Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1)

by Danielle Girard

  In the kitchen, she poured a cup of coffee, then returned to the bedroom. The phone sat silently on the bedside table. She moved to the closet, nudged aside the small vintage brass iron that kept the closet door from opening on its own. Several months before, she had fixed the latch so that the door would stay closed properly, but sometime in the past few weeks, it began to open on its own again. She hadn’t mustered the energy to fix it a second time. So the iron resumed its place as a doorstop. She found a comfortable pair of workout pants and a slouchy sweater in the closet and took her coffee back to bed.

  The day would go faster if she could sleep longer, but she never had any luck staying asleep past seven. Just one of the scars from her life with Spencer. Who would have called on a Sunday morning before eight?

  Hal had been working all weekend. She’d received a brief text from him yesterday about the interview with the victim’s mother. The message included three pieces of information, and only one was remotely helpful. Hal said he had a lead but didn’t say what it was. He also admitted that he hadn’t learned anything more from the victim’s mother about why her daughter was living in a barely furnished apartment in San Francisco. But he told her that Victoria Stein’s real name was actually Sarah Feld. That last bit, at least, was of interest to Schwartzman.

  A Google search of the name revealed a series of head shots and a single commercial credit for Feld.

  It made sense that Spencer had hired an actress. She’d been hired to play a part. How much did she know beforehand? Had she signed up to play the part of a victim without realizing how realistic the role would be?

  Schwartzman rarely saw the victims before they ended up on her table and found it intriguing to study the woman’s images. Her face had been more angular in life, the masseter muscle in her jaw overdeveloped. Stress most likely. The orbicularis oculi muscles around her eyes indicated that she’d recently gotten Botox on her crow’s-feet. It wasn’t relevant to the case, but Schwartzman made a mental note to tell Hal.

  When she reached for her phone, she saw another missed call and a voicemail from a San Francisco number. Not a department number and not Hal’s cell phone.

  She set the phone down, then picked it up again. There was no good reason to wait. It wasn’t like she was avoiding working. She pressed “Play.”

  “Dr. Schwartzman, this is Renu Khan. I hope I’m not waking you. I saw Dr. Fraser when I was doing rounds yesterday at UCSF and pathology had the results of your biopsy.” A beat passed, and Schwartzman used it to suck in a deep breath. “I wanted to get the information to you as soon as possible, so you can determine next steps. The biopsy confirms the presence of invasive lobular cancer in your right breast. I know Dr. Fraser’s office will be in touch with you directly, but I wanted to give you my cell phone number as well so that you can contact me. I know it’s Sunday, but I’m around today if you would like to talk.”

  Dr. Khan started to recite her phone number when the phone rang again in Schwartzman’s hand.

  This time she knew the number. Hal. She pushed herself too fast upright in the bed. Dizzy and nauseous, she lay back down. “Schwartzman,” she said into the phone.

  “It’s Hal. Good morning,” he said, though it didn’t sound like it actually was.

  “Good morning,” she responded with approximately the same lack of conviction. Cancer. Invasive cancer. Lobular. She tried to dredge up memories of med school.

  She caught the tail end of something Hal said.

  “Sorry, Hal. I think my other line was ringing through. I missed what you said.”

  “No problem. Do you need to go?”

  “No, it’s fine,” she said quickly, blushing at the lie.

  “Was wondering if you’re coming in today? I know it’s Sunday.”

  “I can,” she told him, sensing the edge in his voice. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m interviewing a suspect at nine o’clock. You might want to watch, if you’re available.”

  “A suspect? Did you locate the sister?”

  “No, and you were right. They’re not sisters. Sarah Feld doesn’t have any siblings.”

  She had let that woman go. She’d known something was off, but she hadn’t acted on it. Worse, she had actually entertained her questions, let her sit in that chair and watch her, all the while knowing—whatever she knew.

  “Who are you interviewing?”

  Hal sighed. “Ken Macy.”

  Schwartzman was upright again. “Macy wouldn’t have—”

  “I like him, too,” he agreed.

  She was stunned. “It’s not a matter of liking him. It’s just—” But then she couldn’t say what it was. He was trustworthy, honest. Good. Decent. After Spencer, she was cautious—overly cautious. She had a strong sense of people, and Ken Macy seemed as upstanding as they came. Or maybe Hal was right. She liked him, considered him a friend. “Why?” she said finally.

  “They found his prints at the scene. On a napkin in the victim’s trash.”

  Schwartzman pictured Macy’s easy smile. “His prints on a napkin? So he accidentally threw something away in her trash. That doesn’t mean he killed her . . .”

  “The napkin is also stained with the wine she was drinking.”

  “Isn’t it possible that the wine got on the napkin in the trash?”

  “By the location of the stain, Roger doesn’t think so. The napkin’s not enough for a warrant, let alone an arrest, but I’ve got to bring him in for questioning.” The words came out harsh. “He’s agreed to come down.”

  “Does he know about the evidence? The napkin, I mean?”

  “No,” Hal said. “I thought I’d tell him in person.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “How well do you know him, Doc?”

  They’d had dinner the other night. She had bumped into him on the street. How unexpected. She was sick. “I don’t know him, but—”

  “But what?”

