Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1)

by Danielle Girard

  “How do you know—”

  “I talked to Hal Harris,” Harper said, cutting her off so she didn’t have to mention him again. “It was him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re certain?” Harper pressed.

  “One hundred percent. Will you please untie the rope?” she added, nodding to her hands.

  “Of course.” Harper watched her. “Did he sexually assault you?”

  “No.”

  Harper reached for the ropes and hesitated. “Was he wearing gloves?”

  “No,” Anna said, again pushing her hands toward Harper. “Please untie these.”

  “I need you to hang on just a minute, Anna. There may be evidence on the ropes.” Harper pushed herself back to her feet. “Andy, call down to the Greenville police and get one of their detectives on the line. I don’t care that it’s ten o’clock at night—I need his help with this one. They’ve got to get someone out to MacDonald’s house. No way he made it home already.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then get the crime scene team out here. Tell them to put a rush on it. I need them five minutes ago. And get the latex gloves and evidence bags out of my trunk so I can get these damn ropes untied.”

  Anna’s shoulders trembled as she cried.

  Harper touched her shoulder. “I need to get some gloves before I touch anything.”

  Anna shook her head. “No. He wouldn’t have left anything. It’s all clean. He didn’t leave any trace. He’s too careful.”

  “We don’t know that, Anna.”

  “I do.” Anna blinked back tears, but they escaped her eyes and tracked down her cheeks. “He kissed my face, my neck. I promise you—he didn’t leave any evidence. Please,” she added, spurring Harper into motion.

  “I have to try,” Harper said. She turned to shout at Andy; then she saw him appear with her box of gloves.

  “Waiting for a call back from Greenville,” he said with a glance toward Anna.

  “Thanks,” she said and nodded him toward the door. As soon as he turned away, Harper sank down beside Anna and pulled two gloves from the box. “Did he say anything about how long he’s been in Charleston?”

  “No.”

  “How long have you been down here?”

  Anna shook her head. “I don’t know. I just woke up.”

  Harper smoothed the gloves over her hands and started to work on the knots.

  “He had me in a sleeper hold,” Anna said, voice shaking. “He was taunting me. Tightening it, then letting go just before I passed out. Then finally he just held it.”

  The knot loosened, and Harper was able to help free Anna’s left arm. Anna pulled it to her chest, cupping it against her. Harper worked at the other one.

  “I don’t know how long I was unconscious,” Anna said, and Harper couldn’t miss the vulnerability in her voice. The fear. If what Inspector Harris said was true, then it was there for her always. Had been for years. Harper tried to imagine living that way. She couldn’t.

  “I was only at the house maybe ten or fifteen minutes when I heard cats fighting,” Anna began. “I knew it might be a trick. I thought I was ready for him. I really thought I was . . .”

  Anna wore the same clothes she’d had on earlier. “You came straight here from the mortuary?”

  Anna nodded.

  Harper did a quick calculation. She’d left the mortuary just after four. That was more than five hours ago. Could Anna have been here for five hours? Harper freed her other arm. Greenville was just over three hours away, plenty of time for Spencer to get home again.

  Anna pulled her hands close and rubbed gently at the lacerations. “When one of the cats ran out of the garage, I let my guard down. I was righting the can of spilled paint when he came from behind me.” She tilted her head to the ceiling, fighting back her emotions. “He put me in a choke hold. I tried to fight.”

  “And you’re sure it was him?”

  “I would swear on my life.”

  Andy ran back into the garage with evidence bags. “Okay to collect the ropes?”

  “Yes,” Harper said. “If he was in here, Anna, he left something behind. His DNA has to be here. We’ll collect the evidence and prove it was him.”

  “You won’t find anything,” Anna said, staring at the wounds on her wrists.

  “There’s always some trace evidence,” Harper said. She thought about the running shoes in the entryway of Frances Pinckney’s house. “Do you know Spencer’s shoe size?”

