MOSAICS: A Thriller

by E. E. Giorgi

  “No cell phone among his personal items. Who doesn’t have a cell phone these days?”

  Satish went back to his notebook. “The murder book says, ‘Missing.’ The killer probably took it. Phone logs were subpoenaed but all they got was the usual calls to friends, plus a couple of businesses.”

  “What about his family?”

  “Family lives back in Georgia and hasn’t spoken to him ever since he’s moved to California.”

  “Loving family.” I plucked the prescription drugs out of the box—four orange pill bottles—and brought them to my nose before examining the labels. They had all been issued by a J. Thompson, MD, except for the last one, which bore the name A. Liu, MD.

  Ha.

  The label had peeled off at the corner and the only surviving part of Callahan’s name was the C. I opened it and sniffed inside. Didn’t smell familiar.

  “Hey,” Satish said, “this is interesting. Callahan was laid off on September fifth, last year.”

  “Right around labor day. Very thoughtful of his employer.”

  Satish glanced me from above the rim of his reading glasses. “Here’s the thing, though. According to his monthly bank statements, he’s made bi-weekly cash deposits starting October twenty-first. Amounts vary, but they all seem to be around five-hundred, give or take a few bucks.”

  “Unemployment benefits?”

  “Nah, those are much less. One-twenty, direct deposit from the state every two weeks. The rest are cash deposits he made himself.”

  “When was the last one?”

  He turned the page over. “Looks like—January third.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Hmm. He was killed on the thirtieth.”

  Satish tapped his notebook with the tip of his pen. “There are many non-kosher ways one can get by in L.A.”

  “Yeah, and most get you killed. What’s going through your mind, Sat?”

  He sneered, white teeth and all. “How ’bout a date at the Belmont, you and I?”

  My left brow shot up. The Belmont used to be a gay bar at Fifth and Main—Satish’s beat back when he was a street copper.

  “I’m too picky to go on a date with you, Sat,” I replied. “Besides, they tore it down five years ago.”

  He shook his head and sighed. “Skid row is not what it used to be anymore. At least the Regent is still there. You know, one day—”

  “One day you chased a loon inside the Regent and it was all dark and your shoes were popping on the floor because it was covered in manly goo,” I said. “Yes, Sat, I know. I think you told me that story a thousand times.”

  The Regent was a porn theater right next to the Belmont. Certain things come in pairs, like balls.

  “Did I tell you that when me and my partner shouted, ‘Freeze, asshole,’ they all shot their hands up in the air?”

  “Yeah, you told me that part too. Look. We should get ahold of Callahan’s computer, find out what user name he had on Craigslist, post an ad in his name, and see what happens. In the meantime, will you look at the label on this prescription bottle?” I rolled the pill bottle from the Liu doctor over to him.

  He smiled dreamily and picked up the bottle from the table. His eyes were still chasing memories. “Me and my partner, we started arguing on who was supposed to frisk the suspect.” He chuckled. “His zipper was still—”

  “Down” I leaned back in my chair and laced my fingers. “You told me that part too.”

  Satish stared at the label on the prescription bottle. “Man,” he said. “Can’t read anymore. As I grow older, I don’t get any younger.”

  “Seems to be a common problem. Look at the doc’s name in there—A. Liu. What do you make of that?”

  “You’re thinking Amy Liu?”

  “Didn’t you say she specialized on HIV?”

  Satish checked the evidence log. “Hmm. Strange. The pill bottle doesn’t seem to be logged in here. There’s a lot of Liu’s in L.A. If it really was Amy Liu, wouldn’t Henkins mention the connection?”

  I dropped my chin. “You sure about that?”

  Antagonism between divisions was no secret, especially when cases got transferred to the RHD. Even in the hottest investigations, battles for turf often turned into hold-ups and innuendos.

  Satish rose to his feet and put Callahan’s bank statements back inside the evidence box. “Whether or not Henkins keeps her secrets, it’s worth checking out. Let’s go, I think we’ve seen enough for now.”

  Man, I love my agency. Old fashioned bureaucracy and solid spirit of cooperation.

