Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) (11 page)

“It’s how I got my start in the police department,” he told her.

“Ranching? Or being the only boy?”

Macy laughed, and it made her laugh to hear him. “I worked in animal control for the city,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how many of those guys are terrified of raccoons. I became the raccoon guy. Was there three years and decided it was time to try something new.”

The normalcy of their conversation was so striking. Just two people, eating and talking. Laughing. It was so lovely. She wanted to bask in it, and yet she found herself thinking that this was not her life. It took only seconds for the shadow of her real life to fall back over her.

“What about you?” Macy asked.

Schwartzman took a bite of a risoles and chewed slowly, then lifted her beer glass.

“You don’t like to talk about yourself, do you?”

“There’s nothing particularly interesting about me,” she said. “Tell me more about your family. I can’t imagine a house with so many kids.”

Macy carried the reins of the conversation through dinner and their second beers. Only when the waiter asked if they cared for dessert did Schwartzman notice the crowd standing on the street, waiting for a table.

“I think just the check,” Macy told him.

Schwartzman pulled out her credit card.

“No, you have to let me treat,” Macy said. “After all, I did all the talking.”

“No,” she said firmly.

“Split, then.”

“Split,” she agreed.

When the check was settled, Macy walked Schwartzman to her car and opened the door for her. She waited for the awkwardness of the end of the evening, but there was none. He simply let her get into the driver’s seat and closed the door behind her.

Standing on the curb, he watched her drive away.

Back in her apartment, Schwartzman felt lighter than she had in weeks. It was just a distraction, but an effective one. She didn’t realize how badly she’d needed it. Not to mention the reminder of spending time with a nice person—a nice man. She set her keys on the entryway table and shrugged out of her coat. Crossing toward the kitchen, she saw the flashing light on her answering machine. Froze.

Of course.
Of course it couldn’t last. She turned on the teakettle just to hear the scream. She stared at the flashing red number 1, then jabbed the “Playback” button.

“This is a message from the building superintendent. We will be doing the annual inspection of fire extinguishers a week from Monday. Please leave your fire extinguisher outside your door no later than seven o’clock Monday morning. If you are out of town or need assistance, please contact the building superintendent.”

Schwartzman tossed her coat onto the kitchen chair and laughed out loud. It was a message about checking the fire extinguisher. How perfectly boring and mundane.

The kettle whistled the first notes of a song, and Schwartzman could have sung along.

15

San Francisco, California

It was the end of the day when Hal entered the department and spotted Hailey at her desk. He felt a rush of gratitude. They had been partners for almost a decade, and, though he rarely admitted it, working without her was difficult.

His mind functioned in pieces, and he depended on hers to help him pull them together. That and she was probably his closest friend. He had Ryaan, of course, although their relationship was new and came with the complications of romance. He also had plenty of guy friends—the kind he called to play ball or see a game or grab a beer, but few of them talked about anything more personal than their fantasy football leagues.

Over the years, there had been friends who had shared personal hardships. There was a fellow officer whose wife was leaving him for another cop, another inspector whose wife couldn’t get pregnant. As those hardships passed, so did whatever had brought the two men together. The result was that the friendships naturally ebbed back into the casual banter of acquaintances.

Hailey never let things go quietly between them. When he tried to avoid a subject, she had a knack for digging deeper without nagging, and, to give her credit, she relented easily when the tables were reversed. Somehow their gender difference had never made things awkward between them. Hal liked to think it was because he had two older sisters who’d beat him up whenever he met a girl and thought of her first as a potential girlfriend. But it was Hailey, too.

They were both married when they’d started as partners: he to a woman with an affinity for putting herself into dangerous situations and she to the son of a congressman. She had children; he vowed he’d never have any. Their relationship had quickly become easy; they bantered like siblings. After her husband’s death, Hailey had simultaneously pulled away and depended on him like family. Whatever bond they’d had before that was fixed in stone then.

He thought about Schwartzman.

She reminded him of Hailey in the months after her husband died—both strong and fractured at once. He was drawn to Schwartzman, to the desire to support her. He had seen her competence in her job, her strength in arguing the finer points of an autopsy on the stand in front of a jury. She was great at her job. Recently he had seen moments of humor behind her reserved exterior.

The humor was gone now.

That made him angry, too.

Maybe he had a thing for broken people, but he definitely had a thing against bullies. Though he was six four now, Hal had been a small child, one of the shortest in his class through high school. He had grown more than six inches his first year of college. Spencer MacDonald was just a bully—only he was the very worst kind. He hid behind his status, his job, his social reputation, his money. He thought he could use those things as a wall to stand behind as he committed the worst kind of atrocities. It had been a long time since Hal felt this strongly about a suspect.

He crossed to Hailey’s desk without stopping at his own. “Hey.”

“Hi, stranger,” she responded. “Glad you’re here.”

“Me, too,” he agreed.

“I’ve got something for you,” she said, turning to the stack of papers on her desk.

“Man, I could really use some help on this Stein murder,” he admitted, grateful just to say the words.

