Everything to Lose

by Danielle Girard

  When Jamie reached Vich, he was on the phone, calling for an all-points bulletin. “Get an APB out and let’s find out where he might have gone. Family, friends, his job? Call me when you’ve got something.” He ended the call and pocketed his phone.

  “Delman?” she asked.

  “Took off,” Vich said. “Apartment’s empty. Looks like he left in a hurry.”

  Sydney came around the front of the car. She nodded hello to them and motioned to the Mercedes. “We’re about ready to haul it back to the bay. Do the rest there.”

  “What did you get?” Jamie asked. “Vich told me about the two blood types.”

  “We’ve got some paint transfer on the driver’s side mirror,” Sydney said. “No way of telling how recently.”

  Jamie pulled out her notebook. “It’s a new car, but might not have happened last night. I’ll check with Sondra Borden.”

  “We have some hairs and at least four sets of fingerprints.”

  Vich crossed his arms. Jamie had never seen him take notes. “Assuming all three Bordens have driven the car, that last set might belong to Delman. Easier than waiting for his DNA.”

  “Right. We’ll run those first,” Sydney agreed. “Blood in the backseat suggests that the victim was put back there for transport.”

  “Where was the second blood type found?” Jamie asked.

  “So far, only on the outside of the car—” Sydney pointed to where a tech was covering an area of the rear window on the passenger’s side with a sheet of cardboard and tape. “Thankfully, no rain last night or we’d have lost it. There may be more in the back. I won’t know until we have a chance to work on the area.” Sydney called to one of her techs. “Raj, can you bring the camera over?”

  A tall man with small square glasses and a thick, dark goatee loped over carrying a brick of a camera.

  “Can you show them the blood print on the window?” Sydney asked.

  “Sure thing.” Raj quickly thumbed through a number of photos before finding what he wanted. He turned the camera so they could see the display.

  “Can you zoom in?” she asked.

  He focused in on the image. Against the bluish-green glass was an area of blood that was maybe two inches by four and slightly oblong in shape. Along the lower edge, the blood was coagulated in a dark smudge, its center marked by several cross marks. Above that, the oblong shape had a void at its center. Lines of blood crossed the void, but not in any sort of pattern. Jamie pictured someone pressed against the window. “A hand?”

  Sydney shook her head. “Too uniform to be skin but could be material with some absorbency. A jacket maybe.” She pointed to the dark X-like smudge. “This might be some sort of button on a sleeve.”

  Jamie stared at the form, unable to make anything of it.

  “I’ll call you guys as soon as we finish processing the car.” With that, Sydney returned to her evidence, her ponytail bobbing. Nice as could be. Jamie felt like an ass.

  Vich stared down at his phone. “Delman’s got a sister. You know that?”

  Jamie remembered Delman’s sister from her adoption of Z. “I’ve met her once. Tanya.”

  “Right. She lives in the same building he does. With her kids. Patrol made it sound like she’s got a bunch of little ankle biters.”

  “Should we go pay her a visit?”

  Vich pocketed the phone. “Sure. You feel like a burger?”

  Jamie stared at him. “It’s 11:00 at night.”

  “Tanya Delman works at the Jack in the Box on Geary. What, you’re not hungry?”

  Sad thing, she was.

  Chapter 7

  Annabelle Schwartzman was awake when the phone on her bedside table began to quack. Her heart had stopped racing; her gaze no longer darted across the familiar corners of the room to remind her that this was her own place.

  She was safe.

  “Schwartzman,” she answered.

  Twisting the knob on the bedside lamp, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, 1:00. She’d only been asleep an hour or so. That always made it easier to get herself up. She wasn’t one who fell into a deep sleep quickly. Or ever.

  Oversized, gray cotton pajamas pooled around her wrists as she wrote down the address. “I’ll be there in thirty.”

  She hung up and rose from her bed, crossed to the closet, and turned the knob. The door swung open like it had a mind of its own. It took a while to figure out that the room was at some sort of slant so that gravity pulled the door open. Used to bother her.

