Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) (4 page)

Hal stood and pulled his wallet from his back pocket. He handed Fletcher his business card. “I’d appreciate a phone call if you think of anything that might be useful.”

She took the card. “Of course. Anything I can do to help.”

Hal thanked her for her time and headed back to Victoria Stein’s apartment. It had been an average interview. He wasn’t surprised. People didn’t know their neighbors the way they used to. Witnesses had grown less reliable.

Early in his career, there were more people paying attention to what their neighbors were doing. These days almost everything was recorded somewhere—Facebook or Instagram—but no one really saw anything anymore.

In some instances, the Internet made his job much easier. But not here. This one was going to take the old-fashioned kind of work.

Back in Stein’s apartment, Hal found Roger squatting next to the bulky ActionPacker that stored his crime scene kit. The plastic box was maybe three and a half feet wide and two feet tall, its exterior bright orange with black handles that snapped into each end to hold the top in place.

At some point, Roger—more likely one of his kids—had put a large SF Giants sticker on the side. The scratches and wear on the sticker suggested it was from a couple of World Series back.

From where Hal was standing, the overhead light hit the top of Roger’s bald head and reflected it like the sun.

Roger had been new in the lab about the same time Hal was taking his inspector’s exam. Roger suffered from alopecia universalis—he had no hair on his body. Early on, Hal had heard Roger explain the condition to people who came in and out of the lab while Hal was there, waiting for results on one thing or another.

One day Hal asked if it got annoying. While Roger was generous about it, Hal imagined it had to get old. Hal found a bumper sticker that said, “With a body like this, who needs hair?”

To this day, it hung at Roger’s work space in the lab.

“Roger, man,” Hal said. “I’m gonna need some shades.”

Roger laughed without looking up. “It’s the halogen spotlights, man. They reflect the bald well, don’t they?”

Hal palmed his own bald head. “I guess so. How do I look?”

“Not as reflective, I’m afraid,” Roger told him. “To really make it work, you’ve got to be both totally bald and pasty white. You’re only one of the two.”

“I’ve got some pictures where I shine pretty bright, too.” He crossed the room and stopped beside Roger. “Find anything interesting?”

Roger nodded. “Couple things, actually,” he said, standing up. “There was only one wineglass out on the counter, but we found a second one up in the cupboard. Rinsed out and put away in a hurry from the looks of it.”

“Any prints?”

“Prints on both glasses. Won’t know if they’re the same or if they belong to the victim until we get them back to the lab.”

If the two had wine together, then the killer was someone Stein knew.

Did they wash the glass only to hide their prints, or because they were trying to hide the fact that Stein was killed by someone she would drink wine with, someone she knew? “So maybe she had a guest here.”

“You talked to the neighbor?” Roger asked.

“Yeah, but she didn’t hear anything.”

“These places are pretty solid,” Roger noted. “Unless someone was really loud, I doubt you’d hear anything from across the hall.”

“Definitely the high-rent district.”

“You’re not kidding. The way the market is in the city, these places probably go for two or three million.”

Hal whistled. That was about what he’d make in his entire career, and someone was paying that on maybe twelve hundred square feet of living space. Without rent control, he wouldn’t be living in the city at all.

Rents on places like his were close to four grand. He’d been there sixteen years and paid $1,175.

These days you couldn’t rent the shelter of a doorway in an alley for that. “Prices like that, you’d think they could afford a better security system.”

“You’d think. The computer squad is checking. They suspect it was a virus that shut down the system. Happened about fifteen minutes before three o’clock, which is when—”

“The front deskman gets off duty,” Hal finished for him.

“Right.”

“So someone sends a virus, and the whole system is down. Makes it easy to get in and out without being captured on film.” That implied planning, but Hal already knew that this murder was not an act of blind rage. It had been carefully choreographed, which would almost certainly make it tougher to solve.

Hal tried to imagine Schwartzman married to a man capable of something like this.

“It may not even be as sophisticated as all that. According to the front deskman, they have virus problems pretty regularly. Something about how they perform the nightly update and some issue with their antivirus software.”

Hal palmed his head. “So you’re saying this wasn’t a planned attack? That’s a pretty big coincidence.”

