MOSAICS: A Thriller (3 page)

Satish
had filled me in during our ride to Montecito Heights: there had been another victim, a young homosexual from Silver Lake. The similarities between the two murders had put the brass on edge and motivated the case transfer to the RHD. The rumor spreading through the agency was that a new serial killer was on the prowl.

Behind the breakfast counter
was the dining area, which extended into the living area and foyer. An abstract painting hung above the mantelpiece, one of those pictures a two-year-old could draw, yet it came with a six-figure price tag in snobbish art galleries where it’s legal to rip you off and make you feel good about it.

Satish stood
by the door, hands deep in his pockets. “Track, there’s general dissent on whether we’re dealing with a serial or not. Could be a copycat. Could be that Amy Liu’s ex finally wanted payback and found it convenient to follow on the footsteps of another killer. Whatever this is, it’s heinous, and nobody wants another heinous offender on the loose. Especially one that targets nice neighborhoods, if you know what I mean. But yeah, the M.O. is different in this one.”

Yes, I knew what he meant. A homicide in a place like Montecito Heights weighed more than ten slayings in South Central. Always had.

The coffee table was cluttered with used glasses, dried up wine spatters, and tortilla chip crumbs. The sofa, buried in a wide assortment of pillows, smelled of a cat that no longer lived there. I stuck my nose everywhere, picked up everything and sniffed. A dirty plate on a chair, an open book, the TV remote. A bunch of keys and a row of coins on the console in the foyer, the glass top sprayed with fingerprinting powder.

She staggers back and cli
ngs to the wall, one hand on the console, the other one on her face
.

“Traces of acid ha
ve been found on her fingertips,” Satish said. “Both victims were strangled from behind. Both were found in or near their homes with their faces mauled by acid. The victim in Silver Lake, though, had bits of his own skin underneath his fingernails.”

I came back to the foyer
, got on my hands and knees, and perused the ground where Amy’s body had been found. “He tried to pry the ligature away,” I said.

“Correct, and that’s how his own skin ended u
p under his fingernails. Also, the acid spilled down the sides of his neck, erasing the ligature marks. That would be consistent with liquid poured on him while he was lying down, not standing up, as in Amy’s case. At the autopsy, the M.E. concluded the acid had been poured on the Silver Lake victim after his death. There were no traces of acid in his airways. On the other hand, there were droplets of splashed liquid on Amy Liu’s neck and chest—at least on prelim—and inside her throat.”

“The attacker splashed her while she was standing by the door?”

“That’s our hypothesis so far, yes. Her finger pads were burnt, most likely from touching her face. Definitely alive when she was attacked.”

Satish
shook his head. “If it is the same killer, his hunting grounds are quite broad, the cooling off time is less than a year, and the violence is escalating—which makes him very dangerous. If, on the other hand, it’s a copy cat, the motive is unclear: why copy the mode and manner of death, and then take the time to remove the skin flaps?”

“What kind of MD was she?” I asked.

“Internal medicine at UTech university hospital in Boyle Heights.”

“Family practice?”

“No, HIV specialist. They have a large clinic affiliated with the medical school.”

Satish watched me sniff the floor with vague interest. We’d been partners for almost six years now and my modus operandi no longer surprised him. I inhaled, followed the vic’s path from the door back
to the console, where the killer pounced on her, wrapped the ligature around her neck and pulled, leaving a smooth, almost anonymous indentation. No telltale of rope, chain, fibers—none visible to the naked eye at least.

“
You said we don’t have telltale marks on the first victim?”

“Only partials, nothing conclusive. The damage done by the acid in that case was too extensive.”

“Why erase the ligature marks on victim number one but not on victim number two?”

“Maybe he found a better ligature, one he felt confident it wouldn’t give him away. I tell you Track, if it’s the same guy, he’s getting better at this.”

I sniffed the floor where her body had been found. “What were the M.E.’s thoughts on the skin carvings?”

“Smooth blade, firm hand. He knew what he wanted.”

A med, I thought, impulsively. And then I remembered the care with which I dress my game when I go hunting.

Or a butcher
.

Anyone with some practice with animals could do that. 

I let my thoughts wander back to the night of the murder. The clatter of conversation, the laughter, the music from the stereo. Did one of her guests come back after the party was over? Or maybe they never left? I could only imagine the bedlam of fingerprints, fibers, and what-have-you the Field Unit must have collected from this scene. Six guests, plus the victim, plus—or including—the assassin. Or assassins.

I said, “Did you listen to the nine-one-one tape?”

Sat crossed his arms and looked down at the tip of his shoes. “Fairly calm voice, given what he was supposedly looking at. One word he said, though—
abraded
. About the face.”

“Interesting word choice.”

