Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1)

by Danielle Girard

  She pumped her fist. Removed the syringe from its packaging and pressed the vial into its base. Then, with her teeth, she removed the orange protective cover on the needle and stuck into the thick blue vein in the crease of her elbow. She had good veins, easy veins. The kind nurses commented on because they were so fat and ready to give.

  The vial filled with blood, and she turned her attention to Ken. She had no rubbing alcohol swabs to clean the wound site. The vein was languid and flat. She wondered if she could kill him by drawing blood. She’d been to medical school. She should know the answer to something so basic. The vial from her own arm was full. She pulled the vial off and replaced it with an empty one. How much blood would they need to test? Two vials? Three? She’d give them four.

  She fingered his arm. “Okay, here we go,” she told him, glancing at the shirt packed around the knife in his chest. She slid the needle into the vein and took a breath as she pushed the vial into the base of the syringe. Blood trickled into the vial. “You’re doing great, Ken. You hear me?”

  She touched his fingers, but there was no response. His grip loosened. His pulse was palpable but barely. And slow. Too slow. Damn it. Where the hell was the—

  Just then there was pounding at the door. She sprinted, holding her arm, and studied the peephole. Paramedics. She fumbled with the lock. Men dressed as paramedics. Spencer. How far would he go? Fake paramedics? She threw open the bolt and pulled the door open.

  “Dr. Schwartzman?”

  “He’s in the bedroom.”

  She raced across the apartment, the gurney wheels clacking against the hard floor behind her. She stepped aside, and something caught her arm. Saw the syringe in her arm but the vial was gone.

  “What drugs has he taken?”

  The paramedic was a woman. Thin, Asian, intense. The other paramedic moved to Macy.

  “We need to know what drugs are in his system,” the woman said.

  “I don’t know,” Schwartzman told her. “I am drawing our blood to find out. I’ve got two vials of mine.” Just then she spotted the second vial on the floor, rolling slowly toward the door. She scooped it up and showed it to the paramedic.

  “Ma’am,” the female paramedic said. “What kind of drugs did you take?”

  “None. I don’t even know how he got here. I woke up, and he was here. With the knife.”

  “Pulse is one ten,” the second paramedic reported. “Blood pressure’s ninety-six over seventy.”

  The woman moved past Schwartzman, guiding the gurney to the edge of the bed as the other paramedic set up an IV. “How long since he was stabbed?”

  Schwartzman shook her head.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know,” Schwartzman said. But she might have yelled it.

  The two paramedics lifted Macy onto the gurney, the fitted sheet still beneath him. Did they believe she had stabbed him?

  “If you want to save your friend’s life, you need to tell us what happened here,” the woman said as they strapped the belt across Macy, avoiding the knife that jutted from his chest.

  “You’re speaking to the San Francisco medical examiner,” came a voice from the hall.

  Schwartzman started. Hal Harris stood in the doorway. He looked half-asleep. His shirt on backward. He held his badge open, the brass aimed at the paramedics. “She’s a victim here, too, so assume she knows nothing.”

  “If you say so,” the woman said, dubious.

  “I do,” Harris told her, moving aside as they wheeled Macy out.

  Schwartzman started to follow.

  Hal took her arm and stopped her. “Hey.”

  “I’ve got to go with him.”

  “Do you have a robe somewhere, Doc?”

  For the first time, she glanced down at herself. Her pajamas were covered in blood, her breasts visible through the thin material of the cotton. She wrapped her arms around her chest. “In the closet. By the door.”

  Hal pulled a navy terry-cloth robe from its hook and handed it to her. He held the closet door open to allow her to put it on without facing the room. As she tied the belt, she realized she was still holding the vial of blood.

  She handed it to Hal. “It’s my blood. We need to test it for drugs.”

  Hal took the vial. “What do you remember?”

  She shook her head, scanning the room.

  Blood. There was so much blood.

  “Wait,” she cried. “I took his blood. I had a vial of it.” Schwartzman palmed the damp top sheet until she located the vial with less than an inch of blood. “This is his.” She crouched at her ME bag and found labels. “I’ll put our names on them.” She dug through the kit for a marker. Normally she had tons of them. Her vision blurred.

  “Hold up, Schwartzman.”

  She tried to stand. The blood rushed to her head. She reached out with the vial of Ken’s blood and felt it roll off her fingers. Hal’s hand swept through the air. His fingers closed on the vial as the walls moved sideways; the floor rose. Hal’s arm around her waist. Her head fell into his chest, and everything went gray just before it was black.

  24

  San Francisco, California

  The hospital room smelled of astringent, plastic, and the musty smell of body odor and urine that could never quite be scrubbed away. Hal stood against a wide metal beam that ran along the inside of the window. It was as far as he could get from the noises and smells of the rest of the hospital. Schwartzman had been brought directly to the ICU. There was no private room, no privacy at all save a thin curtain that divided the ten-by-ten space from the main desk, where phones rang constantly and doctors and nurses conferred about their patients in voices not quite loud enough to understand but too loud to ignore.

