by E. E. Giorgi
We hadn’t.
“When the HIV virus was first isolated, back in the ‘eighties, a bunch of colleagues were skeptical. Their position was—still is—that drugs and certain behaviors cause AIDS, not HIV. Since so many years pass between the HIV infection and the onset of AIDS, for a while these claims found quite some support in the scientific community. Robert Wilner, an MD from North Carolina, went as far as to inject himself with blood from an HIV-positive patient to prove his conviction. He never got AIDS, by the way. He died of a heart attack one year later.”
“I suppose that could work too,” I commented.
Lyons didn’t take notice. “Conspiracy theorists claimed HIV had been engineered by the US military. Some theorized it came from the polio vaccine, others from the smallpox vaccine. In the meantime, HIV-positive people carried on with their lives, which included high-risk behaviors that caused the number of infections to rise. HIV-positive pregnant women in South Africa were denied anti-retroviral drugs that could’ve prevented their babies to become infected. All because of the denialist movement.” Lyons twisted the clip of the pen until it broke. “Ideas are powerful. They can give life and they can take it away.”
For a few minutes all we heard was the intermittent buzzing of the fly and the drone of traffic down North Los Angeles Street.
Satish shifted in his chair and made it squeak. “It’s been almost ten years, though.”
“And the conspiracy theory hasn’t died,” Lyons retorted.
“What conspiracy?”
He sighed, his eyes hardened. “For some people it’s more feasible to believe in some genetically engineered disease mysteriously introduced in the environment than a fast mutating virus that jumped from monkeys to humans less than one hundred years ago. I’ve dedicated my entire life in proving them wrong. Denialists hate people like me. They send us threat letters and emails on a regular basis. I delete them and that’s the end of it.”
“You never filed a complain with the police?”
Lyons made a brisk gesture as if annoyed by the question. “Of course I did. I even hired a private bodyguard back in 2002. I was traveling a lot, giving talks and participating in board meetings. I don’t take chances with my life.”
The fly had finished its tour of all the pepperoni slices. It crawled along the cardboard then flew on Lyons’s Styrofoam cup. He stared at it vacantly. It never occurred to him to shoo it away. There were a lot of things that had never occurred to him before.
I got up and looked out the window. The workday was coming to an end, and the One-Ten droned its evening commute. From the squad room, I heard chairs drag and murder books snap closed. Laughter, yawns, a pat on the shoulder. A “Hey, wanna grab a beer?” that tapped into a web of solitude we don’t always have the guts to face.
“You’re staying for dinner, Dr. Lyons, right?” I quipped.
The man considered the proposal while chewing on his lower lip. “Actually, I’d rather go home, now. It’s been a long day.”
His voice was plain, his manners calm. I no longer smelled adrenaline. The guy really wanted to go home and have a good night’s sleep. And maybe wake up tomorrow and find it was all a bad dream.
I gave him my best smile. “I understand, Doc. It’s been a long day for me and my partner, too. You wanna know why? Because some people deny AIDS, others deny murder. That’s why.”
That put him right back on alert mode. He flattened his palms on the table and stared at us. I couldn’t tell if he was shocked or outraged by my remark. “I told you everything,” he said.
“Actually,” Satish said, “I never got to numero dos.”
“What?” he said.
“You haven’t told us what you did when you found your dead wife in the study. At least forty minutes went by before you finally picked up the phone and called nine-one-one.”
If Lyons was feigning surprise, he was doing it remarkably well. “Forty minutes? What are you talking about? I saw her on the floor and I—I—” He swallowed, his hand lost in the air as if trying to weave back memories. Then he dropped it on the table. “I called nine-one-one. That’s all I did. I was in shock.”
So shocked he has the presence of mind to put the mug back in the sink and rinse it.
Satish leaned forward and pushed the pizza box toward him. “Have some food, Doctor. We’re gonna be here for a while.”
