Expire

by Danielle Girard

  “Roy Butler!” the woman shouted.

  Schwartzman stared at him. This man looked nothing like the Roy Butler who had worked in her morgue. Was it possible that they were both named Roy?

  He smiled at her, like they were playing a game, but she had no idea what to do or say. He seemed gentle, kind. Her fingers found the collar around her neck, and she pulled, testing it. When the collar didn’t give, tears welled in her eyes.

  He touched her cheek, his finger dirty.

  She tried not to flinch.

  “Roy! Are you in here?” A woman’s voice in the cabin. The sound of hard-soled shoes echoed on the wood floor.

  Schwartzman closed her eyes and turned her head. Let her mouth drop open and tried to take deep, even breaths.

  “Roy Butler. You are not supposed to be in here. This is Tyler’s girl.”

  The man said something she couldn’t understand.

  “You get on out of here. Tyler catch you, he’ll tan your hide.”

  He made a disappointed groan and stomped from the room, the soft rubber soles of his shoes nothing like the hard, heavy ones the woman wore.

  Schwartzman fought not to open her eyes, sensing the woman watching her. She wanted to turn over and bury her head but dared not. The floor beside the bed creaked. Unable to remain on her back, her face and chest exposed, she made a throaty sound as though her sleep were disturbed and rolled over in the bed. The collar pulled and choked, the cord eventually releasing from the spool above to alleviate the tightness.

  Her eyes still squeezed closed, she listened to the silence. The thud of footsteps still remained in the room. Something landed with a light tap on the table beside the door. A moment later, the woman’s shoes clomped across the floor again. Muffled steps in the outer room gave way to the thwack of the screen door closing and the distant sounds of the woman’s voice as she scolded the man.

  Schwartzman pulled her hands to her chest, lifted her knees, and huddled into a tight ball. She touched her face, remembering the tears, but her face was dry. How terrified she’d been to feel that man so close.

  He was a man named Roy Butler. But he certainly wasn’t the Roy Butler she’d known from the morgue or the man who’d abducted her. This was a man with Down syndrome.

  Schwartzman recalled a victim with Down syndrome who’d been killed behind a community college in San Francisco the year before. His wallet had been stolen, though his mother swore he’d had only a bus pass and ten dollars. His head bashed into the pavement, he’d been left to die. On internal examination of his head, Schwartzman had discovered a frontal subgaleal hematoma underlying the forehead contusion. There were similar temporoparietal subgaleal hemorrhages on both the left and right sides, as well as hemorrhage of the temporal muscles. A soft organ in a hard container, the brain has nowhere to go when the blood collects. When parts of the brain are squeezed, the result is herniation. In this case, the brain stem had been pressed farther down the foramen magnum, constricting the centers that control breathing.

  His breathing had simply stopped.

  It had been Hal’s case. The thought of Hal made her heart ache. She pressed her hands to her belly, certain now that their child was growing there. They’d never caught the man’s killer. Schwartzman recalled the roundness of the victim’s face, the distinct features of his genetic anomaly. He had been in his early twenties, but everything about his face was boyish and kind.

  The man who had been here, in this room, had seemed calm, too. Was it his mother who had called after him? Schwartzman replayed the voice in her head. The low tones of the woman’s voice made Schwartzman think she was at least in her late forties, early fifties. A smoker, by the sounds of it, which made it harder to guess. If they smoked enough, a twenty-five-year-old could sound fifty.

  Schwartzman wished she had gotten a look at the woman, but how could she have done that? She shifted her head on the pillow, the ache at her temples a reminder that she didn’t have sufficient clean water. The snow had stopped, and without the metal slat, she had no way to reach the surrounding snow on the ground. She closed her eyes and studied the gentle pulsing in her temples. The pain could be from the drugs themselves, the dehydration, or perhaps caused by the near-strangulation she’d suffered more than once. The day before, she had eaten a yogurt and two peanut butter sandwiches. She was hungrier now, and the food only temporarily settled her stomach, which felt perpetually queasy, either from the drugs or the pregnancy.