  “Ten, ten and a half. Why?”

  The treads were men’s size eleven. He could have worn larger shoes. That would have been easy. Too easy. “We’ll check for footprints, too.”

  Anna looked so much younger than the medical examiner who had been in the morgue with Ava’s body earlier. “I was recording . . . on my phone.”

  Harper glanced around for the phone, excitement tingling in her fingertips.

  “He erased it. There’s nothing there now.” Anna motioned behind her, toward the back of the garage. “A lamp broke. He cleaned up the pieces.”

  Harper waited, sensing what Anna was going to say.

  “He would never leave DNA behind.” Tears streamed down Anna’s cheeks as her shoulders shook.

  “We don’t know that,” Harper said, trying to inspire confidence that she didn’t feel.

  “I do,” Anna said. “I know it. He’s on my skin, my clothes. Everything he touched. I want to scratch it off. But he won’t leave a trace. Not a single trace.”

  “You have to hang on, Anna,” Harper said softly, touching Anna’s arm. The first rape victim Harper had encountered said the same thing. She had described an urgent desire to wash, to scrub every inch of skin, as if by removing any remnants of his DNA, she might also erase the memory of his touch, etched in her memory.

  Anna pulled her hands into the sleeves of her jacket, clenched them into fists.

  Andy jogged through the garage door. “Crime scene team’s en route. Seven to ten minutes out.”

  “Mrs. Schwartzman was going back to the Embassy Suites from the funeral home. Call over there and make sure she’s okay.”

  “Will do,” Andy said.

  Harper kept hold of Anna’s arm as the flow of her tears slowed, then stopped, as her stature slowly shifted from victim back to the woman Harper had first seen at the mortuary.

  Greenville police confirmed Spencer MacDonald was home, where he said he’d been all evening. MacDonald was an upstanding citizen. The police had no reason to doubt his story, and an ex-wife wasn’t considered a reliable witness. That left Harper with no recourse to push them. At least Captain Brown agreed to put a rush on the evidence. Everyone was motivated to tie someone to the attack. If they were successful with that, it increased the odds of linking that same someone to the murders. For that, Harper had risked calling her captain at home in the middle of the night, and she’d been rewarded for her effort. The lab was already checking for the presence of saliva and other biologicals.

  Harper spent an hour in the hospital room with Anna before going to the waiting room to make some calls. Standing in the corridor, she couldn’t help but feel some excitement as the lab technician appeared.

  Every investigator worth her salt knew Locard’s principle, which held that the perpetrator of a crime would both bring something to the crime scene and leave with something from it. Harper had faith in the science. She believed in the exchange principle. She’d studied it for her undergraduate thesis and had seen it play out in every crime scene she’d ever investigated.

  Not that it always led to a suspect.

  What made Harper doubt herself was the look on the tech’s face, the little shake of her head as she got closer.

  “You found something,” Harper said out loud, willing it into reality.

  “No,” the tech responded in a flat voice. “We found no presence of foreign biologicals on the victim. Nothing at all.”

  Harper stared through the exam room window, to where Anna sat on the
exam table, wearing the hospital gown. She wore Harper’s jacket over the top of it and a thin cotton blanket pulled over her legs. Her clothes had been entered into evidence. Except her underwear. Anna had been confident that there had been no sexual assault.

  “Detective?” the lab tech prompted.

  Harper sighed. “Nothing at all?”

  “I’m afraid not, ma’am.”

  “She was sure he kissed her face,” Harper said.

  “If that was the case, we should have found something,” the tech said pointedly.

  “Or there is something we’re overlooking,” Harper returned, her tone a warning.

  The lab tech opened a file. “The skin on her face shows the presence of dimethicone and lanolin.”

  Poisons? Drugs? They were words that meant nothing to her. “What are those?”

  “Ingredients commonly found in moisturizer.” The tech paused a beat. “And nothing else.”

