by E. E. Giorgi
She came closer, so close I could smell the warmth of her breath and it was as soothing as Aretha Franklin’s voice. “The only reason you don’t like Washburn is because you have to sit in his office every time you are in an OIS. And you tend to be in an OIS a lot. To everybody else, Washburn is one of the leading experts on criminal minds. If our guy has Morgellons, maybe Washburn can give us some hints on his next moves.”
I didn’t hear a word she said. Her lips moved, her eyelashes beat, her brows bent in the slightest frown. And all I heard was, Damn it, Ulysses, kiss her. Kiss her now.
She gave me a pale smile, one of those smiles you might consider putting on your lapel if you’re that kind of old fashioned guy. She leaned closer, brushed a finger along the front of my shirt. “You look stressed,” she pressed.
A shade of melancholy blotted her eyes.
Orpheus crossed Hades to get his Eurydice back. Except in this game called life, I was the one with the one-way ticket to Hades.
* * *
Ellis hadn’t gained an ounce since last time I saw him. He was gaunt and lanky, with a face like a crow. He smoked like a chimney, and the smell of nicotine clung to his skin like glaze on doughnuts. It was almost refreshing in a place that reeked of cadavers and formaldehyde. He came out of the autopsy room, stripped off his gown and surgical gear, washed his hands and face, donned a lab coat, and dragged us down the hallway into the histology lab.
“Nice and quiet place to have a chat,” he claimed.
The lab was indeed quiet, save the humming and tilling of the machines, milling around as if they had a life of their own. A technician stood in front of one of the benches, frowning at a microscope while jotting notes in his notebook.
Ellis pushed away a colorful stack of slide boxes, rolled over a couple of stools, and flopped a blue folder on the cytology bench, between a slide stainer and a tissue chopper. They both smelled suspicious to my sensitive nose. Everything smelled suspicious in that place.
“Mind you,” he started, opening the folder. “This is all preliminary. Frank Devore, the forensic anthropologist—you know him, right? He came to the autopsy this morning. Couldn’t tell us much, he needs to run more tests on the fetal bones. Some of his conclusions might be different than mine. I’m hoping he can help us date the remains.” He forked his reading glasses and gave us both a quick glance from above the rim, before scanning his notes. “Anyhow. Various degrees of adipocere in all of the six corpses. The rest is completely skeletonized.” One by one, he took out the pictures of the baby corpses and lined them on the countertop. I recognized the one we’d plucked out first because it was the most intact. All others looked like doll parts with bones sticking out, held together by exsiccated cartilage and tissue: a pelvis with legs, an arm, a torso.
And never a head.
Ellis’s bony fingers swooped over the pictures. “You know the process, right? Because the bags were tightly tied, the anaerobic bacterial fauna turned body fat into what’s commonly known as corpse wax or adipocere.”
“I thought adipocere was quite rare,” Satish said.
“It is, but less so in children who tend to have more body fat than adults. It’s even likelier in infants. In my career I’ve seen it a handful of times. Now. The next thing you need, besides body fat, is water.”
“The cistern was dry,” I admitted.
“Yeah, but we can’t assume it’s always been dry, can we?” Ellis showed me his yellow teeth. It tempted me into offering a Listerine strip. “In fact…” One of his bony fingers pointed at me. “In fact, I think this can give us a clue to when these bodies were dumped.”
That perked my interest.
Ellis arched over the countertop and rearranged the pictures. “Your colleague, Ganzberg. He took nice sketches. Way better at drawing than you, Track.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
“Not that I don’t teach, him,” Satish said.
“Thanks, Sat.”
“Okay.” Ellis stepped aside. “What do you think? I’ve rearranged the pictures according to the way they were found in the cistern. The adipocere corresponds to different levels of water. One level here,” he tapped, “and a second one here. Possibly a third, though for this one we only had an arm and part of the torso, and that’s hard to pin down.”
I remembered a detail that had escaped me before. “There were water level marks on the inside of the cistern.”
