“While we were trying to identify the stain, we found a partial print. We were able to salvage the print and run it through the system.”
Adrenaline stirred in his veins. “And?”
“We got a match,” Roger said.
“That’s great.” Hal slapped his desk. “Was it a match to MacDonald?”
“No.”
Okay. Not MacDonald but his accomplice. That was one step closer. “Who, then?”
Roger spoke slowly. “Actually, I don’t think you’re going to like what we found.”
Hal swallowed. “Why not?”
“Afraid he’s one of ours,” Roger said.
Hal closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. One of our own. These cases were always the worst.
“Hal?”
“I’m here.” He resigned himself to what was coming. This was the job.
“You ready for it?”
“Do I have a choice?” Hal gripped the pen and waited for Roger to give him the name.
16
Charleston, South Carolina
Four days had passed since Frances Pinckney’s murder, and they had nothing. The only evidence other than the body was a size eleven tread print found just inside the front door. The print was partially smudged, making it difficult to determine when it had been left. Harper had already checked on the people who worked for Pinckney.
The couple who cared for the house were eliminated based on their alibi—they’d driven down to see her sister near Atlanta. Plus, they had absolutely nothing to gain from Frances Pinckney’s death unless they had planned to rob the place. But nothing had been taken.
Not to mention his foot was a size thirteen men’s and hers a size six women’s.
The gardener was the right shoe size, but he and his wife had been attending their granddaughter’s dance recital that night along with approximately eighty other parents and grandparents.
The tread indicated it was some kind of running shoe, and the lab would run it against a database to identify the brand and shoe type. But that would only be helpful if they had a suspect to match it against. There were no tread prints found farther into the house, so the one they’d found might have been a neighbor helping Pinckney carry something heavy in from her car or bringing over a piece of mail that had come to the wrong address and stopping in for a chat.
It could have been from anyone. Which meant she had nothing.
With Jed and Lucy at a volleyball game, Harper spent the afternoon sitting at her desk, reading over tiny print on lab results from the scene and waiting for something to strike her. Eyes burning, she flipped back to her own notes on Frances Pinckney’s death.
Employees, family, there was not a single good suspect, and she’d covered every base, checked all the right boxes. Pinckney’s children arrived in town the day after her murder, and Harper met with each of them more than once. She took them through their mother’s house to confirm that nothing was missing. The art was accounted for, as were the more mundane valuables like electronics.
Pinckney’s financial accounts—credit cards, bank and investment accounts—had been checked for any sign of fraudulent activity and had come up clean. Robbery was unlikely as Pinckney’s wallet had been sitting in her purse by the door with more than $100 in cash and five or six different credit cards. Plus, Pinckney was found wearing her antique wedding ring and a necklace with a diamond pendant, a gift from her husband for their fortieth wedding anniversary.
With robbery off the table, Harper had moved on to another most likely motive—greed. She hadn’t gotten anywhere there either. Frances Pinckney’s estate was divided 30 percent to each of her three living children. The remaining 10 percent went to an organization that worked to create stiffer penalties for driving under the influence. Her son Patrick had been struck and killed at eighteen by a drunk driver. Even if Harper could find a motive for one of the children, they all lived in different states. Distance created ironclad alibis. Not that they needed them. It was obvious from their distress that the children were crazy about their mother.
These were the toughest cases. Everyone wanted to know why, and she had absolutely nothing to offer them. She glanced at her watch and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed. Andy had gone out for coffees and offered to pick one up for her.
She needed it.
Harper lifted the receiver off her desk phone to dial Jed about dinner when her captain stuck his head out of his office door.
“When did you get here?” she asked him.
“Forty-five minutes ago, hour maybe. Walked right by you.” Barrel-chested and buzz-cut, Captain Brown looked like a typical Southern boy, especially dressed in jeans and a casual button-down as he was now. Add his boisterous voice and he was as stereotypical as they came. In reality Beau Brown was a sweetheart with a soft spot for stray kittens.
“What are you doing in here on a Saturday?”
“Budget’s due this week,” he told her. “I just got a call on my cell. You know someone named Ava Schwartzman?”
“She’s Frances Pinckney’s best friend.” Maybe Ava had news. “Is she on the phone for me?”
“Nope.” Captain Brown scratched along the line of his buttons, the way he did when he had bad news.
“What is it?”
“Cleaning lady just found her.”
Harper rose slowly from her seat. “Found her?”
“Afraid she’s dead.”
17
San Francisco, California
Hal set a box of Kleenex in front of the woman across from him. She pulled out a handful, using one to dry her swollen eyes. Her shoulders shook in the way of women crying. Her eyes pleaded with him to offer her some alternate possibility. Say it isn’t my daughter.
He remained silent.
He had hoped Hailey would join them, but after five minutes of waiting, he assumed she had been called out on something else. He settled down into his chair, making himself as small as he could, before speaking. “I am very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Feld.”
