Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2)

by Danielle Girard

  “And that means?”

  “The density tells us that Posner was alive for some time after ingesting the Adriamycin. Best guess is between one and three hours.”

  “So he suffered.” Someone had wanted Posner to suffer. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Roger and I talked about the death being possibly related to bondage, sex play—”

  “I heard. He said they found some site where people burn each other with acid for kicks.”

  She nodded.

  “Posner doesn’t feel like a sex crime to me,” he said. “Did you find something?”

  “No,” she said. “I swabbed for fluids during the autopsy. Results show no signs of vaginal or seminal fluid.”

  No sex. “So it wasn’t about sex. If it wasn’t about sex, that leaves us power, money, and love.”

  “Revenge,” she added.

  “Right,” he said. “Forgot revenge.”

  They passed over Angel Island and onto the new section of the Bay Bridge. Until the new bridge had been built, the eastbound direction on the bridge had always been beneath the westbound one. He enjoyed getting to see the bay from this direction—the Oakland Port, the rolling hills in the background.

  “You want some good news?” she asked, her voice soft.

  “I could use some.”

  “Buster’s okay.”

  Hal shook his head. Who the hell was Buster?

  “The dog. Posner’s Australian shepherd.”

  Hal said nothing.

  “I called the vet to check on him.”

  “You checked on the dog?”

  “He was cute.”

  Hal gave her a look.

  Schwartzman laughed. “Okay, I thought it was good news.” She folded her hands in her lap, and her expression grew serious. “What else do we know? Did you talk to Dr. Fraser’s son?”

  Hal nodded. “He’s clean. The kid was at an engagement party—twenty of them in Lake Tahoe for the weekend. Didn’t get home until Tuesday midday.” Lake Tahoe was a three-hour drive without traffic. Too far away to sneak down and kill Posner. Plus there was a constant social media presence of the group from Sunday through the early hours of Tuesday. The group had posted dozens of images on Instagram and Facebook, and Patrick’s Snapchat story showed images of him at the lake throughout the weekend.

  “A solid alibi.”

  “It is.” And Hal was grateful for it. He hated to think that a kid who wanted to go to medical school was the one who had injected Posner with horse tranquilizer, then forced him to ingest a toxin so he would die a slow and painful death. Hal had also confirmed Norman Fraser’s alibi. He and his wife had dined with another couple the night Posner was killed. Without an exact time of death, there was still a slim possibility that Fraser could have gone back out, but Posner’s death had been slow, and it didn’t seem likely that Fraser could have tortured Posner and killed him inside the window Schwartzman had estimated. Hal was running background checks on the two just in case, but nothing was back yet.

  “What other leads do you have?” Schwartzman asked.

  “I went through the list of Posner’s latest girlfriends and the pending lawsuits against him. The legal proceedings are standard. Even the two malpractice cases are pretty minor. No one died; no one’s maimed.”

  “Not enough to warrant torturing him.”

  “Right,” he agreed. “I’m working through the girlfriends. So far they’ve all been short-lived things. No one stands out.” He’d spent a little extra time investigating Tamara Long, even though she wasn’t on the list. She had been easy to eliminate as a suspect. The day Posner was killed, she had spent the afternoon and night in a hospital in Berkeley, acting as doula for a friend who was delivering her first baby.

  “How about all those letters Posner got?”

  “Roger’s got someone working through them,” Hal said, thankful someone else was handling that job. “A lot of irritated folks, but so far no one with a homicidal rage.”

  The two sat quietly for a few minutes. He had opted for Highway 13 over 880, where traffic was lighter and the highway wound through the Oakland Hills. He’d always liked this area, and he tried to anchor himself to the sense of calm he felt driving through it. This was the waiting part, the part he hated. He reminded himself that it took only one piece. He knew this from experience, and yet every time he started a new case with the same thought—what if the piece never came? What if he couldn’t solve it?

  Schwartzman seemed to sense his need for distraction. “Want to hear about acute myeloid leukemia?”

