Expose

by Danielle Girard

  The next obvious step would be to call Tabitha Wilson’s husband. First, though, Hal made phone calls. The principal at Kaelen’s school had given him contact information for four mothers whose sons were close friends of Kaelen’s. Not one answered her phone, so Hal left a voicemail for each, requesting they call him back.

  With the other busy work done, Hal called over to Missing Persons. “I need to talk to Tabitha Wilson’s husband.”

  Hal explained the situation, and when he was done, Dolly Casazza said, “Be my guest.”

  Casazza was a veteran of sex crimes who had moved over to Missing Persons a few years earlier. With a deep, raspy voice and a stern composure, she tore into suspects like a bulldog. But Hal had seen her with victims, and there, she was all heart. “That guy calls ten, twelve times a day. Like she’s the only MP we’re working.”

  “I get it,” Hal said, knowing the department handled hundreds of Missing Persons cases at a time. “I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”

  “I’ll be waiting with bated breath,” Casazza said, hanging up.

  29

  Hal leaned forward in his chair and pinned his black notebook open on the desk as he dialed.

  “Hello,” said a rough voice, the single word cracking.

  “This is Inspector Hal Harris from the San Francisco Police Department.”

  “Oh, thank God,” the man whispered. “You found her?”

  “Uh,” Hal said. “I’m trying to reach Tucker Wilson.”

  “I’m Tucker Wilson,” he said, his voice pitching high with want. Please say you found my wife, that voice said. “Did you find her? Did you find Bitty?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not? Where is she?” The tone verged low, closer to anger.

  “I need to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. Wilson,” Hal said, speaking in a calm voice. “If you’ll answer them for me, I’ll give you what I know. That sound fair?”

  “What?” Tucker asked. “What do you want to know? I already told you everything.”

  “Do you know the name Aleena Laughlin?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She was your wife’s roommate.”

  “That’s it. That’s who she came to see. I knew she had a weird name. Bitty said she was foreign. South America? Or . . . I can’t remember. Did you talk to that A—Adin—that woman?”

  “Ms. Laughlin is deceased,” Hal said.

  “She died,” Tucker said. “Bitty said she was real sick. Cancer.” He halted before the word was fully out of his mouth. “Bitty said it was cancer.” He breathed heavily into the receiver.

  Hal hesitated over the intelligence of telling Tucker Wilson that his wife’s roommate had been killed. “We found your wife’s driver’s license at the Century Hotel. Was that where she was staying?”

  “She was staying with her roommate.”

  Hal digested this until Tucker Wilson interrupted again. “And what do you mean, you have her driver’s license? Just that? Where’s her stuff? Where is she?”

  Hal pictured the room. The pool of blood in the closet. Schwartzman had estimated it as two liters, more than half the quantity of blood in someone Tabitha Wilson’s size.

  “That’s all the information I have currently. Your wife wasn’t there.”

  Hal thought again about that room. One step away from the penthouse. A woman from Perry, Oklahoma. A cracked and worn driver’s license, held inside a cheap sleeve with a little coin pouch on the back, split at one end and frayed along the top edge. The clasps that held the coin purse closed had once been gold but were faded. How had this woman afforded a room that cost $900 a night? And yet the room was in her name. Paid in advance.

  Naomi had talked to the hotel’s accounting department. The room had been paid for via wire transfer. An offshore account. None of those things felt right for a woman named Bitty married to the man on the other end of the line.

  “Where the hell is she without her license?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “What’s this hotel you’re talking about?”

  “The Century Hotel,” Hal repeated.

  “She never said anything about a hotel. She was staying with her—with her roommate.”

  Bitty couldn’t have stayed in Aleena Laughlin’s tiny apartment. There was no evidence that anyone other than Aleena and the kids had been staying there. “When did you last speak to your wife, Mr. Wilson?”

  “My sons—they talked to her on Wednesday morning.” Wilson was breathless, even as he started talking. “She went out there to help her friend. Her roommate.”