  For months, she blocked it with a shoebox or one of her medical textbooks before growing stubborn enough to get a screwdriver and move the door strike over so that the latch caught properly. That kind of obsessive perfectionism was a legacy from her time with Spencer and the one legacy—perhaps the only one—that she’d finally stopped fighting to undo.

  She pulled the white cord and a single bulb illuminated the square closet, easily large enough for two people or for the kind of woman who loved clothes. Schwartzman was not that person. Much to her mother’s disappointment. She slid hangers to the left, one at a time. Three, four, five, until she found the gray slacks she wanted on the last hanger.

  Her slacks and skirts hung on the left, shirts straight ahead, and the three or four dresses she owned hung to the right above her shoes. Within their ranks, clothes were arranged by color, shades of neutrals mostly.

  Once upon a time, her closet was a mismatched patchwork of yellows, blues, greens. Poppy was popular in the old closet, a color her mother swore brought out the blue in her eyes and the color in her cheeks. The poppy was gone. As were the green, the blue, the orange.

  And especially the yellow.

  She owned not a speck of yellow.

  She had come to dislike bananas and corn, though she was fully aware that this dislike was only in her brain. It did not matter. She gave herself permission to disown yellow a long time ago.

  Only a few months ago, she tried on a beautiful pair of black boots. Tall and narrow enough for her slim calves, they had a slight heel but nothing too high. Perfect with the skirts she wore to work. She’d been ready to buy them when she turned them over to check the price. The stitching on the bottom of the sole was yellow. There hadn’t been the slightest bit of remorse as she slipped her feet back into her own shoes and left the store.

  Schwartzman arrived at the scene a few minutes ahead of the promised thirty minutes. The street was blocked off in either direction. People who lived in the adjacent apartment building were milling about, outside the crime scene tape, straining for a look at the body. Dispatch had informed her that two people had been hit, but one, a young girl, was alive and had been taken to the hospital.

  Her victim hadn’t been as lucky.

  Officers were crowded around the body. Overhead, the streetlights flickered, casting all kinds of strange shadows. A team was unloading large spotlights. Standing along the crime scene tape was a patrol officer she knew. Ken Macy. “Evening, Doctor,” Macy said, lifting the crime scene tape so she could cross beneath.

  “Officer Macy,” she said, trying for a polite smile. Her medical bag in hand, she passed several crime scene techs, unloading equipment from a van, as well as two other patrol officers. “Officer Munoz, Officer Kidd,” she said.

  “Evening, Doc,” Munoz answered. Kidd nodded. The two were silent as she passed, then the talk started up again. There was something absolutely soothing about the cop banter that filled a crime scene.

  As long as she didn’t have to be a part of it.

  Another officer directed her to the body, wedged up against the tire of an old Chevy truck. Her view of the head was partially obscured by the shiny, dented front fender. The tech, whose name was Alan Wigby, though his colleagues called him Wiggy, was on his knees taking photographs.

  “Evening, Alan,” Schwartzman said, unable to bring herself to say the nickname out loud.

  “Just finished up documenting the body.”

  “Perfect.” She motioned to
the assistants from her office. The victim’s body was in an awkward place for an autopsy and rigor had set in, making it impossible to lay him out flat. “We need to crack it.”

  Alan, along with two other officers, took hold of the body—one at the shoulders, two at the legs—and laid him out on the pavement, then proceeded to straighten his legs and arms where the rigor had set in and locked the joints.

  The slang for the process—“cracking the body”—came from the sounds that came from the corpse as it was straightened out. Once the body was laid out flat, Wigby and another crime scene tech worked to collect the blood and matter under the truck, Schwartzman focused on the body.

  From her bag, she removed a white disposable Tyvek pantsuit and stepped into it, sliding her arms down the sleeves and zipping it up to her neck. Not all examiners wore the suit.

  For Schwartzman, it was a no-brainer. Once she was done with her on-scene examination, the suit, along with other evidence from the body, would go to the lab on the off chance that there had been some transfer from the body to her. Any evidence that had transferred could be collected there.