Hailey stopped digging. “How’s Schwartzman?”

Hal rubbed his head. “It’s tough to say.”

“She’s reserved.”

That was an understatement. If he had expected her to open up more after their conversation about her marriage, he would have been disappointed. If anything, she seemed more closed.

“Any new leads?” Hailey asked.

Hal exhaled, fighting his frustration. “Nothing since the disappearance of the victim’s fake sister.”

“That pendant was so eerie. How can that be a coincidence?” Hailey said, speaking softly. “Not to mention that Schwartzman and the victim could be sisters. You have anything new on her ex?”

“I got in touch with a deputy in the Greenville Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday. He made a couple of calls. Talked to the ex’s assistant. She said she books all his flights, and he hasn’t traveled since last December. A four-day trip down to Florida to visit his mother.”

“That doesn’t mean much,” Hailey said. “He could have made his own arrangements.”

“Nope. Ran his credit cards, too. Only airline ticket in six months is the one to Florida . . . which is also where the real Victoria Stein lives.”

“The real Stein? What do you mean?”

Hal recounted the call he’d had with the FBI contact.

“So you think he went down there to steal an identity?” Hailey asked.

“It’s not likely. Pensacola is almost in Alabama. His mother’s place is in Palm Bay, on the eastern coast. It’s not like he could drive over and pick up Stein’s card.”

“And there’s no other connection between the real Stein and Spencer MacDonald?”

“None,” he said, the frustration in his teeth. “Or his mother. I’ve got a request to search the flight manifests in case he booked using cash or someone else’s card, but it’s like a needle in a haystack.” He sighed. “I’ve got nothing to go on. Maybe we could go back over to the vic’s place? Take another look around?”

“I’m still interviewing witnesses on that gang shooting,” she said. “But I should be done today.”

“Sure.” He tried to hide his disappointment, but he wished she’d finish up already. He would have liked some help with the Victoria Stein case. He needed two heads on this thing. Hell, he needed a dozen of them. He felt as if they were missing something, that they were close, but it was so elusive.

It wasn’t uncommon to have dozens of prints to sort through at a scene, but to have nothing was rare. And he didn’t like it.

She grinned and gave him a little elbow nudge in the gut. “You’re missing me.”

“Yeah. I have to cry myself to sleep,” he told her.

“Poor Hal. Tomorrow, I promise.”

He really did hope she’d be able to rejoin the investigation tomorrow. “You said you had something for me?” he asked to change the subject.

“Yes.” She turned back to the pile and shuffled the pages until she found a pink message slip. “You got a response on your missing persons. Sacramento PD called about twenty minutes ago. They’ve got a woman who came into the station and said your missing person is her daughter, Sarah Feld. Mother, Rebecca Feld, said she last talked to her daughter about two weeks ago.” Hailey passed him the slip. “Here’s the local sheriff’s number. Mom’s a real mess, so they’re holding her until they can get in touch with you.”

Hal flapped the note against his thigh.

A lead.

ID’ing the victim meant gaining access to her friends and family, people who might be able to point the police to who she hung out with and worked for. And Hailey had been hanging on to it. “Why didn’t you give me this first?”

“I was having too much fun hearing about how much you were missing me.”

He rolled his eyes and crossed back to his own desk, where he dialed the sheriff.

“Sheriff Bowman,” came the response on the first ring.

Hal introduced himself.

“Boy I am glad to hear from you,” Bowman said.

“I hear you’ve got someone who recognized our victim.”

“Yes. Mrs. Feld came in about an hour ago, and we were able to confirm that your victim is her daughter, Sarah. The mother brought in her passport and her driver’s license. Birth certificate.” He dropped his voice. “I think she might have a few photo albums in her bag, too.”

“Sheriff Bowman, I’m going to need the mother to come down here to make an identification and answer some questions. I assume she’s not in any shape to drive.”

“No,” Bowman said quickly. “Definitely not.” There was a brief pause. “I can have an officer bring her down.”

Hal exhaled silently, relieved not to have to make the four-hour round-trip. “That would be really helpful. How soon can they be here?”

“Well, it’s after six, Inspector. I still need to confirm your victim is Feld’s daughter. You send me those pictures, we’ll be sure of that, and then we can bring Ms. Feld down first thing tomorrow morning.”

“That works. Thanks, Sheriff. Give your officer my cell number. I’ll be waiting for the call. I can be here anytime after eight.” Hal recited his mobile phone number and hung up. Slapped his thigh. This was how it went. It just took one crack to break something open.

He thought about calling Schwartzman.
Not yet.
He didn’t want to get her hopes up. He would talk to the mother first, make sure Victoria Stein was, in fact, her daughter.

When the phone rang a second later, he assumed it was the sheriff calling back. “Yeah?”

“Hey, Hal.”

It wasn’t the sheriff, and Hal couldn’t place the voice. “Yeah?”

“It’s Roger.”

“Oh, sorry. Thought you were someone else.” Hal pulled out a notepad and grabbed his pen. “You got something for me?”