  Schwartzman hadn’t mentioned any sign that Aleena Laughlin was sick, so Bitty had lied to her husband. Why? Because he wouldn’t have let her come to California if she’d told him the truth? Because it was easier to tell him that Aleena was dying than to tell him . . . what? What had she come out here to do?

  And where was she now?

  “And your wife came to help her—the roommate,” Hal repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “When was that?”

  “Tuesday. She left out of the city on the afternoon flight and got out there around eight o’clock.”

  “The city?” Hal repeated, wondering if Tucker Wilson considered Perry, Oklahoma, a city. Hal hit the space bar on his computer to wake it up and entered Perry on the search engine. Population: 5,075.

  “Oklahoma City,” Wilson replied, as though Hal were an idiot. The words seemed to be followed by, “What other city is there?”

  Hal didn’t argue. He made another note. The room at the Century Hotel was booked for Wednesday and Thursday nights, so where had she stayed when she arrived on Tuesday? He’d get Naomi to search for credit card activity in Tabitha Wilson’s name. “Okay. Did Bitty give you any contact information for Aleena Laughlin?” Maybe there was a third party involved.

  “No,” he answered a little more sheepishly. “I’ve been calling Bitty’s number, but she hasn’t been answering. Not since Wednesday. The boys are starting to worry.”

  “When was your wife supposed to be home?” Hal asked.

  “She didn’t say. Not exactly. By the weekend, though. She said that.”

  That would be today, Hal thought. Friday. It matched what Parveen Yasmin had said, that whatever Aleena Laughlin had been doing would be completed by Thursday. Was Tabitha Wilson there to participate? Or for moral support?

  “She was dying,” Wilson burst out.

  “Who was dying?”

  “That roommate. Bitty didn’t say she had cancer. Bitty said she was dying.”

  Hal chewed on that. Did Aleena Laughlin know her life was in danger? “But your wife—” He had a hard time saying the name. “Bitty didn’t indicate that she thought it would be dangerous?”

  “Dangerous?” Wilson’s voice pitched high. “The lady was sick. She was dying.”

  There were a lot of ways to interpret what Bitty Wilson had told her husband. Hal didn’t mention this. Instead, he asked, “And you’re certain your wife wasn’t planning to stay at a hotel?”

  “I’m positive. She was out there to take care of her roommate.” Again, with the tone like Hal was an idiot.

  “Her roommate from Berkeley?” Hal clarified.

  “Yes.”

  Hal thought about Tabitha Wilson. Bitty. What kind of name was that? Tucker Wilson didn’t seem like the kind of guy who wouldn’t pay attention to where his wife went and when she’d be back. Which meant she had lied. About why she traveled to San Francisco, about Aleena’s alleged illness, and about where she’d stayed.

  And the Century Hotel? It was arguably the most expensive place in the city. If she had paid for it. If she had access to an offshore account. But he couldn’t imagine she did.

  They had identified the man staying in the room reserved under Tabitha Wilson’s name as Malcolm Wei, a speaker at the software conference hosted by the hotel. Naomi had run a full background check on him. Wei was born in Hong Kong to American expat parents. He ha
d returned to the States for college—Yale—and then business school—Wharton. He looked as clean as they came, except for one detail—no one could locate him.

  Where the hell was he? They had issued a BOLO—be on the lookout—with Wei’s image to the police and hospitals within a hundred miles of San Francisco, but so far, nothing.

  If Tabitha Wilson hadn’t booked that room, then who? The same person who had killed Aleena? Why kill Aleena Laughlin, then book the roommate in Century?

  He considered that someone had paid Tabitha Wilson to kill Aleena Laughlin. It was hard to picture this man’s wife, someone called Bitty, as a hired killer. And if she had been hired to kill Aleena Laughlin, where was she? Was Malik Washington part of that plan? And how about Parveen Yasmin? And why follow Malcolm Wei through the hotel? She should have been on her way back to Perry by now.

  Hell, she should have been in Perry by now.

