Everything to Lose

by Danielle Girard

  Hal and Hailey met them at the curb. The crime scene van’s back doors were open, and two techs unloaded photography and lighting equipment onto the curb. There were also two patrol cars parked on the street, though Jamie didn’t see any uniforms.

  Hailey started down the street and Jamie fell in beside her. “Any sign of Delman?” Jamie asked.

  “Nothing,” said Hailey. “Patrol’s knocking door to door again to ask if anyone has seen him.” She motioned farther down the street. “You want to join Patrol?”

  “Not unless they find him,” Jamie said. Which door was his? “The only link we have to Charlotte Borden and this location is the white transfer paint on the driver’s side mirror, right?” Jamie said.

  “And the fact that Delman lives here,” Hal added.

  “But it is possible that there’s no connection between Borden’s attack and the hit-and-runs,” Vich said.

  “There is always that possibility,” Hal agreed.

  Jamie never liked coincidence. No police officer did. For her, it was almost superstitious. Coincidences did happen, but you would be hard-pressed to find a police officer who would argue it as a viable theory. For now, they had to go with the idea that the two incidents were connected.

  Hailey motioned down the street. “Let’s look at where the victims were hit.”

  They walked about twenty yards in silence. “Our first victim was found here. Dwight Stewart. Late fifties. Hit-and-run, carotid was shredded. He bled out internally.”

  Jamie studied the blood on the pavement. No rain in a few days, an unusual break.

  “Stewart was a drinker,” Hal added. “Lived nearby with his son, who said he made the walk to the liquor store on 25th regularly. No sign of defense wounds, so it doesn’t look like he knew the car was coming.” Hailey and Hal explained how the driver had hit Stewart, halted to a stop, and reversed over him again.

  Jamie squinted down at the pavement. “So, the driver wanted to be sure he was dead. Why else would he reverse?”

  “That’s what we think,” Hailey agreed.

  “Any possible connection between Stewart and the Bordens?” Jamie asked.

  “No,” Hailey said. “The son had never heard of the Bordens and his father really didn’t leave the neighborhood, so chances are slim that their paths would have crossed.”

  “According to his son, Dwight was harmless,” Hailey added. “A really mellow drunk. No enemies, people generally liked him. He didn’t do much besides drink and play cards with his old buddies. The son is getting me a list of the friends so we can talk to them. Maybe they know something the son doesn’t.”

  “It’s possible the driver hit him because Stewart saw something,” Vich said. “Or the driver thought he saw something.”

  “It’s one theory.”

  Jamie glanced down the street. “Where was the other victim?”

  Hailey started back down the street in the opposite direction. “Down here. A young girl, maybe eight or nine.”

  “How is she?” Jamie asked.

  “Still critical.”

  “In this case, we see heavy tire marks before he hit her,” Hal explained. “The driver swerved and hit the brakes hard.”

  Jamie looked up and down the street. There were easily a dozen cars parked within view. Across the street were several long warehouse buildings painted industrial gray, probably sometime in the ’80s. Their windows were the frosted kind with what looked like chicken wire embedded in the glass. Several were crisscrossed with silver duct tape where the windows were cracked. “No one saw anything?”

  Hal shook his head. “Not a damn thing.”

  “The girl was playing alone?” Vich asked.

  “There were two other kids playing soccer in the vacant lot,” Hal said, pointing farther down the block. “They heard her scream but that was all.”

  Jamie sighed. “They identify the car as white?”

  “Not even that,” Hal said.

  “No security footage, either,” Hailey said. “These warehouses have an alarm system, but the company isn’t having it actively monitored. Company’s called Party People. They bought these buildings back in the ’70s, used them to store party rental equipment—like round tables and chairs. But this place is where they store the old stuff. Outdated. The company bought a warehouse in Alameda, but the owner died before the stuff was transferred, so they’ve been sitting on this place for a few years while the family irons out the estate.”

