MOSAICS: A Thriller Page 9

  SEVEN

  ____________

  “Heated argument? What heated argument? We brainstormed over the next budget report, that’s all. Who gave you that kind of misinformation?”

  “We prefer to ask the questions, Doctor,” Satish replied.

  Dr. Fredrick Lyons walked fast and in long strides. A gaudy Hawaiian tie and the neon green of the reading glasses swinging from his neck intentionally clashed with his white-shirt, black-suit attire. He had longish gray locks, a short beard trimmed close to the jaw, and shrewd eyes that sized us up impatiently, yet found the time to linger over a nice pair of legs as we strode across the curving corridor back to the office suites. He looked too wealthy not to be opinionated, and too smart to be unpretentious.

  “I already told you everything: I was the first one to leave the party that night. The other guests can confirm. I was home by midnight. No, I didn’t notice anything strange inside or outside her home. She was a pleasant host, cheerful and happy as always. I assume that’s what everybody else told you.”

  “We’re not exactly looking for originality, here,” I replied. “Just plain old useful information will do.”

  He stopped and gave me a long, condescending look. “If she and I had such a nasty disagreement the day before, why would I even show up at her party?”

  I could think of about a dozen reasons but decided to keep them to myself for the time being.

  Lyons shared the front office with Amy Liu—a small corridor where a parched assistant with oversized glasses and a gray hair bun made an anachronistic mismatch with the computer, printer, fax machine and other electronic gadgets she was surrounded with. Her monitor bloomed with so many fingerprints it would’ve made the Trace lab guys ecstatic.

  There was a tall and narrow window facing down on a lateral street. Next to the tall and narrow window were three upholstered chairs, the kind that come in a row, and if the guy sitting at one end has a twitch, you either join the twitch or you go sit somewhere else.

  The guy sitting at one end didn’t have a twitch, though. He didn’t have much of anything, really, he just sat there looking like somebody who’s been waiting for so long he’s forgotten the reason he got there.

  Luckily, Lyons remembered. “What are you doing here, Medina?”

  Medina raised his head slowly, almost lethargically. His eyes squinted as if staring into too much light then settled on the reading glasses dangling from Lyons’s chest. “I c—came to ask you about the new s—sequences, sir. They’re not a—aligned, and if I include them in the s—sample—”

  “Of course they’re not aligned. That’s what I hired you for, to align sequences.” Lyons opened the door to his office. “Did you reply to the crap from reviewer number three?”

  Medina rose from his chair and leaned against the wall. He was tall and lanky and kept blinking at the floor as if the light from the ceiling were too bright. “N—not yet. I n—need to include the new s—sequences to r—run the additional tests he asked for.”

  Lyons stood so close to Medina’s face their noses almost touched. “Then go—align—the sequences,” he hissed.

  Medina blinked at the floor one more time then scuttled off.

  Lyons motioned us inside his office. “The man only stutters when he’s nervous. Drives me up the wall.” He stepped inside and strode to his desk.

  Lyons’s office was at least twice as large as Amy’s, with a hazed view of the San Gabriel Mountains. He retreated behind a curved mahogany desk that smelled as new and expensive as his clothes, and pretended not to be concerned while Satish and I took our time perusing the room.

  The place was a bouquet of smells. It took me half a second to pin Lyons’s aftershave—poppy and fig fragrance, Italian brand, sixty bucks a bottle. Then came the secretary’s perfume, as antiquated as her hairdo. Several other scents weaved in, probably from daily meetings with staff and collaborators. And finally something totally new and foreign, a mix of dry soil and leather, of spiced perspiration and bags of rice…

  Two djembe drums sat in one corner of the room. On the shelves, between the numerous books on virology, immunology, microbiology, and a bunch other -ogy’s, were wood statuettes of elephants, antelopes, and giraffes. From the wall, next to Lyons’s degrees and certifications, stared a row of black African masks, with slits instead of eyes, and long horns coming out of their heads. Woven baskets in vivid colors—bright yellow, red and blue—decorated the desk and coffee table.