“It definitely is,” Roger agreed. “It basically happened about fifteen minutes before the end of the shift. The front desk guy says he called tech support and waited on hold, but when he called in to tell his boss that he had to stay, guy told him to take off. Kid said he would have stayed. Could’ve used the overtime pay.”

Hal groaned. “So no surveillance all night.”

“The computer guys will see if they can locate the source of the virus and track it. But we might not get anything.”

“So besides the wineglass and the security system failure, we find anything else noteworthy?”

“Not yet. We collected the flowers to compare with the ones Dr. Schwartzman received at her house. They were a low priority until now.”

Everyone would step up the focus on Schwartzman. Comparing the flowers for any similarities, usable prints, skin cells—epithelials—that could be run for DNA.

Anything to link to a suspect.

“That will take us a few days. We’ve also got all the trash from the kitchen and bathrooms. We’ll run through it for prints and evidence. We’re looking for the wine bottle itself. There’s evidence of broken glass on the kitchen floor, but no glass in the trash. I’ve got someone going through the dumpsters.”

“We get lucky, might find some usable prints.”

“That’s the hope,” Roger said. “You talk to the victim’s sister?”

“Not yet,” Hal said. “Stein wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow at noon, so she had a key to let herself in. The neighbor buzzed her in the front door,” he added. “I’ll check her out.”

The apartment had offered precious little about the victim. He needed a list of friends, her work contacts. Someone knew something. It was a matter of following the trail. He just needed one bread crumb to start.

Roger drew a plastic bag out of his pocket. “Ken collected this and gave it to me.”

Hal flipped over the bag and looked at the receipt inside.

“It’s a gas receipt. The sister filled up on Vasco Road in Livermore at nine fifty.”

Hal pulled out his phone to map the distance from Livermore to Stein’s apartment.

“Already Google Mapped it,” Roger said.

Hal stopped fiddling with the phone. “And?”

“Purchase was made an hour and twenty-five minutes before we got the call,” Roger said. “The drive from there is at least an hour, hour and ten.”

Hal pocketed his phone. A solid alibi. “That doesn’t leave her time to get here, kill her sister, clean it up, stage her, then leave, get buzzed back in by the neighbor, and call us. Plus—” He remembered the image Ken Macy had shared of the petite woman tucked into a ball on the couch.

“Your gut says no,” Roger supplied.

“Something like that.”

“Mine, too.”

Hal trusted his instincts. Roger’s, too. The sister wasn’t their killer.

He scanned his memory for anyone else who should have stood out. The victim was staged, which meant there was a chance that the killer stuck around to see the reactions. Naomi had taken pictures of the people on the street, but most were dressed in nightclothes and huddled in small groups. Neighbors most likely. No one looked out of place.

“Any other leads?” Roger asked.

As he handed Roger the bagged receipt, Hal considered the people closest to the scene. The neighbor was one, but the careful staging of the body implied a sexual element to this murder. This just didn’t feel like a case of two female neighbors fighting over who had to water the plant that separated their front doors. “I’m going to check the front desk staff. One of them is new. Kid named Liam. Then we’ll try to talk to the folks at her job, but, basically, I got nothing.”

Hal also had to locate Schwartzman’s ex-husband. He couldn’t imagine that any man would seek out a woman who looked like his ex-wife, kill her, and pose her with flowers and a necklace, all in the name of rattling his ex. If he wanted to scare the crap out of Schwartzman, why not break into her place? Or at the very least attack someone she knew. Other than looking similar and being from neighboring towns that were across the country, there was no obvious connection between Victoria Stein and Schwartzman.

Yellow flowers and the necklace.

Not enough.

The two bouquets could hardly be considered compelling evidence. As for the pendants, it wasn’t impossible to imagine that two of those existed. So Schwartzman thought her dad had designed it for her mom. That was a nice, romantic story. Didn’t make it true.

And yet the pendant stuck with him. The design was unique, the two pendants identical. He couldn’t believe that the fact that the victim had one identical to Schwartzman’s was a coincidence.

Roger loaded his tools into his ActionPacker. “I got the pendant from Hailey. I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve got any information.”

“Let’s check the pendants as soon as possible,” Hal said. “I’d like to identify where they were made.” Before anything else, he wanted to rule out the possibility that the two were made by the same person. If they were, this thing
had
to lead back to Schwartzman’s ex. He hoped like hell it didn’t. Because if it did, it meant that she had been married to one scary bastard.