“Agreed. We got a couple of blue suits trying to trace this guy.”

“And six likely candidates.”

“We’re keeping tabs on each one of them. We taped their voices and sent them off to Electronics. They’re all some kind of medical professionals.”

“All quite familiar with the word
abraded
.”

He shook his head sideways. “Suppose Joe Party Guest forgets something. A pair of reading glasses, a salad bowl, or maybe a question. Joe comes back, finds her dead and makes an anonymous call because—”

“Because he’s got something to hide. Either he did it or he’s holding back.”

Satish’s phone buzzed. “Gomez,” he mouthed,
taking the call. “Yeah, we’re at the scene.”

I
took the chance to explore the rest of the house.

A dark hallway with n
o windows opened to the right from the foyer. The smells changed—the staleness of a vacant place and the victim’s scent—feminine, ambitious, seductive. The wall displayed wrought-iron sconces and a collection of photos of Amy: Amy in her graduation gown, Amy with friends, Amy with her cat.

Her bedroom was orderly. There was a half-empty birth control kit in her nightstand drawer, but no boyfriend in her life, according to the friends and relatives interviewed, only an ex-husband who now lived in Oregon. Toiletries on her vanity table, regular clothes in her closet, a few garments in her drawers that told me she was no nun, but no distinctive masculine scent anywhere. If she shared her bed with somebody, she’d done a good job at hiding it. The sheets smelled freshly washed.

The next door led to her home office, a small carpeted room with a couple of white bookcases, a table with a desktop and printer, a metal chair, and, on the opposite side, a futon, a laundry basket, and an ironing table folded against the wall. Through the window, the hills of Montecito Heights glowed against the evening sky, a wavy fabric of glimmering lights.

I inhaled. The bookshelves were crammed with medical books, the desk buried under stacks of papers.

The sweet, foul smell of the tiles
…

I sat at the desk,
checked the drawers, sniffed the keyboard, then the computer screen.

Not here. Close, though.

The papers
.
He went through the pile of papers.

I rummaged through the folders not knowing what to look for, just tailgating a smell. Gloved fingers had brushed through printouts and graphs, tables, essays, research proposals…

Did he find what he was looking for
?
And if so, what
?

Article after article of scientific jargon, each title some random permutation of the words immunodeficiency, vaccine, study design, therapy, antiretroviral.

“What are you gonna see in the dark?”

By the office door, Satish flipped the light switch.

“Smells.”

“On paper?”

“Yeah. And patterns, too,” I said. I sniffed the top right corner of every paper in the pile. I could follow the gloved fingers searching through the stack, most likely a left thumb holding up the top ones so he could read the titles, and a right index flipping through. Until the trace stopped.

He found what he was looking for. Probably took it with him.

I inhaled and gave one last look around. Everything else seemed untouched. “What did Gomez have to say?”

Satish
wobbled his head. “Autopsy’s scheduled for Thursday morning. Just got an invitation. Wanna join the party?”

He smiled. Waited.

Amy Liu smiled too, from a silver frame on her desk, a man’s hand draped over her shoulder, and a strand of black hair blowing across her face.

“Fine,” I said, walking past him out of the room. “I’ll keep you company on Thursday, but—”

“Uh-uh, Track.” He switched the lights off and followed me back to the foyer. “First things first. Tomorrow you pee in a cup and get your LAPD badge back.”

“I pee in a what?”

We locked the house and made sure the yellow crime scene tape was back in place. Outside, the air was tainted with a hint of humidity and the scent of jacaranda blooms. A handful of pale stars dotted the sky, the glow of downtown beneath them like a disoriented dawn. A broken streetlight strobed from farther down the street. The Latino music persisted.

Yo sufrí mucho por ti, mi corazon
…

Satish unlocked the car and slid
in behind the wheel. “Union mandated drug test. Your leave of absence was longer than ninety days. Welcome back to regulations, Detective Presius.”

I made a face.

“Look at it this way. Whoever handles those cups has it way worse than you.” He started the engine and backed out of the driveway. “Shit happens, Track. Never forget that.”

“Hard to forget on days like this.”

I rolled down the window and let cool air blow in my face. The freeway droned in the distance, as another night descended upon Los Angeles. Another murder, another killer on the loose.

It was June 2009, the beginning of summer.

Killing season had just started.

TWO

____________

I left my Charger in the driveway, clambered out, and smelled freshly baked
lahmajoun
—Armenian pizza. It came from a white plastic bag hanging by the door. Besides the Armenian pizza, wrapped in paper, the bag contained a yellow envelope.

Will jumped on me as
I unlocked the door, yapping and licking. I set the
lahmajoun
on the kitchen counter and tore open the yellow envelope. Inside was the picture of a sixty-something lady, proudly smiling in front of a water fountain. The back read, “Please find her. SKL,” in slanted handwriting.

