“Fine. Let’s roll him.” She was grateful not to have to call the orderlies back in even if the process with Hal took both of them. Posner probably only weighed 170 alive, but the dead effect made him feel significantly heavier.
With Posner on his back again, Schwartzman made her initial Y-incision, putting careful pressure on the scalpel to cut through the layers of skin, fat, and connective tissue but not nick any organs.
As she reached for the red-handled hedge trimmers she used as rib cutters, Hal interrupted. “As much as I love to watch you work, I’m going to head out.”
“You want to take that blood and the fiber to the lab? And that, too.” She pointed to the petri dish with the gum-like substance.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I found it on one of his molars.”
Hal lifted the dish and peered into it. “I’ll ask Roger to run that first. Call when you’re done?”
“I will,” she promised. As he started for the door, she called after him. “Any luck finding Sandy?” He frowned, and she added, “Sandy with the acute myeloid leukemia.”
“Not yet. We’re waiting on the warrant to get access to Posner’s patient files. All the patient-protection stuff makes this a real pain in the ass.”
“Okay. I’ll call you in a couple hours.”
Hal glanced around the room. “You okay in here alone?”
“I’m not alone,” she said. “Posner’s here.”
Hal gave her a worried look, which she returned with a smile. As soon as he left, she settled back to work. Despite what she’d told him, she was ready to get out of there as soon as possible.
5
Hal Harris headed home for a change of clothes and to check on his cat before heading to the cancer center for interviews. He’d barely slept last night, staring at the ceiling for what felt like three hours before finally giving up. For a guy in the business of catching killers, he’d always been a remarkably good sleeper, something most of his colleagues were not. He dropped off quickly, rarely woke in the middle of the night, and could usually take a call and still go back to sleep. His sister had said it was because he didn’t have kids.
“There’s no chance of a good night’s sleep once you bring kids into this world,” she’d said.
Hal didn’t have any plans to find out.
It wasn’t as though he slept ten hours a night. He probably averaged closer to seven. He worked late plenty of times, staying long past five at the department to puzzle together the pieces of a case. And even if he went home, he would bring everything with him and work at the kitchen table, poring over files.
The gruesome scenes didn’t keep him up. He dreamed about the bodies—and their killers—but they weren’t nightmares. The scenes were quiet, and he felt oddly detached from them, as though his brain were working through a complex math problem. The response didn’t match the trigger. He occasionally woke with a new question that helped him get closer to the answer, but the problems seldom disturbed his sleep. The weird dreams were a fair price for a good night’s rest.
But last night sleep had eluded him.
And he didn’t know why.
But he had a guess that he wouldn’t sleep much tonight either.
Posner’s death brought back what had happened in the spring. The woman found dead in her expensive apartment. The yellow bouquet. Despite what Hollywood depicted in the movies, murders were rarely so staged, so calculated. That, in itself, had made the case stand out.
The fact that the woman looked so much like Schwartzman had made it unnerving.
Everything after that had made it terrifying.
Posner’s death shouldn’t have had that effect, but Schwartzman’s reaction had triggered something in him. The expression on Schwartzman’s face when she heard the victim was her surgeon . . . it reminded him of the days after Victoria Stein was found dead, when Schwartzman disappeared to South Carolina. Those had been some of his worst days in the department. He’d been stuck working the case in San Francisco, unable to pick up and follow her. All he could do was wait for word that she was okay, that her son of a bitch ex-husband hadn’t chopped her to bits.
Husband. He wasn’t even her ex. He would be soon.
Hal had kept in touch with the detective in South Carolina, and he’d talked to the DA’s office, as well. Spencer MacDonald had all the traits of a psychopath—intelligent, charming, the ability to remain calm under extreme pressure, and a complete lack of empathy or remorse. And to make matters harder on the prosecution, MacDonald was both well connected and well respected in his community.
And his pockets were deep.
Hal felt protective of his colleagues, but never so strongly as with Schwartzman. There was something about her instinct to turn inward, to fight her own battle, and to cling fiercely to her independence that reminded Hal of himself. He wanted to tell her she could lean on him.
But who was he to tell her that? When had he ever leaned on anyone?
At home, Hal changed into his gray suit and went into the kitchen. Wiley jumped onto the counter and strutted under Hal’s arm, rubbing against his chest.
Hal fed the cat and sat at the small bistro table to review his notes from Posner’s scene while the cat ate.
His phone buzzed on his hip—a text from his partner.
Doing interviews with you. Pick me up at the station?
Coming from home. See you in fifteen, he wrote back, grateful for the company. He gathered his notes and stood from the table, his legs protesting beneath him. He stretched his arms and palmed the ceiling, feeling the tightness in his back slowly ease.
He’d played pickup ball last night for the first time in more than a month. Since college Hal had made it a point to get out to the gym off Folsom a couple of times a week. At 5:30 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., a room in back hosted pickup games.
The court wasn’t regulation size, not by a long shot, but it was thirty-five bucks a month for that game. Never more than ten guys showed up. The guy who owned the gym was five two, squat, could probably bench-press Hal. Why he wanted to have a bunch of guys playing ball in his back room no one knew. But Hal was grateful. In the years since Hal had graduated college, the cost of the membership had increased five bucks. You could barely get breakfast in San Francisco for the cost of a month of games.
