MOSAICS: A Thriller

by E. E. Giorgi

  Satish tapped the steering wheel with the side of his thumb. “Obviously the woman doesn’t drive. She either loaned it or it got stolen and she didn’t report the theft.”

  I swallowed, feeling like a complete idiot. “She has a son,” I said, bitterly. “Lyanne’s nurse told me she hardly sees him, but he’s the one taking care of Lyanne when her shift is over.”

  “You didn’t interview the son?” Satish asked.

  I shook my head. “The officers who investigated the missing persons did. The report didn’t raise any flags, and the nurse said he’d never been there during Katya’s visits. He seemed pretty innocuous, just an average joe who took care of his ill mother, and—Damn it.”

  It was clicking into place. I just remembered that his job description in the report was “medical researcher.”

  “Let’s go,” Satish said.

  We stepped out of the car and crossed the street. The air was hot and viscous. It slowed down everything, even sounds. An inflatable pool simmered in the sun in front of the house next door. A rubber duckie bobbed its head from the shallow water.

  Number 5130 stood at the top of a driveway that led to a one-story cottage house in cracked pink stucco, with tacky plastic awnings hanging over the front windows. The exterior needed a paint job, the window frames begged to be replaced, and the roof had seen better days. A mop of unruly ivy choked the sidewall to the right, crawled around the edge, and sprawled across the garage door. It promised to be an interesting garage, one that hadn’t seen fresh air in a long time.

  Two trash bins were amassed against a metal fence. Sickly dandelions infested what was left of a lawn.

  Satish walked to the door. I stayed back, inhaled, and didn’t like what I smelled.

  Satish knocked. Nobody answered. He knocked again, louder.

  “Sat.”

  “Hmm.”

  “There’s a smell.”

  Satish rocked on his heels. “Don’t look at me, Track. I fart Indian.” He chortled and tried the door again.

  I shook my head and looked around. A little boy stared at me from behind the fence next door. I waved. He showed me the rubber duckie he’d retrieved from the tub. A door slammed from his house and a woman too old to be his mother and too young to be his grandmother marched out and padded across the front yard barefoot. She picked up the child and quickly turned away.

  “Ma’am,” I called.

  She turned with deliberate effort. I cocked my head toward the pink cottage. “Noticed any activity at all today?”

  “She’s sick,” she spat. “She no longer comes out.”

  “Who takes care of her?”

  The boy squirmed in her arms. She narrowed her eyes, studying me. I slid out my badge wallet and held it up for her to see. That loosened her tongue a bit but not too much.

  “They had a home nurse.” She shrugged a shoulder, tweaked half a lip. “She couldn’t take it anymore and quit. Her son takes care of her now. Nice fellow. Doesn’t talk much, but puts up with a lot of crap.”

  “What about today?”

  She shook her head. “Haven’t seen a soul today.”

  “Heard anything at all?”

  She shook her head again, and then she was gone. Satish was staring through one of the windows. He turned and shook his head. “Let’s try the backdoor.”

  We waded through a strip of high weeds between the sidewall and the metal fence and came to a scrawny backyard mottled with patches of naked dirt. A clothesline strung a mellow note in the dull afternoon air. A swarm of flies drew persistent circles on a white screen door.

  The reek grew stronger. It was sweet and rotten and it reminded me of wet rust. It lingered in the air like thick morning fog.

  Satish smelled it too, this time. “This ain’t farts,” he said, wistfully. He banged a fist against the doorjamb. The flies bounced off the screen like spit, pirouetted in and around our faces, and then settled back.

  No answer. There wasn’t going to be any.

  I opened the screen door and drew my Glock. “Hold the screen door.”

  “Track—” He sucked in air through his teeth but held the screen door just the same.

  Flies tickled my face like a feather duster. “When was the last time I was wrong about this?”

  He smiled despite himself. “I just hope we can find a link between all these cadavers we keep finding.”

  I kicked the door open. The frame splintered and chips of old paint flecked off.

  “Police!” I yelled.

  There was no answer.

