The man who squatted in front of her was Ken Macy. “I am so sorry.”
Schwartzman wiped her hands tenderly across her pants, the skin raw.
“Let me help you up,” Macy offered, reaching for her hands.
She turned on her side and got up on her own. She scanned the sidewalk for her car keys.
“Did you drop something?”
“My keys,” she said, getting back on her knees to peer under a black Mercedes SUV parked at the curb.
Macy used the flashlight on his phone to scan the pavement. “Did you hear them land?”
Hot with embarrassment, she wanted to go home.
Macy walked off the curb and into the street to search from the other side.
Standing again, Schwartzman glanced at her palms. The right one was bleeding, and the left had several small pieces of rock embedded in it. She would need to wash them.
“Got ’em.” Macy returned the keys, and she winced as the rough edge of her house key touched the abrasion on her palm. “Let me look at that,” Macy said, taking her hand before she could tell him no.
She flushed at the touch of his hand. Warm, soothing. She forced herself to pull away. “It’s nothing.”
He didn’t let go. “Ouch. Come on. You can wash up inside. You’ve got a little gravel in that one.”
She was desperate to stay and leave, both at once. “I’m okay. Really,” she said, starting to turn for her car.
“You need to get that cleaned out, Doctor.” He smiled gently and nodded toward the restaurant. “And the food’s really good. I’ll order for us.”
The air stuck in her throat.
Macy sensed her stiffen. “Hey,” he said with a reassuring touch on her arm. “Just two friends having dinner.”
She glanced over his shoulder in the direction of her car. Racing past him to make a run for it crossed her mind. “I—”
“Colleagues,” he offered. “Honestly, Doctor. Just food. You need food. I can tell. And a nice cold bottle of beer is going to feel great on those hands.”
He was right. She could have a meal with a colleague. In a public restaurant. This was what normal people did. For tonight she could be a normal person. What was more, she wanted to have dinner with him.
“Say you’ll stay,” he said softly.
“I’ll stay.” She felt a moment of joy. She was out, with a friend. She felt safe and happy. She could do this.
“Good.” Macy held the door open, and the noise from the small restaurant flooded out into the street. “Restroom’s in that back corner,” he told her, pointing over her shoulder.
She made her way around the tables, glancing at the food on the table. Her stomach growled. When was the last time she’d felt hungry? Not even hungry, she was ravenous.
In the bathroom, Schwartzman turned the water on cold and tested it with her fingers before letting it run over her palms. The burn passed quickly, and after a few moments in the cold water, she lathered with soap and gently washed. The scrapes were mild, none reaching below the top layers of the epidermis. They would be healed within a day or two. She let the cold water run over them again, then pressed the backs of her hands to the warmth in her face before patting her skin dry and heading back into the restaurant.
Her stomach gave a little jolt as she spotted Macy, hand raised from a two-top against the far wall of the restaurant.
He was smiling. He had an easy smile. It made her want to smile back.
She was relieved that they were far from the front window. She would not think about needing to hide; for one hour, she would not think. Instead, without allowing herself to hesitate, she walked toward him.
He rose when she arrived at the table and moved out of the seat against the wall to let her take it. Schwartzman appreciated the gesture. Having the view of a room made her more comfortable. She wondered briefly if he’d planned it this way. He was the kind of man who would notice those things.
The waiter returned with two glasses of water and asked if they were ready to order.
“Maybe a drink.” Macy looked across at Schwartzman. “I didn’t order any drinks because I wasn’t sure what you’d want.”
Schwartzman opened the menu and scanned the list of beers. “I’ll have a Tsingtao,” she told the waiter.
“I’ll have the same,” Macy said before turning to her again. “You okay if I order us a few starters? There are a few things I think you’ll like.”
“Sure,” she told him, wrapping her hands around the cool water glass. This was not a date. She felt both relief and disappointment.
Macy picked out a couple of things she’d never heard of, and the waiter left the table. Now she would have to make conversation. She should have asked more questions before the waiter left. Something to bridge the awkward gap between falling on her butt in the street and being seated across from a man she hardly knew.
Macy, on the other hand, seemed completely at ease. He rubbed his hands together like someone about to partake in something wonderful and took a long drink of water. Then he launched right in. “How long have you been in the city?”
“Just a few months,” she told him, then quickly asked about him.
Macy was easygoing and funny, and it took little time to get him talking. Leaning back, he told her about moving down from Klamath Falls, Oregon. His father was a cattle rancher, and Macy was the only boy surrounded by five sisters.
“It’s how I got my start in the police department,” he told her.
“Ranching? Or being the only boy?”
Macy laughed, and it made her laugh to hear him. “I worked in animal control for the city,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how many of those guys are terrified of raccoons. I became the raccoon guy. Was there three years and decided it was time to try something new.”
The normalcy of their conversation was so striking. Just two people, eating and talking. Laughing. It was so lovely. She wanted to bask in it, and yet she found herself thinking that this was not her life. It took only seconds for the shadow of her real life to fall back over her.
“What about you?” Macy asked.
