Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) (9 page)

“Yes. Tomorrow at four fifteen.”

It wasn’t a diagnosis. It was a test result.
Maybe
she had cancer. She wanted to ask what the odds were. How often did they get the diagnosis wrong? What chance did she have to be the false positive? The one with some weird benign calcium deposits.

“Dr. Schwartzman?” Dr. Khan interrupted her thoughts. “Can I call someone for you?”

“No,” she said firmly.
Hailey? Hal?

No.

Ava.

Ava would know what to do. But how long since she’d talked to her aunt? It didn’t matter. Of course it didn’t. Ava would be there. Ava was her first call when everything with Spencer happened. Schwartzman had retreated to her aunt’s home and slept for two days straight. Ava fed her and shielded her from the barrage of phone calls from her mother and Spencer. Schwartzman stayed in Charleston for ten days, mapping out her next moves, her plan.

Ava wrote her a check for $30,000 to help her move to Seattle and covered her living expenses to get her back to school. She put Schwartzman in touch with a woman in the medical school admissions office, someone who helped her apply for scholarships to cover her tuition.

Ava made all that happen.

Yes, she would call Ava. Once she knew the diagnosis. There was no reason to worry anyone prematurely.

It would be okay.

She drew a slow, even breath. “Thank you, Dr. Khan. I will be in touch with Dr. Fraser.”

“They’re holding the spot for you,” Dr. Khan said, sounding relieved. “Just call in the morning to confirm.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Good.” A pause. “There is a chance that the deposits are not cancerous. We just need to check to be sure,” the doctor offered in a small gesture of kindness. Empty of promise. Almost void of hope.

“Of course,” Schwartzman agreed.

She hung up the phone. As she stood straight again, the blood rushed to her head, filling her vision with stars. Schwartzman moved to the door and pulled it open.

Standing in the entry was Inspector Hal Harris.

She reeled backward, releasing a guttural cry.

“Sorry,” he said quickly, raising his hands in the air. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Schwartzman backed into her chair and sat down. She hadn’t seen Hal since he and Hailey were in her apartment. She worked to gather her nerves again.

Push aside the thoughts of cancer. Focus on Stein.

When she glanced up, Hal was seated in the chair opposite her, doing his best to make his substantial size appear small and nonthreatening. It might have been comical if not for the adrenaline flooding her nervous system.

“You okay?” he asked.

It was all she could do to shake her head.

11

Charleston, South Carolina

Harper stood at her desk, shuffling piles of papers, waiting for Burl. She was anxious for the results of the autopsy. Her gut was divided on this one. There was plenty about it that felt like an accidental death. It was a little off that Kimberly Davies hadn’t seen the body when she’d come around the porch, but it was possible that the victim fell after Davies looked. Perhaps the dog was barking because Mrs. Pinckney had fallen or suffered a heart attack or a stroke. Then she tripped, trying to get downstairs. But why go downstairs? Why not call for help from upstairs? And why did the dog go quiet?

Burl entered from the back stairwell. “You got something for me?” she called.

“Yep,” he said. “Let me grab coffee.”

She followed Burl into the break room. He tasted the coffee and made an exaggerated smacking sound. “Hmm. Mmm,” he said. “Delicious.”

“I’m glad you’re so easily pleased.” Burl reminded her of her father, who could never understand all the fuss about an espresso or a latte or a cappuccino. Used to drive him crazy when “city folk”—as he called them—came into the diner asking if they made espresso drinks.

Like Burl, her father enjoyed his coffee even when it might be considered mediocre, which was probably a stretch for the coffee offered at the department.

“I’m a man of simple pleasures, Detective. What I can’t figure out is why the coffee up here is better than the coffee two floors down.”

“Because there are dead people down there,” Harper said flatly.

“Well, we don’t stir them into the coffee.” Burl raised his mug and took a long drink. “At least not on purpose.”

Harper had been raising her mug to her own lips when the image of little pieces of human flesh floating in coffee entered her mind. “Burl.” She groaned and set the coffee down.

“You want to come down and see what I’ve got?”

“You’re done with the body?”

“Yep.” He lifted the mug into the air. “Just came up for my celebratory cup of joe. Come on,” he said, hitching his chin toward the stairs. “I’ll show you.”

In almost sixteen years on the force, Harper had grown accustomed to dead bodies. It was hard to work Homicide if you didn’t. The charcoal-lined masks were effective at eliminating most of the smells. Add a couple drops of lavender or peppermint oil on the inside, as she did, and even the summer’s worst bloaters were almost sufferable.

