Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2)

by Danielle Girard

  The apartment looked like it had on Friday night. She had not been cleaning. Unfortunate but not surprising.

  He took a gulp of the wine and wanted to reach into his pocket, wishing the cyanide spray was there. It could all be over so quickly, so neatly. God, he loved quick and neat. But he didn’t have the spray.

  She moved closer to him. “You seem distracted.”

  “Sorry,” he said, snapping himself into attention. “Still thinking about work.” He took her hand and gave her a little pull. She came to rest against him, and the feel of her breasts made him slightly nauseated. He leaned down and kissed her. She tasted of wine—tart and acidic. Her tongue too soft, like a raw oyster in his mouth. He forced himself to kiss her. He tried to recapture the excitement he’d had Friday night. How hot she’d been then, how sexy.

  How quickly the feelings could dissipate. Vanish.

  Her perfume was cloying, too sweet. Her breasts felt too soft, limp against him as she pressed in, her breath like stale bread behind the wine. He kissed her neck and noticed she smelled vaguely of sweat from the day. He pulled away, leaned against the counter and put his hand on the surface, only to grab it back as if burned.

  More fingerprints. Damn it.

  He drank more of the wine.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “We could order something. There’s a good Thai place nearby.”

  It would not do to have someone else come to the apartment. Pull it together. Do it.

  He refilled their glasses and had downed his glass within a few minutes. Only afterward did he realize it wasn’t smart. He needed to have all his faculties working. She was watching him, taking a small sip of her wine. “Must’ve been a bad day.”

  He set the glass down and leaned in to kiss her, giving it all he had, pulling his hands through her hair and reaching down to cup her buttocks. He pictured Ginger, his go-to. He lifted her off the ground. She squealed as her wineglass tipped. Wine poured down his back. He took the glass from her hand. More fingerprints. Put it on the counter, carried her to the bedroom, and tossed her onto her back on the bed.

  She reached down to unbutton her blouse. He stood over her, gathering his nerve. Anger. He needed anger.

  He got on the bed on top of her. She was wiggling out of the blouse, her wrinkled, fleshy breasts swaying side to side, when he closed his eyes and put his hands around her neck and squeezed.

  He kept his arms straight, elbows locked and his eyes shut as she thrashed beneath him. She bucked her hips, catching him off guard. He almost fell over. Her fingers reached his face. Before he was able to pull away, her nails dug into his neck.

  He howled and reared his head away, tightening his grip.

  She scratched and clawed at his arms, pried his fingers, but he didn’t let go. He watched her wide, terrified eyes. Confusion, hurt, anger all passed through them. Then there was only fear. Terror.

  It made him grip harder.

  Finally she stopped fighting. Then she was limp beneath him.

  Still he squeezed her thin neck in his hands.

  He held her there until his fingers cramped, and pain shot through the muscles in his forearms. Until it felt as though she’d never moved beneath him.

  And then he forced himself to hold on longer, to be sure. Until the tremors in his muscles made it impossible to hold the grip any longer.

  25

  Hal drove toward the morgue to meet Schwartzman. It was early, and the streets were relatively quiet. An hour from now, the trip would take him twice as long. He’d wanted to attend the autopsy on David Kemp, but he’d been busy with interviews. After speaking with Alison Kemp, he’d gotten in touch with some of David Kemp’s friends and colleagues. Each person he spoke with had offered another name.

  If Posner was an utterly unlikable jerk, Kemp was his opposite. A successful orthopedic surgeon with an easygoing attitude and a great bedside manner, Kemp was liked by everyone—patients, colleagues, and friends. The story about David Kemp was as consistently positive as Posner’s had been negative.

  One mother who lived down the street said Kemp met her and her son in the hospital on a Sunday a couple of months back, coming in especially to set her son’s wrist after he broke it skateboarding in front of Kemp’s house. His friends reported that he was a regular guy—young kids, a happy marriage—at least from what they could tell. He played basketball in an over-forty league, and one of his friends joked that Kemp was almost eligible for the over-fifty group. Kemp had married at forty-three, and Alison was fifteen years younger. According to those who knew him, he’d been a playboy in his day but had mellowed with age.