  “Sure,” Hal said, again reminded how grateful he was to have Schwartzman with him. He thought about the way she had been with Norman Fraser, the deference she’d paid to him. He was her doctor. How strange it must have been for her to think of him as a suspect.

  He let go of the thought and listened as Schwartzman described Sandy’s cancer.

  “Rare. Acute myeloid leukemia is almost nonexistent in people under forty-five. Average age for diagnosis is sixty-seven. How old is Sandy?”

  Hal shook his head. “Don’t know. It was hard enough to get her full name. Took me two days of dancing around patient privacy laws. The name and her address are all I’ve got.”

  Schwartzman glanced back down at the folder and then back at Hal. “So Sandy might be . . .”

  “Dead.”

  She said nothing in response.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine.” She lifted the folder again. “Acute myeloid leukemia is also more common in men than women.”

  Hal hadn’t considered that. “Sandy could be a him.”

  She was quiet a moment. “AML starts in the bone marrow and typically moves quickly into the blood. Stem cell transplant is required for cure.” She read over her notes. “Morbidity is greater than fifty percent.”

  “Stem cell transplant? Is that a surgical procedure?” He was trying to figure out how Todd Posner was connected to Sandy.

  “Stem cells are infused through IV. The doctor would order the treatment, but a nurse would oversee the transplant.” She looked up.

  “Posner’s a surgeon,” he said, thinking out loud. “So Posner shouldn’t have had anything to do with a stem cell transplant. The order would come from a medical oncologist. Like Fraser, right?”

  “Right,” she agreed.

  “So why was that name in Posner’s mouth? And how did it get there?”

  Schwartzman paused. “My guess would be that the paper was added peri- or even postmortem. There was no evidence of tooth imprints.”

  “Like you would’ve expected if he’d tried to swallow it.”

  “Right. If he’d wanted to swallow it, I would have expected it to be masticated.”

  “Chewed.”

  She nodded. “The process of chewing manufactures saliva in the mouth, making things easier to swallow. Plus the paper wasn’t fully saturated—it was still relatively dry.”

  “So it hadn’t been in Posner’s mouth long.”

  “Which means Posner probably didn’t put it there,” she added.

  “Right.” Hal pulled to the curb on a quiet residential street in Oakland. The houses were well kept—freshly painted, the lawns small green plots. Most had a tall front fence, and each window was barred. It was weird to be in this neighborhood. The house he’d grown up in was less than two miles from there.

  “You okay?” she asked after a few seconds.

  Hal sighed and released his seat belt without answering the question. He was okay. He was okay until he thought about his dad. Now was not the time for that. If he had his way, there would never be a time for that. “Guess we should go ask about Sandy.”

  Hal led the way to the front door, his black notebook in his coat pocket and his badge in hand. Schwartzman held the folder to her chest, a pen clipped to the front. He rarely showed up at a house without calling first. Even in a neighborhood with a largely black population like Oakland, a strange black man on your front porch wasn’t usually welco
me. Another reason it helped to have Hailey with him. Or Schwartzman.

  People were less likely to shoot at a white woman indiscriminately.

  “Thanks for coming.”

  Her brows rose, and something crossed her face—nervousness or maybe excitement; he couldn’t tell. Not fear. That was one expression he recognized on her, and he was relieved not to see it now.

  The lace curtain beyond the barred window shifted. A woman peered out, and Hal showed his badge.

  There was the sound of locks turning and a chain sliding. The door cracked open.

  “Can I help you, Officer?” The woman behind the door was his age or a little younger. She wore khaki slacks and a colorful shirt with a logo that was partially obscured by the door.

  “I’m Hal Harris with the San Francisco Police Department. This is my colleague, Dr. Schwartzman. We were hoping to ask you a few questions.”

  The door didn’t budge. “San Francisco? Why would the San Francisco police want to talk to us?”

  “We’re here in regard to Todd Posner.”

  She paused a moment.

  “Dr. Todd Posner. He’s an oncologist.”

  “Yes. I remember Dr. Posner. Is everything okay?”