  The door swung open onto a dark hallway that had the distinctive smell of things too old to care. The walls were yellow with no windows, the carpet was dingy and stained. Dark doors with brass knobs stood silently along the way, waiting. I stepped inside.

  Behind me, Satish muttered, “Man, it’s bad.”

  “That’s not the methanol,” I replied. It was the sweet and rotten smell of disease, the reek of decay slowly taking over the body long before it’s dead, of an open wound refusing to heal, of a liquid death seeping through the last shreds of life. I knew that smell, and I cursed at myself for not picking up on it earlier, the first time I detected it on the tiles.

  “Ms. Norris?” Satish called. He tapped my arm and passed me a pair of gloves.

  I turned the knob on the first door to the left. It smelled of old metal, the kind that stays on your hands long after you’ve touched it. The door opened to a bathroom, a strip of space between a wall and an ancient vanity, no windows, slate blue linoleum floors, a white sink with two spouts, a large mirror just not to feel claustrophobic, dark cabinet doors that smelled of medicine. I opened one. Cleaning supplies on the bottom shelf, medicine organizers on the middle one, medical supplies on the top one. There was a year worth of nitrile gloves supply. Everything was clean and orderly. Something I’d not expected, given the outside look of the house.

  In the hallway, bi-fold closet doors opened to an alcove with an outdated washing machine and drier. I closed the doors and turned to look for Satish. The smell of detergent and aged fabric gave way to a new tang. Something acrid, pungent, with an aftertaste of burnt…

  “Satish!”

  “Over here.”

  It was in the past. Everything was in the past. The drawer chest with clawed feet, the oval mirror with the scroll frame, the smell of camphor lingering in the air, the black and white pictures, the golden tassels at the corners of the pillows… the reek of gunpowder, the Walther PPK pistol in her knotted hand, probably a mint edition, one of those things you still see in old James Bond movies.

  Sprawled in a bed too large for her size, Lyanne Norris gawked with pale, vitreous eyes. They looked like the bottom of a green bottle. Her brows flexed together with anger, her lipless mouth hung open like a forgotten drawer. Her skull was sunken at the temples, with long flecks of white hair that looked like sticky cobwebs. A pale arm rested along her side, loosely covered in paper-thin skin, the other bent over her chest. Blue fingers wrapped the butt of the Walther. The barrel sat slightly aloof on top of her bulging stomach.

  The hole in her throat hadn’t bled too much. It was crimson red, the size of a quarter, with blackened edges. It smelled of dried blood and burnt skin.

  “She’s gone,” Sat said. “Cold, no pulse.”

  “You had your doubts?” I leaned over close enough to smell the gun and the inside of her palm. “Not sure she fired it herself.”

  “Even if she did, somebody had to pass her the gun.”

  There were tubes coming out of the bed and connecting her to all sorts of things. The feeding bag was half full. The sharps disposal box on the floor next to the nightstand contained no syringes—it must’ve been emptied recently. The medical waste pedal bin in a corner had a fresh liner.

  I lifted the side hem of the sheets. Still warm, the acidic reek of urine drifted to my nostrils, the bag hanging like a ripe mango from the bedframe. A clear catheter wound up from the bag to the top of the mattress, under Lya
nne’s jutting side.

  “Hey, Sat. Come over to this side.”

  He came, thoughtfully holding his radio as if he tried to remember what to say.

  “Look at this. Does it remind you of anything?”

  He scrunched his forehead together. “When I had my appendix removed?”

  “Jeez, Sat. Look at the catheter. It’s smooth and thin, not too thin, but not too thick either, would leave a nice, uniform indentation except if you hold it too much to the side then the two-way fork leaves a slightly funneling mark, which would fall”—I rose back to my feet and touched my neck—“just about here, close to the ear.”

  Satish looked at me skeptically. “The telltale mark we found on Laura Lyons’s neck,” he finally agreed.