  Hal hoped Schwartzman could pinpoint time of death. His neighbors hadn’t noticed any strange cars on the street, but the Kemps had a three-car garage, so an extra car might easily have been hidden there. And Kemp’s wife didn’t hear from her husband while she was gone. They were pulling his cell phone records, but so far they were unable to narrow the time of death between Thursday evening and Friday late afternoon when the hospital tried to reach him. They called several times before giving up and calling another doctor to cover Kemp’s shift.

  Alison Kemp said it wasn’t unusual to not speak to her husband when she was gone. The on-call weekends were intense, so he slept odd hours and she worried phoning him might wake him during one of his rare chances to sleep.

  She usually texted him—with little news of the day, pictures of the kids playing in the sand or at the aquarium near her parents. This weekend she hadn’t gotten any response. Also not unheard of, she’d said, breaking down at the thought of her husband, who had been dead in their house for days.

  Hal wished he’d brought another cup of coffee for the road. The further they got into this case, the more coffee he needed to keep going. It was eight days after Todd Posner’s murder, way past the ideal time to catch a killer, and Hal was at the same dead end. He’d followed up on every lead he had. The Frasers were no longer suspects. Patrick Fraser had been at his job at UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library for eight hours when Gustafson was killed. Even with his lunch hour, there was no way he crossed from the East Bay into the city, killed Gustafson, and gotten back inside two hours, let alone the fifty-seven minutes his time card showed him out at lunch.

  Hal also had a follow-up call with Norman Fraser regarding the assault charge. Fraser’s story was that the kid had been a friend of Patrick’s, and Fraser had gone over there “just to talk to him.” When he’d arrived at the kid’s house, Patrick’s friend was just getting out of his car and was extremely intoxicated.

  “He’d driven himself home and I was basically holding him upright,” Fraser had told Hal on the phone.

  According to Fraser, the kid’s father had come out of the house and blown a gasket—likely furious with his kid for driving drunk and embarrassed that Fraser had found him in that condition.

  Hal found Schwartzman in the morgue. A body—Kemp’s he assumed—was laid out on the table, covered in a white sheet. Across the morgue, Schwartzman sat on a stool, a travel coffee mug and her laptop open on the small table in front of her. He knocked, and she waved him in.

  She spun on the chair toward him and lifted her coffee mug to her lips. He could tell from the swiftness of her movements that the nausea had abated. He was glad to see her cheeks had regained a bit of their color, though she was paler and thinner than she’d been a couple of months ago.

  Hal rolled the second stool toward the table where she sat and sank down on it. “What’ve we got?”

  “Judging from the early stages of decomposition, time of death is most likely sometime between Thursday night and Friday noon. Leaving the window open helped slow things a bit, but I’ve taken that into account.”

  Hal retrieved his notebook and wrote. “Makes sense. He was due at work Friday morning and never showed.”

  “Also, the lab did confirm the red liquid is Adriamycin. Red Devil,” she added.

  “Same as Posner,” Hal said.

  “Yes. But other
than the presence of the chemotherapy agent, there are no obvious physical connections between Posner’s death and Kemp’s. There is no evidence to tie the two scenes.”

  “Other than the Red Devil,” Hal pointed out. “And the Red Devil is a big similarity. I don’t know that there’s ever been a case that involved death by chemotherapy agent before.”

  “Yes. It certainly connects the deaths,” she agreed.

  “But?” He knew there was one coming.

  She nodded. “There was no Adriamycin in Kemp’s stomach.”

  “So he didn’t ingest it?”

  “Right,” she said. “And the burns on his face were minimal. It’s likely he was dead or close to dead when the toxin came into contact with the skin. There was no detectable increase in white blood cells in the surrounding tissue, which we would expect to see if he were still living.”

  “So the injury to the head killed him.”

