“Yasmin showed up at the hotel, looking for him, most likely,” Hal said.
“If she knew whom she was looking for, why not tell you and let the police handle it?”
“Maybe to save Aleena some humiliation? To avoid adding scandal to her death?”
Schwartzman considered the woman on her autopsy table. “Whoever killed her did it decisively.”
Hal’s phone rang. He lifted it. “It’s Records.”
She nodded for him to take it.
“Harris,” he said, putting the call on speaker.
“I found your Susan Slade,” the man said in a heavy Brooklyn accent. “It’s Slade with a d.”
“Great. Where is she now?” Hal asked.
“Colma.”
The word filled him with dread. Colma was where San Francisco buried its bodies. The city land was too rich for cemeteries.
Hal let out a breath. “She’s dead.”
“Yep,” he confirmed. “Killed in a hit-and-run in August of 2004. I got the highlights from a guy over in Berkeley PD. She died outside her house. The witness said the driver was an old woman in a Benz Coupe, early seventies model. Two-tone. Witness said the street was dark, but the old lady drove like she didn’t see Slade, ran her right down. Slade got caught on the grill and went under the car. Nasty business. Witness said the driver hesitated a couple of seconds and then drove off. Probably thought she hit a dog. Berkeley PD ran down the car but never found a suspect.”
Schwartzman’s table had seen her share of hit-and-run victims. They were rarely a quick and painless death.
Hal processed what the Berkeley officer had said.
“You need anything else?” the officer asked.
“No. Thanks.” Hal ended the call.
“The hotel will find the man in the film,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said as he pulled to the curb in front of Schwartzman’s house. It was almost six p.m., but it was only Friday. The entire weekend stretched out before them. She was not on call, and several inspectors stood ahead of Hal on the rotation. Unless San Francisco was hit with a slew of homicides, he likely wouldn’t get called in either. She hoped they might enjoy the quiet.
As Hal put the car in park, the little girl from next door came skipping up to the car, Buster running along beside her.
Schwartzman and Hal got out of the car to greet the dog. Schwartzman’s neighbor Helen arrived, carrying Buster’s food and bowls, and Hal helped her bring everything inside. When the neighbors had left, Schwartzman offered him a beer.
“Sure, thanks.” He motioned for the door. “I’ll go grab the bags out of the car.”
“And yours,” she said as she stooped in the refrigerator for the beer. She tried to brush aside the nervousness that came from her words. Of course, she wanted him to stay. And why not? They were adults. When she rose again, Hal was still standing in the kitchen doorway.
“Excuse me?” he whispered.
She held two beers in her hand, the cold glass against her palms a contrast to the heat that burned her face. Her phone rang from the other room. “You heard me,” she said.
Hal grinned as he turned to go back out to the car. She opened the beers and scrounged in the fridge for something to make for dinner. They might have to order in.
He returned with the bags and set them in the living room. “I’ll make omelets,” he suggested, pulling the eggs out and bringing down a bowl from the cupboard.
As they settled in, she found herself reflecting on the night before. It felt right, and yet her mind worked the possible difficulties into little webs of worry. For starters, interdepartmental relationships were discouraged. Some captains forbade relationships between members of the force. The Medical Examiner’s Office was independent from the police department, she told herself, but how would Hal’s captain, Marshall, see it? And if he forbade it, surely Hal would respect that. Their jobs were too important to jeopardize for . . .
What was this?
When Schwartzman’s cell phone rang for the second time, she retrieved it from her purse. “Schwartzman.”
“It’s Colton Price,” said the breathless voice on the other end.
The private investigator, the man that she paid to follow Spencer’s every move. She stood up straighter, her fingers pinching down on the phone. “Mr. Price.”
She sensed Hal shift closer.
“I’m glad I reached you,” Price said.
“Something’s happened,” she said. He wouldn’t call if Spencer were home, in his routine.
“A few somethings.”