  “I did have dinner with him on Friday.”

  “You had dinner with him Friday night? Like a date?” he asked, curiosity in his voice.

  “No,” she said quickly. “Not like a date.” A date meant they were involved. She was not ready for that. Maybe she would never be. “It’s not like that. He’s always telling me about good new ethnic restaurants that are opening up. It’s one of the things we talk about when I see him at a scene.”

  “And he invited you to dinner?”

  “No . . .” She went through how it had happened. “He sent a text about a new place down in the Marina. It doesn’t have takeout yet.” The yellow waiting room at Fraser’s office. The biopsy. Friday, the cancer had been only a chance. Now it was reality. People waited a week or longer for the results of a biopsy. Hers had been fast-tracked. Because it was serious? Because she needed to act quickly? Or because Dr. Khan’s sister-in-law was an inspector in the department’s special investigative division on hate crimes?

  Whatever it was, a call on a Sunday morning was special treatment.

  “Schwartzman?”

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “You okay this morning?” Hal asked.

  “Still half-asleep I guess. Sorry. Say it one more time?”

  “You said that the place didn’t have takeout?”

  “Right,” she agreed.

  “So what does that mean?” Hal prompted.

  “Well, I don’t eat out often,” she said. “I usually have something delivered.” Even she heard the unspoken part. She was alone. Without friends. Without a partner. “Friday, I needed to get out of the house, so I decided to go down there for dinner.”

  He didn’t ask if it was just her. He understood that she would be alone. “And Macy just happened to be there?” he asked, the skepticism clear.

  Schwartzman felt a renewed urge to defend Macy. But how could she? What did she really know about him? Before their dinner, she hadn’t known anything other than his name and his job title. “I don’t see how he could’ve known I would g
o,” she said finally.

  “Safe to assume you two talked over dinner?”

  “Yes. About him mostly. His family, that kind of thing.”

  “You talk to him about your ex?” Hal asked.

  Hal always referred to Spencer as her ex. Technically, they were still married, although she had thought of him as her ex-husband for years. She kept telling herself she would point it out. And then she didn’t. It was humiliating that they were still married. And frustrating. And not relevant.

  “Schwartzman?”

  “No. We didn’t talk about him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I don’t even think I mentioned where I’m from. I might’ve told him I’m an only child. That’s it.” As she spoke, she replayed the evening in her mind. She had been so relaxed. She had actually relaxed in the company of a man—a man she liked—and now he was a suspect in the murder of a woman who could have been her twin. “I didn’t tell him anything important,” she added.

  “It’s okay,” he told her.

  She took a deep breath in response to his words. It wasn’t okay, and the panic filled her anyway. “I’ll see you at nine.” Before he could say anything else, she ended the call. She dropped the phone on the bed and let herself slide onto the floor. Her back pressed to the bed, she watched the shadows of the sun move through the clouds through the dark blinds.

  The emptiness was like hunger and indigestion, all tucked up under her lungs. She was reminded of her father’s death. The call she had taken that evening in her tiny med school apartment, her mother telling her that he was in the hospital. She had not changed clothes or told anyone she was leaving. Took her purse and keys and drove straight to the hospital.

  She was shocked when she entered that room—the sheen of his face, the ashen tint of his skin, his body so much smaller in that bed. The infection raced through his body. The doctors’ optimism shifted into tenuous hope and then acceptance that there was nothing they could do.

  He died in the night.

  The days she had passed at home were a blur, but months later, back in something like normalcy, she had woken one morning with this same pain. At the time, it was like being devoured from the inside out.

  Something had shifted in her that morning. The realization that her father was truly gone felt both sudden and complete. She was stunned at how gone he was. I keep looking for traces of you, and you are just so absolutely gone, she had written in her journal that day. There should be more of you lingering. I should feel you, know that you are with me. It’s just absolute, stark absence.

  She still felt the anger of that day, the idea that his silence was an affront. She had meant more to him than that. Everywhere she went, she wanted to scream out to him to show himself, but it was all just the normal, silent world staring back at her with no sign of him in it. She was desperate to tell him that she was not going to be okay without him. Not ever again. She was grateful for what he had given her, that he was her father, but with him gone, she was left with this forever hole in her heart because he was so much of her life. And it just didn’t make any sense that there was a world without him in it.

  It never quite went away, that feeling. She eased herself off the floor and drew the shade just as the sun slipped again behind a gray cloud.

  None of this would have happened if you had stayed.

  And, as always, she knew it was true.

  19

  Charleston, South Carolina

  Sam was standing outside the victim’s bedroom door, his arms crossed, as Harper came up the stairs. She could tell it was bad. He didn’t meet her eyes. She suspected this was difficult for him. The first ones were always the hardest. Two in a row, in such quick succession, made it worse.

  She wished he’d say something. They could have both used a break from the mood, and she would have liked a little pep talk. Or humor. Something to break up the emptiness she felt.

  Those were Andy’s traits, not Sam’s.

  Andy was supposed to be on the scene, too. She would find him later.

  First, the body.