“We found a napkin in the trash, kind of shoved down in there. Evidence of two compounds found on it. The first was red wine, consistent with the bottle we found in the dumpster and the wine in the glass on the kitchen counter.”

Hal felt his pulse revving. This was it. The case was cracking. “Not surprising,” he said. “And the second?”

“Right,” Roger went on. “A dark-red stain, very small. Less than two millimeters. We thought it was blood.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“No. Some sort of sauce. We’re working on what kind exactly.”

Hal felt slightly let down. “So we have wine, which we expected, and something else. How does this help us?”

“While we were trying to identify the stain, we found a partial print. We were able to salvage the print and run it through the system.”

Adrenaline stirred in his veins. “And?”

“We got a match,” Roger said.

“That’s great.” Hal slapped his desk. “Was it a match to MacDonald?”

“No.”

Okay. Not MacDonald but his accomplice.
That was one step closer. “Who, then?”

Roger spoke slowly. “Actually, I don’t think you’re going to like what we found.”

Hal swallowed. “Why not?”

“Afraid he’s one of ours,” Roger said.

Hal closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. One of our own. These cases were always the worst.

“Hal?”

“I’m here.” He resigned himself to what was coming. This was the job.

“You ready for it?”

“Do I have a choice?” Hal gripped the pen and waited for Roger to give him the name.

16

Charleston, South Carolina

Four days had passed since Frances Pinckney’s murder, and they had nothing. The only evidence other than the body was a size eleven tread print found just inside the front door. The print was partially smudged, making it difficult to determine when it had been left. Harper had already checked on the people who worked for Pinckney.

The couple who cared for the house were eliminated based on their alibi—they’d driven down to see her sister near Atlanta. Plus, they had absolutely nothing to gain from Frances Pinckney’s death unless they had planned to rob the place. But nothing had been taken.

Not to mention his foot was a size thirteen men’s and hers a size six women’s.

The gardener was the right shoe size, but he and his wife had been attending their granddaughter’s dance recital that night along with approximately eighty other parents and grandparents.

The tread indicated it was some kind of running shoe, and the lab would run it against a database to identify the brand and shoe type. But that would only be helpful if they had a suspect to match it against. There were no tread prints found farther into the house, so the one they’d found might have been a neighbor helping Pinckney carry something heavy in from her car or bringing over a piece of mail that had come to the wrong address and stopping in for a chat.

It could have been from anyone. Which meant she had nothing.

With Jed and Lucy at a volleyball game, Harper spent the afternoon sitting at her desk, reading over tiny print on lab results from the scene and waiting for something to strike her. Eyes burning, she flipped back to her own notes on Frances Pinckney’s death.

Employees, family, there was not a single good suspect, and she’d covered every base, checked all the right boxes. Pinckney’s children arrived in town the day after her murder, and Harper met with each of them more than once. She took them through their mother’s house to confirm that nothing was missing. The art was accounted for, as were the more mundane valuables like electronics.

Pinckney’s financial accounts—credit cards, bank and investment accounts—had been checked for any sign of fraudulent activity and had come up clean. Robbery was unlikely as Pinckney’s wallet had been sitting in her purse by the door with more than $100 in cash and five or six different credit cards. Plus, Pinckney was found wearing her antique wedding ring and a necklace with a diamond pendant, a gift from her husband for their fortieth wedding anniversary.

With robbery off the table, Harper had moved on to another most likely motive—greed. She hadn’t gotten anywhere there either. Frances Pinckney’s estate was divided 30 percent to each of her three living children. The remaining 10 percent went to an organization that worked to create stiffer penalties for driving under the influence. Her son Patrick had been struck and killed at eighteen by a drunk driver. Even if Harper could find a motive for one of the children, they all lived in different states. Distance created ironclad alibis. Not that they needed them. It was obvious from their distress that the children were crazy about their mother.

These were the toughest cases. Everyone wanted to know why, and she had absolutely nothing to offer them. She glanced at her watch and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed. Andy had gone out for coffees and offered to pick one up for her.

She needed it.

Harper lifted the receiver off her desk phone to dial Jed about dinner when her captain stuck his head out of his office door.

“When did you get here?” she asked him.

“Forty-five minutes ago, hour maybe. Walked right by you.” Barrel-chested and buzz-cut, Captain Brown looked like a typical Southern boy, especially dressed in jeans and a casual button-down as he was now. Add his boisterous voice and he was as stereotypical as they came. In reality Beau Brown was a sweetheart with a soft spot for stray kittens.

“What are you doing in here on a Saturday?”

“Budget’s due this week,” he told her. “I just got a call on my cell. You know someone named Ava Schwartzman?”

“She’s Frances Pinckney’s best friend.” Maybe Ava had news. “Is she on the phone for me?”

“Nope.” Captain Brown scratched along the line of his buttons, the way he did when he had bad news.

“What is it?”

“Cleaning lady just found her.”

Harper rose slowly from her seat. “Found her?”

“Afraid she’s dead.”