  “I’m afraid Dr. Posner was killed.”

  “Killed.” Her lips thinned. “We don’t know anything about that.”

  “We don’t think you do,” Hal said.

  “We actually wanted to hear about Sandy’s cancer,” Schwartzman cut in. “How Dr. Posner was involved. We won’t take much of your time.”

  The woman behind the door shrank. The weight of Sandy’s cancer. He didn’t want to ask how Sandy was. Maybe he already knew.

  “You’re a detective, too?” she asked Schwartzman.

  “I’m a medical examiner.” Schwartzman pulled out her badge and passed it through the open door.

  The woman returned the badge. The door closed and then reopened, wider this time with the chain undone. She waved Hal and Schwartzman into a small living room, furnished in the same sort of inexpensive oak furniture that had filled his parents’ home. And like their home, this one was tidy. It smelled of lemon and something vaguely floral that he always associated with plug-in air fresheners.

  “I didn’t catch your name, ma’am,” Hal said.

  “Susan Coleman.” She motioned to the couch. “I’m Sandy’s mother.”

  Mother. So Sandy Coleman was—or had been—young.

  “AML is rare in young people,” Schwartzman said, taking a seat on the chair closest to the door.

  “It is. Very. And even rarer in people of African descent. Sandy didn’t fit any of the normal criteria.”

  “How was it diagnosed?”

  “In that way, we got lucky. One day Sandy was a normal eleven-year-old kid. Active, good in school, happy. She finished the sixth grade, and suddenly it was the first week of summer and she couldn’t get out of bed. At first I thought she was just recovering from the end of school—all the activities. But she was so sick. Fever and ached all over. It was a weird time of year for the flu. Plus she hadn’t seen anyone for over a week when the fever started, and the rest of us weren’t sick. We thought it was something she ate or the water. But everyone else in the house was fine.”

  Susan took a moment to compose herself.

  Hal always felt slightly at a loss when talking to parents. Parenthood changed people. His sister had told him having a child meant part of your heart lived outside your body. Intellectually he understood. And he loved his niece and his four nephews. But he knew that fell short of what it meant to be a parent. And, in particular, a mother.

  “Then she got these sores in her mouth,” Susan continued.

  “The flu-like symptoms and the sores . . . they’re both symptoms of low white blood cell count,” Schwartzman said.

  Susan nodded. “So we took her to Children’s Hospital, and they did blood tests. While we were waiting for those to come back, she got one nosebleed after another and started getting these bruises on her arms and thighs.” Susan crossed her arms. “Now this is a kid who played soccer, a kid who had two older brothers.”

  Hal noticed she said had. She had two older brothers. He regretted that she had to go through this again.

  “She never bruised like that,” Susan said. “Children’s Hospital admitted her—tests, tests, and more tests. No one would tell us what was going on. But by then Jimmy—that’s my husband—he’d started reading on the Internet. He thought it was leukemia. Jimmy’s sister is an oncology nurse over at San Francisco General. So we took her there.”

  Hal glanced at Schwartzman. Was she thinking about her own diagnosis? She’d told him her doctor had called her one morning—directly—to give her the news. Had even made her an appointment with the oncologist. How much easier it had been for her with no hoops to jump through. No endless tests. It was why she’d gotten the surgery so soon, so quickly. She’d been ushered through the process.

  Because she was the medical examiner. And Sandy Coleman was a black kid from Oakland.

  Hal pulled out his notebook. “Did you see Dr. Posner?”

  Susan Coleman gripped her hands in her lap. “Yes. My sister-in-law knew him, so she arranged a meeting,” she said. “A stem cell transplant was the only option. We knew that already. But she wasn’t a candidate for an autologous transplant.”

  Hal looked up from his book. “An auto—”

  “It means a transplant of her own stem cells,” Schwartzman explained. “Once the patient is in remission, they can harvest and store her own stem cells in the case that another transplant is needed down the line.”

  “But she didn’t have the healthy stem cells for that,” Susan added.

  “What did Dr. Posner suggest?” Hal asked.