  Normally he would have assigned a patrol officer to watch her. Like it or not, she was their primary suspect in Macy’s attack. Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation was usually the correct one. But nothing about this was simple. He wanted to believe, as she did, that her ex-husband was at the center of all of it, that somehow they would be able to tie him to the death of Sarah Feld and now to Macy’s attack. Homicide. God, he hoped it wouldn’t be that.

  The last time he’d seen Macy was in the interrogation room. Confused, deflated, Macy had seemed so genuinely stung by the questions Hal asked. It was the job, but it hadn’t made him feel any better.

  He stood now in the room of another person who looked guilty of a crime. Another colleague. Worse, a friend.

  The window behind him was large, the ledge down at his knees, but the room was dark and cold. A single chair with a plastic blue cushion stood against one wall, but he had yet to sit down.

  Hours had passed, and still adrenaline pumped through him. Schwartzman had woken twice. The first time she cried out like a child, and in the moment it took him to cross the room to her, she tried to sit up, clawing at her IV. Her expression was pure terror until she saw him. She had calmed slightly just before the room was invaded by nurses. As Hal held her hand, the IV was fixed, a sedative added to the fluids. “To help her sleep,” the nurse had said, as if he didn’t understand sedation. The second time she woke, she simply whispered the name. “Macy?”

  Again, he took her hand. “He’s going to pull through,” Hal told her, although he had no idea if it was the truth. Macy was in surgery, and it would be hours before they knew what kind of damage was done. Hal had been to his share of scenes where a victim had died by bleeding out. From what he’d witnessed in Schwartzman’s apartment, there was enough blood for it.

  Macy was out of his control, but he could be here for Schwartzman. There would be a lot of questions when she woke. Difficult ones, and he wanted to be the one to ask them. Where had she gone last night? When did Macy come to her apartment? And what the hell happened after that?

  When Hal had arrived at her apartment, she was holding a vial of her blood. Somehow, in the midst of all the chaos, she’d taken samples of their blood. She told Hal to test the blood for drugs. Hal had given the
patrol officer strict instructions to wait for Roger’s team to arrive and to have them take it directly to the lab. It was there now. They would have results by tomorrow. That was as rushed as they could manage with the current backlog.

  He tried to imagine Schwartzman stabbing Macy some dozen times, then waiting before calling 9-1-1. Then, while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, drawing their blood. Why would she do that if she was the one who’d stabbed him? But it might not be so simple. It was possible that the stabbing was her doing. There were plenty of drugs that caused hallucinations. It wasn’t difficult to imagine a scenario that would fit. A woman with an abusive ex-husband, alone, confronts a man at the door and mistakes him for that husband. In a drug-altered state, she attacks without thinking. When she wakes, the drug has worn off and she realizes what she’s done.

  He stared down at Schwartzman sleeping. Blood in her hair and across her forehead.

  Macy’s blood.

  Was that MacDonald’s end goal? To manufacture a scenario where Schwartzman stabbed Macy and was arrested for assault? Or worse, for murder?

  Had MacDonald realized he wouldn’t get her back and decided this was the next best thing? Or was killing Macy his plan from the beginning?

  Hal hated that he couldn’t send a car to pick up MacDonald, throw him in an interrogation room somewhere, and let him sit for a while. He wanted to face MacDonald when the questions were asked. Instead the most he could do was make long-distance phone calls to a department where he had no clout and ask them to pull in a man who was, by their records, a well-respected citizen.

  Damn this.

  Hal’s phone buzzed with Roger’s latest text.

  The security cameras went down at 11:17. The basement alarm went off at 11:39. The desk clerk followed procedure, locked the outer door, and went to check.

  Hal frowned. False alarm?

  Yes, Roger confirmed.

  Hal considered the building where Schwartzman lived. It was modern, new, high-end. The security systems in those places had to be top-of-the-line. Any idea why the sec system went out?

  The line of dots on his screen told him Roger was replying.

  The company is working on that now. The night guard said everything was working. He saw images on the screens but nothing at all was recorded after 11:17.

  And no Macy before that? Hal typed.

  Roger wrote back, No.

  Roger occasionally complained about inspectors who requested text updates while he was processing a scene. It used to be simply impractical, the constant removing of gloves to type out a text before donning a new pair and going back to work. These days, Roger wore a Bluetooth device that he could voice activate, and he recorded his texts, no fingers required.

  Outside communication meant Roger had to shift his focus from the scene, but there was nothing regular about this case.

  From the frantic pace of the texts Hal was getting, Roger was working this one like a kidnapping. In those cases, the protocol was all about speed. The scene was preserved so that it could be revisited, but that first sweep had to be done as quickly as humanly possible. The sooner they identified and traced the evidence, the sooner they found the victim.

  What about Schwartzman?

  Have her coming home just before 7. Nothing after that.

  So maybe Macy came over. Maybe they were a couple. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d missed signs of an interdepartmental relationship.

  Will get traffic cam feeds. Have one pic. Could be her. On corner.

  Send pls, Hal texted back.

  Coming . . .

  An image appeared in a text message. He enlarged the photograph, but what he saw was not especially useful. Dark, wavy hair under a black ball cap. A black trench coat belted at the waist. Black boots with a small heel, black slacks. A large bag, something between an oversize purse and an overnight bag. It might have been Schwartzman, but it just as easily could have been someone else.

