She opened her mouth to scream, felt dry cloth against the roof of her mouth. She coughed, choking, fighting to draw air through the fabric. Her eyes opened instinctively as she fought for breath. Tears filled them and streamed down her face.
Spencer raised a narrow blade, pushing it close to her face. A single cutting edge, faced inward. Right-handed. She flinched, expecting the knife to come toward her.
Instead Spencer swung from the hips and drove the knife into a tan shirt. A man’s scream. Schwartzman couldn’t see his face, but she knew that shirt. The tan button-down.
She screamed through the gag, fought against the restraints, seeing beyond the skin, where the knife penetrated the clavicle above the second rib. Watched as it stabbed into the spongy tissue of the lung.
The tan shirt grew dark as blood soaked the fabric. The handle of the knife stuck from the chest. She knew that knife. Its bone-colored handle. It was hers—the paring knife from her kitchen set.
Spencer grabbed hold of the knife again, pressed his palm against the chest, and wrenched the knife free. Blood ran in a steady flow from the wound. Her gaze inside again, blood filled the chest cavity. She shifted to press her shoulder to the wound. Stop the bleeding.
“No one should get between a man and his wife,” Spencer said as he brought the knife down again.
Before the knife struck, there was a loud pounding. Someone knocking on a door. “Dr. Schwartzman!”
She gasped, brought a hand to her face. The bindings were gone. She opened her eyes, and the living room appeared before her. Spencer was gone. She was in her living room, inside her apartment. She’d fallen asleep on the couch.
“Dr. Schwartzman, are you all right?” someone called through the door.
She sat up quickly, the room tilting sideways as the blood rushed from her head.
Voices in the hallway. Urgent. The sound of a key in the door.
She looked down at her yoga pants, the tank top she’d been wearing when Ken had come over. Ken. She glanced toward the bedroom as the apartment door flew open. She stood quickly as two men rushed into the room. Alan came in first, his lean frame not filling the shoulders of his blazer. His hair flopped to one side as he halted just inside the door.
When she’d received the bouquet from Spencer last spring, she had specifically asked for Alan from the front desk to come to collect the flowers, handing him a pair of gloves to help preserve the evidence to be taken to the lab. She couldn’t handle doing it on her own, and his was the only name she knew. He was the only one who greeted her by name every time.
“Dr. Schwartzman.” Alan held a hand at his side as though he had a gun to draw. “The neighbors heard screaming.”
Schwartzman crossed to the bedroom before speaking. She pushed the door open with one hand and looked into the room, cast in the cool morning light. She saw exactly what she expected to see. The bed was made from yesterday morning, the gray-blue sheets pulled taut to the pillows and folded down over a paler gray comforter. The pillows were plumped at the head of the bed. Four of them, their open ends faced out. Two throws in the center—one circular and one oblong in a plaid and a floral. A custom mattress—Tempur-Pedic, all brand-new.
She’d replaced it all after she’d found Ken Macy in her bed, half-dead. Even the rug beneath the bed. Ken’s blood had stained it all.
Alan approached without touching her. “Are you all right, Dr. Schwartzman?”
“I fell asleep with the television on,” she said, not meeting Alan’s eyes.
He glanced at the blackened screen. “Of course,” he said quickly.
The security officer behind him made a noise, and Alan cut him a hard stare.
For several seconds her lie dissipated across the room like a bad smell.
“I appreciate you coming in to check, Alan,” she said. “I’m sorry if I woke the neighbors.” If I woke the neighbors. Because it wasn’t the television. It was me screaming because Spencer was there, stabbing Ken again. As though I were seeing it the first time. But I didn’t. And Spencer didn’t stab Ken Macy. He had Carol Fletcher do it for him while I was drugged in the bed beside him.
“You sure you don’t want me to take a look around?” Alan asked.
“I’m fine. Thank you again, Alan.”
She followed the men to the door and locked the bolt and the chain after them. Her back to the door, she rubbed her face. Ken had been here. He’d made her soup. They’d curled on the couch and started Bringing Up Baby. What then? A piece of paper on the coffee table replaced the bowls and glasses that had been there the night before.
A note from Ken.
Good morning. You were sound asleep by ten thirty, so I borrowed the key off your ring to lock myself out. I assume you have an extra? Let’s make a date to finish the movie.
Baby reminds me a little of someone I know . . .
She smiled. Her father used to say she was like Baby. Or, more specifically, like Katharine Hepburn. As a young girl, the comparison seemed funny, but she enjoyed the actress’s antics. Like Hepburn, Schwartzman preferred pants to dresses and was extremely active if not exactly athletic. Schwartzman liked to think she had some of the actress’s boldness, as well. But that was a long time ago.
After her father’s death, Schwartzman lost the best of Hepburn’s qualities. Her independence, her outspokenness, her spirit—all of it vanished entirely and seemingly at once.
It was that woman—barren of confidence and resolve—who’d married Spencer MacDonald.
An independent, intelligent woman would never have married a man who raped her on their first date. And yet she had. She’d yielded to the inner voice that told her he was the best she could do, that she owed it to her mother to marry him and take her position in society—the position her mother had wanted for her since birth.