“Floods during rainy seasons?” Satish offered.
“El Niño,” I said. “Brilliant, Sat. Last strong one was winter ’97-’98.”
Ellis bobbed his head. “That’s what I was thinking. ’91-’92 was the one before that, which could explain the second level. There might be a third one, if you look closely, dating back to the ’eighties.”
“Can you corroborate it by dating the corpses?” Satish asked.
Ellis took the reading glasses off his face and bit one of the tips. “That’s not going to be easy. The flip side with adipocere is that it stops the tissue from aging. All we have for a TOD are the bones, and they’re now in the hands of the anthropologist. We’ll see what he can come up with. From what I can tell you, the bones unaffected by adipocere were completely disarticulated, non-greasy, and free of soft tissue. But as you know, with the kind of weather we have out here, you can get a body completely skeletonized in a matter of weeks. The remains were sealed so well in the plastic bags that, except for the torn one, animals didn’t get to them, and soil erosion was minimal. We could be talking decades. All the clues we have are from the scene, like the El Nino hypothesis. I sent roots and dead vines that were interspersed with the trash bags to the lab. But foliage regrows every year, so don’t hold your breath on that. Another clue would’ve come from clothing, but there’s no trace of fabric in the bags, either.”
“They were buried naked?” Satish asked. “Any chance they were buried right after birth, then? As in still births?”
Ellis bobbed his head. Over his long neck it looked like a crow pecking. He set his glasses down and tapped the first picture with a yellow fingernail. “This was the most intact one. I opened it up and looked at the heart. Detectives, I can tell you that this little guy was born alive and breathed at least once in his short life. The foramen ovale, an opening in the fetal heart, was closed. It closes at birth but remains open in still births.”
“How old do you think the baby was when he died?”
Ellis shook his head. “Days. Hours. Maybe a month, but no more than that, if we believe gestational biometry charts. The length of the femur bones and the abdominal perimeter are compatible with full-term births. Unfortunately, we have no skull, not even a scrap of cranial bone. Usually those are the most informative in fetuses—in terms of age at birth and dating process.”
Satish opened his mouth. “Which brings us to the question—”
“What the hell happened to the heads,” I said, interrupting him.
Ellis stretched his lips into a smile. “Ah, now you ask.” He reached for the blue folder and retrieved a new picture. It was an enlargement of the neck cavity. It reminded me of a thawed Thanksgiving turkey, and the association made me uneasy.
“As you can see from this photo,” Ellis said, “the neck wasn’t severed, or else the edges of the wound would be straight and clean. I sliced a section and put it under the microscope. The tissue looked scarred.”
“Scarred?” Satish seemed surprised. “How?”
“I ran some tests. I was looking for meconium, to see if they’d been killed right after birth. Guess what I found instead?”
I said, “The reason why you called us here?”
“Exactly. Sulfates. Not just in this one. In all of the bags, from the dust retrieved inside. Lots and lots of sulfates.”
“What’s up with sulfates?” Satish asked. “Is it what I’m thinkin’ it is?”
Ellis nodded. “Sulfate salts—what’s left after sulfuric acid reacts with the water in the tissue.”
I inhaled, long and
slow. Satish brought a hand to his face and squeezed his cheeks.
Ellis crossed his arms. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m pretty sure it was postmortem. Newborns’ airways and esophagus are so short it would’ve gotten into their stomach. There was no trace of sulfates in the lungs or stomachs—the ones I could analyze, at least.” He sighed. “I’ve seen enough of this stuff to tell you that the most common way is a pillow on the baby’s face. I guess in this case, the cowards didn’t want to look at that face again, so they got rid of the problem.”
“Would the sulfuric acid completely erase the baby’s head?” I asked.
Ellis nodded. “Newborns are all soft tissue. Not much would be left.”
Did Hercules look at his children’s faces after he killed them in a fit of rage? Fate took revenge on him, as he burned alive, his flesh consumed by a centaur’s blood, much like sulfuric acid on his skin.