  Harper replayed Anna’s account in her head. He had kissed her. He’d choked her. “No foreign fibers?”

  “We are just starting to sort through the fibers. The sleeping bag alone is like a bird’s nest.”

  Harper opened her mouth.

  “But no biologicals. None.”

  She exhaled a long, slow breath. She wanted to strike out. To scream. How could she go back in there and tell Anna they had nothing?

  Anna had known he would be too careful to leave trace evidence, but Harper had been so certain that she would be wrong. “How in the hell is that even possible?”

  “We scraped her fingernails, swabbed her face and neck, her ears. We checked her clothes for hair. All we found were several cat hairs. Two different types. I’ve got the details on those. They match the descriptions she gave.” The tech opened her file.

  Harper waved her hand. “I don’t care about the cat hair . . .”

  “There is literally nothing to indicate that someone else was in that garage with her.”

  The tech waited patiently. Harper couldn’t believe he hadn’t left any evidence. It was impossible. There was always something. But they didn’t always find it. She hated that this might be one of those times. “Can you get me a copy of your findings?”

  “We’re dusting for prints. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”

  “And keep me posted on the fibers,” Harper added, praying something would come of this.

  As Harper gathered herself to face Anna, her phone buzzed in her side pocket. She lifted it out, expecting Jed but seeing the number was from San Francisco. Inspector Harris.

  “This is Detective Leighton.”

  “Harper? It’s Hal.”

  “Hi.”

  “How is she?” Hal asked.

  Harper recalled how shaken and small she had seemed in the garage. “Better than she was.”

  “The bastard kissed her,” Hal said, repeating what she’d told him in her message. The anger hissed in his tone. “So we’ve got him.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean no?”

  Harper explained what the tech had told her.

  Hal growled long and deep. She could imagine his teeth bared in frustration.

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “Christ,” he muttered. “So what do you think happened? He kissed her, and then, once she was passed out, he cleaned her face?” A beat passed. “She said he was meticulous, that he never made a mistake, but that is just insane.”

  Harper felt a wave of nausea. “The trace they found was from some sort of moisturizer.” She followed the thought through. “Oh, God. You think he cleaned her face while she was unconscious, then put moisturizer on her?”

  Another beat passed while Harper considered the idea. She imagined Anna passed out, her attacker lovingly washing and moisturizing her face, a perverse facial.

  Hal spoke first. “Yeah. I’m beginning to think that’s exactly what that bastard would do.”

  Harper sent Andy to retrieve a bag of pajamas and extra clothes Jed had packed up from Lucy’s closet as well as some toiletries from their guest bathroom. She took Anna to the Embassy Suites herself and refused to leave until she was showered, fed, and ready for sleep. Only when Harper was confident that she had done everything she could did she leave the room, pausing outside the door until the dead bolt slid into place and the locking bar clacked against the door frame.

  It was almost one in the morning by the time Harper got back in her cruiser to head home. As her mind began to settle, her stomach growled. The bowl of chips she’d polished off as a dinnertime snack wouldn’t hold her till morning. And morning was almost here. The smart thing was to drive straight home, eat a banana, and go to bed.

  But Harper was a little too angry for that tonight.

  Instead of heading home, she turned down Calhoun and headed toward the river. It was ten, maybe twelve, minutes to Krispy Kreme.

  33

  Charleston, South Carolina

  Schwartzman woke in a strange bed, dreaming of cancer. But in her dream, the disease was Spencer’s creation. He stood over her and touched her skin, a tumor growing under his fingers. In the dream, the cancer was just another way to control her. She pushed herself up in the hotel room bed and studied the bright sunlight that cut through the gap in the shades.

  Instead of being disturbed, the dream left her with hope.

  And an idea.

  The clock on the bedside table read 7:47 a.m. She dialed the front desk from the hotel phone and requested her mother’s room.

  “I’m afraid she’s already checked out,” the clerk said.