Schwartzman took a bite of a risoles and chewed slowly, then lifted her beer glass.
“You don’t like to talk about yourself, do you?”
“There’s nothing particularly interesting about me,” she said. “Tell me more about your family. I can’t imagine a house with so many kids.”
Macy carried the reins of the conversation through dinner and their second beers. Only when the waiter asked if they cared for dessert did Schwartzman notice the crowd standing on the street, waiting for a table.
“I think just the check,” Macy told him.
Schwartzman pulled out her credit card.
“No, you have to let me treat,” Macy said. “After all, I did all the talking.”
“No,” she said firmly.
“Split, then.”
“Split,” she agreed.
When the check was settled, Macy walked Schwartzman to her car and opened the door for her. She waited for the awkwardness of the end of the evening, but there was none. He simply let her get into the driver’s seat and closed the door behind her.
Standing on the curb, he watched her drive away.
Back in her apartment, Schwartzman felt lighter than she had in weeks. It was just a distraction, but an effective one. She didn’t realize how badly she’d needed it. Not to mention the reminder of spending time with a nice person—a nice man. She set her keys on the entryway table and shrugged out of her coat. Crossing toward the kitchen, she saw the flashing light on her answering machine. Froze.
Of course. Of course it couldn’t last. She turned on the teakettle just to hear the scream. She stared at the flashing red number 1, then jabbed the “Playback” button.
“This is a message from the building superintendent. We will be doing the annual inspection of fire extinguishers a week from Monday. Please leave your fire extinguisher outside your door no later than sev
en o’clock Monday morning. If you are out of town or need assistance, please contact the building superintendent.”
Schwartzman tossed her coat onto the kitchen chair and laughed out loud. It was a message about checking the fire extinguisher. How perfectly boring and mundane.
The kettle whistled the first notes of a song, and Schwartzman could have sung along.
15
San Francisco, California
It was the end of the day when Hal entered the department and spotted Hailey at her desk. He felt a rush of gratitude. They had been partners for almost a decade, and, though he rarely admitted it, working without her was difficult.
His mind functioned in pieces, and he depended on hers to help him pull them together. That and she was probably his closest friend. He had Ryaan, of course, although their relationship was new and came with the complications of romance. He also had plenty of guy friends—the kind he called to play ball or see a game or grab a beer, but few of them talked about anything more personal than their fantasy football leagues.
Over the years, there had been friends who had shared personal hardships. There was a fellow officer whose wife was leaving him for another cop, another inspector whose wife couldn’t get pregnant. As those hardships passed, so did whatever had brought the two men together. The result was that the friendships naturally ebbed back into the casual banter of acquaintances.
Hailey never let things go quietly between them. When he tried to avoid a subject, she had a knack for digging deeper without nagging, and, to give her credit, she relented easily when the tables were reversed. Somehow their gender difference had never made things awkward between them. Hal liked to think it was because he had two older sisters who’d beat him up whenever he met a girl and thought of her first as a potential girlfriend. But it was Hailey, too.
They were both married when they’d started as partners: he to a woman with an affinity for putting herself into dangerous situations and she to the son of a congressman. She had children; he vowed he’d never have any. Their relationship had quickly become easy; they bantered like siblings. After her husband’s death, Hailey had simultaneously pulled away and depended on him like family. Whatever bond they’d had before that was fixed in stone then.
He thought about Schwartzman.
She reminded him of Hailey in the months after her husband died—both strong and fractured at once. He was drawn to Schwartzman, to the desire to support her. He had seen her competence in her job, her strength in arguing the finer points of an autopsy on the stand in front of a jury. She was great at her job. Recently he had seen moments of humor behind her reserved exterior.
The humor was gone now.
That made him angry, too.
Maybe he had a thing for broken people, but he definitely had a thing against bullies. Though he was six four now, Hal had been a small child, one of the shortest in his class through high school. He had grown more than six inches his first year of college. Spencer MacDonald was just a bully—only he was the very worst kind. He hid behind his status, his job, his social reputation, his money. He thought he could use those things as a wall to stand behind as he committed the worst kind of atrocities. It had been a long time since Hal felt this strongly about a suspect.
He crossed to Hailey’s desk without stopping at his own. “Hey.”
“Hi, stranger,” she responded. “Glad you’re here.”
“Me, too,” he agreed.
“I’ve got something for you,” she said, turning to the stack of papers on her desk.
“Man, I could really use some help on this Stein murder,” he admitted, grateful just to say the words.
Hailey stopped digging. “How’s Schwartzman?”
Hal rubbed his head. “It’s tough to say.”
“She’s reserved.”
That was an understatement. If he had expected her to open up more after their conversation about her marriage, he would have been disappointed. If anything, she seemed more closed.
“Any new leads?” Hailey asked.
Hal exhaled, fighting his frustration. “Nothing since the disappearance of the victim’s fake sister.”
“That pendant was so eerie. How can that be a coincidence?” Hailey said, speaking softly. “Not to mention that Schwartzman and the victim could be sisters. You have anything new on her ex?”