“Yes,” Roger agreed. “I’ve marked those priority.”

Hal gave him a pat on the back. “Thanks, Roger. Get some sleep, man.”

“You, too.”

“Yeah, I’ll try.” But Hal wasn’t going to do much sleeping. Schwartzman had him worried.

If Schwartzman’s ex wanted to play with her, why make the truth so obvious?

More than that, he felt the wrongness in his teeth. It was an aching electricity that settled into the roots of his molars when he ate too much sugar or when he wanted to deny something on a case.

Was it really just some sort of game for this guy? And if he
was
playing some sick game, then what was coming next?

5

San Francisco, California

Schwartzman shivered in the warm apartment and tightened the belt on her thick wool sweater. The thermostat on the wall read seventy. Still seventy. She had checked it three times. But it felt so much colder than seventy. In the kitchen, she dumped her tea in the sink, poured another mug from the steaming kettle. Pressing her fingertips into the porcelain until they burned.

Why had she chosen to do this here? She might have gone down to the station and taken care of it there. But now Hailey and Hal were coming to her home. To make things easier for her, in consideration of her position.

In her home.

The box sat on the coffee table. A Nike shoe box, the orange dirty from handling, faded. Every bit of evidence she had.

She jumped at the sound of the bell.

“Dr. Schwartzman, it’s Alan at the front desk. Inspectors Harris and Wyatt are here to see you.”

The police were at her door. What would the front desk think? What rumors would start now?

What did she care? These were strangers, a whole building of them. “Thank you, Alan. Send them up, please.”

Waiting for Hal and Hailey, Schwartzman crossed to the antique buffet table in the living room, where the bottle of Evan Williams bourbon sat beside two crystal glasses. Her father’s glasses. She tried to find some sense of him there with her. God, how she would have loved to have him with her now. She drank from the mug of tea until the bell rang.

She opened the door and stood, feeling awkward. They had never been to her home, and this was not a social call.

She invited them in, offered them tea, which both declined.

It was midnight. The hour had taken its toll on them as much as her. Hailey’s dark curls were pulled into a makeshift bun, strands falling loose around her face. She wore no makeup, but her cheeks were rosy, as though she had recently scrubbed her face. Beneath her eyes were hollow half-moons. Hal’s face showed a shadow far later than five o’clock, salt as well as pepper in the growth. She led them to the living room, sat against the arm of the couch, and tucked her feet up and the sweater around them.

“Sorry to come so late,” Hailey said.

Had they met beforehand? Was that why they’d needed additional time? She tried to read the partners, but they didn’t look at each other. Both sat facing her. Schwartzman shook her head. “It’s fine. I wasn’t asleep.”

“You doing okay?” Hal asked, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. The oversize chair was dwarfed by his stature.

She didn’t want to exchange pleasantries. She wanted to know what they knew, share the case as colleagues. She was antsy, picking at the blanket that covered her legs. She wanted to ask the questions.

“Schwartzman,” Hal prompted.

“I’m fine. As well as expected,” she said. A company line. She had a lot of those. But, no. She was not doing okay. Not even close. “Let’s get this over with.”

“What can you tell us about him?” Hailey asked.

Schwartzman set her tea on the table. There was no comfort in the conversation they were about to have. There was no comfort when it came to Spencer.

“You’re one of us, Schwartzman,” Hal said.

How she wanted to believe that this time would be different. That being one of them made a difference.

“We’re on your side. This isn’t an interview. This is us asking for anything you can offer to help us nail this guy.”

“You won’t link this to him,” Schwartzman said. “No one has ever linked him to any of the things he’s done.”

“Let us worry about that.”

Could she do that? Give Spencer over to someone else to handle?

No one had ever asked her to.

How she would love to pass off that burden, or even share it. But she was terrified, too. What if she told them, and they didn’t believe her? What if the evidence pointed to something else? How could she work with them day in, day out, after sharing the darkest piece of her history?

Of her life?

“Tell us how you met him, how it started,” Hailey probed.

Rip the Band-Aid off. Be done with it.
“I was twenty-three, just finishing my third year of medical school.”

“You were twenty-three at the end of your
third
year?” Hal repeated.

