Expose (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 3)

by Danielle Girard

  Schwartzman stooped to retrieve it. A receipt from the library.

  “She was there Friday morning,” Hal said.

  Schwartzman flipped it over. On the back, in a fine block print, it read ANS Optera. The words reminded her of something.

  Hal sighed. “That’s Malcolm Wei’s company.”

  His tone made it clear that Malcolm Wei was still AWOL. She stared at the letters. “Is it an acronym?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “Somehow, all of this must relate to that company.”

  “And specifically to the conference they had hosted at the Century Hotel. Records is working through the list of attendees, looking for anyone with a record.”

  She handed him the paper. “That’s something,” she said, trying to be encouraging.

  “Two thousand people attended that conference.”

  Schwartzman scanned the room, wanting to be helpful. “Maybe the library can tell you what she searched for.”

  Hal held his phone. “Here’s hoping.” As he dialed, the two of them left Parveen Yasmin’s apartment. As Hal patted his pockets for his keys, Schwartzman took a last look at the small space and wondered who would be burdened with the task of going through the dead woman’s things. She didn’t envy them. It occurred to her that someone would have to go through Schwartzman’s things one day, too. No siblings, no spouse . . .

  “Damn,” Hal breathed, lowering his phone.

  “Was that the library?”

  “They’ve got twenty-eight computers, all open for public use. She said they get about a thousand visitors on an average day.”

  “So in other words, a dead end.”

  “Right.”

  The two started down the stairs, Schwartzman searching for something positive to offer.

  Before she came up with anything, Hal’s phone rang. “Hey, Roger.” A beat passed, and his eyes grew wide and bright in excitement. “We’re on our way.” Another pause. “Schwartzman’s here, too. We’ll see you soon.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Roger got some better footage of the two people coming out of the Century Hotel. He confirmed the woman was Tabitha Wilson. And he found Aleena Laughlin’s niqab.” He pushed the front door open and let her pass. “You have time to stop by the lab?”

  The dead infant would be waiting in the second drawer against the wall in the morgue, the drawer Schwartzman saved for the smallest victims. The little girl deserved her attention.

  But Tabitha Wilson might be alive.

  “If I’m quick,” she said, and together, they hurried from the building.

  38

  Hal worked hard to be optimistic as he and Schwartzman made their way to the lab. Roger had laid out the black niqab across one of the large workspaces. Even as Hal approached, the tacky sheen of dried blood was visible on the front of the cloth. A small red sticker marked a tear in the fabric. Schwartzman stood beside Roger, studying the garment.

  Naomi called over to him. “I ran Tabitha Wilson’s credit cards,” she said. “There are a bunch of charges at a motel down by Fisherman’s Wharf, starting last Tuesday.”

  “A motel,” Hal repeated. “So she wasn’t staying at the Century?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Naomi confirmed. “I called over there. Her stuff is in the room, but housekeeping says she hasn’t been there in a few days.”

  “I thought the room at the Century was in her name,” Schwartzman said.

  “It was,” Naomi confirmed. “And you’d definitely rather stay there than this dump.” Naomi rotated her computer screen to display a run-down exterior corridor motel that Hal recognized from more than one call over the years. It was one of the few remaining places in the city that booked by the hour.

  “What about charges at the Century Hotel?” Hal asked.

  “Nothing on her cards,” Naomi said. “If she was staying there, she wasn’t paying for it.”

  She wasn’t staying there. It didn’t make sense for Wilson to pay for a dumpy motel if she had a reservation at the Century. So someone had put that room in her name . . . but why? To link her to Malcolm Wei?

  And where the hell was Wei?

  “Anything else on her card?” he asked.

  “Nothing. She must have been using cash for her other expenses. Just a cab from the airport and the hotel room.”

  Hal rubbed his head and crossed to the table. He hadn’t had a chance to tell Schwartzman about the assault case file he’d studied over the weekend, so he spent a couple of minutes catching her and Roger up on what he’d learned.

