Expose

by Danielle Girard

  She would reach out to her mother again. After their awkward conversation about the Thanksgiving holiday, Schwartzman had left her a couple of messages, and she’d received one in return—a short, breezy message in which her mother said she was off to a bridge tournament and then dinner at a friend’s home. Schwartzman would try her in the morning. She would feel better if they had a more normal conversation—as normal as their conversations ever were.

  At five thirty p.m., Schwartzman completed her official report on Parveen Yasmin’s death and packed up her laptop for the weekend. Hal hadn’t checked in. Again, she told herself that it was to be expected, but the disappointment stung anyway. On the way out to the car, she decided she would walk Buster early and then book a slot in the eight p.m. Pilates class. She’d bought herself a pack of ten classes and had been only twice.

  Aside from walking and the occasional weekend hike, Schwartzman did nothing for exercise. She was fortunate to have her father’s metabolism, but she lacked the definition that she observed in other women. She liked the soreness that came after a workout—so different from the discomfort she’d experienced with chemo. Plus, the Pilates required enough concentration that it would be impossible to think about anything else. Something else she needed tonight.

  She locked up and settled into the car to head home. As she drove, her mind circled back to the case and to Parveen Yasmin’s death.

  Only in the car, driving through the darkened city streets, did she realize the most notable—and most alarming—aspect of Parveen Yasmin’s death. In order to successfully tear the vertebral artery, the killer had to exercise extreme force and have the element of surprise. The human neck was the result of millions of years of evolutionary design to protect the vascular system that fed the brain as well as the nervous system that powered it. Though an older woman, Parveen Yasmin was not frail, and no evidence of any drug or alcohol had been found in her system.

  She would certainly have stiffened her neck and back if someone were attacking her. Had she engaged those neck and back muscles, the killer would have surely struggled to tear the cerebral artery. That effort would leave evidence behind.

  Those parameters almost certainly pointed to the fact that Parveen Yasmin had not considered her killer a threat. She must have trusted him enough to stand with a relaxed stature, with her back to him as he grabbed hold of her neck and snapped it in one fluid and unhesitating motion.

  What kind of person wrenched the neck of an innocent woman without any hesitation?

  That suggested the killer was a sociopath. And that was the man they were looking for—someone with a total lack of conscience.

  Schwartzman reached to the dash and cranked up the heat, suddenly chilled.

  31

  The hotel’s security room was a dungeon at the opposite end of the basement from the tiny storage room where Parveen Yasmin had died. There, Hal found the manager and the hotel’s director of security. A broad man, the director wore an army crew cut, and his nose sat wide and much too flat on his face to be the original shape. Hal would bet that nose had been broken more than once.

  While both men hovered over him, Hal studied the building schematics. This kind of work normally went to the lab. One of the Crime Scene Unit techs would view the footage, find the relevant pieces, and collect them for the inspector. Hal kept telling himself that he should leave it to the labs, that they were professionals. But he didn’t want to wait.

  He couldn’t wait.

  Jared Laughlin was heading home from war to bury his wife—his slain wife. He would be home in roughly thirty hours, sometime on Sunday. Hal didn’t want to start a weekend without some clue, some sharp piece to pry open this case. The statistics buzzed in his head. Forty-eight hours. Seventy-two hours. As time ticked away, the chances of solving the case diminished, the curve of probability speeding its way toward 0 percent, settling at the impossibility line, where it might remain forever, branded unsolved. Cold. He dreaded the idea that Aleena Laughlin might become one of those. Malik Washington. Parveen Yasmin.

  These deaths were connected. That had yet to hit the media, but it wouldn’t be long.

  And then the call from the mayor to the chief, from the chief to his captain. And after that, he would be working the case for other reasons. Because he had to. Because time had put his neck on the line.

  But that wasn’t true.

  He would be working it for Jared Laughlin, for Malik Washington’s mother, whom he had met only briefly. For whomever Parveen Yasmin had left behind. For Ben and Phyllis Johnson.