Schwartzman wanted to sit. She started to move to the kitchen table and found Hal beside her. He put his arm around her back and led her into the living room. “One moment,” she said to Price when she was seated. She lowered the phone. “It’s—”
“I heard,” he said.
Minutes earlier, they’d been together in the kitchen, Hal whipping up eggs for a casual dinner, she moving past him, their bodies brushing as they navigated past each other. All of it over. She put the call on speakerphone.
“I’m here, Mr. Price.”
Price cleared his throat. “First off, everything is fine. Mr. MacDonald is in Greenville.”
Schwartzman deflated. “You’re sure?”
“Yes, ma’am. We just ID’d him at home.”
“So, I don’t understand . . .”
“He left this morning. We tracked him to the airport.”
“Where was he going?” Schwartzman asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t know, ma’am.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Hal growled.
“My colleague was delayed getting through security. Mr. MacDonald already had a ticket, and he didn’t check a bag.”
“Can’t you find his itinerary via the flight manifests?” Hal asked.
“We can,” Price said, a hesitation in his voice. “But it takes some time.”
Schwartzman placed her hand on Hal’s knee. “But he’s currently in Greenville,” she said, wanting to hear it again.
“Yes. He’s home in Greenville now.”
She exhaled. “And he was gone for—what? Ten hours?”
“Just over eleven hours,” Price said. “One of my guys was at the airport, trying to track down MacDonald’s itinerary when he came back through security.”
“So he took a day trip somewhere,” Hal said, seeming to relax a little. A day trip meant somewhere close to Greenville. At least relatively. Schwartzman thought about his mother. Or bank business. There were a lot of reasons he might take a day trip.
“He wasn’t here,” she whispered to Hal.
Buster wandered into the room and laid his head on her knee.
“You said a few somethings,” Schwartzman said into the phone. “Is there more?”
“One more thing,” Price said.
Schwartzman waited.
“MacDonald’s house is on the market. It was listed yesterday.”
“He’s selling his house. Does that mean he’s leaving Greenville?”
“I don’t know,” Price admitted. “I’ve got a call in to my contact at his office, but she wasn’t aware that he was moving. There’s been no word at his job.”
“So maybe he’s downsizing,” Hal said.
She couldn’t imagine Spencer downsizing. Maybe upsizing. “He’s not dating anyone?”
“No, ma’am.”
“So it’s possible that he’s leaving Greenville,” she said.
“Yes,” Price confessed.
She pictured the house she had lived in for five years, where she had lost her baby daughter. Spencer had owned that house from the age of twenty-six. He loved that house. Buying it had been his first confirmation that he was successful.
“I can tell you that there are no pending purchases in his name or the name of his trust,” Price said.
“So he isn’t selling that house to move into something that he’s bought,” she said.
“Right.”
&nbs
p; Silence filled the line as Buster pushed his nose into her lap. There was nothing more to say.
Spencer would leave Greenville for one reason.
To come for her.
47
Though she had tried to shake it off, Schwartzman was visibly upset by the call from Colton Price. Hal made her an omelet and insisted she take a hot shower. They started to watch a movie, but she fell asleep on the couch halfway through. He helped her into bed and settled on the couch.
His voicemail was empty, so he checked in with California Pacific Medical Center, where Malcolm Wei remained unconscious. Then he called the Century Hotel to see if they’d found the name of the employee who’d left Malcom Wei on the bench.
“I spoke with security an hour ago,” the manager said. “The man on the film is Jeffrey Gordon.”
Hal scribbled the name in his notepad. “I need a number.”
“I’ve contacted Mr. Gordon’s mobile phone and left a message. He’s not answering.”
“Then I need an address,” Hal said. Why hadn’t the security tech called him directly?
“Of course. I’m not on property, but I can call over and get that for you. Is there a number I can text it to?”
“This number,” Hal said, and then repeated his cell phone number.
“I’ll be in touch shortly,” the manager said.
“Where could Wei have been held?” he asked. “According to your head of security—and yourself—there is no place in the hotel that isn’t covered by camera other than the penthouse. And that was checked.” Hal paused. “You checked the penthouse.”
