Expose

by Danielle Girard

  “It is a drug,” Phyllis said. “Ten times more addictive than heroin.”

  “And how did she respond when you mentioned it?” Hal asked.

  “She said Phyllis was probably right. That’s when I knew something was wrong,” Ben said. “Aleena loved her sugar. She always argued with Phyllis about how everything in moderation was better than cutting it out completely.”

  Phyllis nodded slowly.

  “There was something,” Parveen said.

  “What was that?”

  “She was on the phone one day when I brought Naadiya back. That was last week, Thursday.”

  Hal made a note and leaned forward. “Who was she talking with?”

  “I don’t know, but she sounded very angry. I’d never heard her like that. The apartment door was closed, but I let myself in.” Her gaze lifted to his. “I always let myself in.”

  “Did you hear what she was saying?” Hal pressed.

  Parveen paused before answering. “My English is not as good as Aleena’s. She talks so fast, but I got the sense someone was asking her to do something. Whatever it was, Aleena did not want to do it. The computer was open behind her, but—” She stopped.

  “But?”

  “I could not see what she was looking at,” Parveen said after a moment.

  “You couldn’t see anything?” Hal pressed.

  “There was a man on the screen, but that was all.” Parveen covered her mouth with her hand. Her shoulders trembled.

  The hairs rose on his neck. “What man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She blinked, shook her head. “The picture was only there for a second before she closed the laptop. I really didn’t see him.”

  Hal made a note to bug Roger to get her computer to the tech guys. Roger had informed him that a few computers were already in line, other investigations waiting for evidence. There was always a line, always too many projects for the tech guys and not enough of them. A sudden frustration welled up in him, from the inefficiencies of the job, from budget cuts and understaffing and case overload, from all of it. And on the heels of the frustration, he was tired. He reread the word he’d written in his notebook: Man?? “What do you remember about him? Was he black? White?”

  “He may have been black,” she said after a brief hesitation. “But not as . . .”

  “Not as dark as me,” he offered when she stopped.

  “Yes.”

  “Was he more like Ben?” Hal asked.

  “Not so dark.”

  Hal and Ben shared a look. Ben was not that dark.

  “But not white?” Hal asked her.

  “No.”

  “And not Middle Eastern? Like you or Aleena?” He snapped his mouth closed as he realized he’d compared the two women in exactly the same way she had compared him and Ben, the way that had struck him as idiotic only moments ago. “I mean, something more like one of your skin tones?”

  She drew a breath. “Perhaps. But his eyes weren’t Iraqi.”

  “But maybe from somewhere else in the Middle East? Iran? Or Pakistan . . . Or . . .”

  “They were more Asian,” she said.

  “Asian,” he repeated and found himself picturing a darker-skinned Asian, Thai, or perhaps Malay. “Did you notice what he was wearing?”

  “He was on a stage,” she said. “In a collared shirt, like . . .” She looked to Ben.

  “A button-down?” he asked, tugging on the opposite sleeve of his shirt.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Dark gray. With dark pants.”

  “And he was on a stage,” Hal repeated. Did that make him a public figure? And if so, where? “Do you recall what time you walked in on her?”

  “It would have been about eleven in the morning.”

  Hal noted the time. “Was she on her mobile phone?”

  “She had to be,” Phyllis interjected. “There’s no other phone in the apartment.”

  No landline. They’d put in a request for the cell phone records, and Hal would ask Naomi to locate that call. “Any chance she was speaking to her husband?”

  “I don’t think so,” Parveen said.

  “She and Jared almost always FaceTime on the computer,” Phyllis added. “I don’t think she’s had a normal phone conversation with him since he left.”

  “What happened after that phone call?” Hal pressed.

  “She said she’d be there, and she wrote something down. Then she hung up,” Parveen said. “That was when she asked me if I could take Naadiya. I said yes and asked if everything was okay. She said it would be. That she just needed a couple of days.”