Sometimes I wish real life worked the same way as mythology.
* * *
Jank Biologicals was founded in 2000 as a consulting service for manufacturers of biological products. After a few failed clinical trials, the company bought Lyons’s patent in 2003 and developed his HIV vaccine. Their revenues had steadily grown since the first pilot study in 2005.
Though they boasted more than 40 consultants, the HIV vaccine was their biggest project. I flipped the report, trying to understand Lyons’s role in the company’s development.
“Lyons got one hundred grand for the vaccine patent,” I said.
“Not bad,” Satish replied. “My old man would be rich by now.” He pulled the bank files on Lyons’s assets out of the evidence cardboard box and dropped them on his desk.
“Your old man? What’d he do?”
“He invented the WYAO vaccine against poverty.”
I clinked a paperclip against my teeth. “WYAO?”
“Work Your Ass Off. Worked miracles.” He sniggered and spread the papers across his desk. “Let’s see if Lyons ever bought any stocks from Jank.” Satish licked his index and turned pages. “Bingo. He did, back when Jank started producing the vaccine—they were penny stocks at the time and he bought five hundred thousand shares. Hmm. PPS stayed the same for the first two years then started growing. And growing. By 2007 his net gain was—wait, am I reading this right? It was almost a million.”
I almost swallowed the paperclip. “That much? So the company’s been doing real well. That why he started recommending the wife to buy shares too?”
Laura Lyons had bought shares in 2007, Amy the following year. Laura had borrowed the money from her mother, except from what the mother had told me over the phone, she never returned it. The company’s shares had been soaring since 2005 and more than quadrupled their value. Obviously, Laura didn’t want to sell and return her mother’s money.
Satish raised his palm. “Hold on. Not the end of the story. Lyons started selling back the shares last year.”
“Last year? When?”
“Right after summer. He’s now got only fifty percent of what he’d originally bought.”
I slammed a hand on the desk. “So he’s convincing everyone to buy stocks while in the meantime he’s selling them?”
Satish shrugged. “He bought property in Malibu after he sold the patent. Maybe he needed the cash.”
“Makes no sense. The company’s revenues are healthy, the vaccine study is going well…”
Satish scrolled down the bank statements. “Hey, look at this.”
I got out of my chair and leaned against his desk. “What is it?”
“Jank’s been bleeding into Lyons’s bank account every six months since 2005: thirty grand, fifty, another thirty…”
“What for? Settlements? Wages?”
“Hmm. Undisclosed work. The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Lyons wasn’t listed as one of Jank’s employees. The money was filed in Lyons’s tax return as “uncategorized income.”
I lifted the phone from its cradle. “Let’s find out,” I said. I looked up Jank’s contact number, dialed, and pressed the speakerphone button.
An operator picked up. We were put on hold for a good five minutes, passed on to one of the company’s financial advisor, then put on hold again.
Finally, a young voice with a vague note of sympathy picked up the phone. “Er—Detectives? I’m told I can’t disclose the information.”
Satish’s browses shot to his hairline. “Why? The recipient is under investigation. If the payments are legit I don’t see why keep them in the dark.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re perfectly legitimate, sir. We have many MD’s working for us on several clinical trials, and they are regularly remunerated for their consulting work. It’s all under the sun, except—”
“Except you can’t tell me the exact reason for these payments.”
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
I leaned over the speaker. “You do realize we can get a warrant signed in two hours and get the information anyway, right?”
“Yes, sir,” the sympathetic yet helpless voice replied. “I’m afraid that’s your only option.”
We thanked him for nothing and hung up.
Satish sighed and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Toss a coin?”
I shook my head, opened the laptop and logged onto the A.D.A. server to start the warrant process. “My turn to do it. Sheesh, it’s four already.”
Satish’s eyes darted to the wall clock. He frowned then jumped out of his chair. “Time to go to Bob’s.”
I raised my eyes from the screen. “Isn’t it early for dinner?”