He shook his head and put on a strained smile. “I thought of reviving her. She wasn’t breathing, and—and there was nowhere to blow air into. She just wasn’t there anymore. I—” He swallowed hard. “I had this patient, once, in my residency. He shot himself through the chin and missed the vital organs. He blew off his face, but he was still alive. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t talk. It was horrific to watch. The idiot couldn’t even kill himself. What were we supposed to do? Let him live with no face?” He stared at the fly then out of the blue shooed it away. His anger rippled the air and drifted to my nostrils.
He drew in a sharp breath and tuned down his voice. “Laura—when I saw her this morning—her face looked like that. But she wasn’t breathing. She didn’t have a pulse. And that—that was good. In a twisted way, but it was good.”
A thought occurred to me then. I felt goose bumps prickle at the back of my neck, and they brought my temperature down a few notches. “You didn’t—did you wait for her to die?”
His sharp, icy eyes felt like a burn on my skin.
“She wasn’t breathing,” he said. “There was no pulse.”
It was getting chilly. Or maybe it was all that snow in the middle of summer.
“Is that what you found out when you went back to Amy’s house the night she was killed?”
He bristled. “I—Why do you keep bringing back Amy? I’m here because my wife was murdered this morning!” He lost it. He slammed a hand on the table—the one he hadn’t injured—and rose from the chair. “I did not go back to Amy’s house. Amy’s dead, and so is my wife. Now do your fucking job and catch the bastard who did this before he comes and kills me too!”
Satish’s eyes gave me the cue. We both rose. “Please sit down, Dr. Lyons,” Satish said.
The man flopped back in the chair like a used magazine. That last spur had taken all his energy. I walked back to the squad room, grabbed the brown paper bag Katie had left on my desk, and returned to the interview cubicle.
Lyons’s eyes darted. “What’s that?”
I took the recorder out of the paper bag and put it on the table. “So you never went back to Amy’s house that night?”
Lyons straightened up and perched on the edge of the chair. Something was finally biting that cool ass of his. “No. I did not. Why? What’s this about?”
I pressed the play button. There was static, then the operator’s voice,
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
At the other end of the line someone breathed into the receiver. “I’m at 453 Santa Fe Terrace, in Montecito Heights.”
Keystrokes, from the operator. “What’s your name and emergency, sir?”
A long sigh, then the answer. “A body.”
“Can you state your name, sir? And are you sure it’s a body—”
“It’s dead. Definitely dead. Her face is… abraded.”
“What? Sir, can you repeat that last word? What happened to her face—”
There was a long beep and the operator telling the dispatcher she’d lost the line. I stopped the tape. Lyons’s face was as white as a full moon.
“Would you like to hear the next tape, Dr. Lyons?”
“What next tape?”
“The call from your home. We got that one, too. And you know what we did? We brought both tapes to our guys at Electronics. They’re smart, the folks down there. They have this cool software that can match voices, even when they’re strained through a handkerchief. And guess what they found?”
He closed his fists and bit his lip again. “You’re bluffing. They can’t—that wasn’t my voice you just played.�
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“You’re so sure, Doctor, aren’t you?” Satish said. “Would that be because you’d put a handkerchief over the mouthpiece?”
I pressed on. “That’s such an old trick. You know computers can get around that stuff.” I leaned closer and locked my eyes on his. “You see, we’ve got your voice on tape and a witness. You better tell us what happened, Doc, or you’re going down for double murder.”
“Double—What? What the hell are you talking about?”
I smelled fear for the first time. High pitched and loud, sour perspiration pearling his wrinkled forehead. Gray locks plastered his temples.
His eyes darted from me to Satish then back to me. He swallowed hard, dug his nails into his arm.
“This is… This is when I ask for a lawyer. Cut the crap and get me a fucking phone.”
Damn. It’s always like that. Right when you think you’ve pressed them into a corner, they sober up. I looked at Satish. He shrugged and shook his head.