There was a round of applause when Hal had walked onto the court last night. Then came the ribbing.
“We thought you got shot, Harris.”
“Discharge your weapon into your foot?”
“Or somewhere a little more tender—”
Roars of laughter.
Hal shook his head as he dribbled the ball slowly toward the basket, taking a shot at the free throw line. All air. Man, he was getting old.
“Don’t sweat it, Harris,” one of the others said, returning the ball. “It’s not like you were any good to begin with.”
More raucous laughter.
It was a long ninety minutes. Guys he used to run laps around were suddenly faster and taller. With only eight players, they were all on the court the whole time. By the end Hal couldn’t breathe. His heart was a hammer pounding at his lungs, and his legs were half-cooked noodles, ready to buckle. He hung a towel across his head and sat on the bench until the room went quiet, after the other guys had shuffled into the showers or headed home.
His ego wasn’t that easily bruised. He was out of shape, but that wasn’t such a terrible thing. He was comfortable. He loved his job. He had his health, his family though he didn’t see them nearly enough. Usually he even got a good night’s sleep.
He stood from the bench and wiped his face, wrapped the towel across his shoulders, and started for the showers.
He hobbled like an old man.
Thirty-nine. In a few short weeks, he would be thirty-nine years old.
Thirty-nine was young. Guys his age hadn’t passed their inspector exams yet, and he’d been doing the job almost a decade. And doing it well.
It was
n’t the job. It wasn’t even his personal life. Who knew if and when he’d have kids?
Maybe it was his dad. How much his father had accomplished by the time he was Hal’s age. By thirty-nine, he had been married twenty years and had three grown kids.
Or maybe the thing that bothered Hal was that only six years later, weeks before his father’s forty-fifth birthday, his father had been shot dead.
Hailey was standing on the curb in front of 850 Bryant when Hal pulled up. She held a Starbucks cup in each hand—one small, one huge. He could have kissed her.
Six months ago he wouldn’t have been caught dead with a Starbucks cup. If he ever ended up in one of the dozen stores within a square mile of the station, he ordered drip coffee. Coffee was supposed to be black and bitter.
“You mean like you?” Hailey used to joke.
It was Schwartzman who’d changed his mind. She’d surprised him in the office after a particularly nasty domestic homicide with a Starbucks cup as big as his shoe, a size thirteen. “Mocha,” she’d said.
Now it was an addiction.
Hailey got into the car and handed him the big one. Whip cream bubbled up through the hole in the lid. “Triple Venti Mocha, extra whip.”
“Triple? How did you know?”
“When I woke up this morning, there were text messages on my phone sent before four a.m.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Didn’t wake me up. I slept in Ali’s room.”
Hailey’s husband had been killed five years ago. Her daughters had been six and four years old then. How long did it take kids to get over something like that? “Is she having nightmares?”
“No. Just an impromptu slumber party.”
Hal laughed. “Better than nightmares.”
Hailey raised her coffee cup as if to toast. “Much, much better.”
They arrived at the Bay City Cancer Center and parked in the patient lot. They would likely be here most of the day. An hour earlier, Hal had spoken to Roger, who was at the lab working through the evidence from Posner’s house. Several of Roger’s team would come to the cancer center to collect evidence from Posner’s office and the center’s pharmacy—where the Adriamycin had most likely came from.
Meanwhile, Hal and Hailey had to interview everyone who had worked with Todd Posner. Hal was grateful Hailey was able to join him. She’d been spending most of her time on a domestic violence task force, which left him working on his own. Interviewing the whole office by himself would not have been fun. These sorts of interviews were his least favorite part of the job—talking to people who barely knew the victim, each keeping his or her own secrets and clinging to some twisted perspective of the deceased, and every one of them wanting to feel important to the case.
It meant sifting through a lot of bull to find a few useful nuggets.
The Bay City Cancer Center’s practice included five medical oncologists and two radiation oncologists, as well as support staff—pharmacy staff, patient coordinators, nurses, administrators, and a billing and administrative department. A total of twenty-nine people worked in the office, though only half to two-thirds were in the office at any one time.
The practice also worked closely with six surgical oncologists. Posner had been one of them. Though he didn’t operate in the center, he maintained a small office in the building. For surgery, he had privileges at three hospitals in the city. According to the staff, he was in the center at most two days a week and usually only for a few hours at a time. Which meant this whole day might be a waste of time.
The breaks of homicide.
The office manager had sent them a schematic for the office along with the list of employees. From this Hal knew the center was set up with two rooms for radiation treatments and twelve stations for administering chemotherapy. There were a dozen small offices for the doctors, four exam rooms, the pharmacy with its own sealed-off room for mixing the chemotherapy agents, three administrative offices, and two conference rooms, which the office had blocked off for today’s interviews.
The crime scene van was in the lot, which meant Roger’s team was already there. With so many people to talk to, Hal and Hailey would split up the interviews. They each had a list of fourteen people. Whoever finished with their first fourteen would take the twenty-ninth witness. Or that was the plan.
