MOSAICS: A Thriller Read online

  “She did?”

  “Well, me and my brother, we always got excited about rasgullas. We helped Ma making them, but we were forbidden to even lick our fingers. It was torture.”

  “So you ate one?”

  “Uh-uh, we did not. But Ma was convinced we did. Our hands were sticky and there was sugar on our cheeks. She sent us to our room. The gods were very mad at us.”

  I winked. “I thought the gods had eaten the missing rasgulla.”

  Satish walked to his car and unlocked it. “Not the gods. Our baby sister Rhani, who’d just started crawling. My old man came back from work, picked her up, and asked, ‘Why is Rhani’s face all sticky with sugar?’” Satish chuckled, unlocked his car and slid behind the wheel.

  “I see,” I said. “So your mom had the perfect profile for the perpetrator, except it led her to the wrong suspects.”

  Satish scrunched his brows together. “Perfect profile? What are you talking about?”

  “You said this is what our meeting with Washburn reminded you of!”

  He wobbled his head and started the car. “Oh, that. Nah. I just miss my old man is all.” And with that, he backed out of his parking spot, bade me goodnight, and drove off, leaving me to cradle my own thoughts on profiling, murder suspects, and what the hell I wanted in life.

  Once a killer, always a killer.

  Danny Mendoza. I slit his throat when I was sixteen. And then stabbed his eyes. Except I recalled nothing of that. All I recalled was his slurred voice, his breath heavy with dope and nicotine, telling me how he’d tortured fourteen-year-old Lily Germano, how he made her beg for her life, before he closed a noose around her neck and strangled her.

  The judge denied bail based on the cruelty of the crime. Every Monday of my one-month pretrial term, the jail psychiatrist came to the interview room with his perfectly knotted tie and clean-shaved face. He smelled of sugarcoated lies and ordinary mediocrity, of unexciting sex and conventional middle-class life, of a suburban two-story home with a blonde wife installed on the front doorsteps.

  Of everything I never had growing up. And he was staring at me, judging me.

  I have no doubt.

  He smelled so damned normal.

  The nights I’d spent curled up in a dirty cot, heavy steps echoing in the background. Keys rattling, inmates moaning, kids—just like me—screeching, sneering, snoring, crying, wrapped in vicious smells that crawled under my skin, into my bones…

  You know nothing about it, I snarled. Nothing.

  My rage churned a smile out of his thin lips. His finger slid toward the panic button, poised.

  Killing fulfills your anger, Ulysses, doesn’t it?

  I did kill again. As a cop, clean shootings. Yet that triumphant little smile of his came back every time I pulled the trigger, like a feather tickling the inside of my ego. To remind me what I am. And what I’ll never be.

  No matter how hard you try, fate is always gonna come back to bite your ass.

  Like Oedipus.

  It’s in your genes, Ulysses, your fate switched when you were six… Every time you collect a new trophy, it reminds you of what you are.

  And what you’ll never be.

  SIX

  ____________

  Wednesday, July 1

  “I hear your man did it again.” Malcolm Olsen squinted his small, beetle eyes trying to look earnest. He was trying too hard. A wrinkle on his left cheek curled around the corner of his mouth and came to rest on his chin like an old scar. He leaned back against the wall, laced his fingers across his stomach and smirked. A smirk never looks good in an orange jumpsuit, especially the kind that has CDCR—California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation—embroidered over the breast pocket.

  Satish sat at the long end of the table, facing the white cinder block wall, and I at the short end, opposite from Olsen. There were no windows, only a gray, heavy metal door, and a cc camera looking down on us from one corner of the ceiling. A bounty of disinfectant sprays lingered over all surfaces and yet failed to cover the stale smells of recirculating air, un-showered humanity, and general ripeness that permeated the place.

  I undid the knot of my tie. It didn’t help much—the nausea had already kicked in. It didn’t matter that I was wearing civilian clothes instead of an orange jumpsuit, or that the hogs—jail guards—nodded at me instead of sneering and yelling to my face. The nausea kicked in as soon as Satish and I walked through the double metal doors and a correctional officer handed us our visitor badges.