  The first time she wore the suit as a new ME with the department, she’d gotten a few odd looks. Shelby Tate, whom she had replaced, had been known to come to scenes in the scrubs she would wear to the morgue to perform the autopsy, sometimes overlaying them with a protective coat if there were a lot of biologicals.

  Schwartzman preferred the suit. She left the hood down in the back—the hood was more than a little goofy-looking—and pulled her wavy dark hair into a ponytail. She donned booties and gloves and knelt beside the body.

  “Ready?” Schwartzman asked.

  “Ready,” Jason answered, clipboard in hand.

  “Victim is male. African American. Approximately six feet one inch. Appears to be mid to late sixties.”

  Jason made notes as she voiced her observations.

  She put the victim’s weight at two hundred pounds. Relatively fit, he reeked of malt liquor. His shirt was open in front, exposing his chest and abdomen. Likely the paramedics cut the shirt open.

  “Were you able to obtain vitals when you arrived on the scene?” Schwartzman asked him.

  “No vitals,” he said. “My partner thought he heard a thready pulse, so we opened the shirt to be sure.”

  It was what she had figured.

  “Better safe than sorry,” he added.

  “Absolutely,” she agreed, and the paramedic seemed to relax. She didn’t need to look far to know the victim had been dead for hours. The body was cool to the touch, but that could have been hypothermia. Because of the color of his skin, the lividity was harder to see, but it was present. The areas where the blood had pooled after death were darker than his skin and with a purple hue, like the color of eggplant.

  Most obviously, the victim’s face muscles showed obvious signs of rigor, which began around the mouth and in the jaw within a couple hours of death. Full rigor had yet to set in. Time of death was less than eight hours ago. She’d have to cut him to measure liver temp. Before she did that, she wanted to be sure they had photographs.

  She glanced at Sampers’s group. Chase was closest; he shifted toward her, but, before their eyes met, Schwartzman turned back to the victim. It was instinct. She took a breath. Most of the crime scene techs were male. Especially on the night shift. There were a few she liked, but Chase was too flirty, too playboy.

  She needed to get the tread marks on the victim documented before she could cut. Schwartzman, do this. She clenched her hands into fists. “Chase,” she called over.

  When he glanced up, she raised a finger to motion him over.

  He jogged over, and she stepped back from the body and from him. “I’m ready to check the body temp, but I don’t want to cut until we have documentation of these tire marks.”

  Chase squatted beside the body. “No problem, Doctor.”

  She stood with her hands at her sides. It had taken time to train herself not to cross her arms and touch her hair. Her therapist had pointed out that those were safety stances. She didn’t need those now.

  Chase took a series of pictures. “Think I got it. Anything else?”

  She shook her head, and Chase walked away without a word. She scolded herself for assuming the worst of every man she met. Then, gave herself permission to feel what she felt. Hokey stuff her therapist said. No. Not hokey. Touchy-feely. Being kind to herself was not hokey. Or only a little hokey, another part of her brain protested.

  Schwartzman squatted beside the body and pulled a #10 scalpel from a hard plastic case. Pressing her fingers along the ridge of the ribcage, she made a clean cut about one centimeter long and slid the thermometer’s probe up under the ribs and into the right lobe of the victim’s liver. She switched on the digital thermometer and set the timer for two minutes. Most examiners used an analog thermometer, but Schwartzman liked the digital. The temp reading was more exact, and the timer function helped ensure she gave it enough time for an accurate reading.

  When the timer beeped, the temperature read 89.6. According to her car, the ambient temperature was 41. Humans ran at 98.6. Subtracting the 89.6 gave her 9. That, divided by 1.5, put the time of death approximately six hours earlier.

  Almost 2:00 a.m., which meant the victim was hit somewhere between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. How was it possible that no one had seen it happen? She studied the buildings in the area. The apartment building had the best views, but the building was set back from the street. But it was unlikely that the street was empty at that time of night. Finding the witness was on someone else. Maybe the girl who had survived could describe the car and driver.

  She reached for her notebook and remembered Jason beside her. She recited the numbers and told him she’d make notes on the rest on her own and get him a copy. She preferred to work alone, but she was new to the San Francisco job and she wasn’t going to make any requests until they knew her.