What she had never quite gotten accustomed to was the process of carving the body apart, examining it in pieces, and weighing and measuring the components before shoving it all back in again, zipping it up with a staple gun, and sending it off for burial or cremation. The sight of the closed-up Y-incision was the thing that made her most uncomfortable.

Jed always teased that it was because Lucy had been born by Cesarean section so Harper had her own version of the scar.

Maybe eighty years ago C-section scars looked like Y-incisions, but hers was only three or four inches long, hidden below the bikini line. The scar was more recent than her last bikini.

Burl held the door open, and Harper stepped into the morgue. As always, the room smelled of bleach and death. Like the rest of the building, the morgue was old, and little had been done in the way of updates.

At least upstairs the walls were covered with the latest most-wanted lists and campaign posters about spousal abuse, drunk driving, and the one Harper found the eeriest, an image of a young meth user, teeth missing, face covered in sores, and track marks up and down her scrawny arms. The caption read, “I wanted to be prom queen. Meth changed that.”

Down in the morgue, though, nothing hung on the walls. Instead the south wall was covered with an orange-yellow water stain from a pipe that had broken a few years back. The water had ruined hundreds of case files. Had the pipe burst on the north side of the morgue, it would have filled the cold storage, where the bodies were kept. According to Burl, the morgue had five “guests” at the time, so the loss of the files was preferable to the alternative.

Today Frances Pinckney was laid out on the autopsy table. Her face and shoulders were uncovered, but Burl had draped a white sheet over the rest of her. As always, Harper kept herself at a firm six or seven feet from the victim. She would have taken the autopsy results over the phone, but Burl tended to be more detailed when he was standing over the victim, and she didn’t want to miss anything that could be important.

“I ruled out natural causes first.”

Harper exhaled. “So, she was murdered?”

Burl crossed to the file cabinet without answering. He enjoyed the process of unveiling the cause of death, and Harper tried to remind herself that this part was his show. His cowboy boots made loud clacking sounds on the floor despite the blue booties he had pulled over them. He returned with a file and flipped it open.

Another of Burl’s little quirks.

Most of the other medical examiners talked from memory, especially when the victim was as recent as this one. Burl liked to hold the folder open in one hand while pointing out relevant markings with the other.

“Heart was healthy,” he said, pointing to her chest. “No obstructions and the brain showed no signs of a stroke.”

“She could have slipped on the stairs.”

“I considered it.”

Harper didn’t like where this was going.

“Let me show you the X-rays.”

The one thing the morgue had updated in the last decade was its computers. It was now outfitted with a state-of-the-art computer system, but Harper wasn’t surprised when Burl led her to the light screen. Burl preferred X-rays the old-fashioned way. She watched him work and wondered how many more years he’d be around. She would miss the way Burl did things.

When he found the slide he wanted, he turned the knob on the old machine and cranked on the lamp. The light flickered twice before illuminating. Burl slid the X-ray under the clips and pointed to Frances Pinckney’s vertebrae. “From the fracturing, we can see that she landed on her sternum first.” He pointed to the image. “Basically, she took the brunt of the fall on her chest.”

“Okay,” Harper said. She pictured Pinckney. “She would have been facing down the stairs.”

“Yes. Her arms were at her sides.” He switched the slides and showed her a line in one of the wrist bones. “She’s got a hairline fracture on her left side, which appears to have happened because the wrist was caught under her. But there are no other breaks on her arms.”

Harper imagined the victim falling. Her arms would be out to break the fall. “You’re saying the break to the wrist wasn’t caused because she had her arm outstretched when she fell?”

“No. The break pattern suggests it was against her like this when she landed.” Burl held his arm to his side, elbow against his ribs.

“She didn’t put her arms out to break the fall? Isn’t that unusual?”

Burl whistled. “Yes, ma’am. In a fall, we almost always see evidence of the victim reaching out to break the fall.”

“Her hands weren’t bound.”

“No,” Burl confirmed.

He knew the answer. She could tell from the quick responses, but she wasn’t ready to give in yet.

Other reasons a victim wouldn’t reach out to break her fall.
“What if she was carrying something?” Harper suggested, snapping her fingers. “Like Cooper. The dog.”

“Possibly.”

“What do you mean? You know the answer.”

He nodded smugly.

She came back around to drugs. “What about the tox screen?”

“Clean, but you’re on to something.”

“So, it’s possible she fell and couldn’t break her fall. That she was impaired somehow.”

Burl nodded.

“Out with it,” Harper told him.

He responded with a low chuckle. “I did a lung biopsy.”

“A lung biopsy,” she repeated. “What for?”

“I noticed a faint odor on her at the scene. I wanted to be certain that I didn’t have it wrong.”

“And you didn’t,” she guessed.

“Nope.”

“What was it?”