  Think it’s her? Roger texted.

  Hal studied the image. He had seen her in slacks and boots, but the baseball cap was odd. Unless she was trying to conceal her identity.

  Not sure, Hal wrote back. What time?

  11:33.

  Almost exactly fifteen minutes after the cameras stopped recording. Just six minutes before the false alarm in the basement. That was no coincidence. No Macy?

  Nothing yet.

  Thx, R. Keep ’em coming. You send a team to his house?

  There was a short delay before a single word popped up on the screen. Yes. Then a few seconds later, Roger wrote, And we’re pulling additional footage from surrounding cameras in the area. It’ll take us a while.

  Everything was being done. Roger would get him results as quickly as possible, but this wasn’t magic. Someone had to pull the traffic cams, run search programs, and hope like hell they got lucky. In the meantime, there was nothing for him to do but wait until Schwartzman woke up and hope she could answer some questions.

  He watched the rhythmic beat of her pulse on the monitor. Outside he saw the sky was cast in an orange glow. Morning? He glanced at his watch. Damn. It was almost seven. Exhaustion cut into his shoulders and neck like heavy straps. He stretched his arms up and laid his palms flat on the ceiling. He could have gone for a walk, but he didn’t want to leave her. Instead he convinced himself to settle into the chair.

  The top edge of the metal chair dug into his back just below his shoulders. He shifted down and stretched his legs out. Folded his arms across his chest and waited for the vibration of his phone to alert him to news.

  25

  San Francisco, California

  Schwartzman couldn’t draw her gaze away from Hal, asleep in the hard hospital chair in her room. His chin tucked to his chest, his arms crossed, his enormously long legs stretched across the floor, he looked distinctly uncomfortable. Touched that he had stayed with her, she could not wake him. She was letting Hal down by leaving.

  She had no choice. It was obvious she’d be the primary suspect for Macy’s attack.

  Moving silently, she slid the lock on the IV to stop the drip. Gritting her teeth, she yanked the lead from her hand. She held her thumb against the skin to stop the bleeding and used her feet to push back the sheet and the thin blanket.

  It was temporary, she told herself. Until Macy woke up. Her pulse drummed inside her ears. If he woke up. God, please let him wake up. If he didn’t survive, she would be charged with his murder. He was found in her bed; she had been covered in his blood. The tox screens might create questions, but without another suspect, she was the obvious choice.

  So she would run.

  She was the kind of woman who ran. Spencer had made her this person. Always looking over one shoulder, afraid. Who would she have been without him? No. The question was, who would she be?

  Because she was ready to be done running.

  Her feet met the cold linoleum floor, and she crept across the room to the locker where her personal belongings would be. If she had any. Please let there be something. She took a deep breath and opened it slowly. The hinge let out a little cry. She froze, but Hal didn’t move. She peered inside. Her purse, her trench coat, and a pair of tennis shoes.

  She bent down to put her shoes on, slipped the coat over the hospital gown, hitched the purse onto her shoulder, and turned the coat collar up. Then she removed her phone from her purse, held it to her ear, and, with her hair half covering her face, walked out of the hospital room. She kept her head down. “Right, right,” she said into the phone when she was far enough away from Hal not to wake him. “I’m on my way.” She paused until she was at the door, pushed it open with her hip. “Urgent. Yes, I understand.”

  She ducked into the stairwell rather than take the elevator and came out the service entrance at the back of the hospital. There, a group of doctors, nurses, and employees was gathered to smoke. Head down, she kept moving. If she looked strange, no one said anything.

  At the corner of the building and out of view, Schw
artzman sped up to a jog. Spotting a cab at the front curb, she ran. She was woozy and off balance. Her head thundered with every step. She wondered if the hospital had performed a toxicology report. It would be useful to know what drug had been used so she’d have an idea of when the effects would wear off.

  As she opened the cab door, her cell phone vibrated. Hal was calling.

  She dropped the phone into her pocket without answering as she slid into the back of the cab. I’m sorry.

  Pulling the door closed, she decided on a plan. “Crunch on Polk Street, please.”

  The driver’s eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “Crunch?” he repeated.

  “It’s on Polk between Union and Green.”

  “A restaurant?”

  “A gym,” she said.

  “You are okay?” he asked, touching his own forehead. “There is a little blood.”

  “I’m fine,” she said quickly. “But I’m running a little late.”

  With that, the driver started his meter and pulled away from the curb. Schwartzman ducked as the hospital’s front doors opened and Hal ran through them. He stopped and scanned the street, rubbing his head. He hadn’t seen her. At least she had that.

  Schwartzman massaged the tender lump on the back of her hand where the IV had been. For a doctor, she had little experience with IVs, and in her hurry, she’d been rough. She thought about Macy. She had to know if he was—she stopped herself. She searched for the hospital number and asked the receptionist to be connected to ICU.

  “Patient name?”

  “Ken Macy,” Schwartzman said, whispering his name like a prayer. There was a brief hold, and during the wait, it was impossible to move air in or out of her lungs.