Had that inner voice been her mother’s? Or Spencer’s?
She ought to be able to stitch together the fabric of who she’d been before, during, and after Spencer. Yet the edges of the tapestry between her father’s death and her marriage to Spencer and the woman she was today never lined up. Their patterns had shifted entirely—from stripes to spots.
The fact that she became a person unrecognizable to herself left behind the question of whether history might repeat itself. If she was truly the strong, intelligent woman she wanted to be, how could she have let herself become a victim so easily?
Whenever she measured her success, her marriage to Spencer canceled out whatever else she had accomplished. She wondered if that would always be true, or if someday she would understand how she’d made such a mistake. And forgive herself. Schwartzman made tea and let her mind drift to the death certificate that had been left on her car. The name Joseph Strom wasn’t familiar to her. She should call her mother, but she couldn’t muster the energy. Instead she sent a text message.
Mama, hope you are doing well. All good here.
Except the cancer. And nightmares about Spencer.
Ran into someone from Charleston. Do you know the name Joseph Strom?
She tried to think of something else to say but came up empty, so she signed it XOX.
Her phone rang on the coffee table, a call from the morgue’s main number.
She straightened her back and adjusted the pillows on the couch. “Schwartzman.”
“Hey, Doc. It’s Wally Jacobs.”
Hearing Wally’s name reminded her of Roy, the new assistant, and his weird behavior the night before. His tattoos, the missing scrub pants.
“Good morning, Wally.”
“We’ve got an unattended death that came in last night. Paramedics responded to a man unconscious in a van off the Embarcadero at six nineteen.” His inflection made it sound as though he was reading from a script. “Pronounced dead on the scene. We got photographs inside the van, and nothing showed up in X-ray. After the day with Posner and your . . .” Wally remained quiet for a second too long.
“Chemotherapy,” she finished for him. “You can say it.”
“Right. After that,” he said, suggesting he couldn’t actually say it. “The director thought this one could wait until this morning. He’s in drawer twelve.”
“Thanks, Wally. I’ll be there within the hour. Any updates on the toxicology on Todd Posner?”
“Posner?” he asked as if he was unable to place the name. “Oh, right. Todd Posner.” A short delay. “Nope. Nothing yet. I’ll follow up.”
She moved quickly through her morning routine, made a single cup of coffee for the road, and arrived at the morgue within the hour.
Settling in, she went straight to work on the victim in drawer twelve. The remains were of a Caucasian male, looked to be in his late thirties, approximately five nine, 190 pounds. Discoloration of the fingertips and teeth suggested tobacco use, not that she needed those signs to identify a smoker. She could tell from the second she had entered the morgue. The whole room smelled of it.
He’d been found with his wallet and ID. No signs of foul play. ID said he was Ben Gustafson. Thirty-six, so he was a little younger than he looked. Not surprising for a smoker. Lived in Albany across the bay and worked for a satellite TV company.
The autopsy on Gustafson was noneventful. He was found in his work van a short distance from the main road. Likely he’d pulled off after feeling some pain or dizziness. The case presented like sudden cardiac death, but the autopsy showed no signs of coronary thrombus, no myocardial infarction, and no signs of ruptured plaque. There were also no signs of significant coronary artery disease. Still, his weight and the fact that he was a smoker put him at a higher risk for heart failure.
In about half the cases like this one, of “sudden death,” an autopsy would identify no specific pathology. The accepted conclusion in those cases was that death was caused by primary arrhythmia.
Schwartzman didn’t like the cases where she was unable to identify the pathology. She liked answers.
After double-checking her findings, she set aside her organ samples to study under the microscope and stitched up the Y-incision on Gustafson’s chest. As she was collecting her tools, the lights in the morgue flickered.
She happened to be standing beside the victim’s head, and the flash of light caught the sheen on Gustafson’s face in a way she hadn’t noticed before. When the halogen lights glared brightly again, she retrieved her alternate light sources and shut off the overheads. There was no sign of abrasions or contusions on the area around his mouth where she thought she’d seen something, but under the fluorescent wand, a series of small droplets appeared across Gustafson’s cheeks and chin. Expectorate could cause that type of pattern—if he’d coughed into his hand, for instance, and some of the saliva or phlegm had bounced back at his face.
But when she studied his hands, there was no sign of trace on them. He might have coughed into his shirtsleeve.
She played with the light, checking for continuity of the droplets across his face, but there was a large void around his mouth and nose. Maybe he had wiped his face. She made a note for Roger to check for traces of fluid on his clothes and took separate samples of the droplets on his cheeks and chin and the areas of void around his mouth and nose.
She returned Gustafson to drawer twelve and checked her phone. She had one text, her mother’s reply to her question about Joseph Strom.
Don’t know the name.
She silenced the phone and set it aside. Maybe her father had known him. There would be a lot of people he knew through work who her mother would not have met or even heard of.
Her stomach growled, and she was trying to decide what might taste good when Hal called. “You free?”
“I was thinking about food,” she said honestly.
“I found Sandy. She’s over in Oakland.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“No. I didn’t want to call, so I’m heading out now. Can you join me?”