Hearing about Terri Stein crying in Schwartzman’s office, Hal had wondered if the grief was real. He’d wanted to see for himself if the crying was part of some act. Sitting across from Rebecca Feld, he had not a shred of doubt that her pain was genuine. He used to think that saying he was very sorry for the pain people were feeling was a worthless gesture, stupid even. That there had to be a way to offer the families something more.
There wasn’t. Those seven thin words and his solemn promise that he would do his best on behalf of whatever loved one had been killed, that was all he could offer. Anything else was false, a lie. He felt the deceit, and they did, too.
“I know this is difficult, but I’d like to ask you a few questions.” He spoke the words carefully. This first step was like tapping on an eggshell. He wanted to open it up enough to get at what was inside without breaking it completely.
She nodded.
Hal opened his notebook. “When was the last time you saw Sarah?”
Rebecca Feld blotted her eyes and lowered her hands to the table. “The holidays,” she said. “Sarah came home for Christmas.”
“Where’s home, ma’am?”
“Placerville.”
“So Sarah didn’t live in Placerville.”
“No. She was down in Los Angeles.” A tiny cast of spit flew from her mouth with the words.
“I take it you’re not a fan of LA?”
“I don’t have anything against the town,” she explained, regaining her composure. “But it was no place for a smart girl like Sarah.”
“Had she been down there long?”
“Oh yeah. She went down about five minutes after finishing high school. It’s almost fifteen years now.”
“And what did Sarah do in LA?”
“Little bit of everything. Bartending, waiting tables, a couple short secretarial-type jobs, but they didn’t last long. Got in the way of her auditioning.” Again with the spit.
Sarah had gone to LA to
pursue acting.
The story was common enough, and he might have jumped past all the background and gotten right to the questions about roommates, boyfriends, and recent jobs, but in his experience, there was a lot to be learned about a child from how her parents spoke of her. “Sarah was an actress?”
“Actor,” Rebecca Feld corrected. “She wanted to be called an actor. Said that the word actress was sexist. They were all actors. She and her dad used to really get into it over that one.”
“Her father,” Hal said, making a note. “Does Sarah have a relationship with him?”
“He passed. Last October. Colon cancer. Sarah didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so it was just her and me left. Now it’s just—” She stopped talking.
He gave her a moment before pressing on. “Do you know what she was working on?”
Mrs. Feld shook her head. “Used to be Sarah would call and tell us about everything. Auditions, of course, but every little detail, like if she met someone in the business or saw a movie that was what she imagined for herself. Or one she hated and thought she coulda done better. Back when she first went down, she called most days.” Rebecca Feld stared down at her hands folded in her lap.
“Over time, she did that less.” Her expression filled with the excruciating guilt reserved for the parents of victims. “I guess we didn’t always take how much she loved acting serious enough. It was hard, too. We wanted her to have a normal life. Like we did. You know, have a husband and a family.”
Hal had no idea what it was like to have a normal family, but he understood the mother’s desire. His mother had the same one for him.
“But she came home different at Christmas.”
He shifted up in his chair. “Different how?”
“She had money, for one. She never had money.”
Hal had talked to Sarah Feld’s landlord in LA the night before, once the Sacramento sheriff had called back to confirm her identity. Her rent and utilities had been prepaid for six months. Fourteen thousand paid in a single deposit by a holding corporation out of Florida.
Florida again. Victoria Stein from Florida. Spencer’s mother in Florida.
The holding company that had paid the rent was in Miami. Forensic accounting was working to follow the paper trail, but the company had been dismantled, which meant it would be difficult to locate the parties involved. He also had someone digging for any possible connections to the holding company and Victoria Stein of Pensacola or Gertrude MacDonald of Palm Bay.
Nothing yet.
There was no connection to the various pieces.
“But she didn’t tell you where the money had come from?” Hal asked.
“She sort of pretended that she was the same old Sarah. But she sure wasn’t. Her clothes were different—she looked more like someone working in an office than she ever did before. Usually she came home in those tight yoga pants and running shoes. This time she wore nice skirts and blouses. She even had a pair of shoes with red soles. They had some fancy name. You know which ones I’m talking about?”
“Afraid not,” he told her. “Women’s shoes aren’t really my thing.”
She cracked a sad smile. “Well, I can’t think that Sarah woulda known what they were last summer, but at Christmas she sure did. She took things to be dry-cleaned. She never used a dry cleaner in her life. She was more . . . sophisticated, I guess. Her hair was straightened and a little wavy, even after she washed it. She always had real frizzy hair, like her daddy. But she had something done to tame it down. She said it was a kind of South American treatment. It looked good. She brought Christmas presents—some fancy chocolates and some whiskey she said a friend introduced her to.”
There it was. The friend. Was that Spencer? If he had paid for her apartment, there had to be a trail that led back to him. Hal made a note to find out if MacDonald had access to any cash businesses, something that enabled him to move money without it showing up in his accounts. “Did she tell you about the friend?”
“She swore he wasn’t a boyfriend. She hadn’t even met him in person.”
Hal wrote that down. “Did she tell you how she met him?”