  The pictures on Lyons’s desk displayed images of African children playing barefoot in a dirt lot. In one of the photos, I recognized Lyons standing in front of a hut, next to a tall, skinny man. Half of the man’s teeth were missing, as well as most of his hair, yet that didn’t deter him from grinning from ear to ear. The next frame depicted a blonde woman in her early forties, heavily made up. She had plenty of hair and teeth, and yet her smile wasn’t even half as heartfelt as the grinning guy’s standing in front of the hut.

  Hair and teeth don’t make happiness.

  Go tell dentists and hair stylists.

  Satish took a seat in one of the leather armchairs. “We understand you and Dr. Liu worked together and discussions came up all the time. We just want to know exactly what it was that you two discussed the day before she was killed.”

  Lyons shot both hands up in the air in mock surrender. “Fine, fine,” he said. “I’m easy, okay? I manage a lot of people and a lot of grant money and as you know, guys managing a lot of people and a lot of grant money don’t usually win popularity contests. I don’t care, okay? I’m not in this to win a popularity contest. I’m in this to stop a pandemic. So, yes, I’ll tell you what our conversation was about. Like I said, despite what you’ll hear elsewhere, I’m easy.”

  I smiled and sat in the chair next to Satish. I had yet to find a witness who admitted to being difficult.

  “It was about the vaccine trial.” Lyons brought a hand to his mouth and carefully brushed the corners of his goatee. “Amy wanted to change some of the wording on the informational packages we hand out at enrollment. A lot of people come in because they’ve heard of our study in the news. Amy was worried the wording wasn’t clear enough on what they were getting and not getting when they enrolled.”

  Satish took notes.

  I raised my opinionated brow. “Of course, injecting yourself in a room filled with paparazzi was a great move to make sure you got a lot of coverage, Dr. Lyons.”

  The man regarded me with contempt. “Do you know how many years I’ve waited to see my vaccine finally tested on humans, Detective? Twelve. Twelve long years, during which the number of people living with HIV rose from twenty-five million to thirty-three million. My vaccine was created on a computer instead of harvested from somebody’s plasma. I had to perform dozens of tests to show that my strain was viable, stable, and safe.” He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and showed me the inside of his arm. “I poked myself. Yes, it generated a lot of buzz in the news. It was for a good cause.”

  Satish raised his eyes from his notebook. “Yet Amy was worried?”

  “Cautious, I suppose. When people come in they get randomly assigned to either the control group or the study group. So they may or may not get the vaccine, but they’re not told what they get. Amy was worried that people could be misled.”

  Satish’s pen squeaked on the notepad. “Her request seems reasonable. Why the altercation, then?”

  His right brow shot up. “We go out on a limb to make sure our volunteers get all the information they need. They sign a waiver clearly stating they may not get the vaccine but only a placebo, and even if they get the vaccine, it’s still an experimental trial and there’s no guarantee it will be protective. And it was not an altercation! We discussed, like we often did.”

  “Amy was quite upset after your ‘discussion’,” I interjected.

  Lyons exhaled. “Look. I don’t know who you’ve been talking to. She didn’t look upset to me. She didn’t like my answer, either—that was
clear. Amy is—” He swallowed, inhaled, then tuned his voice down a notch. “Amy was a brilliant physician, but sometimes she wanted to do things her way. Well, I happen to be the principal investigator on this study, so she had to back off. I told her so, and we left it at that. No harm done. If she was upset, it wasn’t because of something I said.”

  “And you’re pretty certain about that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I laced my fingers across my lap and smiled my polite smile. I love folks like Lyons. Men who thrive on certainties, whose vocabulary is peppered with phrases like absolutely, most certainly, without any doubt; whose world is split between black and white, liberal and conservative, religious and agnostic, straight and gay. No shades in between.

  One of the djembe drums was standing next to my chair so I gave it a little try with the ball of my thumb. It made a nice, round tone.

  “Careful with that, Detective. It’s handmade.”

  “You’ve got a lot of handmade stuff in here, Dr. Lyons.”

