Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) Read online

  There wasn’t a spot of yellow in her closet. In her house.

  The victim’s yellow dress had been fanned out and smoothed across the duvet. Gold flats. Tory Burch. Schwartzman could see the familiar emblem on the soles.

  And the yellow flowers.

  They were not the same as in the bouquet she had received from Spencer. That had been formal, almost a wedding-style bouquet, while these were more like wildflowers, long greens with tiny blossoms, the bunch held together by a piece of white string like cooking twine. Altogether different. Two different bouquets of yellow flowers. A coincidence.

  Not everything tied to Spencer.

  He only wanted her to think that.

  She set her bag on the ground and opened it up for a fresh Tyvek suit, reining in her thoughts.

  The victim had been found in her bedroom. Affluent, white, early to midthirties. In a secured building.

  Schwartzman stepped into the suit and raised the plastic-like fabric up over her dark slacks. It was warm in the apartment. With the suit at her waist, she unbuttoned her gray cashmere sweater, removed it, and placed it in her scene kit beside the box of gloves before pulling the suit up over her tank top. She hated the feeling of the fabric on her arms, but the room was too hot. Sweating under the Tyvek was distracting. She needed to be comfortable enough to give the scene her full attention.

  She checked that her kit was open, made a mental note of her thermometer and the notebook where she would record her initial findings.

  “What do we know?” she asked, snapping on her gloves as she crossed to the victim.

  “The sister called it in,” Hal said. “Came for a visit from Southern California and found her like this.”

  Schwartzman pressed her fingers into the skin. Lividity was apparent on the right side of her arm. “She’s been moved.”

  “I agree. It’s too clean to be the original crime scene.”

  Schwartzman examined the skin for early signs of bruising, checked the eyes for petechiae and found none. She fingered the victim’s rib cage, then her neck. “Not strangled. No obvious trauma. I’ll have to get her to the morgue to find cause of death.”

  “I figured,” Hal said. “What about drugs?”

  With a penlight, Schwartzman checked the victim’s nose and mouth. The passages were clear. She leaned in to smell the victim’s mouth. A little halitosis but no hint of drugs. “It’s possible. But I wouldn’t guess overdose. I don’t see any residue in the nose and mouth.” She pulled off one of her gloves. “There’s a wineglass in the kitchen.”

  “I’ve asked Roger’s team to collect it.” Head of the Crime Scene Unit, Roger Sampers was extremely thorough. Somehow Hal managed to have Roger at most of his scenes, a testament to how much people respected the inspector. Roger was meticulous, comfortable with his own intelligence. Humor came easily to him, and, while he was often self-deprecating, he was careful not to make jokes at the expense of others.

  “Good.” Her skin was hot and her hands cold and clammy. Coming down with something maybe. “What do we know about her?”

  “Victoria Stein. Lived alone. The sister wasn’t aware of a current boyfriend. According to the sister, Stein divorced a couple of years ago. Moved to San Francisco and bought this place.”

  Schwartzman replaced the gloves with fresh ones and raised the victim’s top, pointed to the lividity. “Appears she died on her side. Makes the overdose possibility less likely. OD tends to result in death by aspiration.”

  “Could she aspirate if she was on her side?”

  “They can,” she said. “But it’s not common.” She examined the victim’s scalp for signs of contusion. “You said she’s not from California?”

  “From somewhere down south.”

  “Oh yeah? You know where?” The skull was normal. No trauma to indicate cause of death there either.

  He checked his notebook. “Here it is . . . Spartanburg. The victim’s sister said it’s close to—”

  “Greenville,” Schwartzman finished for him. One town over from her own hometown.

  “You know it?” Hal asked, surprised.

  The victim’s earlobes were pierced, but she was not wearing earrings. No jewelry visible on the dresser. “The sister mention if there was any jewelry missing?”

  “No. Stein didn’t wear any, I guess.”

