Expose

by Danielle Girard

  “I have one more question,” Hal said.

  Jared’s hand covered his mouth as he choked back tears.

  “Did dragonflies mean anything to your wife? A symbol of some sort? Maybe a tattoo?”

  Laughlin’s hand dropped from his mouth. “She hated bugs—anything that buzzed. The flies batting against the windows in the apartment during the summer always drove her crazy. She said . . . she said it made her skin crawl.” His shoulders rose in an awkward shrug. “They were just flies.”

  “Any idea why she had this reaction?”

  He shook his head.

  “And did she ever mention anything about dragonflies in particular?” Hal asked.

  Jared’s mouth opened and closed helplessly. “No. I don’t think so.”

  Hal didn’t believe that Aleena Laughlin’s killer had left the dragonfly in her mouth without a specific purpose. The dragonfly symbolized something relevant to Aleena Laughlin. Maybe a reminder of the thing she had feared.

  Whatever that thing was, it had caught up with her.

  And it was almost certainly the reason she was dead.

  25

  Schwartzman sat in the passenger seat of the department car as Hal turned up Third Street toward the Century Hotel. Roger had requested they come as soon as possible. He didn’t explain. Roger liked to present his findings in person.

  Beside her, Hal gripped the steering wheel in both hands, his focus on the road. She wished she could offer something, some tiny sliver that he might morph into a lead. But what could she say? The two deaths might be at the hand of two assailants? But they might not. No. She wouldn’t disturb him until she had something real to go on.

  If she could come up with something real.

  They were coming up on two and half days since Aleena had been discovered in the park, and they didn’t have a single lead. Statistically, every hour took them exponentially farther from their killer, or killers. The case had gone on too long without a break. And even if there were two assailants at work, nothing she’d found in the autopsies had helped identify either of them.

  They were desperate for a lead. And Fridays normally slowed to a crawl as people wound down, focused on the weekend to come. Outstanding calls might not be returned. Questions would not get answered until Monday. Next week would be worse with the holiday, and she would be with Hal’s family. How had she let that happen? But it would be better than being in her house, alone.

  Certainly safer.

  When would every decision stop being about safety? About Spencer?

  When he was dead.

  Schwartzman remembered Jared Laughlin’s helpless expression. To be across the world, knowing that your wife had been killed, that your children had lost a mother—it had to be torture for him. Hal, too, had been quiet. He would be digesting the information they’d gained about Aleena Laughlin. For Hal, they were puzzle pieces that would create the backdrop for her death.

  Laughlin hated insects that buzzed. The sound of insects on glass, the buzzing, made her skin crawl. Schwartzman thought of the buzzing of a fly in the room, the occasional snap as it struck a window in an attempt to escape, then more buzzing.

  Schwartzman’s thoughts returned to the calculations she’d been doing on Washington’s and Laughlin’s stab wounds. No matter how she measured, the two wounds were different enough to make her take note. Not only did the angle and directionality of the blows differ, so did their apparent force and the height at which the attacker stabbed.

  Something about the differences between the two scenes nagged at her. At the same time, she’d found nothing remotely concrete from which to draw any reasonable conclusion.

  Schwartzman glanced at her phone. The company who’d installed her expensive home security system had not yet called back about last night’s front door failure. They had installed a special bolt, accessible by a six-digit code, which was said to be the best of its kind. But after last night, she wasn’t so sure.

  Unless she had somehow forgotten to lock the door.

  On the same day that two light bulbs blew simultaneously. It happened. The house had old wiring. A little jolt in electricity might have burned out two bulbs. But the door?

  According to the person she’d spoken to that morning, the system should be able to tell them whether the bolt had been engaged when she’d left for work. Access tracking—the ability to be alerted when someone entered the house—was another feature of the expensive upgrade.

  She was waiting to hear back.

  Hal pulled into the valet parking lane at the hotel and put the car in park.