  Jamie scanned the curb. “So, based on the location of the two victims, you’re assuming the Mercedes was parked along the street.”

  “Right,” Hailey confirmed. “The good news is that the crime scene team took images of the street last night. They also collected any evidence along this entire block.”

  “So, maybe they got something related to Charlotte,” Jamie said.

  “We’ll get you a full list of the findings when Roger’s group is through.”

  “Any ideas how to isolate the location of Charlotte’s attack?” Hailey asked Jamie. “We found dust under Charlotte’s nails,” Jamie said. “The lab identified it as concrete.”

  “No paint?” Hal asked, looking across at the warehouses.

  “No.”

  Jamie eyed the sections where the paint had peeled off the walls. “The concrete might’ve come from the warehouses, but Charlotte also had a contrecoup contusion on her skull. That’s consistent with a big fall.”

  “Delman’s apartment complex has two cement stairwells,” Hailey said, pointing to the building behind them. “The main one is at the southwest corner of the building, and there’s another one on the east side. We’ve got the crime scene team starting at the main stairs.”

  “Can the lab match another concrete sample to the one found under Charlotte’s fingernails?” Hal asked.

  “Not definitively,” Jamie said. “Sydney told us that two samples—even from the same structure—can show relatively significant differences.” She started toward the apartment building.

  “So, even if we find the spot where the attack happened… ” Hal started.

  “We need something other than concrete to confirm the location,” Hailey added.

  “Right,” Jamie confirmed. “Blood, and there should be a lot of it.”

  The two crime scene techs were surveying the front stairwell when the foursome approached. “Find anything of interest?” Vich asked.

  One of the techs turned to them, pushing his glasses back up his nose with the back of his hand. “Not yet.”

  There was something on the concrete exterior. “See this honeycombing?”

  “Honeycombing?” Hailey asked.

  “The areas that are coarse and stony,” Vich added.

  “It’s deterioration. Might have been caused by poor mixing when the concrete was made,” Jamie said.

  “Or insufficient fine material in the mixture or incorrect aggregate grading,” Vich added.

  “You do a lot of concrete work in Sex Crimes?” Hal teased.

  “My dad was a builder for forty years,” Vich said.

  “Mine, too,” Jamie said without detail. Every father-daughter bonding memory she had was of building something with her father. They had rebuilt part of the cement retaining wall in the basement and retiled the floor of their one small bathroom, built storage lockers for all the guys at the firehouse. Time with her father meant doing projects.

  “The honeycombing?” Hailey prompted. “It’s important?”

  “I think Jamie meant the deterioration would be consistent with Charlotte being able to scratch into the concrete,” Vich said.

  “Right,” Jamie agreed.

  The other tech, an attractive black woman in her twenties, came back down the stairs.

  “Any results from the luminol testing?” Jamie asked.

  “Actually, yes.” She turned the screen of her camera toward Hailey and Jamie. “You see the faint blue?”

  The glare on the screen made it difficult to see much, so Jamie cup
ped her hands around the display. The cement in the image was speckled with blue.

  Hailey studied it next. “Looks like it’s all blue.”

  “Right,” the tech agreed. “We’ve marked that area off.”

  An area maybe four feet by four feet was surrounded with crime scene tape. Much too large for the injuries Charlotte sustained. The splatter suggested something much more violent, like multiple gunshot wounds.

  “I’ve never seen that much positive reaction from a luminol test,” the tech added.

  “What does it mean?” Hailey asked.

  “It means that either the sunlight is messing with the camera and we’re not getting an accurate read…”

  “Or there’s blood all over this place?” Jamie asked.

  The tech nodded.

  “Maybe there is,” Hailey said.

  “I’m going to get a tent to block the natural light,” the tech said. “If we can make it darker, it will be easier to identify the most reactive areas. Luminol will pick up traces of blood that is years old, but the rain should have dissipated any older blood stains over time.”