I told him a scarf, damn it. A hat, a shoe, a sweater—something I can fucking smell
.

Katya Maria Krikorian, age sixty-two, had vanished on May 24. She
got into her car in the early afternoon to visit a friend in El Sereno, spent about an hour with her, then left and never made it back home. Her brother had hired me to find her but he kept missing the point that I in order to find people I need to know what they smell like.

I tossed the picture on the dining table, together with the rest of the photographs, and served the boys—Will and The King—dinner. I
didn’t feel like eating, so I grabbed a Corona and a lime from the fridge and walked to the living room. Ass in recliner, feet on coffee table, laptop on lap. Will’s adoring eyes on me, The King settled on his windowsill, despising us both. I took a long swig of Corona and typed, “mosaic tiles.”

Google’s my best friend.

My browser told me that mosaics had been around for a long time. The Greeks and the Romans used them to decorate their homes until they became the primary Christian art form. Interestingly, whereas the Greeks and the Romans used mostly stone tiles for their mosaics, it was the Byzantines who introduced glass tiles for the first time.

Glass tiles—the kind our killer seemed to like. I downed the rest of my beer. Four tiles, four different colors. Christianity had a fixation with the numbers three and seven. Wh
at was the meaning of four? Four cardinal directions, four limbs, four elements, four states of matter.

The Byzantine S
trangler.

My eyes fell on the painting propped against the wall, between the bookcases. A red woman lay naked in the grass, her bosom dappled with black stars, a cougar emerging from the shade behind her.
Artist, friend, occasional girlfriend, Hortensia had given the painting to me four months earlier and I still hadn’t gotten around to hanging it. I flipped the cell open and punched in her number.

“Still not available, Track.”

“Hort. It’s been six months already. You don’t need to remind me every time I call.”

She puzzled over that. “You mean you’re not calling to have sex? That’s not flattering.”

I resisted the urge to hang up. “I need an art lesson. On mosaics.”

There were noises in the background—glass jars clinking, water running. “I don’t do mosaics. I paint.”

I missed the time when we had sex instead of talking. “Well, that covers it. Do you know people who do mosaics in L.A.? Would you know where they get the tiles?”

“In the recycling. Broken bottles, colored glasses, crocks, what have you. Even pebbles. Artists are creative people. Hey, I have a friend who does pistachio shells on wire mesh. That’s pretty cool.”

I thanked her and hung up, making a mental note to call her again should I find pistachio shells at the next crime scene. I got out of the recliner, trudged back to the kitchen, and tossed the Corona bottle. My answering machine was still blinking. I hit the play button.

“Yeah. This is Joe from Jiffy Lu—”

Skip
.

“Mr. Presius, your results are in. Dr. Watanabe wanted me to schedule—”

Skip
.

“Hey.”

I froze. My finger retreated from the skip button this time.

“Thought you’d be home,” Diane’s voice crooned through the phone. “Guess not.”

The answering machine’s beep at the end of the message rang like a long amen.

I shuffled
to the fridge, grabbed another Corona and slumped back in the recliner, my fingers itching to dial Diane’s number.

She said not to call. Not to ca
ll, Ulysses, can you follow one simple direction?

Yeah, but then she called me.

She left a message
.

I
punched in her number on the cell phone. It rang once. Twice. Then her voice, snappish, nothing like the message she’d just left. “I still need time, Track.”

“You left me a message.”

“I didn’t—Sheesh, Track, how often do you listen to your messages?”

I swallowed, squeezed the beer bottle in my hand. “Once or
twice—a month… maybe…”

A sigh, a hand going through her hair and materializing in a rustle of static through the
phone. Where was she? Pacing in her living room, or maybe lying on the bed, coiling strands of hair around her index finger…

“Do you ever make mistakes, Track?”

“Lots of them. You were never one.”

She considered.
“It’s not you, Track. It’s me. I’m going through things. I need—I need to find myself again.”

She’d been
saying that for the past three months. How she wasn’t sure about stuff anymore. How she hated her job, hated Los Angeles, hated everything about her life.

I told her to give it some time. Being held at gunpoint twice in one week is not something that goes down as smoothly as bourbon.

Her reply had always been the same: “You don’t get it, Track.”

I
didn’t
get it.

“
You need to give some love to that pretty Sig your dad got you. The range stays open till late on Wednesdays. I could pick you up at—”

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

She wished me goodnight and hung up.

I brought the Corona to my lips, took a sip, and swished the chilled beer in my mouth.

Women are like whiskey
, I thought. If you have too much you get drunk. If you have too little all you’re left with is a bunch of regrets.