  A proud smile grew on his face like a bad habit. “Souvenirs from my trips to Africa. The southern part of the continent has been hit hard by AIDS. Entire villages spread thin because of the pandemic. Kids orphaned by HIV who are raised by her grandparents. Babies born HIV positive.”

  “You travel often to Africa?” Satish asked.

  “I wish I could go more often. Last time I was there was two years ago. I visited my colleagues in Johannesburg then toured around the villages. I go there thinking to give some hope and the people end up giving me hope. We can beat this. We have to.”

  “What can you tell us about Charlie Callahan, Dr. Lyons?”

  He blinked at me, pretending he hadn’t recognized the name.

  “I believe he enrolled in your study about a year ago?” I insisted. The hell he didn’t recognize the name.

  “Oh. Mr. Callahan.” He took a glass paperweight from a stack of papers on his desk and passed it from one hand to the other. My eyes fell on the first paper on the stack. Somebody had scribbled comments all over the first page. One table in particular, had been circled numerous times, next to the word “NO,” followed by several exclamation marks. Interestingly, Amy was the first name in the list of authors, Lyons was the last.

  Dr. Lyons is known to make medical students cry.

  “You have to understand,” Lyons said. “We don’t go by patient names, and—”

  “I know. The usual HIPAA crap. I’m sure you were informed when Mr. Callahan became suddenly unavailable for your study?”

  Satish shifted in his chair. “What my partner’s trying to say—”

  “I get the question. Yes, when the news came out, I was informed about Mr. Callahan’s participation in the study, but just because of the way he died. Of course, I was shocked when I heard. We’re all quite sensitive about the subject. Homophobia is something we despise. Many of my patients tell me they’re scared. Under any other circumstance, participants remain anonymous. People drop out of studies all the time and we don’t keep track of where they end up or why they stopped showing up for samples—we have statistical tools to account for that.”

  I shoved a hand in my pocket and fished out a paperclip.

  “Do you think Amy may have died for the same reason? Homophobia?” Satish asked.

  Lyons’s hand froze around the paperweight. His lower lip trembled, a nerve in his temple twitched. I blinked and the imperturbable, self-confident Dr. Lyons was back, no trace of hesitancy in his baritone voice as he said, “I’ve no idea. It’s something I—I can’t even begin to comprehend. Amy was a great asset to our group. A fine scientist and a good—friend.” He choked out the last word.

  There was a moment of silence, before the paperclip flew from my hand and skidded under the desk. I delved to retrieve it and on my way back I took a good sniff at the paper.

  I smelled Amy on it. And something vaguely sweet, enough to perk my interest. I leaned forward for a second sniff, but our time was up. Lyons swiveled away from the desk and shot to his feet. “I’d love to chat more, but I’ve got a meeting in five minutes.”

  He shook our hands as if we’d just sealed a million dollar deal.

  As we walked to the door, I took one last peek at the children framed in Lyons’s photos. They were dressed in rags, playing with broken sticks and a deflated ball, and yet their smiles were happy and full.

  They end up giving me hope.

  I turned and met his eyes. “Do you think you’ll nail it, Doctor?” I asked. “The vaccine—do you believe it’ll eventually stop the pandemic?”

  He’d already lifted the receiver of his phone. He put it back down and gave me a condescending smile. “I’ve no doubt we will succeed. We owe it to those kids you’re staring at.”

  I nodded, stepped out, and closed the door behind us.

  * * *

  “Interesting character, this Dr. Lyons,” Satish said once we were back on the street. Hot air blew in our faces like a drunkard’s breath. A crane rattled above our heads, a truck idled by the curb. Men in hard helmets and yellow vests spilled out of the fence surrounding the construction site across the street, UTech’s next fifty-million-dollar project. They settled on the sidewalk with their lunchboxes, a radio tuned to pop music to keep them company. Others formed a line outside Einstein Bros, mingling with students in flip-flops and skimpy tops, doctors in white coats, and a couple of campus security guards.

  “Guess what it reminds me of, Track?”

  I grinned. “Mangoes? Elm trees? Bicycles?”

  “Pistachios.”