  “She wrote something down,” Hal repeated. “On a notepad?”

  “I don’t know,” Parveen answered, and something in her tone made the declaration final. “I didn’t see it.”

  Hal returned to Naadiya. “When exactly did you take Naadiya?”

  “Tuesday afternoon,” Parveen answered.

  “And you were to keep her for the night?” Hal clarified.

  “Two nights,” Parveen said. “Aleena told me she’d call and come get her on Thursday morning.”

  “But you’d never cared for the baby overnight before?”

  “Never,” Parveen confirmed.

  Hal tried to imagine Aleena’s state of mind. What would have prompted her to need two nights away from her baby? And if Aleena had made arrangements for Naadiya, why was her son in the park with her that night? “What about Kaelen? What was her plan for him?”

  “I asked her as we were leaving the house, and she said he would stay with a friend from school,” Parveen said. “But she never told me what friend.”

  “And you two didn’t know anything about it?” He glanced at the Johnsons.

  “No,” Ben said.

  “I didn’t realize there was a problem until I arrived this morning to bring Naadiya home,” Parveen said. “I saw the tape on the door, and I came here.”

  “Parveen was worried that Aleena had been deported,” Phyllis explained.

  “Aleena is a US citizen, isn’t she?” Hal asked, flipping back in his notes.

  “Yes, but . . .” Parveen glanced between Ben and Phyllis.

  “I see,” he said. Maybe being a US citizen didn’t seem like a guarantee if you were Muslim. Hal didn’t know what to say to that. Of course, they couldn’t deport Americans. But maybe that was like saying that because hate crimes were illegal, the police didn’t kill innocent people.

  He brought his mind back to what Parveen had seen. “And you didn’t see what Aleena wrote down on the notepad?”

  Parveen looked away, shaking her head.

  “You’re certain?” he pressed, sensing there was something she wasn’t saying.

  “Yes.”

  “Was her secrecy unusual?” Hal asked Ben and Phyllis.

  “Very,” Ben said. “She was a very open person, very honest.”

  “She’d spent years hiding her love for Jared from her parents and their friends,” Phyllis added. “When she decided to tell them the truth, she was determined not to hide things from the people she loved ever again. That was us. She always confided in us, especially when Jared was away.”

  Ben gripped his wife’s shoulders from behind.

  “Did you confront her? About what was going on?” Hal asked.

  “We did,” Phyllis said, her voice grave.

  “And?” Hal prompted.

  “She left,” Ben said.

  “Angry?”

  “No,” Phyllis said. “It was clear that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “And I probably would’ve pushed,” Ben admitted.

  “Aleena knew that,” Phyllis said. “When she didn’t bring Kaelen to us on Tuesday night, we figured her work schedule had changed. I sent her a text.” Phyllis looked down at the plate of untouched food. She lifted the fork off the table and laid it at the side of the plate. “She didn’t respond.”

  “She wasn’t always
good at responding right away,” Ben said in an effort to console his wife.

  “But it was strange that we didn’t hear from her at all.” Phyllis turned to her husband. “We saw her most days.”

  “She always came to Phyllis when something was wrong,” Ben said.

  Always, Hal thought. Until now.

  Whatever secret Aleena had been keeping, it was big enough that she had kept it from Ben and Phyllis. Hal made a note to follow up with Kaelen’s teacher, whom Aleena would have had to contact if she’d kept Kaelen out of school. Why was he with her that night? Had she been unable to find coverage for him? Or had she decided to keep him? But if she had known the situation might be dangerous, why bring her son?

  Ben reached down and lifted Naadiya into his arms. He bounced her gently, and she laughed, reaching to put her fingers in his mouth. He was stoic and quiet, though it was obvious he adored Aleena and her family. His affection for his wife was also abundantly clear.

  Hal thought again of Aleena Laughlin’s naked body in the park. What had she been planning to do without her children? Something shameful?