Hailey was led into the conference room on the east side of the office, while Hal followed the receptionist to an identical room at the west end. “Dr. Fraser will be right in,” she told him.
In the center of the table was a pitcher of water and four glasses. Hal poured himself one and set it beside his empty Starbucks cup. He opened to a blank page in his notebook and waited for Fraser.
Since Norman Fraser was the medical oncologist handling Schwartzman’s care, Hal already knew a little about him. Posner had done her mastectomy. And now he was dead. A man she knew. Schwartzman was connecting that fact back to Spencer MacDonald. He didn’t blame her. Surely she was remembering what had happened to Ken Macy when Spencer found out that they’d had dinner together. A single dinner.
Eighteen stab wounds. Macy was lucky to be alive.
But Spencer’s involvement in Posner’s death was impossible. Hal trusted the detective down in South Carolina. If something—if anything—had changed with Spencer MacDonald’s incarceration, Harper Leighton would have contacted them. She regularly shared the prison reports—who came to see Spencer, who he spent time with in jail, what he did. People had attempted to visit him—some local businesspeople from Greenville as well as Schwartzman’s mother. There had also been a handful of reporters who had requested access for interviews. One had come from as far north as Philadelphia. But so far Spencer had denied all visitor requests other than those from his attorney.
Hal wasn’t sure of Spencer’s reasoning, but for now he preferred that Schwartzman’s ex have as little contact with the outside as possible.
Hal’s thoughts were interrupted as a man entered the room. Breathless, his cheeks flushed, he wore a white lab coat and tan slacks. Norman Fraser.
Fraser was in his midsixties, with a full head of gray-blond hair and a strong, athletic stride. His hair was blown back slightly as if he’d been in a convertible or, more likely, the wind. Except for the circles under his eyes, he looked younger than his age.
Hal stood. “Dr. Fraser, I’m Inspector Hal Harris.”
“Please call me Norman.” Fraser took a seat to Hal’s right, poured himself a glass of water, and drank. “Sorry,” he said between sips. “I had rounds this morning. It took a bit longer than I expected, so I had to run back.”
“I guess you know why I’m here.”
“Of course.” Fraser met his gaze. No facial tells, no wandering eyes. He didn’t seem nervous. Harried and a little distracted, which was in line with what he’d told Hal about his morning.
“I’ll get right to it, so you can get back to work.”
“Anything I can do to help,” Fraser said.
“Any ideas who would have wanted Dr. Posner dead?”
Fraser set down the water glass. “I had a feeling you’d start with something like that.”
“And you have an idea?” Hal asked, pen poised.
“I have dozens of them,” Fraser said.
Hal wasn’t sure he’d heard the doctor correctly. “Dozens. As in dozens of people who might have wanted Posner dead?”
Fraser nodded. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but . . .”
“In this case, please do,” Hal said.
“Posner was a real son of a bitch,” Fraser said without malice. His tone held more exhaustion than anything else, as though he had dealt with a difficult situation for a long time. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “He was brilliant, too, and the best surgeon we’ve worked with. And it wasn’t like we didn’t know that he was arrogant. Hell, when he was right out of school, he was about the most arrogant doctor I’d ever encountered, and his behavior only got worse. Posner was a golden b
oy—Stanford undergrad, Stanford medical school. Wealthy parents with the he-could-do-no-wrong attitude.”
Hal tipped the notebook toward his lap and wrote, Stanford x 2, golden boy, $$. None of this was noteworthy, but he wanted to see how Fraser responded to seeing an inspector taking notes. If Fraser seemed worried about what might end up in a police report, it might mean he was hiding something.
Fraser refilled his water glass and drank again, seeming uninterested in what Hal was writing in his notebook.
Consistent. “Go on,” Hal said.
“His old man was a surgeon who invented a couple of techniques that are still used today. Pretty sure Posner chose surgical oncology to get out from under his father’s reach.”
“So why work with him if he’s such an ass?” Hal asked, matching Fraser’s bluntness.
“Largely, Posner got away with bad behavior because he was such a fine surgeon. You have to understand that surgical oncology is complex. We’re not talking about removing an appendix or tonsils. The tumor is a growing organism. Even though we do comprehensive scans and testing before surgery, the surgeon never really knows what he’s up against until he goes in. He has to determine—in that moment—how best to remove the malignancy without damaging the surrounding tissue and organs. Not to mention the times when the tumor invades an organ. It takes incredible patience, a very steady hand, and a strategic mind.”
“He must have saved a lot of lives.”
“Oh, he did. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand.” Fraser sighed. “But the way he behaved outside the OR . . . he was pretty awful. I can’t think of a single person who considered him a friend.”
So Todd Posner didn’t have a lot of friends. It wasn’t as if they were investigating an event on a playground. The chemotherapy agent had burned through the skin of Posner’s face. Getting him to ingest that took dedication and force. Nothing about Posner’s death was quick. It wasn’t about killing him—it was about making him suffer and then killing him. They were looking for someone with sadistic inclinations—or someone who was really, really angry. “This was someone with a lot of rage toward Dr. Posner, not someone who didn’t want to be friends.”
Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2) Page 5