She scanned the morgue. There was plenty of paperwork but no cases awaiting autopsy.
“I’ll feed you,” he added as though she was holding out for a better offer.
“How soon?”
“How soon will we eat?” he teased.
“No. How soon will you be here?”
“Ten minutes.”
“I’ll be ready,” she said and went to pack up a travel kit. There was no reason to think she’d need it, but the kit was comforting. It reminded her that this was a job she could do.
And right now that kind of comfort was worth clinging to.
14
Hal pulled up to the morgue entrance and stopped at the curb as Schwartzman walked out into the bright sunlight. Her hair blew in the wind, and she kept her jacket tied closed although he was hot in his shirtsleeves. Her purse hung off one shoulder, and in the opposite hand was a small blue toolbox, a mini version of the large ActionPacker she took to their scenes. She looked better than she had yesterday—better even than she had the night before. Seeing the improvement reminded him how well she handled those first days after chemo.
He knew her treatments were on Mondays, three weeks apart. Four treatments total. She never talked about it, so he kept her progress in his head. It seemed important that he know how she was going to feel.
Not that he needed to remember it. Since the first treatment, her disposition had forecasted the arrival of the next. The week before the second treatment, she’d changed. Not much of a talker to begin with, she’d grown quieter. She was less patient with the morgue assistants and with the officers on the scenes. If she weren’t so pleasant about it, he’d say she got grouchy. But grouchy for Schwartzman was right below saintly in his book.
He had offered to accompany her to the treatments, but she was stern in her refusal. If she’d had her way, he suspected no one would know she had cancer. But someone had to get her home from the mastectomy.
Hailey had arranged to get the day off work to help Schwartzman, but at the last minute, her daughter Ali had come down with the flu. Even if Hailey could get away, it seemed like a bad idea for her to show up after she’d been spending time with a sick kid.
So Hailey had recruited Hal.
Schwartzman had clearly been surprised when she’d woken up from surgery to find him instead of Hailey. Not surprisingly, she’d handled it the way she always did—deflecting attention, masking the pain.
He popped the trunk, and Schwartzman loaded her small kit inside. She put her hand on the car as she came around to the passenger side as if she needed it for balance or support. It had been four days since her last chemo treatment. Week two was the reprieve. She would feel mostly better by then. Her energy would return. But by week three, she’d be starting to worry again about the upcoming treatment—about feeling sick and tired, about missing work, and likely about the cancer itself.
She took off her coat before getting in the car and set it over her lap and shivered. Something else he knew from Hailey. She was perpetually cold . . . until she was boiling hot. He adjusted the vents toward himself and turned down the AC.
As soon as she was settled in the car, relief washed over him. He’d been spinning this case in his own head alone for too long. “Ready?”
“Ready,” she confirmed, fastening her seat belt.
Hal put the car in gear and started toward the street. They were heading to Sandy Coleman’s address of record. Coleman’s name had been found in Posner’s mouth, which meant the killer was trying to tell them something. Going to see her was the obvious next step.
“I’ve got some news on Posner.” She gripped a small stack of papers with two hands. “Checked my e-mail on the way out the door and we got tox results.”
“Tell me,” he said, desperate for a break in the case.
“That mole?”
Hal nodded.
“It was an injection site.”
“Of?” he prompted.
“Detomidine mixed with butorphanol.”
Hal forgot the drug names even as she spoke them. He’d never heard of either. “What the hell are those?
”
“The detomidine is an alpha-2 drug.”
He shook his head. “Alpha-2?”
“It’s a drug that shuts down the release of adrenaline. It’s used for sedation.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “A sedative. Prescribed by a doctor, I assume?”
“A vet, usually,” she said.
Hal stared at her.
“It’s a sedative cocktail used in horses,” she explained.
“Horses?” Hal repeated.
She seemed excited. “Does that offer any clues?”
“It might.” He lifted his mobile phone, put a call into the cancer center, and requested Tamara Long. He was on a brief hold before Tamara came on the line.
They exchanged quick pleasantries before Hal got to business. “I’m calling with an odd question. I need to know if anyone at the center owns horses.” He put the phone on speaker and held it so Schwartzman could hear, too.
“Not that I can think of,” Tamara said. “Not many people in the Bay Area keep horses.”
“How about someone who grew up with horses? Or someone with a vet in the family.”
“I can check.”
Hal held his sigh to himself. “Call me if you think of anyone who has a connection to horses—owning, riding, anything.”
“Will do,” she promised, and he could hear her talking to someone else before the call ended.
“Something might come of it,” Schwartzman said.
“It might,” he agreed, though not convincingly.
“Where’s Hailey?”
“Wondering why you’re here instead?” he asked.
“It crossed my mind.”
“Hailey is out on another case.” For the past month, Hailey had been part of a domestic homicide task force focused on increased support for domestic abuse victims before they became homicide victims. It was supposed to be a part-time thing, but lately he rarely saw her.
“And I’m a doctor, so you thought I might be useful.”
“It crossed my mind,” he returned with a smile.
She paused and lifted the page again. “I’ve got more. The blood results from the femoral artery also came back. They show an increased level of white blood cells.”
Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2) Page 11