Satish picked up cell phone and badge wallet from his desk, and slid them both in his pocket “Happy hour starts at four thirty. And clam chowder during happy hour is only five bucks.” He winked. “I’m half Indian, Track. And I’m a cop. I never miss a good deal. Wanna join when you’re done with those warrants?”
I made a face and started typing the warrant application. My appetite had run away from me again. “Go ahead. I might join you later.”
Satish adjusted his holster. “As you wish. But don’t forget happy hour’s until five thirty. That’s all you get at Bob’s.” He flashed me a smile that smelled of dental floss and cumin. I tracked the sandy scent of his skin out of the door, down the hallway, into the elevator. Then I lost it.
I submitted the warrant application, then closed the laptop and wondered what to do with my life. My eyes fell on the open murder book on my desk.
No matching ligature.
No matching code.
No matching tiles.
No matching fibers.
And now six infants, murdered, then marred with sulfuric acid.
When? And why? By whom? Same person who was teasing us with a handful of colorful tiles?
The connection with Jank was intriguing, though so far it had revealed nothing.
Lyons had ties with all three victims, but no knowledge of computers. From what his assistant told us, he even had her type and send his emails because he didn’t want to bother with the mail editor. The hospital’s bioinformatics department developed all the software and computer work needed for the vaccine design and data analyses. All Lyons did was give orders.
What if the symbols found at the back of the tiles weren’t a computer code?
Maybe Lyons is right. Maybe the Byzantine Strangler is after him.
The murders so far could’ve been just practice. The killer was getting closer and closer to Lyons, circling him.
The photos of the baby corpses made me nauseated. I flipped through them until I got to the pics of the water tank. I stared at the corrugated metal cover and the cement structure, its interior lined by different floods.
The report had a full paragraph on the trash bags: “Seven pairs of black plastic trash bags (one inside the other), size large, no cinch tie, the handles tightly knotted, tied with a double loop and two loose ends. Detritus found inside included: dried vegetative material (roots, vines, and leaves),
insect pupae, sandy dirt, spiders, and common beetles.”
From the pictures, I could tell that the outer bags were all faded in color, but the inner ones still had the GLAD logo. The logos were all slightly different. The most informative had a “3-ply StressFlex” motto right beneath the company names.
No cinch ties. Those had appeared relatively recently, maybe in the last ten years? Back when I was a kid we’d tie the handles to close them. I still remembered hauling the trash bags to the bins outside.
The memory lit up a light bulb. I opened the laptop again and Googled “Tom Bosley.” Wikipedia page, Facebook fan page, movie database. Hmm. I typed “Tom Bosley GLAD.” The computer redirected me to YouTube. I watched a video of a kid bouncing around a trash bag and smiled. I used to be like that. On a good day. Bosley’s friendly smile appeared on the screen after the kid. I paused the video. Both bags in Bosley’s hands had the writing “3-ply StressFlex” on them. It was 1982.
One by one, I found all GLAD logos through the TV commercials on YouTube. They spanned the ’eighties and early ’nineties. It wasn’t a time stamp, and it added nothing to what Ellis had already told us.
But it was something.
I moved on to my next item on the agenda and started a new search. This one was iffy, had to fill out a form that ensured the LAPD that my search was legal and motivated by an ongoing investigation. I entered one of Callahan’s favorite Internet boards, assured the site that I was older than eighteen, and was rewarded with free advice on safe sex and the phone number of a bunch of clinics offering free HIV testing. Interestingly, Laura Lyons’s one was the third one on the list.
I clicked enter.
The language was crude, the offerings bold (an understatement, really): top, bottom, cock pics, butt pics, undetermined hours of sex. I was only interested in screen names. I clicked on the archives and navigated all the way back to when Callahan was roaming the site. I found only two of his posts, both rants on same-sex marriage rights. I scrolled down the responses and the screen names they’d been posted under: Ultimate Cock, AlwaysOnTop, mr_kam… I clicked on the last one and found a few more posts.