  Arriving at a scene without her ActionPacker felt strange, but Roger assured her she wouldn’t need it. Instead, she carried a small tote bag with a supply of gloves and the navy Crocs she always wore to scenes.

  Hal passed his keys over to the attendant, telling him to leave the car up front. He’d stepped in front of her at the hotel’s revolving door and entered first. Her father had once told her that men went first through that kind of door. With most doors, the man followed a different rule, opening the door and standing aside for a woman to enter. Revolving doors were the exception, as they required pushing. Her father took those things seriously. He’d been a gentleman.

  She experienced a little pang at the memory of him.

  Hal moved past the two elevators and stepped on the escalator that ran to the lobby.

  She pointed to the elevators. “We’re going to Room 1201, right?”

  “Right. We’ll get on up here.”

  In the time she’d known him, Hal never got on an elevator when he could avoid it. But the twelfth floor made for a long climb. In the lobby, they followed signs to the elevators that ran to the correct floor.

  When the car arrived, Schwartzman entered first, and Hal stepped carefully, as though making sure the cables would hold his weight. Once inside, he pressed himself to the back corner and gripped the wide brass handrails on either side. Suppressing a smile, she pressed the button.

  Each time the elevator stopped, Hal’s grip tightened on the brass bar until the knuckles on his hands were pink with the effort. She found his fear of elevators endearing and a bit funny, but he did not, so she kept her mouth shut.

  A patrol officer guarded the hotel room door—unusual since Roger had said there was no body. With no sign-in sheet, she displayed her department ID and entered the hotel room. She recognized the blond tech, Chase Hammar. Chase had always struck Schwartzman as a bit of a playboy. He had a very pretty face, and he smiled often and easily. In the beginning, it felt like he was flirting, and for that reason, she tended to avoid him.

  But he’d never been anything but professional toward her, and she’d begun to suspect that she’d misjudged him. He was currently photographing evidence denoted by small, numbered markers made of bright orange plastic. Each time Chase bent over to take an image, a shock of blond hair slipped from his plastic cap and fell across his face. She wondered how many blond hairs they might collect at his scenes.

  “Roger?” Hal called into the room.

  “Hey,” Chase said from the floor.

  “Hey, Chase,” Hal said. “Is Roger around?”

  “I’m here.” Roger’s bald head emerged from behind an open closet door. His skin blended with the eggshell color of the door in a way she found a little disconcerting.

  Roger held a pair of long tweezers in one hand and a small plastic collection bag in the other. “Oh good. You’re both here. Just in time.”

  At the entrance to the room, Schwartzman changed into her Crocs and picked her way across the floor, stepping around the evidence. It was a big room, certainly expensive. Everything in San Francisco was, but this hotel was particularly pricey, and a room this large and at this height—the floors were mostly residential above the twelfth—would have commanded a premium. She imagined it might cost $1,000 or more. Per night.

  On the floor lay a small pink coin purse with a plastic sleeve on the front side that displayed a driver’s l
icense. It wasn’t a California license, and the woman in the photo wasn’t familiar. Schwartzman stooped to get a better look. The license was from Oklahoma, someone named Tabitha Wilson. She scanned the other details, though they meant nothing.

  In the center of the bed, a rounded indentation of wrinkles in the comforter indicated where someone had sat. The bed was made, and there were no personal items on the tables or bureau.

  “Check this out,” Roger said, disappearing into the closet again.

  Hal put out a hand for Schwartzman to go first.

  Schwartzman moved around the door and stepped into a six-by-four-foot closet. Hanging bars ran along three sides of the room. Two white robes hung on hangers along with a plastic laundry sack. On the fourth wall hung an ironing board and, on a small shelf above it, an iron. Below, a safe was mounted on the floor. Beside the safe was a large, dark spot.

  Schwartzman smelled the metallic scent in the still air of the confined space.

  Blood.

  A lot of blood.

  But where was the body?

  26

  The stain covered maybe two square feet of space. Schwartzman pulled gloves from her tote bag and set the bag out of the way. Once her hands were gloved, she approached the stain, careful to remain on its periphery.