  “Yes.” She rose and retrieved a metal pan with an odd-shaped piece of white plaster from the table beside Kemp’s head. “This is the mold I made of the contusion.”

  He lifted the mold and turned it over in his hand. The straight-edged end, the rounded cylindrical side. “We didn’t find any wine bottles at the scene, and not a lot of alcohol in the house in general,” he said. That had struck him as odd. In his experience, affluent people usually had a lot of wine and spirits around. “Recycling was picked up Thursday morning. We found a bottle of single malt on the kitchen counter, but no evidence that it had been used as a weapon.”

  “The weapon was bottle shaped, but I found something interesting in the wound.” She set the tray down and lifted a small plastic baggie. Inside it was a tiny fleck of blue.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “It looks like some sort of paint.”

  Hal was thinking. “He was hit by a painted bottle?”

  “A painted something that was bottle-shaped,” she clarified.

  “Well, what the hell would that be?” Hal asked.

  “Naomi is on her way to the house to check for something we might have missed. I’m going to take this sample to the lab so they can test it. I was waiting to talk to you.”

  Why did the killer use Red Devil if not to kill Kemp? He could understand using the bottle as a bludgeon if the Adriamycin wasn’t working, but to inject Kemp with the chemo drug after he was already dead didn’t make sense. “So Kemp didn’t drink the Adriamycin, but what about the needle? Did the killer try to inject it? You said last night that the needle went through the vein.”

  “It did,” she confirmed. “I found a minimal amount of the toxin in the tissue of his arm behind the needle mark. It was only evident because of the color. Like with the tissue on his face, there were no signs of the body reacting to the toxin. No increased white blood cells, no bruising at the injection site.”

  “Which means he was dead when the needle went in.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He was hit on the head before the Adriamycin was either poured into his mouth or injected into his arm. Based on the skin response, I would theorize that the Adriamycin was poured first and then injected. But he was already dead.”

  With Posner, Red Devil was the main event. Everything else—the horse sedative, the restraint on his leg—had been a way to get Posner to ingest it. Red Devil was related to cancer, which was Todd Posner’s field. David Kemp had no connection to cancer or the cancer center. At least not that Hal could figure out.

  But somehow the murders were connected.

  They had to be.

  “So cause of death was?” he asked after a moment.

  “Severe brain injury due to blunt force trauma.”

  Hal couldn’t motivate himself to get up. Posner had died after as long as three hours of torture, his brain so swollen that it was like a smooth lump of clay. Then there was David Kemp. Dead—or nearly dead—in a matter of minutes. And finally Gustafson. How the hell did the cable guy fit into any of this?

  “You okay?” Schwartzman asked.

  He nodded and rose to his feet. “You heading to the lab? I’ll walk you.”

  “Sure. Let me grab my coat.” Schwartzman slid the drawer containing David Kemp back into the wall and pulled on her coat.

  They walked together to the main building. He was trying to decide what steps to take next. He’d go see Ruth Finlay, ask about any conflicts among the board members and see if anyone hated Posner enough to kill him. Then he’d hope that something came up on Kemp—the traffic cameras or some fingerprints. Something.

  He would have loved to ask Schwartzman to come with him to meet Ruth Finlay, but he could see she was still not feeling 100 percent. She needed her rest. No word from Hailey today, so he was on his own again.

  She stopped short of the stairs. “Have you heard anything more from Harper Leighton?”

  He hadn’t thought about the detective in Charleston, not since the night he and Schwartzman had talked about Spencer. He should have reached out, made sure she was okay. “Not since you and I talked to her.” Hal watched her face, read fear in her expression. “Why? What’s going on?”

  She hesitated, her lips parting as though she was about to tell him. Then her gaze shifted over his shoulder. Her mouth snapped closed, and her eyes narrowed.

  Hal turned and saw a blond man walking toward the morgue. His thin frame, his crew cut—it was the same kid he’d seen watching Schwartzman in Starbucks. “Who is that?”

  “Who?”

  “The blond, the one you just glared at.”

  Her eyes flashed wide. “I did not.”