“Of course, Inspector. I’m certain we will get to the bottom of this. I’ll call you as soon as I have an address for Mr. Gordon.”
Hal blew out his breath, ended the call, and then booted up his computer to run a records search for Jeffrey Gordon. Nineteen listings showed up in the California state database. He clicked through them one at a time, but none matched the man he’d seen on film.
What was he missing? He’d spent last Friday in the hotel’s security room, going through the footage for the hotel. But somehow, he was missing pieces of the puzzle, pieces that didn’t show up on the hotel’s cameras. Malcolm Wei, for instance.
And even Tabitha Wilson. Security had acknowledged that the cameras on the twelfth floor had failed, but the ones in the elevator worked. So why didn’t they see Malcolm Wei come down in an elevator? No cameras monitored the stairwells. Did that mean that someone had carried a bleeding Wei down eleven flights of stairs? Had that someone been Jeffrey Gordon? Wei wasn’t a large man, but he had to weigh at least 150 pounds.
And what about the wheelchair? Malcolm Wei had been pushed out of the hotel in a wheelchair, but he had walked in. So where had the wheelchair come from? And Wei’s stuff was still missing, as was Tabitha Wilson’s purse, now that he thought about it. She’d had a large bag when she’d gone after Wei in the elevator, but she hadn’t been carrying anything when her captor led her out the back of the hotel.
He’d have to go back to the hotel, get a team out there, and go through the place floor by floor. Maybe he also needed to look more closely at the people who worked on the hotel’s security team. Was it possible one of them was hiding the relevant footage from him?
He glanced at his phone again. How long did it take to get an address? Hal pulled up the list of male conference attendees again. How would one of them benefit from killing Aleena Laughlin? Again, it all circled back to the assault in Berkeley fourteen years ago.
Fourteen years ago, Snapchat and Instagram didn’t exist. Facebook was in its infancy. If only the party were more recent . . . if he could go online and comb through pictures . . .
A text came in with Jeffrey Gordon’s address. Hal called Dispatch and requested a patrol car be sent over to his house. “If he’s there, bring him in for questioning.”
“Questioning on what?”
“An attempted homicide,” Hal said, not wanting to explain too much. Let Gordon sweat it out a bit. “I’ll meet them at the station, so let me know as soon as they reach the house.”
“Will do.”
Hal ended the call and rubbed his face. Rolling his neck and stretching his shoulders above his head, he tried to wake himself up. It would be at least a half hour before patrol could confirm whether Gordon was home.
Hal navigated to the website for ANS Optera. There had to be a clue there somewhere. The video of Tabitha Wilson with Malcolm Wei, the room registered in her name, Aleena Laughlin’s cell number on the floor where Malcolm Wei had been stabbed, the red lipstick that was Aleena Laughlin’s exact color, Parveen Yasmin’s killing in the basement . . . Every thread in this case led him back to the Century Hotel and the ANS Optera conference. He studied the website as it loaded on his laptop.
Through the bedroom door, Buster’s breathing rose to a snore. When Hal stayed on the couch, the dog slept on the floor beside Anna. Hal listened for noise from Anna, but she was a quiet sleeper, her breathing like the purring of a cat. It made him smile to picture her as she’d been in the bed at Tasha’s last night.
How he wanted that again.
What if he went into her room, crawled in beside her? Surely, she wouldn’t kick him out. He imagined her sleepy smile, the way her long thin fingers curled into loose fists, which she tucked beneath her chin.
She was probably asleep. This wasn’t how he imagined they would spend this evening, not after last night. But he didn’t want to push her.
And he wasn’t going to leave her alone.
Hal read through the bios of the founding members of ANS Optera. They had unusual backgrounds. One was a Chinese national who had gone to MIT and finished when he was fourteen. Three others had gotten degrees from similar universities—Caltech, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon—all before the age of twenty.