  She reached the top of the stairs slowly, dreading what was waiting for her. Frances Pinckney was someone she’d known all of her adult life. Ava Schwartzman was not. But she was someone Harper had sat down with, face-to-face, only days before, and that made her death more personal than was comfortable. Not to mention that the word serial was starting to get tossed around the department. A serial killer in Charleston. That was downright terrifying.

  “Ugly?” she asked Sam.

  “Worse than that,” he answered.

  From inside the room came the flashing lights of the crime scene analyst’s camera. Though Harper rarely saw the face hidden behind the cyclops of the camera, the tech was distinctive for the strawberry-blonde ponytail that snapped left and right as she pivoted from shot to shot.

  “Almost, Burl,” said the tech as Burl inched ever closer to the body. He occasionally complained about the number of photographs the crime scene techs took these days. When Burl started with the department, they took maybe twenty. Film was expensive and not high quality. Digital film was cheap, cost of development, zero.

  For some of the inside scenes, techs took as many as seven or eight hundred photographs.

  For Harper, clicking through those images was an important part of putting the puzzle together.

  Staying out of the tech’s way, Harper stepped into the room, which might have been staged from 1920s Charleston. The furniture was dark wood and heavily carved. A large Persian rug occupied the center of the room and ran under the bed and bureau. The wear suggested the rug had been there for some decades. The room was lit only by two bedside lamps. Eyelet window shades let in the sunlight, but the room was especially dark as she moved toward the bed.

  Harper fought back the intensity of her own reactions.

  The woman lying on the bed was nothing like the Ava Schwartzman who Harper had met. Seated in the police conference room, Ava Schwartzman had been composed. Strong, elegant, even a little intense.

  Now she seemed small and terrified and much, much older.

  While her eyes remained wide-open, her mouth was tightly closed, the muscles of her jaw bulging in her cheeks. She was a thin woman, but in her sleeveless nightgown she looked emaciated, almost sickly. Her arms were stretched above her head. Each wrist was bound with a red bungee cord, which had been hooked around the bedpost.

  “If he wasn’t wearing gloves, we might find epithelial cells in the cord,” Harper said. It could be that easy.

  “Yep,” the tech agreed. “We’ll test ’em.”

  The victim’s feet had been bound by regular white rope. A square knot. Nothing fancy there. “And—”

  “Yep,” the tech said, cutting her off. “The rope, too.” The young woman continued her arc of the victim, finger depressed on the shutter release.

  Finally, she appeared from behind the camera. Narrow brown eyes and brows that were the same pale reddish-blonde as her hair. She scanned the victim and glanced up at Burl. “All yours.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Burl said, even though the tech probably wasn’t much older than Lucy. His case already open, his hands already gloved, Burl moved right in and inspected the victim’s eyes and face. He shined a penlight across the skin, shifting his angle as he searched.

  Burl had told her he’d once found a perfect thumbprint on an eyelid. Boy killed his aunt because she wouldn’t give him thirty bucks. Afterward, he closed her eyes and left a print. Swore he’d been out all night, but the thumbprint said otherwise. They’d gotten a conviction on that one.

  “Petechiae,” Burl said, waving her over.

  She rounded the bed and stood across from him.

  “See it here.” He lifted Ava’s lower eyelid to display the red dots associated with strangulation. “And also here, around the mouth.” He moved the light down her face.

  “Some sort of asphyxiation.”

  “Looks like it.”


  Without fanfare, Burl unbuttoned the victim’s nightgown and exposed her chest.

  Harper forced herself to study the body. This wasn’t Ava Schwartzman. This was the victim. Just below her breasts were two oval bruises about 50 percent larger than chicken eggs.

  “Perimortem,” Burl confirmed. “You can tell because the edges are well defined. The injuries did create bruises—that doesn’t happen if the victim’s already dead—but the blood didn’t spread into the surrounding tissue, so she wasn’t alive long.”

  “What caused those?”

  “If I were gambling man, I’d say knees.”

  “Knees?” But as soon as she’d said it, she pictured the victim’s killer mounted on top of her small chest.

  “She was burked.”

  Harper had never seen a burking victim, but she was familiar with the term. Normally, burking involved two killers. One to hold his hands over the victim’s mouth and nose to prevent breathing while the other sat on the victim’s chest to press the air from the lungs.

  In this case, the evidence suggested that both parts were accomplished by a single killer. With her hands and feet bound, the killer was able to use his hands to cover her mouth and nose and his knees to prevent her chest from rising to draw in air.

  Burl studied the victim’s hands. “No defensive wounds.”

  “You think he surprised her?”

  “Can’t imagine he could get her tied up without waking her,” Burl said.

  “Could have threatened her with a gun to get her to comply. Once she was tied up, there wasn’t much she could do to fight him. I’ll have patrol check with the neighbors and see if they heard anything.”

  “Not sure she put up much of a fight,” Burl said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If she struggled, I’d expect to see more bruising.”

  Harper hated the idea that Ava didn’t fight her attacker but said nothing. But what about Pinckney? What would have kept her from fighting? “Chloroform?”

  “Would make sense. I’ll test for it.” He used the penlight to illuminate the chest bruises and moved his head to see them from different angles. “Hmm.”