  He’d asked almost all the simple questions. Which meant he had to start asking the tough ones.

  “How often does your wife travel, Mr. Wilson?”

  “Travel?”

  “Leave Perry,” he clarified.

  “She probably goes down to Stillwater once a week or so.”

  “Stillwater . . . Oklahoma?”

  “It’s about a half hour or so. They’ve got a movie theater down there, so she takes the boys sometimes.”

  “Your wife, does she work outside the home?”

  “No. She’s a full-time homemaker,” he said proudly.

  “And when was the last time she’s been on an overnight trip without you?”

  “She hasn’t. Not since we’ve been together. We’ve driven up to Kansas and to Nebraska, but—”

  “So this is the first time your wife has been away since you’ve been married?”

  “Our families are all here in Perry,” he said.

  “And you’ve been married how long?”

  “Ten—no, eleven years. And we were together three years before that.”

  Tabitha Wilson hadn’t left Perry, Oklahoma, since she’d come home from her first year at Berkeley. What would have made her come now? “Did you notice any changes with your wife before her trip? Was she worried about anything? Or melancholy?”

  “What? No. She was Bitty. She was just Bitty,” he added, his voice cracking.

  “When did she tell you about her plans to fly out here?”

  “Sunday. She was real set on going. I tried to convince her that it wasn’t necessary. That lady had her own family, so it wasn’t like she was alone,” Wilson said, the confusion and distress evident in his voice.

  “We’ll find her,” Hal said, wishing immediately that he hadn’t made that promise. “What’s your wife’s cell phone number?”

  “Hang on. I got to figure how to look it up.” There was the sound of the phone being set down and fiddled with and then a shout. “Sam!”

  A second voice spoke in the background, a young boy who was probably explaining the technology to his father. Hal understood that. His niece and nephews were always showing him how to do things with his iPhone. Kids these days were born prewired.

  “Here it is.” Wilson came back on the line.

  Hal took down the number and offered Wilson his own number in exchange.

  “What now?” Wilson asked.

  Hal lowered his elbows onto his knees and dropped his head as he considered how to explain the evidence they’d found of his wife in the hotel room. “We’re going to do everything we can to find your wife, Mr. Wilson. There’s no reason for you to come out.”

  “I’m not coming out there,” he said quickly.

  “Okay,” Hal said. He paused a beat, then asked the toughest question of all. Because Tucker Wilson was about to realize that something was wrong. Very wrong. No matter how he put it, these words would ring an alarm in Perry, Oklahoma.

  “Mr. Wilson, do you know your wife’s blood type?”

  Hal gripped the phone a little hard in the seconds it took for those words to cross 1,800 miles and sink in.

  30

  Schwartzman’s autopsy of Parveen Yasmin went quickly, the hours disrupted only by the occasional phone call—one from the DA’s office about an upcoming trial in which she would testify, another from the security company at her house testing the system, and a request for a second opinion on a case in a smaller city across the bay. Then the security company called again to report that the front door failure resulted from a short in the system caused by a power outage and some unknown issue with the backup battery. Power outages were common in their little section of town—especially with all the bad weather. The technician had replaced the battery, and everything tested fine.

  She took this all in stride even as doubt blurred the edges of her thoughts. She no longer had any bedside clocks that plugged into the wall, but the microwave clock hadn’t reset. Wouldn’t that have happened if there had been a power surge?

  She reminded herself that things did sometimes simply happen—security systems faltered, power surges happened, light bulbs died. It did not have to mean that a violent ex-husband was back.

  And she felt this. Truly felt it. Months ago, she would have had to convince herself. She couldn’t allow herself to believe he’d given up. She’d been proven stupid and blind to him too many times not to be hypervigilant, not to take every sign as the warning it was. But now she’d started to believe that maybe he was gone.

  And the relief was incredible. The effort of working so hard to protect herself only served to unravel both health and sanity. Not to mention anything resembling happiness. One could be hypervigilant only for so long before it became a way not of living but of slowly dying.