“Chloroform.”

Harper studied Pinckney’s face. She had been drugged. “So someone knocked her out with chloroform and then sent her down the stairs.”

“Yes, ma’am. Those are my findings.” Burl rocked back on his heels like the sheriff in an old Western, but the game lost its appeal as Harper recognized the woman whose children she had grown up with.

Frances at their eighth-grade graduations, taking pictures before prom. Drugged and thrown down the stairs. Deaths like this didn’t happen in this wealthy pocket of Charleston. People died of old age and cardiac disease. How could she face her parents? What could she tell them? She knew the cause of death, but she still had no explanation for why.

“Who on earth would want to throw an old lady down the stairs?”

“That, my dear, is your job.” Burl set his hand gently on her shoulder in encouragement, and Harper nodded, pulling herself away from Pinckney’s corpse.

Harper climbed the stairs and returned to her desk, where a plain white coffee cup told her Andy had gone to a French café a couple of blocks away. The Gaulart & Maliclet cup was like a gift.

She took a sip of the drink, disappointed to find it was tepid.

It was tepid, and Frances Pinckney, a lady not very different from her own mother, had been drugged and savagely thrown down a flight of stairs to break her neck. Harper felt as if her skin was crawling. She scratched through her shirt at an itch she couldn’t reach.

What she needed was to get out of the building. It was after noon, but she craved breakfast. Callie’s served the best biscuits. She dialed her husband’s work line. Jed answered on the second ring.

“I’m going over to Callie’s for breakfast,” she told him.

“Bad news on a case?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be there in ten,” Jed told her. “Order me some coffee.”

Harper hung up and left the coffee cup on her desk. She grabbed her coat off the chair, told the admin that she was going to be out for about an hour, and hit the street, walking in big, fast strides. The itching began to wane. A light breeze cooled her skin as a horse-drawn carriage stopped on the sidewalk, one of Charleston’s historical tours en route. This particular guide, an older gentleman wearing a tweed vest and cap, was explaining the earthquake bolt plates on a building along King Street.

Pinckney’s house had the disks, too, Harper recalled. Solving Frances Pinckney’s death was like putting bolts in one of those old buildings. Somehow Harper just needed to pull the pieces together, bit by bit, to figure out who would have wanted her dead.

In the meantime, she was counting on biscuits and gravy to take her mind off the case.

12

San Francisco, California

“She was right here. In my office.”

Hal watched Schwartzman pace a tight semicircle around the backside of her desk. “In that chair.” She jabbed her finger toward the empty chair beside him. “She knew about cause of death. She knew about the pendant.” Her expression was a mixture of terror and fury. “How could she know about that?”

Motionless, Hal tried to make sense of her rambling. He had missed the entire beginning of her rant because she was talking too fast, and he was hopelessly lost. “‘She’ who?”

“Stein.”

Without offering more, she turned and walked around the desk again. Her fingers were working in and out of fists, her brow furrowed as though she were doing some sort of intricate surgery while she walked. He’d seen her this rattled only once before—when he’d walked into the morgue after Spencer told Schwartzman that her mother was in the hospital. Lied about her mother being in the hospital.

That was Hal’s first encounter with Spencer and his sick games. And this had to be another game. After what felt like five minutes spent watching her talking and pacing, Hal was dizzy. “Schwartzman.”

She kept moving.

“Hey,” he said louder. “Schwartzman.”

She halted. She seemed surprised to find him in the room.

“Who knew that Stein drowned in lavender water?” he asked.

“The sister.”

“Victoria Stein’s sister?”

“Yes. She knew about the lavender, the water. She asked if she’d been drugged.” Schwartzman touched her chest as if she was searching for something. “And the pendant. She knew about the pendant.”

“When did she leave?”

“She was here five minutes ago.”

Damn!
He’d missed her. “I’ve been trying to reach her all day,” he said. “If she wants answers, why not call me back?”

Something was up with Terri Stein. By the time he had arrived at the crime scene Tuesday night, she’d been taken to the hospital by one of the patrol officers to be treated for shock.

According to the hospital, she had checked herself out shortly afterward and was put into a cab. She’d agreed to come to the station today in a text message, but he hadn’t heard from her. He had no idea where she was staying or for how long. He’d called her three times since then.

“She doesn’t need answers,” Schwartzman said. “She already knows it all.”

“Schwartzman,” he shouted to get her attention.

She stopped and stared at him.

“All the moving around is making me dizzy,” he said softly. He motioned to the desk. “Maybe you could sit for a couple minutes.”

She sat down as Hal opened his notebook. When he looked up, she was seated, her hands folded on her lap as though obeying a schoolmaster.

