He. It was a mistake to assume gender. Victoria Stein could have been drowned by another female. Schwartzman tapped the paper on the desk. “I’m afraid I can’t speculate—”
“Was she drugged?”
Schwartzman closed her mouth and said nothing. She had gotten the tox results back less than an hour before. Diazepam, the generic form of Valium, had been used in addition to wine.
“You know, don’t you?” Terri pressed.
“Ms. Stein, I’m not at liberty to speak about any ongoing investigation. I’m sorry. If you’d like to fill out this paperwork, I’ll make sure everything is ready for you, but I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to work.” Schwartzman inched the form a little closer to Terri Stein and set a pen on top. Then, offering an encouraging smile, she walked out the door.
“You look like her,” Terri called after her.
Like a punch to the gut. Schwartzman closed her eyes and stopped moving.
Maybe Terri Stein knew something about the connection between Spencer and her sister.
Hal had promised to follow up. He must have learned something. But he hadn’t called. Was he pursuing a lead? Had he found something to link Stein’s death to Spencer?
“That’s why I started to cry when I saw you,” Terri added. “Because you look so much like her.”
Schwartzman breathed a deep sigh and turned back around. Hal would be in contact. He would reach out when he could. Something had come up. It must have. “Yes. We have similar coloring.”
“It’s more than that,” Terri said. “The shape of your nose. Even your gestures. You two are much more alike than she and I are.”
And how is that possible? Schwartzman wanted to ask. Looking at the victim’s sister, she saw almost no similarities. Perhaps a little in the mouth. “Do you have other siblings?”
“It was just us.”
“And your parents? Are they living?”
Her eyes welled up again. “No. They both passed.”
“I’m sorry. I noticed a lot of pictures of the two of you in her house.”
“Yes.” Terri’s face flexed into a smile, a little too fast, too happy. Grief made people strange. She studied the faint freckles on Terri Stein’s face, the single dimple on her left side that added to the air of youth about her.
Schwartzman felt calmer, taking charge of the conversation again. “I didn’t see any images of your parents.”
“No,” she said as though accepting some criticism. “I don’t know that she had any.”
The images began to surface in Schwartzman’s mind. “In one of the pictures, you two were in front of an aircraft carrier.”
Terri nodded. “I think that’s right.”
“Was that taken near the ferry to Fort Sumter? At Patriots Point?”
Her expression was blank. “I don’t remember.”
“I wondered because it’s down near where you guys grew up.”
“Why would someone kill her?” Terri asked.
Schwartzman was startled by the question, which came out of nowhere. Because she looked like me.
“She had a boring job,” Terri went on. “She hardly ever dated. Why would someone go into her home and kill her?”
Schwartzman wanted to ask more about Victoria. What she did, who she spent time with.
And yet that wasn’t her job. Her job was the remains.
Her job was done.
“I have no idea,” she told the victim’s sister. “I’m sure the inspectors are doing everything they can to find out who did this to your sister. Have you spoken to Inspector Harris?”
“I’d like to see her.”
Schwartzman was not going to show the body without Hal. She didn’t even want to see it again. “We should make arrangements with Inspector Harris.”
“You can’t just take me to her?”
Schwartzman lifted the phone and dialed the extension for Homicide.
“Never mind. It’s okay,” Terri said, sounding disappointed. “I just wanted to talk to someone. I’m going a little stir-crazy.”
Schwartzman held out the phone. “You don’t want me to call?”
“No. I’m sure Inspector Harris will call me if there is any news.”
Schwartzman replaced the receiver in its cradle. Terri stood and dug her hands into her pockets but remained rooted in place, silent.
Schwartzman let several seconds pass. Finally she said, “Is there something else I can do for you, Ms. Stein?”
“I heard someone had a pendant like Vicky’s. The cross with the Star of David.”
Schwartzman felt her mouth drop open and closed it quickly in an attempt to hide her surprise. How would the victim’s know about Schwartzman’s necklace? The details of a case were never shared with the family, not during an active investigation. Plus, that necklace was not just a detail of the case.
It was about her personally.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Terri asked. “You had a necklace like hers?”
“You heard that?”
“The officers were talking about it.”
Schwartzman said nothing. That she and the victim had matching necklaces was odd, worthy of gossip. But it made her angry. At the case, at herself. For sharing her past with Hailey and Hal.
That information was sensitive. The leak could be damaging to the case. But more than the case, the information felt deeply personal.
That it was shared felt like a betrayal.
“When I was waiting to talk to the inspector,” Terri added.
“Which officers?”
“I don’t know. They wore uniforms. A couple of men.” Terri paused. “I was eavesdropping when I probably shouldn’t have been,” she admitted.
Schwartzman tried to imagine who would have been talking about evidence from a murder scene in front of the victim’s sister.
“It just seems like you knew her somehow, that you two were connected.”
“No,” Schwartzman said firmly. “I didn’t know your sister at all.” There was an edge in her voice, but she let it sit.
“It was really nice to get a chance to meet you, Dr. Schwartzman.” With that, Terri Stein walked out of her office.
The woman knew her name.