  “Jeez… so close.”

  We zigzagged around street cones and orange tape.

  “My old man used to be addicted to pistachios. You see, Satish, he used to say. There’s three kinds of pistachios. The breakable ones and the unbreakable ones.”

  “That’s two.”

  “That’s what I said. Pa, that’s two. He said, The cracked ones are a whole species on their own. They trick you into thinking they’re breakable, they show you a peek of their fruit inside, but you either never get to break them, or if you do, you learn somebody else’s already got them.”

  “Hmm. You think Lyons is the cracked kind?”

  “No. I’m thinking I just don’t want to dig through the pile of pistachio shells and find that somebody else’s already eaten all the fruits.”

  We cornered an old apartment complex, now converted to office suites—probably where all the folks who didn’t get their grant last year got sent to pay for their sins, judging from the rundown appearance of the building.

  The asphalt exuded whiffs of hot air.

  I eyed with envy the row of vehicles stationed around the corner, the gate arm at the entrance bearing the warning that access was reserved for the faculty in the Schnell building. We’d parked our vehicle two blocks away, by the Chavez campus entrance.

  Satish didn’t seem to mind the heat. Jingling loose change in his pockets, he kept walking and musing. “What struck me of our doc, actually, was how emotionally detached he wanted to appear.”

  I stopped by the sidewalk and stared at the cars in the reserved lot. The spots in the first row were assigned by name.

  Dr. J. Salmad, Dr. K.H. Kurt, Dr. Hoon…

  I said, “He almost lost it when you mentioned Amy’s murder.”

  Dr. F. Lyons.

  Interesting.

  “I noticed,” Satish replied. “Now, if one of your best physicians had been brutally murdered, wouldn’t you make sure you showed some kind of shock, whether you felt it or not? Track? Where the hell are you going?”

  I walked around the parking gate arm into the lot. “Would I show some shock? Depends, Sat.”

  He followed me and we both stared at Lyons’s car. A white Audi A8, same 2006 model Vargas had seen at Amy’s house.

  “Depends on whether I’m innocent or guilty.”

  I crouched to look at the tires. There was dirt in the grooves, and the fenders were dusted with dried soil. I took
out a handkerchief and brushed it along the wheel well.

  Soil had spilled onto the street from the barriers along the hillside by Amy’s house…

  I rose, cupped a hand around my right eye and stared through the window.

  “And there’s your guy sleeping in the backseat,” I said.

  I took a step back and motioned to Satish to come closer to the car. “Look at the backseat and tell me what you see.”

  He leaned against the window, hands around his face to shield off the glare from the sun. “I see a blanket, a duffel bag, and a white lab coat.”

  “The lab coat is sprawled across the back seat, giving the impression of a—”

  “Track, I know what you’re thinking. The car is white, though, not silver.”

  “The street light by Amy’s house wasn’t working. It was strobing. And Vargas wasn’t sure about the color. Silver could easily be mixed up with white. Now imagine taking a peek inside this car and the light going off in flashes. All you get is a quick glimpse of the interior, the whites jumping at you—”

  “…in a way that you might mistake the lab coat for a person.”

  A campus security van stopped by the curb. “Can I help you?”

  I flashed my badge and the driver waved back. “Should’ve guessed,” he mumbled. “Do you need any help, Detective?”

  “How much for your silence?” I asked.

  He laughed and drove away.

  Satish shoved both hands in his pockets and stared at the dirty handkerchief in my hands. “Even if you get a match, dirt’s still dirt pretty much anywhere in L.A.”

  “But if we get the dirt, and Vargas’s statement, and the nine-one-one tape…”

  He nodded. “And we’ve got fibers sitting at the lab. Let’s wait until we hear back from the forensic labs. We might have some leverage at that point.”

  “You never know,” I said. “Even the hardest pistachios eventually crack.”

  We started back down the sidewalk. A web of scaffolding and cranes reflected off the glass façade of the Schnell building. A siren wailed in the distance. The workers made their way back inside the fence. The crane started rattling again. A faint breeze blew warm air in our faces.