“How did she end up in your office?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I came in for a bandage, and she was sitting there, crying.”

Hal wondered about the tears. He’d seen grief enough times to get a good sense for when emotion was real and when it wasn’t. Of course, there was no way of being certain. He’d been fooled plenty, too. “Did you ask her?”

She stopped to think. “I did, but she didn’t answer. She just started into how Victoria had drowned in lavender water.”

Dread was heavy in his gut. “She shouldn’t have known that.”

“I thought she’d talked to you.”

“I haven’t told anyone but Hailey.” He scanned her office. “There’s no way that she read something on your desk? A file?”

“All my files are in the morgue. My computer, too.”

Neither spoke for a moment. “If she knew—” Schwartzman said.

“She had to be involved,” he finished. Her alibi was the gas station. How quick she had been to provide an alibi. Ken Macy had had the receipt in his hand when Roger showed up at the crime scene. A time-stamped credit card receipt. That was a solid alibi. Which meant someone else was working with her. A boyfriend maybe. But what was the motive?

Hal was already pulling out his cell phone. “I’ve got to see if we can find her before she gets out of town.” Hailey was working the gang-related shooting, so he dialed Dispatch directly. “This is Inspector Harris. I need to get a BOLO out on a suspect in a 187. A female, age approximately—”

“Midthirties,” Schwartzman said.

“Midthirties.”

Schwartzman kept talking. “Approximately five foot three. A hundred and fifteen pounds. Brown hair, brown eyes. Wearing an orange peacoat and yellow tights. Last seen at 850 Bryant Street.”

Hal passed the information on to Dispatch. “Going by the name of Terri Stein, but may be known by another name.” The BOLO—be on the lookout for—would cover the state, but the more specific he could be, the better the chances of locating her. Maybe she was heading home to Southern California. She probably didn’t have another place to stay. At least, he hoped she didn’t. “Suspect may be heading south toward Los Angeles. Pass the description to highway patrol.” He tried to imagine her getting on a plane. “Airports, too,” he added.

“We have a description of the car?” Dispatch asked.

“Her car?” Hal said out loud.

Schwartzman stood from the desk. “Let me ask at the desk.”

“Not yet,” Hal said. “Is Officer Ken Macy on patrol today?”

“I’ll check,” Dispatch answered.

“Get that BOLO going, and I’ll see about getting more information.”

There was a brief pause as Hal crossed his fingers. He needed someone to help create a composite sketch for the BOLO for Terri Stein. Macy had been first on the scene, which meant that, aside from Schwartzman, he’d had the most interaction with Stein’s sister.

“Inspector?” asked Dispatch.

“I’m here,” Hal confirmed.

“I’m patching you through to Officer Macy.”

There were a series of beeps and two short ringtones followed by Ken Macy’s voice. “This is Macy.”

“Inspector Harris here. I’m calling about the Stein murder. Did you see the car that Victoria Stein’s sister was driving?”

“Her sister?”

“Right. The victim from Tuesday night,” Hal said again. “You met the sister at the scene. Her name was Terri Stein.”

“Right. Sure,” Macy said quickly. “I’m trying to think. No, I met her inside. Fischer took her to the hospital, but I was on the street when they left. She didn’t go to her car.”

Hal fought off his frustration. It wasn’t Macy’s fault that he hadn’t seen the car. He couldn’t be blamed for letting the sister leave the scene. It was his duty to help her get medical care if she needed it. Hal just hated the fact that he hadn’t gotten to see the sister himself. “Macy, I need you to come in and help create a composite sketch of Terri Stein.”

“Sure. I’m only a couple of blocks from the department. I’ll call the captain and let him know.”

“The sketch artist will meet you in Homicide. As soon as it’s done, it needs to go to Dispatch for the BOLO. Got it?”

“Got it, Inspector.”

“Thanks.” Hal hung up as Schwartzman was coming back in the door. Something in her had shifted. The dizziness-making woman of a few minutes ago now wore a different expression, something more focused, almost fierce. “Anything?” he asked.

“They didn’t see where Terri Stein went when she left the building.”

Terri Stein was involved, but why would she admit it? What was she hoping to get from Schwartzman? And if she was involved, what motive did she have for killing her sister?

“I don’t think they were sisters,” Schwartzman said, as if she could read his mind.

How did she do that?
“What? Why?”

“I’ll show you.” She ran her hands down her arms as if she was cold. She was unnerved but trying to play it off. Hal didn’t blame her. If she was convinced that there was something weird about Victoria Stein’s death before, the interaction with Terri Stein added merit to the theory.

Schwartzman pulled open the door.

“Where are we going?” Hal asked her.

“The morgue.”