  But the more she ate of those foods, the more she would have to drink the drugged water. She was caught in a vicious cycle. At that thought, she had to fight the urge to scream and fight against the cable, the collar.

  She forced herself to take slow, deep breaths. She would not break the collar. Certainly not on her own. Not without some tool.

  She needed an ally.

  She recalled the sound of a woman crying out when Roy—or the man she’d thought had been Roy—had struck her. But maybe it wasn’t a woman. Maybe the person who was struck had been the man with Down syndrome.

  She thought about the man who’d hovered over, pressing his finger to his lips as he’d evaded his mother or sister. Pairing that man with the child-like writing of the Holocaust tattoo on her arm, she was suddenly relieved. Likely, he had written those numbers. As hateful as they were, they might have seemed like a game to him. Something he’d seen his family do. She thought again about Roy Butler. Roy. The boy’s name was Roy. “Tyler’s girl,” the woman had said. But the man in her morgue was Roy Butler. Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the Roy Butler who had worked in the morgue wasn’t actually Roy. He might have used his brother’s identity to get the job. And there was only one reason for Tyler Butler to steal his disabled brother’s identity—Tyler already had a record.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the track on the ceiling. For the first time, she really studied its finish, the screws that held it to the ceiling. Was it new? She’d assumed this had been installed for her, but what if it wasn’t? What if she was wrong about the projection? What if Spencer wasn’t behind this? Or what if Spencer had decided to let someone else have her, torture her?

  The woman had called her Tyler’s girl.

  What if he regularly brought women here? Perhaps he’d been close to capture, so he’d changed his name and taken his brother’s. It would work once. But that meant another woman had lived in these walls, been drugged . . . and then what?

  What had happened to her when Tyler Butler was done?

  32

  Friday, 3:15 p.m. PST

  Hal was at his desk when the internal call came in. If he’d been paying attention, he would have hesitated to answer. But now it was too late. The voice on the line was Scott Theobold.

  “I called Hailey first,” he said. He must have heard the dread in Hal’s silence. “But she wasn’t answering, so I thought I’d try you.”

  Hal shifted in his chair. “Sure.”

  “I’m finishing the autopsy on our first gunshot victim, and I’ve found something I think you should see.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can you come down? It’s in several places, and I could photograph it, but I think it might be clearer in person. I’m also collecting it to send to Roger, so I could get it to him first, if that’s the process. I was under the impression that Dr. Schwartzman did her best to show you her findings before she separated the evidence from the victim.”

  The rushed sound of Theobold’s voice, the long explanation, exposed the man’s nervousness.

  “I’ll come now,” Hal said and hung up the desk phone. He stared at Hailey’s empty chair and wondered how soon she would be back. He sighed. Get up and go, Harris. He rose from his chair and went.

  On his way down the department stairs, the tightness that had lived in his chest since last Saturday clamped down. He came through the lobby doors hardly able to breathe, almost stumbling out onto the department’s steps. Breathe. Breathe. He hurried down the stairs and around the side of the building, stoppi
ng before he reached the morgue building to force air into his lungs.

  Six days she’d been gone. Almost a week. He thought about the statistics on missing persons. The chances of finding someone alive halved after twenty-four hours. Then it halved again sometime in the next thirty-six. He pushed the number from his head. The needle would remain at 100 percent until he had her in his arms.

  Within a few strides, his lungs expanded, and he drew air to fill them. He would work this case and find Anna. Things would go back to normal. No, they would be better. She was pregnant. Everything would change. It would be a new normal. He glanced back up at the department building and wondered again if he should have waited for Hailey to return to the station. But having Hailey at his side as he walked into the morgue would not have made this easier.

  Nothing would, short of Anna herself.

  He squeezed his fists against the pain in his chest. Where are you? He wanted to scream. His heart thumped like a caged rabbit beneath his ribs.

