise him. Instead, the man didn’t even flinch. He looked down at the pen, bent the clip backwards and started twisting it. Swarms of freckles netted the back of his hands. They were interesting freckles, the kind that form patterns, and the more you stare the more patterns you see. Somehow I found it fascinating.

  I didn’t smell fear or sorrow. I smelled annoyance, impatience, regret. I smelled a life of overachieving and giving orders, of Harvard degrees and Ivy League recognition, of important handshakes and well-orchestrated battles of egos.

  I tapped Amy’s face in the picture, what was still visible of it through the inflicted scribbles. “You know what I’m thinking, Doc? I’m thinking Laura did this.” Lyons flinched at his wife’s name. “She found out about the affair and confronted you. You went alone to Amy’s party the night she was killed—was it because Laura had a reason to hold a grudge against Amy? Did Laura kill Amy or did you? And then things got out of hand—”

  “Stop talking about my dead wife like that,” he snapped. “Laura didn’t need to find out about Amy. Laura knew about Amy.”

  There was a pause. Satish and I stared at one another.

  A crack as thin as ice came to Lyons’s voice. “You do
n’t get it, do you?”

  I spoke nicely. “Help us get it.”

  “We filed for divorce two months ago. You can ask Laura’s lawyer. It was a mutual agreement, and we were in friendly terms. Laura was working on the grant proposal—the grant was all she’d been doing for the past four weeks. That’s why she hadn’t started looking for her own place yet. We’d agreed I’d pay her half and she’d move out as soon as time allowed.” He swallowed. “The grant deadline is next Monday, and—”

  He gave me one of those looks that you feel like washing off your face like spit. “You don’t understand. I still loved my wife.”

  Satish leaned back in his chair. His smile was understanding and embracing and it wisely spread to a grin. “As a matter of fact we do, Doctor. Especially us cops. We love our wives so much we feel the need to have three or four at least. Ask my partner. How many wives does a cop have on average, Track?”

  I got out of the chair and started pacing. “Two and a half. The half comes from people like me who’d rather exchange beds than wedding vows.”

  Lyons didn’t register any of the words we’d said. He stared into his coffee cup, by now as lukewarm as the room. “You’ve got it all wrong. They’re after me. Laura… oh god, this is despicable. First Amy, then Laura. Don’t you see? They’re after me. They want to kill me.”

  Satish and I exchanged a long glance.

  I dropped back in the chair. “Why d’you think you’re the target?”

  Lyons straightened his back and put on a face like I’d just asked why he was wearing pants. “They’ve been after me since my research focused on the origin of HIV.”

  We welcomed the statement with a long, thoughtful silence.

  After the long, thoughtful silence, Satish spoke. “Why would anyone be upset over a disease?”

  Lyons’s thin lips stretched. It was a sad, bitter smile. “We’re scholars, right? You’d think research would be respected, whether it’s stem cell research or gene therapy or disease epidemiology. You’d think we’d civilly discuss things among ourselves.” He shook his head. “There’s always somebody who knows better.” He tapped the pen with the bandaged hand and twirled the Styrofoam cup with the other. “Have you heard of HIV/AIDS denialism?”