  Smells remain engraved in the brain like lovers’ initials on a tree—long after the love is gone.

  Satish plucked a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, opened it, and set the offering on the table in front of Olsen. “We’re not sure, Mr. Olsen,” he said. “A birdie told us you might have something to do with Charlie Callahan’s murder.”

  Olsen squinted. He shot his chin up and regarded both Satish and me very carefully. His complexion had absorbed the dull and gray color of the walls. A sagging wrinkle across his neck was reminiscent of his pre-jail chubbiness. Brown hearing aids sat behind his ears—from a trauma or genetic condition, I guessed, as he didn’t look older than fifty. He picked up the pack of cigarettes, plucked one out, and pocketed the rest. Satish produced a lighter and lit his cig. I inhaled and held my breath. I couldn’t hold for too long and eventually resigned to yet another reek filling up the room.

  “I didn’t do the fag,” Olsen said, sucking on his cig.

  “We heard you weren’t exactly fond of him, either,” I interjected.

  Olsen unplugged the cigarette from his mouth and blew smoke toward me. I made a face. He stretched his lips and showed me two rows of yellow teeth, too small for his big mouth. “You don’t smoke, Detective?”

  “Hate the smell,” I said.

  His lips stretched further.

  Satish rapped his fingers on the table. “My partner gets easily irritated. I suggest you help us out, Mr. Olsen, so you can enjoy your cigarette and we can be out of here soon.”

  Olsen wiped the smile off his face. “What’s in it for me?”

  I shifted in my chair. “Besides the cigarettes?”

  Satish sent me a sideways glance. “We can talk to people, Mr. Olsen,” he said. “We’re after Amy Liu’s killer, whether the killer did it again, like you say, or he’s just a copycat. Help us out and we’ll help you out.”

  Olsen shook his cigarette and tiny flakes of ashes fluttered to the ground. “I already said what I know. To the other cops. They didn’t help me out. Why would you guys be any different?”

  Nausea crawled from my stomach up to my throat. I banged a hand on the table in frustration.

  Olsen leaned forward and locked his eyes onto mine. “You hate it here, Detective, don’t you? You hate it just like me. You hate the smells, I can tell from your face. The banging, the shouting, the moaning—I don’t care for any of that.” He shrugged and tapped the hearing aid behind his right ear. “I just turn these off and I can forget all of that. But the smells…” He sucked on the last bit of his cigarette, dropped it to the floor and crushed it with the tip of his shoe. “Can’t tune out the smells. Urine. Shit, from when the smart asses clog the latrines. Sweat. Freaking disgusting.”

  “I hear Vacaville is better, Mr. Olsen,” Satish said. “We can get you a transfer. Tell us what you told the other cops and we’ll work from there.”

  Olsen lifted his chin and squinted. He dipped a hand in his pocket and plucked a new cigarette out of the pack. This time Satish didn’t reach for the lighter.

  I pushed my chair backwards and got to my feet. “We’re wasting our time, Sat,” I said and walked to the door.

  Olsen stuck the cigarette between his lips. “Nail polish,” he said.

  I turned and looked at him.

  “It’s your clue. I told the other cops, too, but they didn’t believe me. There was a car that night. I saw it when I walked the dog. An Oldsmobile Alero, black, one of the older models. Th
e driver was smoking. When I walked by, he rolled up the window and left. And I smelled nail polish after the car.”

  “Nail polish?” Satish repeated.

  He snapped. “What do you expect from homos?”

  Satish asked, “You got a plate number?”

  “Arizona plates. That’s all I remember.”

  I strode back to the table, turned the chair around, and straddled it. “What night, Olsen? If you’re gonna help, you might as well try a little harder than some manicure bullshit.”

  His lips closed around the cigarette butt, his eyes smirked. “The night the fag got whacked, of course.”