  * * *

  The jagged skyline of Bunker Hill emerged through a film of haze. A chopper circled over Dodger Stadium, the Five below a ten-lane river snaking into downtown. All around, under a yellow dome of smog, treetops and palm fronds speckled the expanse of buildings and houses.

  Another sizzling day in the City of Angels.

  “Nice view,” I said, tapping the windowpane. “The glass could use some cleaning, though.”

  Satish slammed a drawer closed and opened a second one. “We’ll put a memo in the murder book.”

  The building was new—the latest addition to the UTech medical campus in Boyle Heights. It hosted genomics labs on the lower floors, and offices and conference rooms on the upper ones. Construction had begun five years earlier and stalled several times until one of the most affluent UTech alumni, philanthropist Amintore Schnell, poured a stunning fifty million donation into the completion of the project. Eight months later, the Schnell Molecular Genomics Core saw its grand opening—another sleek tower rising from the hills of Boyle Heights.

  Amy Liu’s office was long and narrow, with skewed walls that made the furniture sit at weird angles. The wall facing west was a floor-to-ceiling windowpane looking over downtown, a view Amy hid behind stacks of research papers, a printer and two computer screens. Somebody had left flowers next to her keyboard, and needles of dried-up petals spilled over her desk.

  Having found nothing of interest in her drawers, Satish moved to a metal file cabinet standing against the north wall between two armchairs upholstered in red.

  I knew Amy’s killer had taken something from her home office. I’d detected the sweet, almost nauseating odor from the tiles on a pile of papers on her home desk. What if he hadn’t found what he’d been looking for? What if he came back here, to her work office, searching for more? I perused the small room trying to detect the same scent, but all I got was fresh paint from the walls and formaldehyde from the brand new bookshelves. I sat in her chair, flipped through the stacks of papers and sniffed her keyboard, mouse, pens. Same result: only the victim’s smell, mixed with the artificial scent of medical labs.

  On one of the shelves was a picture of Amy Liu surrounded by a bunch of other docs, all in white coats, stethoscopes dangling from their necks, arms crossed, and confident smiles sprawled across their handsome faces. They looked like they’d come straight out of a highway billboard.

  “Do doctors live in soaps?”

  Satish fished some papers out of one of the cabinet drawers and leafed through. “Let me tell you something, Track. When I was eight, I told my mom I wanted to be a doctor. She laughed and I was hurt. I said, Why, Ma? You think I’m not smart enough?

  Oh, you’re smart all right. She patted my head and kissed me on the forehead. But doctors need to be handsome, honey.”

  “Of course,” Satish went on, “she changed her mind ten years later when I told her I wanted to be a cop.”

  “She was happy, I suppose?”

  He sighed. “She was devastated.”

  “What? Why?”

  “People in India don’t generally like cops. My old man, though, was thrilled. He thought a cop in the family is always a good insurance plan. I ended up being an ABCD cop.”

  I stood by the door and looked down the hallway. “ABCD?”

  “American-Born Confused Desi.”

  The hallway was a long corridor with curving walls. Whoever designed the place had an issu
e with straight angles.

  “Hey, Sat,” I said. “I’m gonna take a look around, ’kay?”

  Satish didn’t reply. He went on opening and closing drawers and mumbling within himself about India, cops, and strange alphabet acronyms.

  The bending corridor converged into a lobby with tall windowpanes that once again displayed the same, hazy view of downtown and Bunker Hill. On the opposite side was a reception area enclosed by a sleek, semi-circular desk. Two rows of black leather chairs faced one another in the waiting area. A kid with a few chin hairs and a lot of pimples sat in one of the chairs. He stared intently at the screen of his cell phone tapping it with his thumbs. The thumbs were a blur, the rest of him was as still as a statue.

  A hand slid across the reception desk and pushed a clipboard toward me. “Your name and who you’ve got your appointment with.” A pen followed. “Insurance information in the second sheet.”

  And then a scent happened. It wafted my way in little, syncopated waves—the smell of salty, sun-bathed skin, and the balmy fragrance of an exotic beach. She appeared shortly after, hips humming and calves flexing under the hem of a lab coat. They were nice calves, the kind your eyes trip over when jogging at the shore.