  When he described the marks on Aleena Laughlin’s body, Schwartzman interjected, “They were bites.”

  “What?” Roger asked.

  “I saw the scars on Laughlin’s anterior. I assumed childhood chicken pox caused them. But there weren’t any on the backs of her legs or on her back, which I thought weird at the time. But now it makes sense. She wouldn’t have been bitten on her posterior side because she must have been lying on her back. The insects couldn’t get to her there.”

  Hal recalled the file on the assault, the pink bites that had covered Aleena Laughlin. Christ.

  “I got your images of the burns,” Roger said, referring to the half-moon-shaped scars on Tabitha Wilson.

  Schwartzman studied the images from the Berkeley PD file. “They’re the right size and shape for a match to the weapon we found in the theater,” she said.

  “Yes, but we can’t compare the measurements.” Roger pointed to the original photos of Tabitha Wilson’s burns. Whoever took them hadn’t included a way to scale the injuries. “Without a ruler in these images, I can’t say with absolute certainty it’s the same weapon.”

  “But it looks like a match?” Hal asked.

  “Definitely,” Roger said.

  Hal remained silent, thinking while Roger filled Schwartzman in on the burn marks. When Roger was done, Hal gave them the last and least pleasant detail from the assault file—the burns Wilson had sustained on her genitals.

  “Brutal bastard, isn’t he?” Roger said.

  Hal and Schwartzman exchanged a glance. Roger rarely showed emotion about cases. When they finished talking about the assault file, Hal motioned to the niqab on the table. “Looks like her assailant stabbed her right through the material.”

  Roger showed him the narrow hole in the front of the garment.

  “Anything else on it?”

  “Some hairs,” Roger said. “And part of someone’s burrito on the backside. It was in a dumpster at the corner of California and Joice streets.”

  On the way out of Parveen’s building, Schwartzman had told him about what she’d learned from Najah Mian, the Muslim oncologist. He agreed with her theory that Aleena Laughlin might have worn the niqab to hide her identity. But the hole in the fabric provided the stark reminder that the niqab hadn’t done her much good.

  “What about the footage you got from the Century?” Hal asked. “Can you tell who the man is?”

  Roger pointed to his monitor. “I’ll queue it up. It’s from Thursday, about an hour after we see her follow Malcolm Wei into the elevator in the lobby.”

  Hal moved to Roger’s desk, sensing this wasn’t going to be what he needed to drive this case forward. When Roger had something useful, he liked to talk it up, to get everyone excited. He was too subdued, too quiet.

  Hal crossed his arms and watched as the small side street of Joice filled the screen. In slow motion, the woman in the niqab came around the corner. The man held her arm as he pushed her down the street. The footage was clear, the imagery crisp, and Hal experienced a flash of hope. The man’s hand came into focus, the rise of his individual knuckles.

  But the man kept his head held down, a ball cap shrouding his face.

  “Look up,” Hal whispered, his gaze on the monitor. Schwartzman moved in next to him, and he edged sideways to give her room.

  The three of them watched in silence. Hal felt the anticipation building, as thou
gh they were watching the climactic scene of a thriller.

  Roger knew the ending, and he wasn’t excited. That was not good news.

  “Look up,” he said again, hoping he was wrong about Roger’s mood.

  The two approached a black car, and as the man’s face turned, the trunk popped, obscuring his features.

  Beside him, Schwartzman groaned.

  The man came around to the rear of the car and pulled the black cloth over the woman’s head. Her face hidden, she swung her arms blindly until he shoved her backward. She struck her head on the trunk’s lid and doubled over. He yanked the niqab off, and Tabitha Wilson’s face appeared on the screen.

  Wilson took a single step away from him, but he swung her around and shoved her toward the car again. She tripped and pitched forward, falling into the open trunk. He swiftly lifted her legs, dumping her into the dark space.

  “Oh, God,” Schwartzman whispered.