  A bit unusual. In her experience, most women wore jewelry. The more affluent the woman, the nicer the jewelry. There were exceptions, of course. She herself was one. Schwartzman had gone so long without earrings, her holes had closed up.

  Spencer didn’t like earrings. Lobes were to be bare.

  One of his rules. Something always reminded her of him. Maybe one day it wouldn’t. She hoped.

  Schwartzman raised the victim’s hands, studying the palms for defensive wounds.

  “You seeing anything?”

  “Not yet,” she admitted. “Victim’s nails are pretty short, so it’s possible we wouldn’t see breakage with defensive wounds.” She studied the underside of the nails. “But I don’t see any tissue underneath.” She flipped the hand back over and studied the fingers for the telltale indentation or sun mark that would indicate a ring. None.

  No earrings, no ring. Could be skin allergies.

  She shifted the neckline of the victim’s dress and found a thin gold chain. She pulled it free of the dress to see the pendant. A gold cross. On the right side was a small hole, about the size of a pinhead. Like the kind jewelers used to let light through to gems. After laying the cross in her gloved palm, Schwartzman used her free hand to flip it over.

  Embedded in the gold of the right cross beam was a Star of David.

  “Oh, God.” She dropped the pendant, pedaled away from the body. Snapped the gloves off and let them fall to the floor.

  “What is it?” Hal said, crossing to her.

  His hands gripped her shoulders. The pressure was reassuring, settling the waves of panic that made it hard to stand. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “Schwartzman,” he said firmly. “Talk to me. Are you okay?”

  She leaned into his hands, shook her head slowly.

  “What happened?” Hailey Wyatt appeared in the doorway.

  Just hours earlier they had been talking about Spencer. She had opened up to Hailey and the others about Spencer. She’d told Hailey about being trapped in that marriage. And now . . . Schwartzman hugged herself to fight the shaking.

  “My God, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, Schwartzman,” Hailey said. “Are you okay?”

  If only Spencer were a ghost. But he was all too real. The victim’s dress was yellow. She wore no jewelry. These were just coincidences.

  “Shit. Did you know her?”

  “No. It’s not her—” She pressed her palm to her chest. Hers was there. She felt suddenly exposed. As though by speaking of Spencer at dinner, she had conjured him into being right here. She had allowed herself to open up about him, and here he was.

  “Why would you think she’d know the victim?” Hal asked.

  “I don’t know, but they look alike,” Hailey said. “The wavy hair, the shape of the face, the nose. It must have freaked her out.”

  They did look alike. God, how had he managed to find a woman who looked like her? She wasn’t imagining it. The lack of jewelry, the dress, the flowers. It was all him.

  “No,” Hal said. “She didn’t freak out until she saw the necklace.”

  Schwartzman remained against the wall. Her bare hands pressed to the skin on her neck. It was icy cold and also slick, like a body coming out of the morgue refrigeration unit after being washed down.

  “It’s a cross with the Star of David on it,” Hailey said. “And a little gemstone in the star.”

  Would they think she was crazy when she showed them? She had spent months building up their trust. It took so little to break it.

  What choice did she have? She couldn’t hide the pendant from them.

  Schwartzman forced herself to lower her h
ands. “It’s a Christian cross with a Star of David on it,” she said, struggling to get the words out. “The Star of David is placed exactly where the heart would be if the cross were a woman. A tiny diamond in the center of the star.”

  Schwartzman fingered the chain on her neck, located the pendant under her tank. To celebrate their first wedding anniversary, her father had designed a pendant for her mother.

  The room tipped, and Schwartzman closed her eyes.

  A pendant identical to the one on the dead woman.

  3

  San Francisco, California

  “Schwartzman!” The voice was urgent and female. Schwartzman had to pull herself back to focus on where she was. She saw beige carpet, a green duvet at eye level. Above her, Hailey and Hal were staring down. She was on the floor, her back to the wall.

  “Help me get her up,” Hailey told Hal.

  She flinched at Hal’s huge hands on her shoulder and back, but she was on her feet quickly. Compose yourself. She wasn’t some distraught female. She was a doctor, a scientist.