  The syncopated scent buzzed in my ears at the rhythm of Jobim’s tune The Girl from Ipanema.

  “Mr. Cress?”

  Ipanema Girl stood with a clipboard clutched to her chest, the wake of her scent crooning in my head. From the row of black leather seats, a man raised his head, blinked a couple of times then returned his attention to the magazine on his lap. The kid with the cell phone froze his thumbs for a fraction of a second.

  “Mr. Cress?” Ipanema Girl asked, squeezing the clipboard to her chest.

  Her eyes rested on me, hopeful.

  Hell, you don’t disappoint a girl like that.

  I smiled, she smiled back. “Right this way, Mr. Cress,” she said, cocking her head to the side and letting a black lock brush her long neck.

  And who was I not to follow?

  She crossed the waiting room, heads turning as she gently swayed by the rows of chairs.

  The tune hummed in my head and somehow escaped my lips.

  “Sorry, did you just say something?”

  I froze. “Me? Er—no.”

  Her black lashes fluttered and her brows knitted together, the faintest ripple crossing her forehead. She beckoned to a small room fitted with a chair, a scale, gray cabinets, and educational posters on safe sex, condom use, and HIV.

  Very romantic.

  “Since this is your first appointment,” she explained, wrapping a sphygmomanometer cuff around my right arm, “Dr. Swanson will do a physical first.” Her hands were cold and smelled of pineapple lotion, her breath of watermelon. The girl was a fruit basket.

  “Actually, I’m not here for an appointment.” I fished out my badge wallet with my left hand and flipped it open. “Presius, LAPD Homicide.”

  Her smile evaporated like rain from a dry storm. Her lips tightened. She said nothing and kept pumping air into the cuff until it was about to pop. My fingers went numb from lack of blood flow.

  “Your BP’s too high,” she finally sentenced, before removing the cuff from my arm. “You could’ve told me. Now I have to go find the real Mr. Cress.” She flopped on the chair across from me and sighed. Her scent drifted my way, now spiced with the staccato of her adrenaline.

  The girl’s musical and vengeful.

  She shook her head and bit hard on her lower lip. “It’s about Amy, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, put away my badge and gave her a minute. Her name—Leilani—was embroidered on the front pocket of her coat.

  She pulled a tissue from a box on the countertop and crumpled it in her hands. “Amy was so nice,” she whispered. “What happened to her is chilling. Gives me nightmares. How could this happen… Everybody loved her here at work. Everybody.”

  The pen she’d left by the clipboard rolled off the countertop and on the floor. She considered picking it up, then bit her lip again and didn’t move.

  “Did anybody love her a little too much?”

  Leilani wrung the tissue in her hands. “You mean romantically? No.” She shook her head, her hair releasing a cantabile of fragrances. João Gilberto started humming again in my head.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  She gave me the “women-know-better” look. “Amy was gorgeous. I’m sure she had her suitors. But she once told me she got her life back after her divorce. She loved her independence and wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. Her life was divided between the lab and her patients. We’re the busiest HIV clinic in L.A. county.”

  “What kind of lab work did she do?”

  Her eyes widened. “You don’t know about Dr. Lyons’s vaccine?”

  “I tend to be more up-to-date on murders than vaccines,” I said.

  She tilted her head and looked at me with a mix of pity and disappointment. “Dr. Lyons is the director of the clinic. He patented a revolutionary vaccine to cure HIV. It took him years to get it tested. The FDA wouldn’t give him the approval until—I think it was two years ago—he made the news by injecting himself at Vaccine International, a yearly world conference on vaccines. It was all over the news.” She paused, searched my face for some kind of recognition. It didn’t come. “We started recruiting patients and high-risk subjects for phase one trials ten months ago.”

  “Patients? Aren’t patients already HIV-positive?”

  “Yes, but that’s the point. We want to see if the vaccine can cure them from AIDS.”

  I considered. One doctor, a revolutionary vaccine, two murders.