* * *
The lawyer came—a distinct, mature man with round, intellectual eyeglasses, or maybe I should say spectacles, and a bowtie sitting below his throat. The rusty red of his hair strained into gray at the temples. His white shirt smelled of starch and old-fashioned things—pipe tobacco, Beethoven and Wagner LPs, and a black cat curled on an old, tartan throw. His posture was staged yet casual, and his brown linen blazer ran a little long on the hips, with carefully arranged wrinkles. He spoke softly, which is not unheard of among defense lawyers, his well-intoned diction tampered with the subtlest accent of all—the lack of one.
Satish showed both the law doctor and the medical doctor into the Captain’s office, which was a far more appropriate accommodation than the dingy cubicle at the back of our squad room, and left them there to confabulate. They called us back after about half an hour. Lyons looked reinvigorated. The lawyer hadn’t changed a bit.
“My Client wishes to cooperate,” the lawyer said, in his whispery voice. How he could capitalize the word “client” every time he pronounced it, I couldn’t tell. He just did. His eyelids hung halfway across his lenses as he steepled his hands neatly in front of him. “I advised him not to, but he still wants to talk to you.”
Satish leaned forward and crossed his arms. “We’re happy to hear that.”
The lawyer didn’t reciprocate the enthusiasm. “My Client has nothing to hide,” he said. “He’s choosing to cooperate because he wants you to get the perpetrator as much as you do.”
I pulled a chair and sat down. “Let’s hear it.”
Lyons bobbed his head forward and cleared his throat. “I made the nine-one-one call from Amy’s house,” he said. Two sets of brows in the room shot up. “But I didn’t kill her.”
“Why did you lie about it, then?”
His eyes turned the color of water under a stormy sky. “Because everybody had already seen me leave. I couldn’t—” He inhaled. “Look. That was the plan. Leave before everybody else did, drive around for some time until everybody left the party, then come back.”
“You had plans for the night?”
He nodded wearily.
“Why keep it all hushed up if Laura knew and you two had already filed for divorce?”
“Amy didn’t want the news to spread at the clinic. Not until Laura had moved out, at least.”
“How long had the affair been going on?” Satish asked.
The icy look in his eyes resurfaced. “Six months.”
I looked at the lawyer. He sat quietly next to his Client, his features as expressive as Abraham Lincoln’s statue at the National Mall.
I was getting tired. “Amy never hinted at wanting to put an end to it?”
Lyons shook his head. “We were—happy.” He swallowed, licked his lips. His fingers played with a piece of paper. “Amy—she liked the secrecy. She said it made it more exciting.”
I scratched my brow. “Amy didn’t mind the fact that Laura was still living with you?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
His glare was as sharp as a paper cut. “You may not understand this, Detective, but I loved my wife. And Amy, too—”
“May I remind you, Detective, that my Client has no Obligation to answer that kind of Question.”
The Lawyer was getting pissed. Now he capitalized all nouns.
I leaned back and crossed my arms. “Fine. Tell us what you saw when you returned to Amy’s house.”
“The door was ajar, which was strange. All lights were on.” He inhaled. “I didn’t see much, really. I saw her feet on the floor, first, and then the rest. When I saw her face, I—”
If it were a show, it was a damn good one. Lyons brought a hand to his face and sobbed like a child. The lawyer, pardon me, the Lawyer took a handkerchief out of the front pocket of his blazer and offered it to his Client. “My Client saw nothing,” he said. “He needs to go home and rest. He’s been through a lot. If he can think of anything to help the investigation, we will call.”
The Lawyer stood up. We all followed.
“Catch the bastard,” Lyons said, choking on his own words.
We shook hands. They were soft hands. I waited until their scents vanished down the hallway and into the elevator, then retrieved the pizza box from the cubicle, dropped it on my desk, grabbed a slice and bit into it.
Satish leaned on his desk and watched me with a frown sculpted across his forehead. “A fly has walked all over those leftover slices.”
I shrugged. “I’ve eaten far worse than pepperoni walked over by flies.”
Sat grinned. “You’re right, there’s always worse than flies. Frank Armand, from Van Nuys, used to frisk bums and whores with his bare hands. Never bothered washing them before eating, either.”