  But according to Parveen, Aleena didn’t want to do it, whatever it was.

  Kaelen returned to the kitchen and announced he was hungry. Phyllis directed him to the empty chair beside her as she rose to make him peanut butter toast. Parveen stood to help.

  Though the Johnsons and Parveen Yasmin weren’t able to shed light on what Aleena Laughlin had been doing in the last hours of her life, it was clear that Kaelen and Naadiya were in good hands.

  That, at least, was something.

  He looked forward to telling Schwartzman.

  17

  As was often the case, Malik Washington’s corpse told Schwartzman as much about his life as it did about his death. The scars at the back of his throat were evidence of a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy. While tonsils were occasionally removed in adults, the adenoidectomy was a sure sign that the procedure had been done when Washington was a child, likely a response to a series of ear infections or strep throat.

  While Medicaid assistance offered to the poor covered those surgeries, the process required jumping through a litany of bureaucratic hoops. In her experience, the presence of these scars meant Malik Washington was most likely raised in a middle-class household.

  His hands were soft, the nails trimmed and their beds neat. No signs of dirt, none of the wear she associated with hard living. Flat calluses lined his palm, consistent with playing baseball or tennis or perhaps weight lifting, the kind of training athletes did for cross-training. His broad chest was muscular and trim. Other than the contusion to his skull and the single stab wound, she found no other recent injuries.

  In addition to the scars inside his mouth, Washington also had three small round scars on his right knee, two on either side of the base of the patella, and one located above on the outside of the femur—a common surgical pattern. The lower outside wound would have been the entrance point for the camera and light source. The interior one was for the arthroscopic instrument. The third entry point was where the cannula would have been. Malik Washington had once had surgery on his anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL.

  An athlete.

  And judging from the symmetry and size of his musculature, she guessed he had been a good one. But based on the lack of other injuries—old scars or recent bruising—whatever Malik Washington played wasn’t a contact sport.

  The other thing she didn’t find on Washington was ink—not a single tattoo, something that was increasingly rare in young people. In addition, no piercings, not even the faint scar where one might have briefly lived.

  His body was as clean as they came.

  And what she found internally matched her observations. Pink and spongy lungs and no sign of smoke damage. A good-size, strong heart. If he hadn’t been killed, Malik Washington might have gone on to live a long, healthy life.

  The stab wound that had entered the lower right quadrant of Malik Washington’s abdomen had not been immediately fatal. Like Aleena Laughlin, Malik Washington, too, had died from exsanguination—bleeding out. But for him, it had been a lengthy process.

  The blade had penetrated sections of the large and small intestines and nicked the liver. While it had hit no major blood vessels, the blade severed numerous small arteries and veins of the intestine mesentery, a fatty sheet attached to the intestines. The damage to the rich blood supply of the mesentery had ultimately caused Washington to bleed out.

  Before that had happened, though, Washington spent upward of an hour on the floor, bleeding. As with many injuries like this one, a victim might get up and run. Washington would have been a good candidate for that. He could have gotten help before the blood loss was substantial enough to affect the lungs and brain and cause collapse.

  But the cerebral contusion had prevented Malik Washington from running. Washington struck his head when he fell, likely soon after he’d been stabbed. Based on Naomi’s crime scene photos and the shape and pattern on the skull, Washington struck his head on the handrail right inside the theater’s side door. As a result, he almost certainly experienced some period of extended unconsciousness.

  As there was no evidence that Washington had shifted position after the initial fall, he likely bled out during that period.

  When he woke—if he woke at all—he would have been too weak from the blood loss to move or try to get help.

  Schwartzman made measurements and took tissue samples, double-checking her work before closing up the Y-incision.

  As she made the first loop with the suture needle, she remembered the article she’d read before bed last night, after Hal had left. More and more, funeral homes requested pathologists and coroners not close up the Y-incisions of their autopsies. Once the remains went to the funeral home, the stitches had to be removed for embalming anyway, and the holes from needles or staples used to close the incision leaked fluid after the embalming process was completed.