As a young college student, her every focus had been on getting through school. Undergraduate in three years, med school in three years. People did it. She could do it. The sooner she was through, the sooner she could practice. Her whole life had been preparation. She had wanted to launch herself from the South, start a life somewhere real. “I was in an accelerated program.” Two of them actually.

“Was he in school with you?” Hailey asked.

“No. He was working in Greenville when I was at Duke. He was only three years older but already very well established in the bank.”

He had told her they were meant for each other.
Think of how smart our children will be.
How appealing that sounded.

“Go on,” Hal said. Softly, coaxing.

Get it out. Tell them and be done with it.
“My father died May of that year. Suddenly.” The words were like weight on her chest. She would never have married Spencer if her father was alive. How could she impress on them the weight of that loss? What her father had meant to her. Did it matter? The familiar ache of loss was in her chest again. Press forward. “I stayed with my mother. She was—” How to describe her? Schwartzman hadn’t thought her mother even cared much for her father. She was so standoffish and short with him. But she broke in his absence. “It was very difficult for her.”

And for me.
Her father was her idol, her closest friend. It was devastating.

“My mother ran into Spencer in the bank, when she was dealing with my father’s accounts. Somehow Spencer ended up at the house one evening. Our house.” Her mother insisted she dress up to receive one of her father’s banking colleagues. That was what her mother had called him. Schwartzman hadn’t argued. She argued with so little that her mother asked in those days. Arguing meant an onslaught of emotion from her mother that left Schwartzman exhausted. “We went out for the first time the next week.”

“What was he like?” Hailey asked.

A monster.

Talking about him was like pulling on a strip of skin and exposing the dermis below. Raw and red, the truth burned when exposed.

“Charming,” she admitted. “So charming. To everyone. People stopped at the table constantly, and he engaged with them. Then he would ask them to excuse him so he could get back to his date. It was so flattering.” Images of the club, of her navy button-down dress. “He invited me back to his house and raped me.”

“Oh, God,” Hailey whispered.

Hal rubbed his face. “Jesus, Schwartzman.”

She drew a shaky breath, clenched the blanket in her fist.

“Did you report it?” Hailey asked.

Schwartzman laughed. A hard, sharp laugh that stung her ears.

Hal started at the noise.

“I was a virgin, stunned. I can’t even recall that I felt angry about it, although I know I told him to stop. I fought him. That is the magical thing about Spencer. He could rape you or beat you and convince you that it was for your own good.”

“When did you see him again?” Hailey asked.

“I didn’t hear from him for ten days. My mother was in a panic, sure I’d messed up my chances. Of course, I never told her what he had done. When he finally called, I don’t know who was more relieved—my mother or me.”

“And how long were you married?” Hailey asked.

“Just over five years.” She had once known the number of days and months.

“And did he harm you during your marriage?” Hailey asked.

She nodded.

Hal laid his huge hand on hers, effectively covering them completely. The small gesture made her feel safe, protected. “Did you ever call the police?” he asked.

“Not once.”

Disappointment in his face. He couldn’t understand what it was like—the pressure to stay. From her mother, from him, and beyond them. She was a Southern woman, carrying his child. It didn’t feel as if she’d had any choice at all.

“Why did you leave?” he asked.

“I was pregnant. Four months and—” The hard slab of marble rammed against her belly, the terrific pressure of the baby’s form against her spine. “I lost the baby when he threw me into a bureau.”

“God, that’s awful,” Hailey said, her eyes glassy. “Did you tell the doctors what caused the miscarriage?”

“Spencer talked to the doctors. Spencer handled everything. The longer into the marriage we got, the more isolated I became.”

“Was it the miscarriage that made you realize you had to leave?” Hal asked.

“Not exactly.” Schwartzman recalled that girl.
Kaitlin.
Her long, red locks, her fair skin. “Around that same time, there was a family at Spencer’s country club, the kind that looks perfect. The father was in local government; she came from a ton of money and did all sorts of philanthropy work. Two kids: an older son who was on the football team and the basketball team and a younger daughter who competed in dressage and horse jumping. It was within a week of the miscarriage that the girl—Kaitlin—was thrown from the horse. Broke her back.