“I got in touch with a deputy in the Greenville Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday. He made a couple of calls. Talked to the ex’s assistant. She said she books all his flights, and he hasn’t traveled since last December. A four-day trip down to Florida to visit his mother.”
“That doesn’t mean much,” Hailey said. “He could have made his own arrangements.”
“Nope. Ran his credit cards, too. Only airline ticket in six months is the one to Florida . . . which is also where the real Victoria Stein lives.”
“The real Stein? What do you mean?”
Hal recounted the call he’d had with the FBI contact.
“So you think he went down there to steal an identity?” Hailey asked.
“It’s not likely. Pensacola is almost in Alabama. His mother’s place is in Palm Bay, on the eastern coast. It’s not like he could drive over and pick up Stein’s card.”
“And there’s no other connection between the real Stein and Spencer MacDonald?”
“None,” he said, the frustration in his teeth. “Or his mother. I’ve got a request to search the flight manifests in case he booked using cash or someone else’s card, but it’s like a needle in a haystack.” He sighed. “I’ve got nothing to go on. Maybe we could go back over to the vic’s place? Take another look around?”
“I’m still interviewing witnesses on that gang shooting,” she said. “But I should be done today.”
“Sure.” He tried to hide his disappointment, but he wished she’d finish up already. He would have liked some help with the Victoria Stein case. He needed two heads on this thing. Hell, he needed a dozen of them. He felt as if they were missing something, that they were close, but it was so elusive.
It wasn’t uncommon to have dozens of prints to sort through at a scene, but to have nothing was rare. And he didn’t like it.
She grinned and gave him a little elbow nudge in the gut. “You’re missing me.”
“Yeah. I have to cry myself to sleep,” he told her.
“Poor Hal. Tomorrow, I promise.”
He really did hope she’d be able to rejoin the investigation tomorrow. “You said you had something for me?” he asked to change the subject.
“Yes.” She turned back to the pile and shuffled the pages until she found a pink message slip. “You got a response on your missing persons. Sacramento PD called about twenty minutes ago. They’ve got a woman who came into the station and said your missing person is her daughter, Sarah Feld. Mother, Rebecca Feld, said she last talked to her daughter about two weeks ago.” Hailey passed him the slip. “Here’s the local sheriff’s number. Mom’s a real mess, so they’re holding her until they can get in touch with you.”
Hal flapped the note against his thigh.
A lead.
ID’ing the victim meant gaining access to her friends and family, people who might be able to point the police to who she hung out with and worked for. And Hailey had been hanging on to it. “Why didn’t you give me this first?”
“I was having too much fun hearing about how much you were missing me.”
He rolled his eyes and crossed back to his own desk, where he dialed the sheriff.
“Sheriff Bowman,” came the response on the first ring.
Hal introduced himself.
“Boy I am glad to hear from you,” Bowman said.
“I hear you’ve got someone who recognized our victim.”
“Yes. Mrs. Feld came in about an hour ago, and we were able to confirm that your victim is her daughter, Sarah. The mother brought in her passport and her driver’s license. Birth certificate.” He dropped his voice. “I think she might have a few photo al
bums in her bag, too.”
“Sheriff Bowman, I’m going to need the mother to come down here to make an identification and answer some questions. I assume she’s not in any shape to drive.”
“No,” Bowman said quickly. “Definitely not.” There was a brief pause. “I can have an officer bring her down.”
Hal exhaled silently, relieved not to have to make the four-hour round-trip. “That would be really helpful. How soon can they be here?”
“Well, it’s after six, Inspector. I still need to confirm your victim is Feld’s daughter. You send me those pictures, we’ll be sure of that, and then we can bring Ms. Feld down first thing tomorrow morning.”
“That works. Thanks, Sheriff. Give your officer my cell number. I’ll be waiting for the call. I can be here anytime after eight.” Hal recited his mobile phone number and hung up. Slapped his thigh. This was how it went. It just took one crack to break something open.
He thought about calling Schwartzman. Not yet. He didn’t want to get her hopes up. He would talk to the mother first, make sure Victoria Stein was, in fact, her daughter.
When the phone rang a second later, he assumed it was the sheriff calling back. “Yeah?”
“Hey, Hal.”
It wasn’t the sheriff, and Hal couldn’t place the voice. “Yeah?”
“It’s Roger.”
“Oh, sorry. Thought you were someone else.” Hal pulled out a notepad and grabbed his pen. “You got something for me?”
“We found a napkin in the trash, kind of shoved down in there. Evidence of two compounds found on it. The first was red wine, consistent with the bottle we found in the dumpster and the wine in the glass on the kitchen counter.”
Hal felt his pulse revving. This was it. The case was cracking. “Not surprising,” he said. “And the second?”
“Right,” Roger went on. “A dark-red stain, very small. Less than two millimeters. We thought it was blood.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No. Some sort of sauce. We’re working on what kind exactly.”
Hal felt slightly let down. “So we have wine, which we expected, and something else. How does this help us?”
Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) Page 13