  Pull it together, Harris.

  The sooner you catch this son of a bitch, the sooner you get back to finding Anna.

  Inside the building, Hal refused to see the worry in anyone’s faces or feel their eyes dissecting his own expression. Instead, he strode down the hall to the morgue’s door. Through the small window, he could see Dr. Theobold at work.

  Gripping the handle hard, Hal almost barreled into the door when it didn’t open. It took him a minute to realize it was locked.

  Anna never locked the door when she was inside working.

  He rapped on the window, and Theobold looked up, raised a blue-gloved hand.

  The acting medical examiner removed his gloves and disposed of them before opening the door for Hal. Theobold then returned to the sink, washed his hands, and put on a fresh pair of gloves before returning to the body. That explained why Anna never locked the damn door. It was a waste of time.

  Theobold returned to the body and adjusted the sheet to cover the victim’s face. Clasping his hands together, he turned to Hal and offered a tentative smile. In it was a flash of fear.

  Hal pulled on a pair of gloves as well and turned to the table.

  “My sister died when she was nineteen,” Theobold said.

  Hal turned to the medical examiner. “How?”

  “Car accident,” he said, as though apologizing that it wasn’t something more dramatic.

  “I’m sorry,” Hal said.

  Theobold looked up, surprised. “I was twenty-two, just finishing at Berkeley. I had planned to go into research medicine . . .” He let the words trail off. Her death had changed his plans. It was understood. What was unclear was why Theobold had shared this. Perhaps he thought Hal could relate.

  But there were no similarities. Anna was not dead. And she was not his sister.

  Theobold lifted a notebook and started reading. His voice held a nervous tremor as though he were a high schooler giving a presentation. “Male victim, five eleven, one hundred and eighty pounds. Aged thirty—”

  “I don’t think I need his age,” Hal said. “Unless it’s relevant to what you wanted to show me.” He tried to keep his voice calm, soothing. Theobold was being thorough, but Hal didn’t need thorough. He needed efficient. He needed answers, and then he needed to move on.

  Removing his gloves, Theobold opened his laptop and unlocked the screen, double clicking on a file. “A gunshot entrance wound to the right side of the chest is centered eighteen inches below the top of the head and three inches right of midline. It is a five-sixteenths-inch round defect with a circumferential margin of abrasion measuring up to one-eighth inch in maximum span. The wound has no associated soot or stippling.”

  It was too much detail, much more than Hal needed, but he caught the gist. Gunshot to the chest. No soot or stippling meant the shooter was at least eighteen inches from the victim.

  “A gunshot exit wound of the right side of the back is centered nineteen inches below the top of the head and four inches right of midline. It is a half-inch, curvilinear, slit-like defect with no margin of abrasion.” Theobold pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  “Through and through,” Hal said.

  Theobold looked up. “Yes.”

  “Any fragments recovered?”

  Theobold consulted his notes. “Not in conjunction with this wound, no.”

  “And the other bullet?”

  Theobold cleared his throat. “The second bullet perforated the anterolateral right fifth intercostal space—”

  “What did the bullet hit? What killed him?”

  Theobold set down his laptop and removed his glasses. “I’m not used to homicide. I usually just submit my reports in writing.”

  “You’re doing a great job,” Hal said. “This is just—” He closed his mouth. What could he say? It was awkward? Impossible? Torture?

  Theobold nodded. “Let me back up. I called you down for this.” He double clicked on a close-up of the victim’s shirt, a collared light-blue golf shirt that looked new. On its right side was the hole from the first bullet. Theobold zoomed in on the image. As he did, a tiny spot of gold appeared on one edge of the hole.

  “What is that?”

  “At first, I thought it was something on the shirt.” Theobold switched to another image, this one taken through a microscope. “But now I think it’s paint.”

  “Gold paint?”

  Theobold nodded. “It looks like it may have come off the projectile.”

  “You think the paint was on the bullet?”