“It was all everyone talked about. What was the latest with Kaitlin. The doctors didn’t think there was any chance she would walk again. But someone’s doctor suggested they go down to Georgia for some new experimental surgery. I can’t even remember the details of the procedure—if I ever knew—but it had to do with immobilizing the spine and using stem cells to regenerate the area that had been damaged. The whole town rallied behind the family. They were big in the church, and for weeks part of every Sunday focused on Kaitlin’s recovery.

“I’ll get to the relevant part,” she said, sensing the bodies shifting across the room from her. “A few weeks after the accident, Kaitlin’s family brought her out. She was in a wheelchair with head support, but she was dressed beautifully—like a doll. Gorgeous dress, her skin and hair. She was truly a remarkable young woman.” Schwartzman reached for the teacup and stopped herself.
Get it out.
“Spencer became obsessed with her.”

“With this Kaitlin? And she was how old?” Hal was poised to write.

She remembered the way he had looked at Kaitlin, the jealousy it had evoked in her. She didn’t want him, and yet that look of longing was so intense; she felt naked that it was aimed at someone else. But his obsession wasn’t with Kaitlin. She soon discovered it was much worse than that.

“She was early twenties, maybe. Spencer was never inappropriate with her, but he became obsessed with the idea of her—this perfect woman in that chair. It appealed to him that someone had to care for her twenty-four hours a day, that she was totally helpless. I think it was an incredible rush for him. Spencer started to research the condition and the surgery.”

“I don’t understand,” Hal said. “How does this relate to you?”

She could imagine how it sounded to him. How bizarre, how unrealistic. She’d come too far now. Maybe they wouldn’t believe her. She searched Hal’s face, but it was intense, unreadable. “For a few weeks, nothing. But then Spencer started to drop hints about the pain I had as a result of the miscarriage. When I fell against the bureau, the baby—” She stopped. “It hurt my back, but Spencer wanted to believe that I had some serious injury.”

“Because he wanted you to be like this woman? In a wheelchair?” Hailey asked. Her voice was a whisper. The words too awful to speak in a normal voice. Beside her, Hal’s mouth was propped open.

“I know it sounds crazy, but it was almost like I could see him working through the problem of how to break my back without killing me. To create his own Kaitlin.”

“Jesus H,” Hal said.

“Did he try anything? To hurt you, I mean?” Hailey asked.

“No.” How did he imagine he would take care of her if she was truly in a wheelchair? But he wouldn’t. He would find someone else to do it. Then what? Would he have tired of her? Would he have expected some surgeon to be able to perform some miracle so that she could walk again? “The true danger of Spencer is that he is so calculating. And patient. He is endlessly patient. After that, he started working on the problem. It was no longer a matter of whether he would do it, just when. I don’t know how far he’d gotten when I got away, but I knew he was planning something.

“I knew I didn’t have much time. I needed a few hours to escape, and he rarely went that long without checking in on me. One of his colleagues was running a charity event. She asked me to help. I told her I thought I was needed at home. Spencer didn’t like when I made commitments that kept me away from home.”

“It sounds like prison,” Hailey said.

“It was. Worse.” She would gladly go to prison before she’d go back to Spencer. His own set of rules, a limitless supply of cruelty—prison would be easy.

“Of course, she told her husband that it wouldn’t be the same without me, he talked to Spencer, and I was on the list.” That was always the trick with Spencer. If she said no to one of his colleagues, there was a chance it would get back to him. That he would insist she go. It wasn’t foolproof, but it worked that time. “I arrived at the charity location, was assigned a task with a bunch of women I didn’t know, and hid my cell phone in one of the couches so it would trace back to the luncheon if he tracked it. Then I paid cash for a taxi to my aunt Ava’s house in Charleston. I worried he might go there, but she made sure there were people watching the house.” Those days of hiding at Ava’s, as terrified as she had been, had felt like the first moments of joy in years. Ava had ordered food in. They’d stayed up late, searching the Internet for medical schools where she could reenroll. Ava had saved her life. If not for her father’s sister, she couldn’t have imagined leaving. “I stayed for about ten days to figure out what was next; then Ava and I took a limousine to Atlanta and got on a plane there. I haven’t seen him since. It’s been more than seven years.”

“And he hasn’t left you alone?” Hailey asked.

“No. There have been periods where it’s quieter, but it has never stopped. He’s always found me.”