  “Have you photographed this yet?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Roger confirmed. “And taken samples.”

  She squatted to one side and pressed her gloved hand into the center of the stain. Blood pooled beneath her touch—the carpet was saturated. There was also evidence of extensive clotting in the surface, so the stain was likely twelve to eighteen hours old. Roger’s team would collect a sample and the lab would be able to give them a better idea of how long the blood had been there.

  “You think she’s dead?” Hal asked.

  Schwartzman looked up at him. “Who?”

  Hal waved to the spot on the floor. “Whoever was here.”

  “You said she.” Schwartzman nodded toward the main room. “Because of the driver’s license?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Hal admitted.

  Schwartzman studied the blood pool. “This could be two liters of blood, or even a little more.” She did the calculations. “A woman who weighs one hundred fifteen pounds has maybe three and a half liters of blood,” she said. “A tiny bit less.” Tabitha Wilson had recorded her weight at 120, so three and a half liters was probably a good estimate for the quantity of blood in her body. “If it’s her blood, then no. It’s unlikely that she lost this much blood and survived.”

  “But a man . . .” Roger started.

  “A two hundred–pound man has twice as much blood,” she said. “Almost seven liters. He could lose this much and survive. As long as he got to a hospital quickly.” She turned to Roger.

  “Naomi is calling around to the hospitals,” Roger said. “Nothing so far.”

  “Why call us?” Hal asked.

  Roger stood to leave the closet. “Chase?”

  Chase paused his work.

  “Where is the number?” Roger asked.

  “It’s in the bin of evidence. Should be close to the bottom.”

  Hal glanced in Schwartzman’s direction as Roger went to the orange ActionPacker, where they stored collected evidence. But her gaze stayed on the plastic bag in Chase’s hand. A thin tube-like shape, black on one end and red on the other. Even without getting closer, she recognized the gold scrawl on the side of the tube. She had one like it in her bathroom—not red but the palest of pinks.

  “What is it?” Hal asked her.

  “Liquid lipstick,” Schwartzman said. “May I see it?”

  Chase handed it to her, and she twisted the bag in her hand until she was able read the name of the color. “Nosferatu.”

  “What is that?” Hal asked.

  “The name of the color,” she said.

  “It looks red,” Hal said.

  “Yeah, but those companies have a million weird names for red,” Chase interjected. When she looked at him, Chase shrugged. “My girlfriend works at Sephora.”

  She read the name again. Something about it tickled the back of her mind. “Nosferatu,” she repeated, waiting for the memory to surface.

  “It’s an ancient Hungarian-Romanian word,” Roger said from across the room. “It means vampire.”

  “It’s the color Aleena Laughlin was wearing,” Schwartzman said, her voice soft as it caught in her throat. “Or one almost identical.”

  “Yes,” Roger said. “That makes sense, considering.”

  “Considering what?” Hal asked.

  Roger pulled a plastic bag from the ActionPacker and handed it to Hal.

  Inside was a heavily creased piece of white paper, a little longer than a business card. One end had been torn. Someone with a sloppy hand had written a phone number across it in blue ink. The last two digits were missing.

  Hal looked up at Roger. “A phone number.”

  “Naomi ran a search on the number,” Roger said.

  “And?”

  “Aleena Laughlin’s number starts with those exact digits,” Roger said.

  Schwartzman stooped down to the license again. “Who is Tabitha Wilson?”

  “We’re working on that,” Roger said.

  Schwartzman handed the lipstick back to Chase. “We can match the color with Aleena Laughlin, but it’s certainly close.”

  “And we’ll check for fingerprints as well,” Chase said.

  Hal stared around the room. “You find anything else?” he asked Roger. He was puzzling it out, and she felt awkward, being there, watching him. Normally, she had her own work to do on the scenes. Where was the body that belonged to all that blood?

  “Not so far,” Roger said. “And we’ve been here most of an hour. There are tons of prints, of course. The walls, the door, dresser, but who knows how old they are?”