  “Can someone get me a bottle of water?” Hailey shouted into the hallway.

  Hailey and Hal. She could tell them. They needed to know. “I’m fine.” Schwartzman cleared her throat. “Really. It was startling is all.”

  They would think she was crazy. That was always her mother’s response—that she was overreacting or making something of nothing.

  This was not nothing. Or maybe it was. She was overreacting. She needed time to calm herself, to think about it before she spoke up. Never predict an outcome, a lesson of her field. She was a scientist. Follow the evidence. The body would provide the answers.

  “The necklace?” Hailey asked.

  “It’s unusual.”

  Hal and Hailey exchanged a glance. It was a necklace. Just a necklace. And of course there would be others like it. That she had never seen another one herself meant nothing.

  One of the crime scene techs, Naomi Muir, entered the room, carrying a bottle of water. She gave it to Hal.

  He cracked the top and pressed the bottle into Schwartzman’s hands. “Drink this.”

  She lifted the water to her lips, took a sip. The cold jolted her, bringing her focus back to the room, the case. She handed it back. “I’m better.” She unzipped the Tyvek suit, released the hot air. “I just overheated a little.”

  Hailey watched her with a suspicious gaze. Schwartzman felt herself shrink. She needed them to believe her. What would she do if they didn’t? San Francisco was supposed to be her fresh start, her clean slate. How she wanted to just start over. But she knew better.

  She shook the Tyvek suit at the zipper to force in some fresh air, then zipped it back up.

  Donning a fresh pair of gloves, she returned to the body. She studied the slight bump in the victim’s nasal bridge and ran her fingers across the cartilage for signs of a break. There was none. Like Schwartzman, Victoria Stein was born with rounded septal cartilage that gave her a traditional Jewish-looking nose.

  Schwartzman’s mother had offered her a nose job on her sixteenth birthday, hoping her daughter might decide on something straighter and more patrician, more like her own.

  “Find something?” Hal asked.

  Shaking her head, Schwartzman moved on from the nose to probe the jaw and cheekbones. Nothing to explain cause of death. Finally, she opened the victim’s mouth and peered into the teeth. Regularly whitened, straight.

  Nothing to suggest trauma.

  Schwartzman stood back and inspected the area around the victim, then studied the victim head to toe for contusions or signs of trauma, measured the core temperature, and bagged the hands to preserve evidence. “I can’t give you cause of death without an autopsy,” she said as she removed her gloves. “No obvious lacerations or contusions, no evident injuries at all to suggest what killed her.”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t natural,” Hal added.

  “No. Definitely not.”

  Schwartzman found Hailey looking back and forth between her and the victim. Hailey was comparing them. The dark hair, the length, their height . . . they might have been sisters. “So there’s no reason to draw any connections between you and the victim?”

  “Not without being paranoid.” The comment was as much, or more, for her as for them. She would not be paranoid. That was what he wanted, to remain at the front of her mind, where every little thing reminded her of him. She would not do that. San Francisco was a fresh break, a real start. “The victim does look like me. She is holding a bouquet of yellow flowers . . .”

  “They look familiar?” Hal asked, and she felt the weight of his stare.

  Of course Hal knew about the flowers. Roger would have shared that with him.

  They had talked about her. It felt like an intrusion, but it shouldn’t have. They were protecting her. As colleagues. She would do the same for them. “The flowers are different. The ones I got were more formal.” She wondered if Roger was still working on them. “Is Roger here? I was going to ask him if he found anything on the ones I received.”

  “I haven’t seen him yet, but I’ll check in with him when I do,” Hal said.

  No doubt the lab was overwhelmed with real cases, but Schwartzman had hoped they would expedite the flowers. “These are more like wildflowers than the bouquet that came to my apartment.” The dress is something he would have picked. She couldn’t force herself to say the words aloud.

  That was not evidence, and conjecture was not useful.

