Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2)

by Danielle Girard

  She used to arrive to their scenes while the inspectors and the crime scene team were still sorting out the crime. Their silence was a sign that she was late today. She had gotten Hal’s call while reviewing the traffic-camera footage.

  “You okay?”

  Schwartzman was startled to find Hal standing beside her. He was staring. Was she okay? Yes.

  She nodded. “Fine.”

  She set her case beside the door and went straight to the body, glad for her jacket in the frigid room. Like Posner, there was red staining on the collar and the front of the victim’s shirt. Red Devil perhaps but not necessarily. There was some redness around his mouth and a thin strip of irritated skin down his chin. Nothing like the injuries to Posner. If this was, in fact, Adriamycin, then this victim had been dead—or almost dead—when the toxin came into contact with his skin.

  She circled the chair and took note of the matted bloody patch of hair and the clear indentation in the skull. He’d been hit with something hard enough to crack his cranium. There was blood down the back of the leather chair and around his neck and the headrest, enough blood to make her think this would likely be the cause of death. Not that she would share that supposition just yet.

  As she finished her circle around the navy recliner, she noticed that the victim’s left arm was dangling beside the chair. Sticking out of the medial cubital vein—the most common site for injections—was an intravenous needle.

  The syringe was filled with bright-red liquid.

  With her initial impression completed, she turned to Hal and nodded.

  “David Kemp,” Hal said. “Forty-nine. He was an orthopedic surgeon at General.” Hal went quiet several seconds before asking, his voice almost a whisper, “Did you know him?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  Hal’s expression showed his relief. This was not about Spencer. Hal said he’d known that already, but he’d still asked. He would want to be sure.

  “The victim was home alone Thursday night. Security system was shut down from the inside around eleven p.m.” Hal turned to Roger.

  “That was unusual,” Roger explained. “Shutting down the security system didn’t mean just disarming the house—which we would expect if he was leaving or having someone come in. Shutting it down entailed disabling the 24-7 camera, as well.”

  “So there was no footage of who was here.”

  “None,” Naomi confirmed. “When a system is shut down, the security company calls as a matter of protocol.”

  “Right,” Roger said. “One of their representatives spoke to Dr. Kemp, who confirmed his password and said he’d shut the system down on purpose.”

  “They didn’t ask him why,” Naomi said, her tone suggesting this was a grave error.

  “But it was something he’d done before,” Roger added.

  “Four times before,” Hal clarified. “All in the last six weeks.”

  A mistress. The most obvious reason for disarming the house so that no film was captured was that David Kemp was expecting someone he didn’t want his wife to know about.

  “You want to know if this could have been done by a woman,” Schwartzman said to Hal.

  He nodded. “We’re working to collect the traffic-camera footage from the rest of the neighborhood. See if we can pick her—or him—up on a traffic camera in the area.”

  Traffic camera. Schwartzman fought to slow her pounding pulse. She needed to return the ADA’s call. What would she say? No. She could not worry about that now.

  “I’m sure there’s a camera on every corner in this neighborhood,” Naomi said.

  “Which is good for us,” Hal said.

  Naomi spoke to Schwartzman. “We’ve got photographs of everything as it was when we arrived.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll get in touch with the Bureau of Transportation,” Naomi said. “Get started on traffic-camera footage.”

  Schwartzman watched her go, her thoughts pivoting again to the film of herself on camera. Almost as upsetting as the footage itself was how she would tell Hal. He had one hand on the top of his head, the way he did sometimes when he was thinking. His focus was on the victim.

  With the pictures already taken, Schwartzman brought her kit and set it beside the body. Roger, too, exited the room, leaving Schwartzman to work. Hal stood off to the side, watching, but he said nothing.

  Dictating as she went, Schwartzman fell into the rhythm of the exam. She studied Kemp’s hands for signs of defensive wounds. There were none. She used a flashlight to check under his nails in case he might have scratched his attacker. She began with his right hand, turning it over to get a better view. The nail beds were clean. Better than that, they were pristine. Even through the gloves, she could feel the smooth texture of his skin. Dr. Kemp was a manicure man, his nails buffed to a smooth surface, the half-moon shapes perfectly round. About a millimeter of white showed at the end of each one.

  “He’s had a manicure recently.” While it varied, human nails grew an average of three millimeters a month. “I’d say the last week or so.”

  Hal said nothing, and she kept working.

  The nails on Kemp’s left hand were as clean as those on the right. He had not scratched his attacker. There was no blood either, which meant he had not touched the wound on the back of his head.

  The blow had been unexpected and almost certainly fatal.

  She bagged his hands and examined the site of the needle injected in his left arm. The needle placement was technically correct—whoever had inserted the needle had managed to hit the medial cubital vein. But they had come at the skin from a ninety-degree angle—straight down. A subcutaneous injection such as a vaccine shot given in the arm was administered at ninety degrees, but an intravenous line was always done with a low-angle approach. Whoever had killed David Kemp had actually inserted the needle straight through the vein and out the other side.

  Not that it had mattered for Kemp. The area showed almost no bruising. Kemp’s heart had no longer been pumping when the needle went in.