  Hotel rooms were rife with prints. The idea of collecting all those partials to try to find a match was overwhelming.

  “We have dusted for prints in the obvious places—doorknobs, toilet handle, sink fixtures—but someone wiped those surfaces clean. We could broaden the collection, but we could easily be looking at a hundred prints or more and still not find the person who was here last.”

  Hal shook his head. “What about the cameras? In the halls?”

  “Nothing. The whole floor is out.”

  “Only this floor?” Schwartzman asked.

  “Yes,” Roger confirmed. “This floor and one of the elevators.”

  Someone hadn’t wanted to be seen coming or going.

  “Who was the room registered to?” Hal asked.

  Roger pointed toward the driver’s license. “Tabitha Wilson.” His phone buzzed on his hip. “I put in a call to Dispatch to run the name.” He stared at the screen. “This might be them.” He pushed a button. “Sampers, you’re on speaker. I’m with Inspector Harris and Dr. Schwartzman.”

  “It’s Villanueva at the desk.”

  “What did you get?” Roger asked.

  “There’s an alert on that name,” the officer said.

  “An alert?” Roger repeated. “What kind of alert?”

  “Tabitha Wilson has been reported as a missing person.”

  “This is Inspector Harris,” Hal interjected. “Who reported her missing?”

  “Her husband,” Villanueva said. “He’s been calling every hour for the past two days, saying he hasn’t heard from her. He’s in Oklahoma.”

  Missing Persons would handle the case. Until it became something else—like assault . . . or homicide.

  “He said she came out here on Tuesday because her roommate from college is sick. It sounds like he’s not a big fan of out here,” Villanueva added.

  Schwartzman stared at the driver’s license, which Chase was photographing for collection. What did a woman from Oklahoma have to do with Aleena Laughlin?

  “What do we know?” Hal asked.

  “Guy said his wife went to Berkeley but only for
a year—her first year. Then she went back to Oklahoma. Never came back. Her last name then was Jones.”

  “Jones,” Hal repeated with a half laugh. “Great. There aren’t going to be many Joneses at Cal.” The school had something like thirty thousand students. Hal sighed. “You know when she was there?”

  “Yes,” the officer said, seeming pleased to be able to answer one of the questions. “She was there from 2003 to 2004.”

  “Has anyone called over to find out who the roommate was?”

  “Yeah. The roommate’s name was Aleena Safar.”

  The name stuck in Schwartzman’s throat. Aleena.

  “Looks like her married name is . . .”

  Hal squeezed his eyes closed as the words came across the line.

  “Aleena Laughlin.”

  “We need all the footage from the whole hotel,” Hal told Roger. “Every camera.”

  “I’ve called the DA’s office to get a warrant,” Roger said.

  “Whoever was in this room may not have shown up on the cameras on this floor, but they are on camera in this hotel. They took somebody out of this room,” Hal said. “Somebody in bad shape. That’s not easy to do without drawing some attention.”

  “We’ll start with the footage from the elevator cameras and then move on to footage from the adjacent floors,” Roger said. “Work our way backward from when the cleaning staff arrived at the door.”

  A knock sounded on the hotel room door, and Chase pulled it open. It was the officer who had been standing guard. “It’s Dispatch for you guys.”

  “Us?” Hal asked, holding his phone. He looked down and saw he’d missed two calls.

  “You and Dr. Schwartzman. They need you in the basement,” he said, pulling the phone from his ear. “There’s a corpse in the basement.”

  Hal looked to Schwartzman, who nodded, again with the fleeting wish that she’d brought her ActionPacker.

  “Tell them we’re on our way,” Hal confirmed, and together they headed back to the elevators for the long ride down.

  27

  Schwartzman was anxious to get to the body, but the hotel manager kept stopping to talk to them. “We’ve never had anything like this happen,” the manager said for the tenth—or maybe the twelfth—time as he described finding the dead woman.