  The building schematics were in rough shape, making Hal’s job harder. Someone had written “Century Hotel” in burgundy font across the top left. Some sort of crest-type emblem dominated the right corner. A large, rounded x-like shape occupied the center of the design, and around it were six smaller designs.

  He could read none of the designs, all of which had likely been ruined by whatever had left a large, brown liquid stain—coffee or maybe soda? The limp paper had been taped and retaped, and in the places where the camera numbers faded to nothing, someone had written over them in black marker. “What happened to these?” Hal asked.

  “They’ve been like that since I started,” the security director said with a shrug. He leaned over the battered schematic to point out the numbered locations. “There are eighty-three cameras in total.”

  “We have them located in and around the hotel,” the manager added, from over the director’s shoulder. “Every elevator, every floor, every common area. The exceptions are public bathrooms and the penthouse, which has a private elevator. That elevator is only accessible by the tenant of the penthouse. There is no camera in that elevator or on the penthouse floor. For privacy, of course.”

  The penthouse. Hal turned back. “Who’s in the penthouse?”

  The manager shook his head. “No one. It’s corporate housing, mostly, and not currently occupied.”

  Not occupied meant someone could be in there—a hotel employee with a key. “We should check the penthouse.”

  “It was just cleaned this morning, and everything was in order,” the manager said.

  “Just the same,” Hal said. “We should check it again. We have to be one hundred percent certain.”

  The manager nodded. “Of course. Why don’t I have someone go up and check it now? Would that be agreeable? The police presence in the hotel is quite distressing to the guests,” he added.

  Hal didn’t care if the guests were distressed. But he didn’t have time to waste either. If the penthouse was clear, it meant everyone in the hotel should have been captured on the film stored in that room. Eighty-three cameras. That was a lot of footage to go through. He thought about getting Roger’s team to check out the penthouse. Friday afternoon. He sighed. “If there’s any evidence that someone was in the penthouse, I need to have it checked out by my team. I need you to be one hundred percent sure.”

  “Of course. I’ll go right now.” The manager slipped out of the room, surely ecstatic to take his leave. The head of security said something inaudible into his radio, and a moment later, a tech arrived. With a sigh, Hal settled into a worn desk chair, too close to the ground, something hard and blunt poking into his back, and began reviewing video. One by one, he chose a camera, and the director of security motioned to the tech to load the video for that camera to Hal’s monitor. One by one, he watched twelve hours of footage from a single viewpoint in fast-forward.

  He had started with the obvious cameras—first, the footage of twelfth floor, where the room was. He watched the footage for the day before Wei had disappeared and then that morning, right up until the twelfth-floor cameras went dead at about nine a.m.

  Next, he moved to the adjacent floors—ten and thirteen—and watched those. In the middle of the thirteenth floor, the manager called to tell him that the penthouse was clear. Damn.

  Hal settled in. Some hours later, when the manager realized Hal would be reviewing video in the small, musty room for the d
uration of the day, he insisted he eat from the restaurant menu. During the third or fourth hour of reviewing video, Hal ate a burger and sweet potato french fries, which settled uncomfortably in his stomach as he watched people buzz through the lobby and down corridors on fast-forward.

  Hal found no indication that Tabitha Wilson had been in Malcolm Wei’s room at all before today. To be certain, they had gone back over the video from the corridor for the preceding forty hours. Wei had come from the room two other times—once about an hour after he’d arrived at the room with his suitcase, and the second time earlier yesterday morning when he had gone out, in shorts and tennis shoes, to the gym or for a run. No Tabitha.

  And yet the room reservation had been made in her name. Hal had requested Naomi call the husband, Tucker Wilson, but Hal wasn’t surprised to learn that Tabitha Wilson’s husband had never head of Malcolm Wei or of the company—ANS Optera—where he worked. The only good news for Tucker Wilson was his wife’s blood type—O negative—didn’t match the A-positive blood they’d found in the hotel room. Which meant it had to be Wei’s. Unless there had been someone else in that room?