  “You guys want to help me set up the tent?” the tech asked.

  “Sure,” Vich said.

  “Hailey and I will check the east staircase,” Jamie said.

  “Delman’s apartment is on that side, too,” Hailey said.

  “He’s on the second floor. I’ll show you when we get there.”

  Jamie fought to calm her nerves. Delman was not Z, she reminded herself.

  The two women walked around the side of the building in silence. The other staircase was steel and tucked out of the sun. Jamie was cold before they started up the staircase. She peered at the cement wall.

  “We should have brought the luminol,” Hailey said. “It’s plenty dark back here.”

  Jamie had no experience with luminol. Most of her victims could tell her where they’d been attacked. Finding the blood evidence was usually something that happened with homicides. The two women moved up the stairs slowly, scanning each step. The railing, the cement above the wall, the steel base. It took maybe nine minutes to reach the top. “Nothing.”

  “Me neither,” Hailey confirmed, a minute later. She nodded to the next stairwell. “Keep going up?”

  Together, the two inspectors searched the four levels of stairs for any sign of where Charlotte might have been attacked and found nothing.

  “With that kind of injury, you’d expect some hair and blood evidence,” Hailey said as they started back down.

  “Unless someone cleaned it up.”

  “We’ll get Naomi to check it with the luminol.”

  Naomi. That was the tech’s name. Jamie had met her before. God, she was terrible with names.

  “You want to see where Delman lives,” Hailey said when they reached the second floor.

  “Sure,” Jamie said. “We sure he’s not home?”

  Hailey pointed to the street where a patrol car was parked. Unlike the patrol cars parked on Tennessee, this car had a full view of Delman’s door. The officer in the driver’s seat waved and Hailey waved back. “We’ve had a car parked there twenty-four seven. No sign of him yet.”

  Jamie started down the hall. “You sure the officers didn’t miss him? People blink.”

  “Let’s check.” Hailey stopped at the third door.

  Jamie stopped in front of the door. Red crime scene tape sealed the door. It hadn’t been broken.

  “It’s not technically a crime scene,” Hailey said. “Not yet, anyway, but…”

  “We’ll know if he’s been back,” Jamie finished.

  “Exactly.”

  Jamie went back toward the stairwell. A small ray of natural light cut across the cement pillars. There was a graffiti tag that matched one behind the police department. Below it, inside the area highlighted by the light, was a thin orange line, bright against the dull concrete. Jamie halted.

  Hailey came up behind her. “What?”

  Jamie knelt down to examine the line. “This.” She pointed to the orange and leaned in closer and sniffed.

  “Orange paint?”

  “Not paint,” Jamie said. “Nail polish. Tangerine nail polish.”

  “Tangerine?”

  “It’s the color Charlotte was wearing.”

  “You know the name of the color?” Hailey asked.

  “Not the nail polish, but the lingerie she was wearing. Matched her nails exactly.” Jamie scanned the surface. “Look there.” She pointed to several tiny spots of reddish-brown.

  “I see it,” Hailey confirmed. “Blood in a spray pattern.”

  Jamie pulled out her phone and dialed Vich.

  “What’ve you got?” he answered a little breathless. She pictured him trying to put up an unwieldy tent.

  “We’re at the east stairs. I think we found the spot where Charlotte was attacked. Bring the techs to test for blood.”

  Chapter 13

  In order to make her meeting with Heath Brody, Jamie left without learning the results of the luminol testing. Was she crazy to assume the orange was nail polish?

  It could have been a million things.

  A hornet’s nest buzzed in her mind. Questions about whether they were making too many connections, resting too much on one location. White paint wasn’t uncommon. That Mercedes might have been hit anywhere. In the hospital parking lot or at City Academy, where Charlotte had parked it the day before her attack.

  With all the buzzing, her mind also went to Z. His lost phone, his black eye. All the things he was suddenly keeping from her. Her inability to ask, to push him to open up. How would she do that? She lacked those skills. Just as her own father had lacked them. She thought of the concrete on Delman’s building, of the times she’d spent with her father. His unending list of projects.