  “It’s a theory,” Theobold said carefully. “Roger agreed it was possible. I sent an image to him. There’s probably not enough residue to perform tests on chemical makeup, but he’s going to try.”

  Testing would take days, maybe longer, depending on how backed up the lab was.

  “I thought seeing it might help,” Theobold added.

  Hal nodded, trying to place the gold paint in the puzzle of this case. “I appreciate it. Was there paint on the other shooting victim?”

  “Not that I’ve found so far, but I’m planning to go back for another look next.”

  “Let me know if you find anything.”

  “I will,” Theobold promised. “And I’ll get the rest of my report to you tonight.”

  Hal walked to the door, removing the gloves as he did. At the door, he took a last look back. “Thanks, Doc.”

  Theobold nodded, his expression unreadable.

  Hal made his way back out of the morgue building, happy to be in the open air again. Gold paint ought to have been a helpful clue, but without the bullet or cartridges, there was no way to confirm it was transferred from the bullet itself. Hal walked toward his car, thinking about taking another look around Union Square with an eye out for gold paint. As he reached his car, his phone rang. Telly.

  “Azar,” he said, his voice breaking on the word.

  “I don’t have any news,” Telly said quickly. Like ripping off a Band-Aid so that Hal didn’t hope for too many seconds.

  “Okay,” Hal said.

  There was a pause on Telly’s end.

  Something was wrong. “What is it?”

  “I’m getting pulled,” Telly said after a moment.

  “What do you mean? You’re supposed to stay with him. Every step.” Hal was shouting, his voice bouncing across the parking lot. “They promised,” he added, lowering his voice.

  “I’ve got two more days—today and tomorrow.”

  “Today’s almost over,” Hal said. “You can’t count today.” Even to his own ears, he sounded petulant, but he couldn’t help himself.

  “After tomorrow, I’ll make sure someone keeps an eye on him, but it won’t be full-time.” There was a brief pause before the agent started talking again. “And we’re flagging all his credit cards for purchases. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. We don’t have anything on him.”

  “No,” Hal said, a forceful bark. “He’s waiting for us to give up, to stop tracking him.” Hal heard the desp
eration in his own voice. “What about his mother’s death? You said the Tampa police were working that angle?”

  “They are, but there’s no clear footage of the man who visited Mrs. MacDonald the day she died. And they haven’t been able to locate MacDonald on the flights around the time of her death.”

  He didn’t want MacDonald in prison in Florida, but having him free without a tail was worse. Much worse. His gaze on the building where Anna worked, Hal leaned across his car, laying his free hand on the roof, slick from the moisture in the air. “You can’t give up.”

  “I’m not giving up,” Telly said.

  But the tone of his voice said exactly the opposite. The door to the morgue building opened, and a dark-haired woman emerged, pulling her coat tight across her as the wind tried to blow it open. Anna, for a moment. But not Anna.

  Hal ended the call without saying good-bye.

  33

  Friday, 6:20 p.m. MST

  Schwartzman woke to breath on her face. Her eyes sprang open, and she wriggled to the corner of the bed where she pressed herself against the wall. The collar jerked her back. She tucked her fingers beneath the band, trying to draw breath.

  “You’re scared,” came the voice. A child’s voice. It was Roy.

  Slowly, the outline of his face emerged in the dark. His chin rested on one hand, his head barely higher than the bed. He was kneeling on the floor, breathing noisily through his nose.

  “Roy?” she whispered.

  He nodded, his tongue filling the gap between his lips.

  “Are you alone?”

  He shook his head.

  She stared past him at the bedroom door. “Who’s here?”

  He smiled, pointing at her. “You.”

  She smiled back, the sensation stretching uncomfortably on her lips. “Right. But no one else?”

  He shook his head again.

  She tugged the covers up and tucked them under her arms, putting another layer between them. “Do you think you could help me, Roy?”

  His eyes widened in interest. “I left you a key.”

  “I got it,” she whispered. “Is it a key for the door?”