  Hal held her gaze.

  “He’s a new assistant at the morgue,” she said. “Roy.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “No,” she admitted. “But I don’t know why. He’s practically a kid.”

  There was something creepy about him. A quiet anger, unusual in a kid who looked like him—young and blond. Not a bad-boy anger. Real fury.

  Schwartzman stood stiffly beside him.

  “Has he done anything?” Hal said, tracking the kid. “Threatening, I mean?”

  She shook her head as the kid disappeared into the morgue building.

  “I should go,” Schwartzman said.

  He thought of the questions she’d been asking. “Is there something going on?”

  “No. He’s just . . .”

  “What is it? Something to do with the case?” Hal pressed. “With Spencer?”

  “No,” she answered quickly. Too quickly. “I’ll see you later.” And with that, she was gone.

  Hal drove to the address Jay Schenck had given him for Ruth Finlay. He had called in advance, though the nurse couldn’t guarantee that Mrs. Finlay would be well enough to talk.

  Hal pulled to the curb in front of the Finlay home. The house was in an area zoned for both commercial and residential buildings. Finlay’s home was two stories, and much of the exterior facade looked original, a light-yellow stucco with an ornate design along the top of the building. The house was probably built right after the 1906 earthquake. Again he had the thought that the afternoon would go better if Hailey or Schwartzman were there. He parked and stepped from the car.

  If anyone had insight into who would have known about Sandy Coleman and hated Todd Posner, it was the foundation’s founder.

  If she wasn’t senile.

  Or too ill.

  He was almost desperate enough to cross his fingers. Instead he jabbed the doorbell and waited.

  Behind the enormous door, the doorbell echoed like a church organ. A moment later, the door opened. “Alice Williams,” the woman said. “You must be Inspector Harris.”

  Williams was dressed in pale-yellow nurse’s scrubs with a long gray cardigan. On her feet she wore black clogs. Her skin tone and features looked to be of Hispanic descent, but she spoke without an accent.

  Hal shook her hand. “Thank you again for letting me come by.”

  Williams waved him in. “Of course.”

  Hal steppe
d into a grand marble entryway and glanced up at the chandelier hanging fifteen feet over his head. It had to weigh as much as a baby grand piano.

  “I’m afraid Mrs. Finlay isn’t well enough to come down,” Williams explained. “She doesn’t use the stairs much these days.”

  “I understand,” Hal said. “You mentioned I might be able to go up for a few minutes.”

  “Certainly, she seemed up for company earlier, so I’ll double-check with her. If you would wait here.” Williams turned toward the stairs.

  “Perhaps I could ask you a few questions first.” Hal pointed into the front room. “May we?”

  Williams nodded tentatively. “I don’t know how I can help.”

  “It’s pretty standard stuff.”

  Williams entered the sitting room. She looked around as though the room were unfamiliar before perching on the edge of an armchair.

  Hal sat on the couch and opened his notebook. “How long have you worked with Mrs. Finlay?”

  “This is my second week.”

  Hal paused. “Did you replace someone else?”

  “I don’t believe so—at least not recently.”

  Hal glanced around. The news surprised him, though maybe it shouldn’t have. Schenck did say that Ruth Finlay had always been very independent. Still cooking, cleaning. A place like this took a lot to run, and from the looks of it, she could certainly afford help.

  “I believe they had someone doing some cleaning once a week,” Williams added. “And I know Mr. Finlay was bringing meals in.”

  “Mr. Finlay? That’s Mrs. Finlay’s son?”

  Just then the sound of footsteps came from farther inside the house, and a gentleman stepped through the foyer. “That’s me,” he said, dropping his keys on the front table. “I’m sorry I’m late. I’m Justin Finlay.”

  Hal stood as the man entered the room. He looked familiar, but before he could say from where, Finlay said, “I recognize you from the foundation offices yesterday.” The two men shook hands.

  A six-four black man was probably pretty memorable to a guy like Justin Finlay. “Right, you were on the stairs.”