  He nodded then held the radio to his mouth and called for backup over a dead body. He walked to the dresser and started opening random drawers as he explained the situation to the dispatcher. I let the sheets fall back down and walked out of the room. Clean kitchen, clear Formica countertops, a white fridge with empty shelves save a couple of open medicine bottles, more drugs in a corner between the stove and a metal toaster that could’ve come out of a vintage sale. Jars of formula in the cabinets, ordered by expiration date. They had the sweet, gooey smell of the tiles—the rotten bit being the disease decay. No other food item visible anywhere, not even crumbs. There was no dishwasher. The sink was empty and dry, a few items rested in the dish rack: two bowls, a wooden spoon, a measuring cup. I found a one-year worth supply of catheter boxes in the pantry. They came in two options, sixteen French and twenty-four French. I picked one of each, closed the pantry, and moved to the last room in the house.

  THIRTY

  ____________

  Black tarp covered the only window, duct-taped all around the frame. There was a folding bed against the wall, frugally made, and a metal desk covered with papers, a black swivel chair, a waste basket filled with used nitrile gloves that smelled of decay mixed with feeding formula—sweet and rotten like the Byzantine Strangler’s tiles. The first desk drawer contained a box of paid bill stubs—electricity, gas, phone—all in Lyanne’s name. I removed the box and something rattled at the back of the drawer—a ring with two keys. I sniffed them, didn’t notice anything particularly interesting besides the usual key smell, placed them back and closed the drawer. An Internet cable was sandwiched between two piles of papers, looking for the computer it’d once connected to. I looked too—in the remaining desk drawers, under the bed, in the closet, but the computer had vanished with no trace.

  It didn’t really matter. All I needed to know was on the wall. Scientific journal articles and paper clips, photos, some cut, some neatly torn by hand, all stapled on a cork board, and when the corkboard had run out, he’d continued taping them on the wall, on the tarp covering the window, on the closet door. In one clip, Lyons was the featured researcher of the month, in another he was at a lab bench, unconvincingly holding a pipette, his name highlighted in the text below the photo. Lyons in his lab coat at the hospital, Lyons in his office, a younger Lyons smiling at the camera, a hand around his deceased wife’s shoulder.

  The younger Lyons was praised in most clips. He’d won the Medal of Science in recognition for his work on HIV. A photo of him shaking hands with Mr. Clinton had the caption, “Dr. Frederick Lyons makes stunning discovery on the origin of HIV.”

  The clips with the older Lyons had mixed reviews. “Dr. Lyons’s grant shrunk over the past five years,” an NIH grant reviewer was quoted saying. “Dr. Lyons left the International Immunology Meeting in the midst of controversial critiques.” It looked like in the past couple of years, famous Dr. Lyons had lost his stamina. I skimmed over the rest of the clips and moved over to the next portion of the quilted mural.

  A chrysalis was pinned to the corkboard, on top of a paper on gypsy moths.

  Diagrams of chromosomes populated one side of the wall, genes and position numbers annotated in blue marker. And then the graphs—the ones Diane had discovered. They were plastered in the middle of the wall, sets of horizontal lines occasionally peppered with colored ticks, always four colors—red, aquamarine, orange, and green—line after line of As, Gs, Ts, and Cs. I leaned against the wall and examined the printouts closely. They were pasted together so that the lines continued from one graph to the next, with penciled marks at the top. Words had been scribbled below, words I couldn’t read at first, until my eyes adjusted to the spidery handwriting and started deciphering letters, then sounds, then names. Gloria Weiss, Katya Krikorian, Amy Liu, Louis Gallegos, Laura Lyons.

  Gloria Weiss was a twelve-year-old run away girl who’d gone missing two years earlier. I didn’t recognize the name Louis Gallegos. Katya Krikorian, though, I did recognize. I’d finally found her—albeit too late.

  The graphs were taped together, like tiles in a mosaic, a mosaic of DNAs, gene after gene, chromosome after chromosome, after… I froze, gloved hands flattened against the wall. The last graph was blank, the name scribbled at the top written in a hurry, a pencil stroke to the last letter running off to the edge of the paper.

  Presius. Ulysses M. Presius.

  Sweat chilled at the back of my neck.

  The phone call.

  He’d called me to tell me about my genes.

  The bastard has my lab results. That’s how he got my phone number, too. He left the tiles at my house to tell me he’s after me.