“Some online talent search. She was going to be the star of some new reality show.”
Had Spencer reached out to Feld by posting an acting job? “Did she mention the name of the show? Or of anyone else who was involved?”
Rebecca Feld pressed the tissues to her eyes as the tears flowed again. “All that was top secret. She said she didn’t even know much about the job, but that it was going to be huge. Bigger than Survivor.”
Hal knew almost nothing about reality TV. He got enough reality in his job, so he opted for sports on TV. “Was the show going to be like that one? Some sort of physical competition?” he asked.
“I have no idea. She wouldn’t give any details. Either she didn’t know or she didn’t want to share.”
Hal tried to think of another angle. “You ever hear her on the phone over Christmas?”
“She didn’t talk to anyone. Texting. She did a lot of texting.”
Hal flipped the page in his notebook. “Would you write down your daughter’s phone number for me?”
Rebecca Feld took his pen and wrote down a number with a 310 area code. “But I think she had a new phone, too.”
“A new phone for this number?”
“She was texting her friends at home on her old phone. It was nothing fancy, one of those where the top slides up and there’s a keyboard underneath so you can text. But she had a new iPhone, too.” As her voice drifted off, her gaze settled on the wall behind Hal. “It’s like she was some kind of double agent.”
Hal couldn’t believe that Sarah hadn’t left some clue about her new life when she was home for the holidays. It was starting to feel as if what she did on that visit was his only chance to find out who she had become involved with.
Or to confirm it was Spencer MacDonald behind this whole ruse. But not alone.
That didn’t seem possible.
Which meant they were still missing another piece.
Who was paying for her rent, buying her new clothes and phones? And for what? What was the purpose of paying for her to live there for six months if the plan was simply to kill and stage her for the police to find? “Did she see any old friends when she was home for Christmas?”
“A few. She went out with some friends from high school a couple of nights.”
Okay. Maybe there was something. “I’d like to get their names and numbers so I can talk to them and see if Sarah told them anything else that might be helpful.”
“You think this new job is the thing that got her killed?”
“The more I know about what Sarah was doing when she died—her work, her friends—the better the chances that I can find out what happened to her.” Hal slid the notebook back again. “Can you write down some names for me?”
Feld wrote three names. “These are maiden names. I’m not sure what names they go by now.”
“I should be able to find them.” Hal opened the manila folder and pulled out the composite sketch of Terri Stein that they had been circulating. “One last question, Mrs. Feld. Do you recognize this woman?”
“No. I’ve never seen her before.”
Hal did his best to mask his disappointment. He wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t going to be that easy. “I appreciate you coming in.”
She hesitated before standing from the table; then she opened her purse and pulled out a plastic sack, placed it on the table. “Maybe this stuff will help you.”
Hal turned the bag in his hands. He saw a passport and California driver’s license in the name of Sarah Feld. Behind those was a folded paper, which he drew out and opened. He recognized the blue paper. Her birth certificate. He returned the paper to the bag. “You can keep these, Mrs. Feld.”
Standing from her chair, she shook her head. “I can’t. Please take them.” She motioned to the bag and started crying again. “She got that passport while she was home.
Planned on going to Spain in the fall when the show was done filming.” Mrs. Feld adjusted the strap of her purse up on her shoulder. “I don’t want any reminder of what my baby girl will never get to do.”
Hal understood the torture of parents whose roles were cut short by the death of a child.
A parent was supposed to die first. It was a child’s job to look back on her parent’s life to appreciate what she had accomplished and even where she had fallen short.
A parent who lost a child never had that kind of peace. The child’s life would always feel truncated, opportunities stolen.
Mrs. Feld struggled to maintain her composure, and, when she got control, she said, “If you don’t mind getting me a ride to the bus station, I’d like to go home.”
18
San Francisco, California
Schwartzman shut off the shower. The phone was ringing. She wasn’t working today, so the call was likely from Hal. Or maybe it was Macy, asking her for a date. Or something benign, like the dry cleaner. She dried efficiently, moving gingerly around the site of the breast biopsy. The places where they entered to biopsy her adrenal glands didn’t hurt, but the one on her breast was tender. She put vitamin E on the healing wound before pulling on her robe, taking her time.
The phone would be there. She had all day to waste. May as well draw it out.
Though it was Sunday morning, it felt like a second Saturday. Every third Monday she was off to make up for the weekend shift she took every six weeks. It was one of the perks mentioned when she’d applied for the job. People loved having a weekday off. It was a time to go to all the places that were only available while working people worked—the post office, the dentist. Or to be at the grocery store or the gym or Nordstrom without the weekend crowds.
Schwartzman was not one of those people. She didn’t mind the sea of people at the Marina Safeway on Sundays or the fact that there were always people on her favorite trails. Those bodies created comfort, safety. She was most comfortable in a crowd as long as she was on the periphery. Schwartzman normally dedicated these days off to the stack of medical journals and forensic pathology reading that piled up when she was working. This morning, though, she was off to a slow start.
Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) Page 14