  “She’s from the town next to the one you grew up in,” Hal went on.

  “There are more than sixty thousand people in Greenville and probably another forty thousand in Spartanburg. It’s not like we all know each other, and I have no idea who this woman is.”

  “Okay,” he conceded.

  “Anything else you want to add to this, Schwartzman?” Hailey asked.

  Schwartzman straightened her back and touched the hollow of her neck. It was as though Hailey could see she was holding something back.

  Hailey would be connecting their conversation to Schwartzman’s admission that she was still afraid of Spencer. As an investigator, this line of thinking would come naturally.

  Schwartzman freed her necklace from under her tank top. Meeting Hailey’s gaze, she made the decision to trust them. “There’s this. My father designed it for my mother on their first anniversary.”

  Hal leaned in. “I’ll be damned.”

  Before anyone could comment further, she went to pack up her case. “I’ll do the autopsy first thing.”

  Hailey put a hand on her shoulder. The touch gentle, a reassurance that they were friends. “You mind if we take your necklace?” she asked. Hailey was on her side. They were all on the same side. Finally she had allies against Spencer. “To compare them?” Hailey pressed.

  Schwartzman fingered the pendant that had hung on her neck since her father’s death. “How would that help?”

  “It might not,” Hailey said. “But we might be able to get something from yours that we can’t from hers.”

  Schwartzman felt sick about taking it off. She’d worn that necklace every day, the one physical thing that connected her to her father.

  It was only a thing. An object. They needed it to catch him.

  She didn’t see how she could refuse, so when Hailey offered up an evidence bag, she unfastened the chain and let it drop into the plastic sack.

  “I’ll make sure you get it back as soon as possible,” Hailey promised.

  After handing over the necklace, she was eager to leave, to get some distance from the scene. She forced herself to slow down, removed her Tyvek suit, and returned it to its plastic sack to be entered into evidence.

  The floor vibrated beneath her feet as Schwartzman made her way through the house.

  Her house with Spencer had been like this. Flowers and soft tones. Everything always in its place. A chameleon, her ex-husband could change on a dime. He was charming, sensitive, the kind of man who walked on t
he street side so that if a car splashed through a puddle, the water would hit him rather than her. The kind of man who chose expensive throw pillows that matched the drapes.

  At the same time, he was the kind of man to throw his pregnant wife across the room if things weren’t kept just so.

  He’s not your ex.

  He was still contesting the divorce. South Carolina was protective of the institution of marriage.

  Good Southern women did not leave their husbands.

  Back in street shoes, she left the building, anxious for cool air. Her bag was too heavy, her heels too high. She was both cold and hot at once.

  She wanted desperately to be home but also didn’t want to be alone anywhere. She pressed her arm across her stomach, held it tight so her ulna was against her diaphragm. Took slow breaths and fought against the memories.

  The way he had manipulated her from the start. How easily she’d played into his hands.

  Arriving on their first date in seersucker pants and a navy blazer, he’d brought her mother flowers. A bright bouquet of yellow flowers. Not something so large as to be gauche. Just the right touch of respect and something to brighten her day.

  During dinner at his country club, Schwartzman had felt like some sort of celebrity. The way he’d reached out to touch her hand, she was the centerpiece of the entire room. The envy in the eyes of the women who passed their table had been obvious. Spencer MacDonald was sought after. Wealthy, gorgeous, powerful, he was Greenville’s prize bachelor.

  That night, when Spencer suggested a nightcap, she’d accepted. There had been champagne and wine at the club, but the real buzz came from him.

  Back in his home, he’d poured a second nightcap only minutes before he pinned her down and raped her on the expensive Persian rug in his den.

  The sex, her first, was painful and rough as she had struggled against him for its duration. But as soon as he had finished, he’d smiled and cupped her face for a kiss as though the act had been loving and consensual. Then he’d led her, bleeding and crying, to the bathroom and ran her a bath. He had insisted she soak, lit a candle, brought her ice water and Advil, which she did not take.