  Schwartzman always stitched carefully. Not that it would make a difference to the embalming process, if there was to be one for Malik Washington. She moved more slowly for the ritual of the suturing. That time was the closure between her and the victim, an opportunity to sift back through what she had learned about him—both in the way he had died but also in the way he had lived.

  The article’s author had boasted of the increased productivity MEs might gain from eliminating this step.

  Schwartzman disagreed.

  It was odd to imagine completing an autopsy without that time for reflection. Although the process rarely took more than ten or fifteen minutes, it was important. The constant goal of productivity took its toll in the world. She would be happy to have the world shift down a gear or two. She, for one, would suture her victims, close up the secrets they had shared with her. And she’d keep doing it until someone forbade her.

  And if that happened, she’d make a case for continuing.

  Now, as she carefully drew closed the incision along Malik Washington’s young chest, she considered the timeline of his death. As with Aleena Laughlin, the killer had stabbed him only once. Victims who had been stabbed only once were rare. Knife wounds, of which she’d seen plenty, tended to be a matter of overkill. She’d worked on victims with hundreds of stab wounds, although they’d surely died well before the count reached half that high.

  That the killer had stabbed only a single time showed a great deal of control—a very measured person. And, in the case of Malik Washington, also lucky. Because he wasn’t dead after that first wound.

  Surely, someone capable of the kind of perfect incision that had killed Aleena Laughlin was experienced enough to check the pulse on a victim. Malik Washington’s pulse would not have been weak, not for some time after the stabbing. Quite the opposite—adrenaline would have caused his pulse to increase initially. There was no way to know if Washington had been moving or not, if he’d been partially aware or knocked totally unconscious.

  Had the killer realized Wa
shington was still alive? Known and watched the slow death process? Or had he been careless and left the scene, simply the winner of a lottery of dumb luck? The odds were slim, but she’d seen stranger things.

  There was no evidence that Washington had been restrained or held down. There was also no evidence that the victim had experienced a spontaneous death some other way—edema of the lung or aneurism in the brain.

  She tied the suture closed with a one-handed surgical tie, a square knot also called a reef knot in nautical use. Then she cleaned her workspace, returned Washington to his place in the wall, and settled down at her computer to write up her notes.

  It was close to noon when she finished, and her stomach reminded her that the banana she’d had for breakfast was long gone from her stomach. Where was Hal this morning? She had yet to hear from him, which was unusual, as he would have been waiting for her results.

  Her mobile phone rang, and she answered without looking at the screen, certain it would be Hal calling.

  “Schwartzman.”

  “Hello, dear.”

  “Mama,” she responded as her hand instinctively closed the laptop to shield her mother from the gruesome details of Malik Washington’s death. “How are you?”

  “I’m well.”

  There was a pause, and Schwartzman pictured her mother’s face—the strained smile that held her lips taut when she wanted to ask for something. It had been Schwartzman’s father who’d always chuckled lightly and said, “Go on, Georgia. How often does anyone really say no to you?” With the encouragement, her mother’s smile would loosen into the natural one that made her so stunning.

  Schwartzman wouldn’t compel her to speak. Over the past eight and a half years—since leaving Spencer—Schwartzman had tried to reach common ground with her mother, but they’d never had many shared interests. Their relationship had always been arbitrated by her father and, later, by Spencer. And when she had left Spencer, she’d severed a large artery of the relationship with her mother as well.

  The overwhelming evidence amassed against Spencer—the loss of her baby, the bruises that had covered her after the miscarriage and again when she’d gotten free of Spencer last year, even Spencer’s conviction and imprisonment—was never sufficient to convince her mother that Spencer was not the golden boy she’d imagined. Her mother continued to hold tight to her notion that her daughter had wronged Spencer.