I spoke with my mouth full. “That’s nothing. It’s after he frisks stiffs that he has me grossed out.”
Satish smiled without really meaning it. He stared at the ceiling without meaning that either. I munched down the last slice of pizza, then walked to the water fountain, drank, and returned to my desk. It’s a nice feeling to be hungry, one that shouldn’t be taken for granted.
I opened a drawer, plucked out a paper clip, and stuck it between my teeth. “So, you buy his story?” I asked.
Satish crossed his arms and wobbled his head. “Some pieces are still missing from the puzzle. He could’ve done Amy in because of the argument they had at work. But why do the wife?”
I worked my tongue around the paperclip. “Laura’s lawyer confirmed she’d filed for divorce.” I’d made the call while Lyons and the Lawyer were confabulating in the captain’s office.
Satish wrapped a fist around his chin. “And what about the clues? The fibers, the tiles…”
“The fibers could be from the African artifacts,” I said. “I’ve got Diane working on that.”
“Why the tiles?”
“To veer us.”
There was some silence. After the silence, Satish said, “Lyons strikes me as a womanizer, not a killer.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Forget Amy, for a moment. Focus on the wife. Even if he didn’t kill her—he found her clinging for life and waited until she was dead to call nine-one-one.”
Satish walked around his desk and picked up the phone. “You can’t prove it.”
“You heard him, didn’t you? Why did he tell us the story of the faceless guy at the ER? Hey, who are you calling?”
He raised a hand and talked into the mouthpiece. “Hi, Pacific Station, this is Satish Cooper from Parker Center.” He clicked his jaw and wore his charming smile. Female watch officer at the other end of the line, no doubt. “I’m good, how are you, kid?”
The kid said something. Satish laughed politely. “It’s good to talk to you too. Listen. I know things get tight over there, but when you got a minute for this old cop friend of yours, would you mind doing me a favor?” His voice rose and bobbed like a boat on a lull. “You got time now? Well, that’s fabulous. I know I can always count on you, baby!”<
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The baby giggled and the giggle crackled out of the mouthpiece.
Satish winked at me and made his request. “U-huh. You can pull it up? U-huh. Yeah, I can wait. No problemo, babe.”
Detective Cooper charmed his way through the terminals of the Pacific Community Station while wearing his imperturbable smile and examining his polished nails. I could hear the clicking of a keyboard from the other end of the phone. He laughed, from time to time, asked about the kid’s kid. When he was done, he bargained a promise to have everything sent through email and then hung up. He opened up his notebook and scribbled down some notes.
“May I be part of this investigation too, partner?”
Satish tapped the notebook with his pen. “Lyons wasn’t lying about one thing.”
“Which is?”
“The hate mail. He filed two complaints in 2002 and 2004. There are letters and emails on record. Jade’s going to send me a copy of the report. She pulled it up and gave me a sneak peek: Lyons filed a third complaint while at a conference in San Francisco in 2002. He claimed a stranger approached him with a knife and told him to retract his positions on HIV. After the incident, Lyons requested a police escort but all he got from the PD was a list of names and numbers of private companies. We can call them up and find out which one he ended up hiring.”
“The origin of the threats was never ascertained?”
“No. Some emails bore the signature ‘Continuum,’ a denialist group, but the IP addresses turned out to be bogus.” He scratched his jaw. “What do you know? Maybe he’s right. Maybe they’re after him and he’ll be the next victim.”
“Hmm.” I moved the paperclip around my mouth. It made nice, clinking sounds against my teeth. “It’s been five years, though, since his last complaint.”
“And nine since the Durban declaration, a document signed by over five thousand scientists asserting that HIV causes AIDS. Apparently, the denialist movement hasn’t died yet.”
“You can kill people, not ideologies.”
“There’s two reasons why people are hated. One is money, and the other is opinions,” Satish said, checking his watch. “We should go get a print out of Laura Lyons’s assets. The bank’s closing in five minutes, but a buddy of mine who works there said he’d be waiting for us.”