  Tabitha Wilson scrambled to get to her knees, but the man closed the trunk lid. They watched the back of his head as he pulled something from his pocket, lifted a light blue tube, and flicked the side of it.

  The trunk popped open again. The man held Tabitha Wilson down and drove the needle into her back.

  “He’s drugging her,” Schwartzman said, her voice pitched high.

  The man replaced the top on the needle and slid it back into his pocket. Without facing the camera, he tossed the niqab into the dumpster with his right hand and slammed the trunk closed with his left. Then he got into the car and drove away.

  The car had no rear license plate.

  “Shit,” Hal whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” Schwartzman said.

  “I’m working on blowing up some individual frames, checking for possible reflections in the glass of the car or some detail on his clothing that will give him away,” Roger said, moving on. “You can tell from the coloring that he’s not pale, like me. That’s something. And I’ll work on collecting footage from any other cameras in the area.”

  “She’s still alive,” Schwartzman said.

  “Or she was on Thursday,” Hal said.

  Hal’s phone buzzed on his hip, and he pulled it free. “Harris.”

  “We’ve got the search history on the laptop. You want me to email it to you?”

  Hal glanced at his watch. The computer lab had finished with Aleena Laughlin’s laptop. It hadn’t even been a half hour. “Yeah. Sure. And cc Roger Sampers in the Crime Lab, will you?”

  “Done,” the voice said and rang off.

  “What was that?” Roger asked, moving toward his computer.

  “They went through Aleena Laughlin’s laptop. They’re sending over her browser history.”

  Roger double-clicked on the message. “Last search was for a company called ANS Optera.”

  “Malcolm Wei’s company,” Schwartzman interjected.

  “Aleena navigated to their ‘About Us’ page.” Roger followed the link as Hal moved in. The top of the page was a short history of the company. The eight-year-old company had developed multitenancy software architecture to help organizations gauge and manage risk. Hal’s eyes started to water. “This is what she was reading?”

  “The last page she visited.”

  “Scroll down,” Schwartzman said.

  Roger moved down the page. At the bottom was the company’s leadership team. Nine headshots, nine names and titles. Second row center was Malcolm Wei, chief marketing officer.

  “Him again,” Schwartzman said.

  Hal scanned the other faces—all men. The company was based in China, but there were a variety of ethnicities in the group: two black men, a white man, two Asians, and four men who looked to be Middle Eastern or Indian. Other than Wei, none of them was familiar. According to the background checks Chase had run on all of them, they were also clean—no scandals, no arrests.

  The company was touted as one to watch, its leadership bright, innovative, and young. Aside from Malcolm Wei, none of the other men was currently in the United States or had been in the past three months.

  “What other sites did she visit?” Hal asked, hunting for a new angle.

  Roger went back to the email with Aleena Laughlin’s browser history. “The search before was for a book on Amazon . . . And before that, she searched for a bicycle on Craigslist.” He paused. “With training wheels.”

  “And before that?”

  “The library website, a health insurance log-on, her bank . . . Now we’re back to the weekend before she died.”

  Hal shook his head. It wouldn’t be that far back. “It has to be that company site.”

  “Can Naomi run more in-depth records on these other names? Anything we can find on them—news, complaints, previous jobs, spouses—we need to know if they’ve had so much as a speeding ticket—and find out if they were in the US in 2004, or if they’re currently in town.”

  “Naomi’s got something else to work on, but I’ll get Chase on it. I’ll have him go back through Laughlin’s history, too, to be sure.”

  “Thanks.” Hal started for the door. “I’m going to get the Century Hotel’s security department to work through these faces, see if any of them were at the hotel when Tabitha Wilson and Malcolm Wei disappeared.”

  39

  Thanksgiving morning, Hal arrived at Schwartzman’s house at eight thirty, feeling like an ass for even considering leaving town. He didn’t care about Thanksgiving. He wanted to find Tabitha Wilson.