  Schwartzman set the receiver back in its cradle and slid her cell phone off the table. No missed calls, no texts. Had her mother waited for her in the restaurant last night? She dialed the hotel operator and requested the restaurant.

  “I’m wondering if my mother might be down there,” she told the hostess who answered. “She’s sixty, about five four with blondish-gray hair cut in a bob.”

  The hostess put her on hold for several moments. “I’m afraid not,” she said when she came back on the line. “I don’t think we’ve seen her yet today.”

  Schwartzman was not surprised. Her mother was certainly already on her way back to Greenville. To be safe, she dialed her mother’s number.

  “Good morning, Annabelle,” she answered as though this was just a regular check-in call.

  “I just wanted to make sure you got home safely,” Schwartzman said.

  “That’s very considerate of you. I’m just passing through Columbia.” Her mother sounded the same as she always did on the phone. She might have been talking to the housekeeper or making a tee time. Polite, brief.

  Schwartzman sighed. Some tiny part of her had hoped that maybe her mother had stayed. There was the familiar weight of disappointment. She knew enough not to tell her mother about Spencer. She would never believe Schwartzman—had never believed her before. Spencer would always be a prince in her mother’s eyes. Nothing Schwartzman said would change that. “Will you text me when you get home?”

  “Yes, dear. If I remember, but you don’t need to worry about me.” With that, her mother rang off.

  Schwartzman washed her face and dressed again in the leggings and a volleyball sweatshirt that Harper had brought her. Today she would find new clothes. But first she had a call to make.

  At a few minutes after eight, the phone rang in Melanie O’Connell’s office, and Schwartzman prayed that Melanie was in the office today. And when the receptionist confirmed that she was, Schwartzman prayed that she could convince the nurse that she was an old friend dropping in for a surprise, that they would find an open appointment time to slide her into so that she could be sitting in one of the rooms, just like a normal patient, when Melanie walked in. And didn’t Melanie love surprises? Wasn’t she the same as she had been in medical school? Always one for an impromptu night out or a drink after the longest, hardest of days. Always bringing a light to the darkness of things.

  Had it real
ly been seven years ago that they’d met?

  Melanie had been a fourth-year med student in Seattle; Schwartzman had been making the awkward transition of coming into a new medical school after three years at Duke and hiding from a crazy husband.

  Her prayers were answered. A cancellation late in the day had opened up a slot. That the appointment was late in the day gave Schwartzman time to find a rental car. Time to stop by Ava’s for some clothes. Time to get to Savannah.

  She wondered if there was a way she could have convinced her mother to stay. Perhaps if she knew about the cancer. Or about the attack. But no. That was impossible. Her mother would never believe that Spencer was capable of something like that.

  Schwartzman left through the side door of the hotel and crossed the park to King Street, where she caught a cab toward Ava’s. She had the driver drop her at Tradd and Church, a block and a half from Ava’s. From there, she could approach the house without drawing attention.

  Ava’s house looked exactly as she’d left it. Schwartzman used her key to enter and pushed open the front door wide as though to declare she wasn’t going to be afraid. Surely Spencer wasn’t here.

  She entered Ava’s bedroom, intent on not looking at the place where Ava had been killed. Caught sight of an evidence marker on the floor and rushed into the closet, closed the door behind her.

  She would not look at the crime scene, not now.

  Instead she moved quickly, rummaging through the closet drawers for something inconspicuous. She left Ava’s house ten minutes later with sunglasses and a scarf to hide her hair. She wore a light jacket and khaki slacks of Ava’s.

  Again she saw no one. To be sure she wasn’t followed, she walked for blocks and blocks in no particular direction.

  As she walked, she took out her phone to call Hal. Fifty-some hours since she’d left that hospital room.

  Before deciding she had to come here. Before her mother told her she wasn’t staying. Before seeing Ava’s body. Before the cats and the crash of breaking glass. Before being tricked.