Malcolm Wei was the child of an expat, raised in sixteen countries in eighteen years. He spoke six languages, including sign language, because his younger sister had been left deaf after childhood meningitis.
Hal Googled the men one by one. The most interesting story featured the company’s CEO and founder, Deming Bao, who had been raised in an orphanage in the Soviet Union. The city where he lived, Dushanbe, had become the capital of Tajikistan when he was twelve. That same year, Bao had attended the local university. The story went on to say that once Bao had completed school, he’d gone to mainland China, where he was reunited with his birth mother’s family.
Hal yawned and considered making coffee. He carried the computer into the kitchen and dropped a capsule into Anna’s Nespresso machine without starting it. Once he started drinking caffeine, he’d be awake. As much as he wanted to talk to Jeffrey Gordon, he wanted to sleep more. He ached from the day in the car, from the night without rest. The exhaustion weighed down his shoulders, pulling his spine down as though with heavy fishing line so that the small of his back ached.
How he wanted to crawl into bed with her. And sleep.
Instead, he sat at the kitchen table and read through articles on ANS Optera. Another write-up mentioned the company had filed for an IPO. He checked the date. The filing was to be completed next spring, at which time the company shares would be available in an initial public offering. The company was estimated to be worth more than $400 million—that would make the six men very wealthy. Money was not something that motivated Hal. A good thing, as he would never be rich as a homicide inspector.
Maybe there was another angle to these crimes. He went back and read the “About Us” page. ANS Optera was a SaaS company—software as a service. He read on, the phrases like a foreign language. Cloud computing and multitenant architecture. Something about risk management. Not something Tabitha Wilson was likely involved in. In her one year at Berkeley, she’d taken classes in literature and accounting.
He rubbed his head. Somehow, he had to be looking at it wrong. Had Malcolm Wei been sent to draw out Tabitha Wilson? And, if so, why? What for?
He kept coming back to the
assault in Berkeley. The renter at Ramseyer’s house. There had to be a way to track him down. The sudden buzz of his phone on the hard wood surface of Anna’s kitchen table jolted him upright.
No one home at Gordon’s address.
Hal lifted the phone and texted back. Check again throughout your shift. Keep me posted.
Hal rose from the table and looked at the coffee maker, waiting to be started. He shut his laptop, took his phone back into the living room, and lay on the couch. Even with him lying at a diagonal, his feet touched the floor. He tucked his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, certain he wouldn’t fall asleep.
“Hal.”
He reached out for her, trying to hold her still. Ssh. It’s okay.
“Hal!”
He bolted upright. “What?”
Schwartzman stood before him in another pair of matching pajamas, her long, lean legs inches from his fingers. She held his hand, and he squeezed in return. She had come to get him. Of course she had.
He sat up and took her other hand, gripping them in his. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She pulled a hand free and pushed back her hair. “I figured it out.”
He shook his head. Figured what out?
“Did you see the email from Roger?”
The sky through the shades was dark. “What email? What time is it?” Hal asked.
“It’s after six,” she said.
Only then did he notice her laptop on the coffee table. She spun it around and pointed to a blurry photograph on the screen.
Hal blinked, trying to clear his vision. “What is that?”
“It’s the hand of the man who took Tabitha Wilson.” She pointed to a fuzzy, gold-colored shape on the hand. “Look at his ring.”
Hal squinted. “What is that?”
“It all came together,” she went on, talking so fast he could barely follow her. She waved her hands, like a kid excited over a show about to start. “That company, ANS Optera.”
He tried to shake off the sleep. “What about it?”
“Anisoptera,” she pronounced, fumbling with her phone.
“They’re initials,” Hal said. “It’s ANS.”
“But that word—all of it together—I read it when I was researching dragonflies.” She sank beside him, her thumbs jumping across the screen. The heat of her bare thigh felt warm through his slacks. “Here,” she said. “Dragonflies belong to the order Odonata and the infraorder Anisoptera, from the Greek for uneven wing.”
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