MOSAICS: A Thriller by E.E. Giorgi Page A

the week before. And the one before, again. Same car. Same vague nail polish smell.”
    Satish straightened up and leaned both elbows on the table. “And why do you believe this guy in the Alero was after Callahan, Mr. Olsen?”
    Olsen bit on the cigarette and narrowed his eyes. “Couple weeks earlier. Car was there. Fag comes out of his house and sees it. He gets nervous. Starts walking away. Car follows him. They talk. Doesn’t look good.”
    “You hear what they say?”
    He flashed us a yellow grin. “Uh-uh. That’s when I yelled ‘Go away fags’ at them and the car vanished.”
    The grin got wider and prouder.
    My stomach knotted. I pushed the chair away from the table and walked to the door. The correctional officer waiting outside the interview room shot to his feet.
    “Is everything okay, Detective?”
    “Your closest restroom,” I said.  
    I didn’t bother latching the stall door behind me. I kicked up the lid, bent on my knees, and retched.
     
    *  *  *
     
    “A smell for a clue?” Satish protested.
    “All my clues are smells,” I replied.
    “Oh, please. Nail polish? If at least he’d given us a license plate…”
    “Smoked meth smells like acetone, nail polish remover. Weren’t there traces of meth in Callahan’s pockets?”
    Satish shook his head. “To you it may smell like that. The only thing I smell around meth users is their armpits.”
    “I’m not the only one with a sensitive nose. The guy wears hearing aids. If he can’t hear, chances are he’s got a good sense of smell.”
    Satish shrugged. “Nail polish in a black Alero. He could’ve smelled it from some girl doing her nails with her feet propped against the window. That’s as helpful as a cell phone without signal.”
    The foggy, cooler days of June were over. It was ten in the morning and downtown was a sweltering pot of metal, smog, and asphalt. In a few weeks, the wildfires would start raging the foothills, adding a new fragrance to the mix.
    We left Starbucks at the corner with First and crossed the street toward Parker Center, our headquarters, Satish sipping his iced latte, and I savoring the aftertaste of a double shot espresso.
    I said, “The whole scalping and skin removal has me wondering. Why wasn’t Charlie Callahan scalped? I’m not buying the theory that the guy had worked out a new ritual the second time around—that the first time he acted on instinct, and the second time he had more time to plan ahead.”
    “That’s because that theory came from Washburn, and you don’t like Washburn. Olsen will never admit to whacking Callahan. He knows we’ve got nothing on him.”
    “But then why risk it and give us a bogus story?”
    We walked a few steps without saying anything.
    “June’s gone already,” I said, squinting through sunglasses.
    “You know,” Satish replied, “Cohen was right about the scalping. I looked it up. Apparently, the colonists scalped Native Americans and sometimes even stripped them of their skin. Native Americans started it as retaliation.”
    I considered. “ What he did to Amy didn’t look like retialiation.”
    Satish sucked from his straw and nodded. “I agree. Cohen said it himself, it was a meticulous and careful job.”
    A DASH bus stopped by the curb. I raised my voice over the growling of the engine. “You said Katie looked up scalping in the databases and found nothing.”
    “Sh e tried both VICAP and NCIC,” Satish said, “and found a gruesome case in Montana. The victim was not only scalped but also skinned and partly mutilated. Her husband was convicted two years later.”
    The NCIC and VICAP were national investigative repositories for all violent crimes in the country. If scalping had been done before in some other crime or murder, all details of the case and the investigation would have been indexed and filed in at least one of the databases.
    My eyes strayed from the bus, now closing its doors and attempting to merge back into traffic, and the shiny