  Naomi remained on the hunt for Wei, who hadn’t been seen since leaving a lunch meeting the day before. Naomi had warned Hal she had a few things to do before she could refocus her efforts on Malcolm Wei. The plan was to check for hits on his credit cards and social media accounts, and work with his cell phone provider to track the phone. She promised she’d get to it today. Hal had the sense that Naomi liked him—just as a friend, or maybe in the way that younger women liked older men. Hell, he was almost fifteen years her senior. She was a sweet kid but not someone he would date, and he’d never done anything to insinuate otherwise. But Roger watched them—or watched her when they worked together. He tried to be especially professional in those times. He hadn’t led her on. But he never totally squashed the crush either.

  And he knew why.

  He’d seen Naomi interact with Kong and O’Shea—good guys but with more bravado and less polish than he. With them, Naomi’s responses were clipped. She did the job but didn’t hang around to offer anything extra. He suspected that if it had been Kong or O’Shea asking her to find Malcolm Wei, she’d have told them she couldn’t get to it today.

  But for him, she would dig as deep as possible, as soon as she could. So he was grateful for the crush, and when he experienced the occasional twinge of guilt, he tried to convince himself that being grateful didn’t make him a terrible person. And if it meant he got a lead sooner rather than later, he was okay with being a little bit terrible.

  While he was waiting to hear from her, he went through the camera recordings. From the twelfth floor, he checked the eleventh and thirteenth, looking for someone heading into the stairwell, or coming out of it. But there was no one. Delivery people, waitstaff, and maids buzzed about the floors, and two maintenance people spent an hour on the thirteenth, working on something in the ceiling. But Hal was confident that he was looking for a single person, or maybe Tabitha Wilson and one other.

  He found no sign of her at all.

  After that, he went through the tenth and fourteenth floors, and then nine and fifteen. The farther out he got, the faster he went through the recordings. Wasting returns. He stopped when he’d completed the seventh and seventeenth, as the seventeenth was the last floor below the penthouse.

  From there, he studied the lobby footage, beginning with the time when Roger had arrived on the scene and moving backward. It took almost no time before he spotted Tabitha Wilson. It would have been difficult to miss her, she was so out of place.

  Her hair was frizzy brown-blonde—Hal never knew how to describe this color—and hit her shoulders unevenly, as though she’d cut it herself. She wore an off-white blouse with gray slacks and flat, black shoes. The outfit was cheap and ill-fitting—too summery, the fabric too shiny, the colors somehow incompatible. And he knew nothing about clothing. But her overall look had as much to do with the way she carried herself as with the clothes themselves—shoulders hunched and head down, as if she were uncomfortable in her own skin.

  Others seemed to notice the same, casting surreptitious glances at her once she had passed them. Not to mention that she was half running across the lobby. In reverse, because that was how Hal was viewing the film. He clicked back ten minutes and then fast-forwarded. When he caught sight of her emerging hurriedly from the restaurant, he stopped and rewound again. It wasn’t a perfect angle, but it was clear that she had been seated alone at the table.

  When he backed up a bit more, he spotted the slender, attractive Asian man who had crossed through the lobby not long before her. Malcolm Wei. As he watched it again, playing forward, he became certain that Wilson was running after that man. Malcolm Wei disappeared behind a corner, and moving at almost a full run, she vanished around the same corner fifteen seconds later.

  Tabitha Wilson had definitely been following Malcolm Wei.

  32

  Bitty struggled to roll over in her bed, to reach for the glass of water on the bedside table. Her mouth was parched, her shoulders stiff to the point of feeling locked in place. She’d been having a familiar bad dream—the one where the darkness swallowed her and smothered her into the mattress.