The office was too hot, too small. She had to leave. She lifted her coat off the hook on her door, her eye on the chair where the victim’s sister had sat. Some realization fluttered at the edge of her mind. Something strange about Terri Stein, but she couldn’t quite place it. Her phone rang, and she lifted the receiver. “Schwartzman.”
“Oh good. I’m glad I caught you in the office.”
Schwartzman couldn’t place the voice. “I’m sorry. Who—”
“Sorry, it’s Renu Khan.”
Her gynecologist. “Dr. Khan.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. She’d been in the doctor’s office only five hours earlier. They’d already read her scans, and the doctor was calling back. For a fleeting moment, Schwartzman missed the cheerful nurse who’d called before. “That was fast. I assume you are calling with news about the second mammogram and the ultrasound.”
“Yes.”
Schwartzman remained standing, frozen as though she could control the doctor’s next words by sheer power of will.
“I just got off the phone with the radiologist,” Dr. Khan said.
“The radiologist,” Schwartzman repeated.
“Yes. I wanted to get back to you as quickly as possible because I know you often have a lot on your plate.”
Radiology meant cancer. “What did the radiologist find?”
“There are several microcalcifications—I’m sorry, several calcium deposits that we believe warrant biopsy.”
Cancer. They were talking about breast cancer. “In my breast.”
“Yes. Both breasts,” Dr. Khan corrected.
Schwartzman sank into the chair, the coat caught under her so that it felt like the added weight of a person on her back. “Breast cancer.”
“We need to do a biopsy to be certai
n. We can’t confirm the lesions are cancerous until then. They may be benign.”
“Of course.” Schwartzman’s reply felt empty. Of course. There was no reason to assume the worst.
“You’re young to have mammograms, but I notice that this isn’t your first. You must have familial risk factors.”
Schwartzman didn’t have an answer. She didn’t much remember the first mammogram other than that it was done in Seattle as part of her medical training. It was some component of a course she took on genetics when testing for the BRCA gene was growing more common.
That period was a blur, all of it happening only weeks after Spencer had found her in Seattle. She’d had more than a year of reprieve from him, and then, somehow, he had tracked her down. She suspected her mother was the leak, but the timing was terrible. His calls came in at all hours, on her cell phone and—when she stopped answering that—on the landline in her apartment, in the anatomy lab at school, even once on rounds at the hospital. Just six weeks before her orals.
The mammogram had come back clean. That was in her file.
She’d hand-delivered that file to Dr. Khan herself. But she hadn’t read it. Somewhere in there it must have indicated that she was at risk. Otherwise, why would she have another mammogram before she was forty? How could she not know this? But she knew how.
The pressure of preparing for her oral exams, Spencer. In that period, she hadn’t slept, barely ate. She didn’t take care of herself at all, so how would she remember the results of a test no one was concerned about?
“Dr. Schwartzman?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I was trying to recall, but to be honest, I’m not sure. I’m not aware of any family history. I think that first mammogram was done as part of a medical school course.”
“Hmm,” Dr. Khan said. “I recommend Dr. Norman Fraser. He’s very good. I took the liberty of calling ahead to let him know he might hear from you. He’s a friend. He can fit you in as early as tomorrow afternoon if you can be available.”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Schwartzman repeated. That was soon. If the microcalcifications were benign, why the rush?
They didn’t think they were benign.
They thought she had cancer. Breast cancer. Breast. Cancer. She squeezed her eyes closed. It couldn’t be. She thought of her father. He always said God only gave you what you could handle. How did God think she could handle this? She couldn’t.
“Yes. Tomorrow at four fifteen.”
It wasn’t a diagnosis. It was a test result. Maybe she had cancer. She wanted to ask what the odds were. How often did they get the diagnosis wrong? What chance did she have to be the false positive? The one with some weird benign calcium deposits.
“Dr. Schwartzman?” Dr. Khan interrupted her thoughts. “Can I call someone for you?”
“No,” she said firmly. Hailey? Hal?
No.
Ava.
Ava would know what to do. But how long since she’d talked to her aunt? It didn’t matter. Of course it didn’t. Ava would be there. Ava was her first call when everything with Spencer happened. Schwartzman had retreated to her aunt’s home and slept for two days straight. Ava fed her and shielded her from the barrage of phone calls from her mother and Spencer. Schwartzman stayed in Charleston for ten days, mapping out her next moves, her plan.
Ava wrote her a check for $30,000 to help her move to Seattle and covered her living expenses to get her back to school. She put Schwartzman in touch with a woman in the medical school admissions office, someone who helped her apply for scholarships to cover her tuition.
Ava made all that happen.
Yes, she would call Ava. Once she knew the diagnosis. There was no reason to worry anyone prematurely.
It would be okay.
She drew a slow, even breath. “Thank you, Dr. Khan. I will be in touch with Dr. Fraser.”
“They’re holding the spot for you,” Dr. Khan said, sounding relieved. “Just call in the morning to confirm.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Good.” A pause. “There is a chance that the deposits are not cancerous. We just need to check to be sure,” the doctor offered in a small gesture of kindness. Empty of promise. Almost void of hope.
“Of course,” Schwartzman agreed.