  My eyes strayed over the neat piles of papers blanketing the desk. Research papers, drafts, lab notebooks—one for each victim whose DNA he’d collected. I searched through the pile until I found the one with Katya’s name written in caps on the spine and opened it. It read like a journal—a lab journal. Samples he’d collected, thawed and tested, DNA typing, PCR amplification, RNA matching, even the mitochondrial DNA Diane had mentioned, gene expression arrays, the whole nine yards. The details were beyond me, all I understood was the lucid and chilling details with which he documented everything, from the tissue excisions to the extraction of strings of letters—DNA, RNA, amino acids.

  The guy wasn’t just obsessed with DNA. He was after DNA, the whole package in fact, the full genome, the way it worked in every tissue, what genes were expressed and why.

  These weren’t victims. They were his lab rats.

  He kills because of DNA.

  From the bedroom, I heard Satish talking to the dispatcher, frisking the room as he talked, opening and closing drawers and closet doors. I closed the lab notebook and started digging the pile of scientific papers.

  I found the paper I’d spotted on Lyons’s desk the time we interviewed him in his office. I recognized it from the penciled corrections, a feminine calligraphy that matched the different annotations on Callahan’s graphs. There were new marks, in red ink this time. A side note read: “Medina, this is BS. Check Amy’s notes and make sure this doesn’t happen again.” The tone was Lyons’s. The penciled notes had to be Amy Liu’s, then.

  Medina. My memory rewound to the day we interviewed Lyons at the hospital. Medina was the skinny guy stuttering about alignments. I concentrated on his face, drew a blank. An anonymous face, scarily pale, the hint of a stubble… like the guy I’d chased on the Volvo.

  “What’s this, a shrine?” Satish was standing by the door, a weary look on his face.

  “A shrine, a lab, a hell.” I caught myself grinding my teeth. “What have you found?”

  He dropped a closed checkbook on the desk for me to see. “This. Two names on the account—Lyanne Norris and Hector—”

  “Medina. Hector S. Medina.”

  “You been reading minds again?”

  “No. Papers.” I held up the one with Lyons’s note and pointed to the list of authors. Hector S. Medina was the first one. “Amy Liu had found some kind of flaw and Lyons ordered Medina to clean up. That’s how her DNA ended up right…” I rotated my hand up in the air, found the graph with Amy’s genes and pinned it with my index finger. “Here.”

  Satish frowned. “That what got
her killed? Her DNA?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the DNA was the trophy.” I rapped the paper with the back of my fingers. “It sounds like she exposed some kind of crap Medina did in this paper. I’m guessing the guy wasn’t too thrilled.”

  Sirens howled from the street.

  “That’s our party,” Satish said. He tilted his head, took in once more the wall and its gruesome trophies, and left the room. I picked up the checkbook and the paper and followed him to the front door. A cruiser and the coroner’s van were parked in the driveway. Satish stepped out to talk to the responding officers.

  The entry way smelled of shoes and Febreze. A faint reminiscence of gasoline clawed its fingers around my chin and turned it to the door to the right. The usual brass knob with ancient black dents stared at me and told me to try it. It was locked. I walked back to the office turned into shrine, opened the first desk drawer, removed the box with the bill stubs, retrieved the ring with the two keys, returned to the entryway, inserted the first key, didn’t work, inserted the second one, unlocked the door, and stepped into another world.

  * * *

  The smell of gasoline was still there, lingering in the background. It’s one of those smells that never fades, no matter how long ago the garage stopped being a garage and turned into a storage locker. I blinked, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  It was a large, L-shaped room, and I was standing at one end, with the garage door around the corner at the other end. The floor was made of cement and the walls were unfinished, with yellow layers of fiberglass insulation rippling between wood studs. Trusses and exposed pipes crammed the ceiling. Dried up halos of mold retraced past roof leaks and poor repair jobs. A rusty bicycle hung from a hook in the ceiling. Around the corner, a sheet of thin light pooled from the glass panes at the top of the garage door and pooled over randomly assorted items: a three-legged chair, a rusty oil drum, a standing freezer.