  Schwartzman explained the discovery to Hal.

  “So it probably wasn’t done by a nurse. Or a doctor.”

  “Hard to say with certainty.”

  “Right,” Hal agreed. “Might’ve been a nurse and she—or he—was panicked out of her mind because she’d just killed him.”

  “I’ll get him to the morgue and do the autopsy right away, see if I can find anything else.”

  “Murder weapon would be useful.”

  Schwartzman palpated the wound on the back of Kemp’s head, feeling the curve in the fracture, a shelf along the edge of the wound closest to the front of the cranium.

  “You’ve got a guess.”

  She glanced up at Hal. “I can do a plaster once I get back to the morgue.”

  “Schwartzman, I can see it. You’ve got an idea of what it was.”

  She sighed.

  “You can do the plaster, too, but if you think you know—”

  “A wine bottle,” she said. “It might have been a wine bottle. Or something cylindrical with a flat bottom.”

  Hal grinned and slapped his hands together. “Okay. It’s something. We can comb through the trash.”

  Schwartzman opened her mouth to argue.

  “I know,” he interrupted, palms up in surrender. He took hold of her shoulders, squeezed gently. “Thank you. It’s only a guess, but damn if I don’t need something to go on.”

  She nodded and began to pack up her kit as the morgue attendants arrived to transport the body. She was grateful that Roy was not working today.

  Hal was still smiling. She saw hope, always impressed by how little it took to make him motivated, how hard he fought.

  She thought about the camera footage, about the Home Depot bag. But she couldn’t tell him now.

  Let him have his hope.

  One of them deserved to hang on to some hope. She certainly didn’t have any.

  24

  He called the center and
confirmed that Denise had left for the day.

  He might beat her home. She took the train, and he could drive.

  He was furious with himself. Seeing Denise on that video, in the pharmacy with that vial of Adriamycin, he had assumed she was onto him. He had never considered that she might be there for another reason. She had been seeing David Kemp—that schmuck. He knew about that. Hell, everyone did. And on Friday night, she’d said it was over. She had been different—empowered. Strange, because he thought she’d been dumped. Assumed that maybe Kemp had ended their relationship.

  But Denise had ended it more permanently.

  It was only a matter of time before the police zeroed in on her.

  What could she tell them? She didn’t know anything about how he had killed Todd Posner. Or did she?

  Surely she’d gotten the idea of using Red Devil because of him. No. Not because of him. Because of Posner.

  It might all be fine. There was a chance . . .

  But he couldn’t play on a chance.

  He grabbed his keys off the desk and headed for the door. He had slept in her bed. He stopped to think back to that night. God, the sex had been great. Of course it had. She was fresh off a kill. Her first, surely. She was heady and bold.

  His fingerprints were—damn, they were everywhere—the headboard, the bedside table, the counter in the bathroom, the shower, the hallway wall. He’d touched it all. And that was before they’d gone back to bed the second time. Then there was the morning. So early it was barely morning. In the kitchen.

  He’d let sex cloud his judgment.

  And he was furious with her.

  What if he hadn’t heard about Kemp’s death? The police would end up at her home. Where he had been, where he had left his fingerprints and more . . . in the course of their investigation, the police would look into her life, and that might lead to him. Even if the police didn’t think he was guilty of helping her kill Kemp, they would want to question him. He would be in their radar. That was risky. Way too risky. The police would come from San Francisco, wouldn’t they? Her house was thirty miles from the city. Plus they would be focused on Kemp. His wife, his family. They wouldn’t get to Denise tonight. He wanted to believe that it gave him time to make a plan. To make a good plan. To be calm and calculated.

  But he didn’t feel calm.

  He was panicked, picturing his prints all over her apartment.

  He couldn’t eliminate his own prints. There would be too many of them. He’d wipe things down and forget somewhere. It would be much worse for the police to find his prints in some places and wiped off in others.

  He had to think.

  Something would come to him. First, he needed to get to her before anyone else. Before leaving the city, he texted Trent to tell him there was an issue he had to handle at work, and it might take him a couple of hours. He wouldn’t text or call again. As soon as he pulled onto the street, he shut down his cell phone.

  It was dangerous to be unreachable. Trent had a tendency to take an unanswered call as permission to do whatever he wanted—inevitably something stupid. But he knew enough about technology to wager that leaving the phone off was worth the risk. Where he was going—where Denise lived—was way outside his normal route. Thirty miles outside. If the police did zero in on him, his chances of avoiding prosecution for whatever was about to happen—and he knew what that was—were better if his phone couldn’t be tracked bouncing between cell towers near her home.

  No GPS was another benefit of the shitty car he drove.

  The traffic through the tunnel was infuriatingly slow. He listened to bad local radio and clenched and unclenched his fists, one at a time. It took more than ninety minutes to reach her house. The peak of the afternoon rush hour, the apartment parking lot was a frenzy of activity. He drove past her apartment, but the single front window shade was drawn, leaving him with no idea as to whether or not she was home.

  What if she wasn’t coming home?