  He waited on Schwartzman’s couch, Buster pressing his muzzle into Hal’s lap for petting. He had convinced Schwartzman to come up to his sister’s house, helped find someone to watch Buster, and promised his mother. But sitting around watching football and eating a big meal felt wrong.

  He should have been finding a damn lead to his case.

  Roger had taken the day off. So had Naomi and a big portion of the Crime Scene Unit. Many of them would be back tomorrow, but others wouldn’t roll in until Monday.

  There’s nothing you can do today, he told himself. He didn’t have a single lead to pursue.

  A full investigation of Aleena’s internet browser history showed nothing the least bit suspicious. The man Parveen Yasmin had seen on Laughlin’s laptop screen had to be one of the men on the ANS Optera website—Hal was sure of it—perhaps Malcolm Wei himself. Yasmin had said she didn’t believe the man was Asian, but maybe she’d been mistaken.

  Even if the man was Malcolm Wei, what then? What possible connection was there between Malcolm Wei and Tabitha Wilson? He would have been in middle school when she enrolled at Berkeley.

  Waiting in Schwartzman’s house was making him antsy. To move things along, he delivered Buster—along with dog food, his bed, and a bag full of toys and treats—to the next-door neighbors’ house.

  He was going to Sacramento. He had no choice. And there was really no angle to pursue. Not without a break.

  Thankfully, the start of Scranton’s child pornography trial Monday had distracted the press from the killer targeting minorities in the city. Crimes against children always won top billing. For once, he was thankful for the perverse priorities of the press.

  Back in Schwartzman’s house, he made himself a coffee and settled into the biggest chair in her living room—full-size and almost large enough to hold him comfortably. There, he tried to focus on the copy of the New York Times he’d found in the entryway, but his mind kept looping back to the case.

  Roger had collected additional camera footage from the path Tabitha Wilson and her abductor had taken from the rear exit of the hotel to the car parked on Joice Street, but in all that footage, Hal didn’t have a single clear view of the man’s face.

  And they’d lost track of the car when it had wound through the more residential area south of the city. It might have tracked north and across the Golden Gate Bridge to meet up with 101 north or south, or headed east on 80. In other words, the car—and Tabitha Wilson—might have been anywhere.

  “I’m almost ready,” Schwartzman
called from the bedroom—the third time she’d called out these same words. The first time, she’d said it would be only five minutes. That was easily ten or fifteen minutes ago. He wondered what could be taking her so long, but he didn’t allow himself to dwell there. He couldn’t imagine her changing outfits or worrying over her hair. She’d never seemed the type.

  Maybe she dreaded the whole thing, secretly hoping that he’d give up and leave without her. Why had she agreed to Thanksgiving dinner with Hal’s family? Because he’d given her no choice? Used her fear from the night her front door was open, then pestered her, and convinced the neighbors to keep Buster for the night so that she couldn’t use the dog as an excuse.

  Basically, he’d made it happen.

  It had been a good idea. Coming with him would mean she would be out of the city and away from any potential danger from—from what? Spencer? Was Spencer still a threat? Was there danger for her here?

  If her coming to Sacramento wasn’t necessary, at least he now had a good way to excuse himself from his sister’s house on Friday. Schwartzman needed a ride back to the city. There would be work, but his family never bought that excuse, mostly because he’d used it too many times. All of them real—well, most of them real. And anyway, his mother and sisters had met Hailey Wyatt lots of times. They adored his old partner. They were over the moon at the idea that he was bringing another colleague.

  Except Schwartzman wasn’t a married colleague with two children.

  She was single.

  And that was the part he hadn’t thought through.

  When he brought Hailey around, his family understood that they were only colleagues. And he sensed the way his sisters had studied him and Hailey. The little hitch or tilt of an eyebrow if Hal stood too close or if Hailey put her hand on his shoulder, which he realized she did a lot—innocent, all of it.

  After meeting Hailey a few times, the eyebrow dances had settled down, but his family would be doing it again today. And it would be worse because Schwartzman was single.