  With her notebook open, she moved down the length of the body, noting debris and marks on the victim’s clothing. Once the body was removed, the crime techs would make sure nothing else had been left behind. Her domain was anything attached to the victim. She’d made her first pass on the victim when she heard a woman’s voice, “Evening, Doctor.”

  Hal Harris and Hailey Wyatt were in front of her. They were her favorite homicide team. “Evening. Just starting the examination. Looks like the victim died between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m.”

  “That’s not that late,” Hailey said. “No one saw anything?”

  “Haven’t heard a word about a witness,” Schwartzman told them.

  “No surprise,” Hailey commented.

  “How about the other victim?” Schwartzman asked. “The young girl?”

  “She’s in the ICU at General,” Hailey said.

  Hal pointed to the victim’s chest. “So, someone ran him over? That what killed him?”

  “Yes, to your first question.” Schwartzman got down beside the body. “These marks are definitely made by a tire’s tread.” She touched his neck. “There is evidence of early stages of bruising and the formation of some abrasions, so my inclination would be that the tread marks occurred perimortem.”

  Hal and Hailey squatted beside the body in a motion that looked coordinated. They appeared oblivious to their synchronization. Hailey and Hal were sometimes referred to as H20 or H&H, nicknames that suggested they’d been together a long time. The first time Schwartzman met Hal, Hailey wasn’t there.

  At that first meeting, Hal’s size had made her distinctly uncomfortable. Worse, the case was a woman who had been strangled in her apartment. Hal had come in and gotten down on his haunches right beside Schwartzman and the body in a cramped corner of the woman’s apartment.

  It was all she could do not to shrink right into the wall.

  Seeing him with Hailey made him much less intimidating. It was hard to imagine that she’d ever relate to a man the way Hailey did to Hal. She preferred physical space, and a lot of it.

&nb
sp; “What do you think, Doc?” Hal asked.

  One of the things Schwartzman most appreciated about this particular homicide team was that they never told her how they thought a victim had died. Most homicide inspectors had their own theories, often well-developed, before Schwartzman made any determinations of her own.

  She appreciated that Hal and Hailey deferred to her.

  “I suspect internal bleeding, but I won’t know for sure until the autopsy. What’s interesting is that there are three distinct tread lines. There’s one here, across his collar.” She pointed to the impression torn into the skin of his neck. The clavicle bone was obviously fractured there, creating a dent in the area between his shoulder and his mandible. “The weight of the car crushed his trachea.”

  “But that didn’t kill him?” Hal asked.

  “No. Eventually, he would have died from oxygen deprivation, but it’s more likely that the car tire shredded his carotid and he bled out first. If something else didn’t go wrong before that. There are no signs that he lasted long enough to asphyxiate. Plus, I don’t see cyanosis—” Schwartzman scanned the victim’s face for the bluish tint that would show that he’d suffered from inadequate oxygenation.

  Schwartzman opened the victim’s left eyelid and shined her penlight into his eye. “We do have some signs of petechiae, but that’s not unusual, considering the pressure caused by the vehicle.” She pressed the eye closed again and repeated it on the other side. “I’m betting on internal damage. There is tread on his neck and tread here.” Schwartzman walked her fingers across his sternum. Broken ribs poked up against the skin and she was careful not to exert any pressure that might cause them to break through the skin as she pulled his shirt aside to expose his left side.

  “That’s not surprising,” Hailey said. “The car drove off at an angle. The front tires went over one area and the back wheels over the other.”

  “I apologize, Doctor, for my partner’s interruption,” Hal said, smiling at Hailey.

  “That’s fine,” Schwartzman said. “I thought the same thing at first, but look at this.” She moved down to the victim’s right foot where his shoe was missing and shined her flashlight across his ankle to show where the white sock was blackened with tread. Schwartzman had tried to imagine how his body might have been curled to achieve all three sets of marks simultaneously. Unless his back had been broken and turned at one hundred and eighty degrees, it was impossible. The spine was completely intact.