  She had taken too much of the sleep stuff again. The drugs weighed on her, pinning her arms and legs, thrusting her hard into sleep. The medication required a more scientific approach than she could manage, the dosage a matter of the level of her exhaustion balanced with her anxiety, her mood. Too little and she didn’t sleep, instead lying frantic in bed as the hours passed, and she missed her window for taking more.

  Those were the worst nights.

  When she didn’t sleep, her mind went to that night. It always went to that night.

  She needed the numbness, needed the heaviness in her limbs, in order to let go and really rest. It was the weight that calmed her on nights when the images came back. When the memories were triggered.

  Countless things provoked those memories—it might be dry grass against the skin of her shin, the rough texture of straw that reminded her of the barbs. Or the buzzing of a crop duster, the whining of its engine as it rose in the sky, bringing back the roar of the insects.

  A hot dish on her skin, the smell of flesh burning. The scent of hot metal.

  After that night, she had spent the remainder of her nights in the library. Slept in a corner of the undergraduate stacks. She had gone to the gym to shower and to the dining hall. She had never gone to her dorm room, never allowed herself to be alone. He would come back. He would finish them.

  She and Aleena passed in the hallways as though the other were a ghost, flinching at the face that reminded each of her own torture. In other circumstances, they might have come together, found strength in each other.

  But neither had any strength to give.

  Aleena wore the black garment—one like she’d worn the first day of school. Only this one covered her face as well, except her eyes. It covered the scar on her face, the one that Bitty had only seen as the two had escaped off that hill and back to campus in the brightening scarlet light of dawn.

  They didn’t speak, didn’t touch each other.

  Even as the blood dripped across Aleena’s mouth and the burns on her own feet made it almost impossible to walk, they continued. Heads down, slowly, ducking off the streets when cars passed.

  Like fugitives. And they felt like fugitives—certain that they had escaped death, with no memory of how.

  In the first weeks after Bitty had survived her finals and made it home, certain sensations brought her to her knees. Little things sent her fleeing to her room, where she would huddle in a corner and wait until the panic subsided.

  Her parents had blamed her return on California, that being around all those people—liberals, crazies, even intellectuals—had loosened something in her nerves. Her mother had dragged her to Doc Chester twice. He had prescribed rest.

  But she did not sleep, so how could she rest?


  On the next visit, several weeks later, Chester prescribed something to help her sleep. The pills had been little and yellow then. She was to take a half and only as needed. But she always needed them. And one half didn’t knock her out, not the way a whole one did. So she took them nightly, an entire yellow pill. And she kept taking them.

  On those trips to the pharmacy to pick up her pills—one of the only times she left the house in those days—she was always terrified they would tell her the request for medication had been denied. That she was taking too many, too often.

  But Doc Chester filled her prescription, time after time.

  And so she’d slept at night. For years, the little pills had worked. After meeting Tucker, after they were married, she kept them hidden under the sink in case he should question them.

  When she was pregnant with Noah, she’d had to stop. Doc Chester had warned her of all the things that might go wrong if she continued, warned her and Tucker as they sat together in his little office that smelled like pipe smoke and wet wood. Tucker had thrown her supply of little yellow pills into the toilet, looking triumphant while she had felt desperate and nauseated—unsure whether her sickness came from the pregnancy or the fear that she would never sleep again.

  And then she was breastfeeding and pregnant with Dirk, and the pure exhaustion of motherhood had solved her insomnia.

  Until it hadn’t.

  By then the boys were four and one, and she was no longer able to find that heavy sleep. She had to be nimble and alert when the boys woke in the night, hurry to soothe them, feed them, change them.

  So she simply didn’t sleep.

  The constant exhaustion morphed into a heaviness all its own, and in some ways, it soothed her panic as the medication had done. So sapped were her reserves that no spike of adrenaline came when she woke on the couch to the terrifying sensation of Dirk driving his toy trucks across her legs, or the stench of blood when the boys were roughhousing early on a weekend morning and Noah took an elbow to the nose. So she’d come back to the pills a few years ago.