  “Did you ever meet a patient named Charlie Callahan?”

  Leilani’s dark eyes narrowed. “No. But I heard what happened to him. There’s no words, really.” Her lips curled. By then, the tissue in her hands had disintegrated.

  “I heard he was a patient of Dr. Liu’s,” I said.

  She tilted her head. “Amy’s? No, I would’ve seen him personally—just like I should’ve seen Mr. Cress.” She served me a long, stern glance. I thought of how she’d cut the blood flow in my arm with the sphygmomanometer and figured she wasn’t one to argue with. “I’m not sure who was seeing Charlie Callahan, here at the clinic, but I know he had enrolled in our clinical trial. Patty said she recognized the name.”

  “Who’s Patty?”

  “Patty Roberts. She’s in charge of enrolling patients in the study—when they agree, that is. She explains everything to them, does the paperwork, and hands them the questionnaires. Everybody here at the clinic was outraged when we learned he’d been killed by a homophobic. We all have friends, family members or patients who are gay.”

  I crossed my arms. “What did Patty tell you exactly?”

  “That she remembered him because he told her he’d come in to see Dr. Lyons, but Dr. Lyons no longer accepts new patients. Callahan ended up seeing a different doctor.”

  “Do you know who?”

  She shook her head. “Could’ve been either Dr. Swanson or Dr. Thompson.”

  Thompson, I thought. I remembered the name from one of the other prescription bottles in Callahan’s evidence boxes.

  “Could Amy have signed one of Callahan’s prescriptions even though he wasn’t her patient? Don’t doctors in the same clinic sign prescriptions for one another when one’s not available?”

  She shrugged in the loveliest way. “That’s possible.”

  I switched subjects. “Did Amy get along well with Dr. Lyons?”

  “Like I said, Amy was very nice to everybody.”

  “What about Dr. Lyons? Is he nice to everybody?”

  Leilani squirmed out of her chair and decided to pick up the pen from the floor right then. “Of course,” she said, sitting up again.

  “Right,” I said. Like I didn’t register the spike in adrenaline in her scent.

  She ran her fingers along the back of her neck and studied me carefully. It was a nice neck, long
and slender. “Look. Mr. Cress,” she teased. “Dr. Lyons is known for making medical students cry. That’s just who he is. But he’s a good person. He fought really hard for his vaccine to be a success.”

  “Did he ever make Amy cry?”

  Her shoulders drooped. She sighed and looked away.

  I leaned forward, her scent singing in my nostrils. “Leilani. Whatever you just thought of, you need to tell me.”

  “It probably has nothing to do with anything.”

  “If that’s the case then I’ll forget right after you’ve told me.”

  She looked down at the shredded tissue in her hands. “Okay. But please don’t say I told you this.”

  I grinned. “I’m a cop, Leilani. I can keep a secret.”

  “Amy and Dr. Lyons had a heated argument the week she was killed. I don’t know what it was about. All I know is that Amy was upset. She stormed out of his office and asked me to wait a few minutes before sending in her next patient. She needed time by herself.”

  Now the girl was talking. “She didn’t say anything about the subject of their discussion?”

  Leilani shook her head. “No, but I’m guessing it must’ve been about the vaccine trial. Like I said, it had become her priority. We’re one of six clinics in town recruiting people and handing out consent forms. Especially after the conference two years ago, we’ve had volunteers pouring into the clinic. Amy cared very much about the study, and Dr. Lyons...” She brought a hand to her earlobe and fiddled with a long earring. “Dr. Lyons has a strong persona but a generous heart. I’m sure whatever disagreement Amy and he had, it was probably nothing. It’s a—”

  “Look who I found roaming in the hallway.”

  A nurse in floral scrubs and pink clogs stood by the door. She smelled of soda pops and latex gloves and she tried to look sociable but didn’t try too hard. Behind her was a fragile looking little man a hundred and ten years old, give or take a month.

  “Mr. Cress went to the loo and couldn’t find his way back,” the nurse explained. She then looked down on me, scrunched her fine brows together, swayed a large hip to the right and said, “And if this is Mr. Cress—who are you?”