  She occasionally wondered if the cancer hadn’t been the result of all her fear. That it had grown inside her chest—which, of course, was not anatomically correct but somehow felt true—because that’s where her fear had lived. Where it had grown and festered.

  But her cancer was gone. She was healthy. She was sane. She was even happy, especially at work.

  Schwartzman filled her water bottle and returned to her notes on Parveen Yasmin. The autopsy revealed that her death had been caused by the tearing of the vertebral artery at the third cerebral vertebra. With the artery severed, Parveen Yasmin would have experienced a massive stroke. Aside from the initial moments, she would not have suffered.

  Death, too, would have come quickly. An imprint of the attacker’s fingers marked the front side of the victim’s neck under her chin. He—and she had little doubt that the killer was a man—had overtaken her from behind. In order to successfully tear the artery, the killer needed a very strong upper body and, likely, the benefit of some height over Yasmin, who was five six.

  Schwartzman used her alternative light sources to document the marks on the victim’s neck. Unfortunately, the pressure of the fingertips, while intense, had also been brief, so she found no usable whorls or loops in the tissue to help identify a fingerprint. Aside from those marks, she found no other evidence of contusions and no lacerations. The attacker had overtaken Yasmin and done it fast.

  It didn’t appear that Yasmin had attempted to defend herself, but as a matter of course, Schwartzman scraped and then clipped the victim’s fingernails over a clean piece of butcher paper. Once finished, she folded the paper to prevent any of the evidence from escaping and put it into a plastic bag for transport to the lab.

  Clues from Parveen Yasmin’s body told Schwartzman she was most likely in her early to midseventies. The X-rays divulged the signs of some significant osteoporosis. Swelling in her knees and hands, particularly the right one, suggested she also suffered from arthritis. Other than that, Yasmin was in good shape. She’d never borne children, had a surgery, or broken a bone. In addition, the clear lungs and the healthy liver suggested she’d never been a smoker or much of a drinker.

  As Schwartzman worked, she thought about the weekend. Hal had suggested they get a drink at the end of the day, but that was before Parveen Yasmin had
been discovered in the hotel basement. His job was inherently difficult, but he’d seemed especially disturbed by Yasmin’s death.

  The cases they worked usually involved the deaths of strangers. Death in itself was intimately familiar—both in its motives and its manifestations—but the canvasses it painted itself on were, almost without exception, unfamiliar.

  This case was different.

  Each of them had dealt with the job hitting close to home. Schwartzman, in particular, had been peripheral to the case of her own aunt’s murder last year. She hoped no case would ever be so personal again.

  In this case, it was as though they were riding in the wind behind Death’s long, black robe. Schwartzman had seen Aleena Laughlin in the park hours before her slaughter. Hal had sat at a breakfast table across from Parveen Yasmin the day before hers. They’d been close enough to feel the flutter of the breeze Death’s presence created but too far to catch hold of him.

  Who would be next?

  She’d been unable to read Hal’s expression as he’d looked down at Yasmin’s body. Was he remembering something from their initial meeting? Some question he wished he’d asked?

  She’d said nothing, of course. They didn’t ask those kinds of questions—the ones that would break the barrier of professionalism, that would risk puncturing the veneer that protected them from the ugliness of the job.

  He regretted something he hadn’t done or asked when he had talked to Yasmin.

  Schwartzman told herself not to worry if she didn’t hear from Hal. He might need the time to process this latest development, or there might be work left to do, tasks that would fill his hours late into the night.

  For her, Parveen Yasmin’s autopsy was her final act of the week. Friday afternoons always produced mixed feelings in her. The idea of curling up with a book, of sleeping in, of having the time to take a long, leisurely walk with Buster without the pace being sped by the setting sun or the need to get to work—it all appealed to her. At the same time, the weekends were long, stretched out.

  She usually had an invite or two from one of the inspectors she’d grown close to—Hailey Wyatt or Jamie Vail. Occasionally, a group got together and urged her to join them, but the draw of solitude was almost always more alluring.