  She might have gone out for drinks with Sarah, the office lush. Or had another date. A stab of something like jealousy struck him. Would she go out with someone else after Friday? Idiot. He was losing his focus. Too much time with Trent. He was becoming soft, distractible.

  He circled the complex—a monolith of connected townhomes with ground-floor garages spanning five or six square blocks—and came back around.

  He ought to know what kind of car she drove but didn’t.

  He made another loop, taking different side streets, and returned a third time.

  As his gaze found the square window of her apartment, his heart jumped. There. The front shade was open. She was home. He wondered if she would be alone. If she wasn’t, he’d be forced to leave. But he had to try. He had to go there, knock on her door. He had no choice.

  He made a final pass of her building and parked along a side street two blocks down. The engine off, he reached across to the glove compartment and released the lock. It fell open, and his stomach drew into a tight, hard knot.

  None of it was there. Not his gloves or his spray. Only two of the small wipes packets remained.

  He stared at the empty glove box. Damn. Damn. Damn. He’d taken the spray with him Friday night, in the Mercedes, and then brought it into the house when he’d switched cars. It and the new pair of Fratelli Orsini gloves, royal blue this time with matching stitching. They were his favorite so far, bought online and mailed to the office.

  Left behind. All of it.

  How he wished he hadn’t dumped the Taser he’d used on Posner. Why had he been too panicked to keep it? Because it looked like a weapon? Because he’d read that there were tiny variations in the prods that meant it might be traced back to him? No. He’d gotten rid of it because of Trent. The canister, the handkerchief, the gloves—they were all household goods, things he could explain if Trent came upon them. But a Taser?

  What now? He palmed the two packets of travel wipes. Then, the anger building like a hurricane, he threw them back into the glove compartment and slammed it closed.

  He hung his head and pulled the breath in through his nostrils.

  Unprepared. Completely unprepared.

  He drew two deep breaths and let them out slowly, hearing his father’s scornful voice. “You’ve got to be responsible enough for both of you.”

  So he would have to work on the fly. He could do that. She was hardly Todd Posner. The doctor had weighed north of two-twenty. Denise might have been 130 pounds soaking wet.

  Regaining his calm, he gathered his briefcase and coat and was about to get out of the car when another thought came to him. Posner. The glass. The pint glass from Posner’s. He reached under the passenger seat and pulled out the grocery bag with the glass. The residue of Red Devil stained the bottom. It had been there, under his seat, for more than a week.

  He’d forgotten to get rid of it.

  Another loose end he hadn’t tied up.

  What else had he forgotten? His mind started to spiral away from him. No. He had to be the clear twin, the focused one. He had to be sharper, better. Much better.

  Finish Denise. Clean up this mess. Then he could figure out if there were other loose ends.

  He forced another deep breath and stepped out of the car. Briefcase and coat in hand, like any other commuter, he started for her unit. Head down, he swung his keys between his fingers, caught them, swung again. A casual gesture, a man heading home after a long day.

  He passed maybe a half dozen people—a couple of joggers, two mothers pushing baby carriages, a few professionals coming home. He nodded but didn’t speak. People remembered a voice. There must have been eight hundred, maybe a thousand units in the development. These people didn’t know all their neighbors. They didn’t recognize everyone. New faces were normal.

  A couple was coming out of the unit beside Denise’s, so he walked past them, keeping his head low. When they had disappeared around the corner of the building, he doubled back and hurried up the steps.

  With his jacket
covering his hand, he checked the door. It was locked. He rang the bell. Prayed she was alone.

  The house was quiet.

  He thought about all the joggers. What if she’d gone jogging? Damn it.

  He rang the bell again and glanced over his shoulder. A man crossed the parking lot toward an adjacent unit. His tie pulled loose at his collar, a jacket slung over his shoulder, he didn’t look up. Another car pulled into the lot.

  Damn it.

  It was like Grand Fucking Central Station.

  A sound at the door. He held his breath, and a moment later, it opened.

  Denise stood at the threshold in a pair of yoga pants and an oversize blouse. A glass of wine in her hand.

  “Surprise,” he said before she could speak.

  Her eyes went wide, and he felt a flash of panic. That she wasn’t alone. Or wasn’t happy to see him. Had other company. Was on her way out.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Not bothering you, I hope,” he said, shifting toward her.

  She let the door fall open. “Not at all. But you’re such a long way from home.”

  He slid into the unit, pushing the door closed with his backside before setting his coat and briefcase on the floor. “I wanted to see you.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly as she searched his face. He saw doubt.

  “Do you have more of that?” he asked, motioning to the wineglass. “I could use some. What a hellish commute.”

  “You drove?”

  He nodded. “Not the best way to get here.”

  “God, no.”

  She started for the kitchen, and he stepped out of his shoes and loosened his tie, like he, too, was home for the evening. Like this was something they’d done before, a normal night. She seemed to relax as she padded through the living area to the kitchen, brought a bottle of white wine from the fridge, and took down another glass. The bottle was already half-empty, the corkscrew still on the counter. She was starting fast. That was good.

  He took the glass from her hand and made note of it. The first thing he had touched. Today anyway.