She hung up the phone. As she stood straight again, the blood rushed to her head, filling her vision with stars. Schwartzman moved to the door and pulled it open.
Standing in the entry was Inspector Hal Harris.
She reeled backward, releasing a guttural cry.
“Sorry,” he said quickly, raising his hands in the air. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Schwartzman backed into her chair and sat down. She hadn’t seen Hal since he and Hailey were in her apartment. She worked to gather her nerves again.
Push aside the thoughts of cancer. Focus on Stein.
When she glanced up, Hal was seated in the chair opposite her, doing his best to make his substantial size appear small and nonthreatening. It might have been comical if not for the adrenaline flooding her nervous system.
“You okay?” he asked.
It was all she could do to shake her head.
11
Charleston, South Carolina
Harper stood at her desk, shuffling piles of papers, waiting for Burl. She was anxious for the results of the autopsy. Her gut was divided on this one. There was plenty about it that felt like an accidental death. It was a little off that Kimberly Davies hadn’t seen the body when she’d come around the porch, but it was possible that the victim fell after Davies looked. Perhaps the dog was barking because Mrs. Pinckney had fallen or suffered a heart attack or a stroke. Then she tripped, trying to get downstairs. But why go downstairs? Why not call for help from upstairs? And why did the dog go quiet?
Burl entered from the back stairwell. “You got something for me?” she called.
“Yep,” he said. “Let me grab coffee.”
She followed Burl into the break room. He tasted the coffee and made an exaggerated smacking sound. “Hmm. Mmm,” he said. “Delicious.”
“I’m glad you’re so easily pleased.” Burl reminded her of her father, who could never understand all the fuss about an espresso or a latte or a cappuccino. Used to drive him crazy when “city folk”—as he called them—came into the diner asking if they made espresso drinks.
Like Burl, her father enjoyed his coffee even when it might be considered mediocre, which was probably a stretch for the coffee offered at the department.
“I’m a man of simple pleasures, Detective. What I can’t figure out is why the coffee up here is better than the coffee two floors down.”
“Because there are dead people down there,” Harper said flatly.
“Well, we don’t stir them into the coffee.” Burl raised his mug and took a long drink. “At least not on purpose.”
Harper had been raising her mug to her own lips when the image of little pieces of human flesh floating in coffee entered her mind. “Burl.” She groaned and set the coffee down.
“You want to come down and see what I’ve got?”
“You’re done with the body?”
“Yep.” He lifted the mug into the air. “Just came up for my celebratory cup of joe. Come on,” he said, hitching his chin toward the stairs. “I’ll show you.”
In almost sixteen years on the force, Harper had grown accustomed to dead bodies. It was hard to work Homicide if you didn’t. The charcoal-lined masks were effective at eliminating most of the smells. Add a couple drops of lavender or peppermint oil on the inside, as she did, and even the summer’s worst bloaters were almost sufferable.
What she had never quite gotten accustomed to was the process of carving the body apart, examining it in pieces, and weighing and measuring the components before shoving it all back in again, zipping it up with a staple gun, and sending it off for burial or cremation. The sight of the closed-up Y-incision was the thing that made her most uncomfortable.
Jed
always teased that it was because Lucy had been born by Cesarean section so Harper had her own version of the scar.
Maybe eighty years ago C-section scars looked like Y-incisions, but hers was only three or four inches long, hidden below the bikini line. The scar was more recent than her last bikini.
Burl held the door open, and Harper stepped into the morgue. As always, the room smelled of bleach and death. Like the rest of the building, the morgue was old, and little had been done in the way of updates.
At least upstairs the walls were covered with the latest most-wanted lists and campaign posters about spousal abuse, drunk driving, and the one Harper found the eeriest, an image of a young meth user, teeth missing, face covered in sores, and track marks up and down her scrawny arms. The caption read, “I wanted to be prom queen. Meth changed that.”
Down in the morgue, though, nothing hung on the walls. Instead the south wall was covered with an orange-yellow water stain from a pipe that had broken a few years back. The water had ruined hundreds of case files. Had the pipe burst on the north side of the morgue, it would have filled the cold storage, where the bodies were kept. According to Burl, the morgue had five “guests” at the time, so the loss of the files was preferable to the alternative.
Today Frances Pinckney was laid out on the autopsy table. Her face and shoulders were uncovered, but Burl had draped a white sheet over the rest of her. As always, Harper kept herself at a firm six or seven feet from the victim. She would have taken the autopsy results over the phone, but Burl tended to be more detailed when he was standing over the victim, and she didn’t want to miss anything that could be important.
“I ruled out natural causes first.”
Harper exhaled. “So, she was murdered?”
Burl crossed to the file cabinet without answering. He enjoyed the process of unveiling the cause of death, and Harper tried to remind herself that this part was his show. His cowboy boots made loud clacking sounds on the floor despite the blue booties he had pulled over them. He returned with a file and flipped it open.
Another of Burl’s little quirks.
Most of the other medical examiners talked from memory, especially when the victim was as recent as this one. Burl liked to hold the folder open in one hand while pointing out relevant markings with the other.
Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) Page 10