  I banged a hand on the table. “Wrong,” I said. “According to your wife, the night Callahan was killed you stepped out to walk the dog at least one hour before the murder. If you saw the car leave—”

  “So? He could’ve driven around the block and come back. Like he’d done the week before. And the one before, again. Same car. Same vague nail polish smell.”

  Satish straightened up and leaned both elbows on the table. “And why do you believe this guy in the Alero was after Callahan, Mr. Olsen?”

  Olsen bit on the cigarette and narrowed his eyes. “Couple weeks earlier. Car was there. Fag comes out of his house and sees it. He gets nervous. Starts walking away. Car follows him. They talk. Doesn’t look good.”

  “You hear what they say?”

  He flashed us a yellow grin. “Uh-uh. That’s when I yelled ‘Go away fags’ at them and the car vanished.”

  The grin got wider and prouder.

  My stomach knotted. I pushed the chair away from the table and walked to the door. The correctional officer waiting outside the interview room shot to his feet.

  “Is everything okay, Detective?”

  “Your closest restroom,” I said.

  I didn’t bother latching the stall door behind me. I kicked up the lid, bent on my knees, and retched.

  * * *

  “A smell for a clue?” Satish protested.

  “All my clues are smells,” I replied.

  “Oh, please. Nail polish? If at least he’d given us a license plate…”

  “Smoked meth smells like acetone, nail polish remover. Weren’t there traces of meth in Callahan’s pockets?”

  Satish shook his head. “To you it may smell like that. The only thing I smell around meth users is their armpits.”

  “I’m not the only one with a sensitive nose. The guy wears hearing aids. If he can’t hear, chances are he’s got a good sense of smell.”

  Satish shrugged. “Nail polish in a black Alero. He could’ve smelled it from some girl doing her nails with her feet propped against the window. That’s as helpful as a cell phone without signal.”

  The foggy, cooler days of June were over. It was ten in the morning and downtown was a sweltering pot of metal, smog, and asphalt. In a few weeks, the wildfires would start raging the foothills, adding a new fragrance to the mix.

  We left Starbucks at the corner with First and crossed the street toward Parker Center, our headquarters, Satish sipping his iced latte, and I savoring the aftertaste of a double shot espresso.

  I said, “The whole scalping and skin removal has me wondering. Why wasn’t Charlie Callahan scalped? I’m not buying the theory that the guy had worked out a new ritual the second time around—that the first time he acted on instinct, and the second time he had more time to plan ahead.”

  “That’s because that theory came from Washburn, and you don’t like Washburn. Olsen will never admit to whacking Callahan. He knows we’ve got nothing on him.”

  “But then why risk it and give us a bogus story?”

  We walked a few steps without saying anything.

  “June’s gone already,” I said, squinting through sunglasses.

  “You know,” Satish replied, “Cohen was right about the scalping. I looked it up. Apparently, the colonists scalped Native Americans and sometimes even stripped them of their skin. Native Americans started it as retaliation.”

  I considered. “What he did to Amy didn’t look like retialiation.”

  Satish sucked from his straw and nodded. “I agree. Cohen said it himself, it was a meticulous and careful job.”

  A DASH bus stopped by the curb. I raised my voice over the growling of the engine. “You said Katie looked up scalping in the databases and found nothing.”

  “She tried both VICAP and NCIC,” Satish said, “and found a gruesome case in Montana. The victim was not only scalped but also skinned and partly mutilated. Her husband was convicted two years later.”

  The NCIC and VICAP were national investigative repositories for all violent crimes in the country. If scalping had been done before in some other crime or murder, all details of the case and the investigation would have been indexed and filed in at least one of the databases.

  My eyes strayed from the bus, now closing its doors and attempting to merge back into traffic, and the shiny façade of Parker Center, a lonely cloud reflecting off its windows. A van from one of the L.A. news station was parked in front of one of our patrol cars.

  “They’re prowling again,” I commented.

  Satish nodded. Now that the Callahan case was back in the news, the news vultures had come back to the nest.