  Were all those projects a way of not thinking too much about her own mother?

  *

  Heath Brody lived in a loft in a new trendy building by San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center. The sides of the buildings reminded Jamie of the game Jenga, which Z had loved and insisted they play almost daily for a full six months. The sides of the buildings had alternating protruding and inset cubes in a random design. The protrusions were lined with horizontal slats of clouded blue glass. The inset areas were large glass windows and decks that overflowed with plants. She’d never seen anything like it.

  Vich was following up on Sondra’s alibi and interviewing Charlotte’s friends, while Jamie met the artist on her own. Jamie hadn’t wanted to risk one of the friends recognizing her as Z’s mother.

  This area of town was expensive and nothing about the building suggested Brody could be a starving artist. Why teach, then? Usually that was what artists did before they made it. Were Brody’s lessons a personal favor to the Bordens? Or did he have some other motivation for teaching a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl? Like maybe something in the color orange. Brody was as good a suspect as anyone. Certainly, he had access to Charlotte. A young woman falling for her older instructor—an artist, no less—was nothing new.

  Jamie made her way to the front of the building and entered the foyer, which stretched half the length of a football field with ceilings easily twenty feet high. Aside from the blue glass doors and the bank of resident mailboxes, the whole thing was industrial gray concrete. A concrete bench ran along one wall, a concrete reception desk. Where it used to remind her of her father, concrete now reminded her of Charlotte Borden.

  Maybe it always would.

  Some of those connections never went away. Like the way that the smell of bleach would always remind her of a particularly violent rapist named Marchek, who had almost killed her in her own garage five years ago. Marchek stored his work boots in a shallow, rubber tub, its bottom filled with a half-inch of bleach. She assumed the bleach was an attempt to eradicate any evidence of where he’d been. Uncut by water, the bleach smell was pungent in his immaculate apartment. A small collection of hobby boats that he’d built sat on one shelf, t
he only decoration. Hobby boats, too, reminded her of Marchek.

  Heath Brody had left a pass for her at the desk and Jamie took the elevator to his seventh-floor space. His was one of the work-live combination spaces. He answered the door in a pair of jeans and no shirt. A rag hung from his back pocket. His feet were bare.

  “I’m Inspector Vail,” Jamie said.

  “Heath Brody,” he responded, padding back into the apartment. His jeans hung low on his hips, showing off the cut muscles all the way from his shoulders to his waist. No question that Heath Brody was deliberately showing off his sculpted form.

  “I’m finishing up a project,” he said.

  If Jamie had expected a sparse, starving artist residence, Heath Brody’s apartment was anything but. The twenty-foot walls were covered in huge abstract canvases. A twelve-foot marble sculpture of a woman occupied one corner of the room. With her flowing gown, hair elaborately braided on her head, and the arms missing, the statue looked like it was straight from Italy.

  Brody continued through the living room down a hall to another room. He slid a large, barnlike metal door open and they entered what must have been his workroom. He closed the door behind them, and Jamie surveyed the room. Three industrial grade fans hung from the ceiling and a complex venting system ran from one end of the room to the other, its own fans humming. Along one wall was a series of brilliant blue pieces that looked like some sort of marble. As Jamie got closer, she saw they were metal.

  “Copper,” Brody said. “It’s oxidation. I use acids to bring out the colors.”

  “Is the art in front your work as well?”

  “No. That’s my personal collection. This is my work.”

  She studied the blues emerging from the metal surfaces. “Acid?”

  “Acid,” he confirmed. “I use different types for different lengths of time. That’s how I create the color variation.”

  She motioned to his outfit. “You work with acid in no shirt and no shoes?”

  “No. When I’m working with the acid, I wear clothes.”

  Jamie was tempted to touch the brilliant blue and green.