  “He tested us first. Her dad and I and her two older brothers, but none of us were compatible. Which was hard because that was really our best bet.”

  “And after that?”

  “Dr. Posner put Sandy in the system, but he wasn’t optimistic. He said that even if we found a compatible donor, Sandy would be in the hospital at least three months. The chances of rejection were really high and the costs enormous. We honestly didn’t know what we were going to do.” She stared down at her hands.

  Hal waited a beat before prompting, “And then?”

  “We got a call from the angel.”

  “The angel?” Hal repeated.

  “That’s what we called him—Dr. Fraser. He was the one who stepped in when Dr. Posner told us that there was nothing he could do.”

  A sound from Schwartzman. Like something caught in her throat. She covered her mouth and pretended to cough. “Excuse me.”

  Susan Coleman watched her.

  “Would that be Norman Fraser?” Hal asked.

  “Yes,” Sandy answered. “Do you know him?”

  Before Hal could answer, there was the sound of someone struggling to open the front door. After a series of thumps, the door sprang open, and a teenager in shorts and a jersey burst into the room like a hurricane. She dropped a gym bag, a water bottle, a backpack, and a soccer ball, which bounced into the dining room and knocked against the glass pane of the cabinet.

  The girl wore a sheepish smile. “Sorry, Mom.”

  Susan Coleman exhaled. “This is Sandy.”

  Sandy had suffered from a rare cancer most common in white men over fifty with a high mortality rate. And here she was, a teenager in perfect health.

  Schwartzman was smiling.

  “Sandy, do you know Dr. Norman Fraser?” Hal asked.

  “Dr. Norm,” Susan explained.

  “Sure. Dr. Norm helped connect us to the foundation.”

  “What foundation?”

  “The one who paid for my treatment—right, Mom?”

  “We owe Dr. Norm everything,” Susan agreed. “He connected us to the Finlay Foundation, and they took care of us. We call Dr. Norm Sandy’s angel.”

  Hal recalled the crime scene. Why Sandy’s name? What did
she have to do with Posner’s death? There was no way this kid had injected him with a horse tranquilizer and forced him to drink a bottle of Red Devil. Even if Posner had been pessimistic about Sandy’s cancer, she had gotten treatment. Norman Fraser had saved her life when Posner hadn’t tried to help. Fraser, whose son was being blackmailed. Did Fraser know that Posner had blown Sandy off? Was Sandy Coleman another reason Fraser had to hate Posner?

  More troubling was the fact that Fraser hadn’t mentioned his involvement in the Finlay Foundation, yet he’d clearly been involved.

  Seated on the arm of the couch beside her mother, Sandy Coleman spun the soccer ball on her finger.

  “Did you interact with anyone other than Dr. Fraser during the treatments?”

  Sandy looked at her mother. “There were tons of people at the hospital. I was there for more than a month.”

  “Right,” agreed Susan. “The stem cell treatment is quite a production.”

  “Anyone stand out?” Hal asked.

  Sandy stopped spinning the ball and shook her head slowly.

  “Dr. Fraser didn’t perform the stem cell transplant,” Schwartzman cut in. “Did he?”

  “No. It was a nurse named . . . ?” Again Sandy deferred to her mother.

  “I don’t remember her name,” Susan said.

  Hal waited until he was certain Sandy and Susan Coleman didn’t have anything else to add. Then he stood and thanked them. At the door, he turned back. “Do you ride horses, Sandy?”

  “No,” she said, looking confused.

  “She’s never been on a horse. Not many horses in Oakland,” Susan said.

  Hal opened the door and let Schwartzman pass in front of him.

  Walking out the door, he drew a deep breath. He needed to take a closer look at Norman Fraser.

  15

  Schwartzman and Hal were still parked on the street outside Sandy Coleman’s house. Schwartzman glanced up at the windows, picturing the vibrant young woman in her soccer uniform.

  Alive. Healthy.

  She tried to imagine what that family had gone through, being told there was no hope for their eleven-year-old daughter. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Fraser had stepped in.