  The rattling of a jackhammer joined the honks of downtown traffic. Workers were replacing the old memorial monument with a forest of metal tubes—some sleek concept by the firm Northrop Grumman Space and Missions Systems. Together with the new headquarters about to open up, it was all part of the beautification of our over one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old agency. Our façade was being polished and refreshed, yet the bureaucratic loopholes kept tightening, the brass was aging, and our crime labs were still understaffed and overburdened.

  We walked past the fenced off area and inside the building. Under the skeptical brows of the watch officers, two cameramen were wrestling their equipment through the metal detector. Satish and I snuck right behind them and took the elevator down to Property Division, where all evidence from cold and closed cases was stored until they could either be officially released or used for court proceedings.

  An officer checked our badges and scribbled our numbers on the visitor log. She looked neither black nor white, neither young nor old. Her inflection was from the valley, her stance from the city.

  We walked down a long corridor. The waiting room to Jail Division was located at the opposite end, and we could clearly hear the bickering of family members in line to visit their relatives. A man shouted he’d been waiting for more than an hour to see his son. An officer replied his son had been waiting in the joint for more than one year, so he could wait a few minutes longer.

  The evidence room was small and windowless. Four boxes sat on a round, metal table. They all bore the LAPD stamp and the additional labels, “Charlie Callahan, case ID XCV56, submitted by Det. C. Henkins.”

  “The evidence on the Callahan case, as you requested,” the officer said. “All his personal items are here. We contacted the family to see if they wanted it, but they replied we could burn it all.” She gave us a quick glance that meant, “Do you have any questions?” Relieved to see that we didn’t, she took off.

  Satish hooked his hands on his belt and took a deep breath. “Well—looks like we’ll be in here for a while.”

  I leaned across the table and pulled one of the boxes closer.

  “Look at the bright side,” I said. “Chances are, by the time we’re done, the news crews up on our floor will be long gone from Parker Center.”

  Satish flopped on the chair across from me, loosened the knot of his tie, and pulled out the field reports. “They’ll come back,” he said. “They always do.”

  We sorted through the victim’s clothing, field notes, pictures, crime sketches. In the inventory, we found Callahan’s apartment floor plans marked with all the places from where evidence had been taken.

  “What’s in the box that says ‘Digital’?”

  I craned my head and looked
inside. “CDs. Couple of jump drives.”

  He reached for the box and looked for himself. “No laptop?”

  I shook my head. “Does the inventory say laptop somewhere?”

  Reading glasses precariously hanging from the tip of his nose, Satish flipped through the pages of the inventory. “Home desktop.”

  “Was it seized?” I asked.

  Satish frowned, flipped more pages, then dropped his chin and stared at the boxes on the table from above the rim of his reading glasses. “Well, it does say they looked at emails and personal documents, but I don’t see no computer here.”

  I sifted through the box of CDs, mentally counting. There were about a dozen data CDs and a couple of jump drives. “Maybe it’s still at Electronics. Did they find anything interesting?”

  “Personal emails to friends. Nothing out of the ordinary or raising flags. All data on the CDs was from work.” He clicked his tongue. “Browsing history didn’t raise any red flags either, apart from the usual gay and lesbian internet rooms and the men-seeking-men pages on Craigslist.”

  I pushed away the box with the digital evidence and went through Callahan’s personal belongings. “Tell me something I don’t know. I’ve seen those ads. Those loons, they hook up, get high on meth, and fuck for three straight days. When they wake up they have HIV. Where did he work?”

  Satish went back to his notes. “Used to work for a local web design company.”

  “Positive on a drug test?” said judgmental me.

  “Nope. Been laid off last fall. The company was going through a hard time. Track, there wasn’t any meth in his veins and no drugs were found in his apartment. The only traces found were from his pockets.”

  “You’re thinking planted?”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking. It just doesn’t add up.”

  I fished several things out of the personal belongings box: prescription drugs, a battered leather wallet with no cash but several credit cards, a box of condoms, an address book with only three entries. I brought each item to my nose. They smelled of overused deodorant and cheap perfume, of dog hairs and passive smoke. They smelled forlorn.