Fifteen minutes was a fast response. Not a lot of crime at five a.m. on a Wednesday morning.
“Said he didn’t even approach the body to check if she was okay. Just called nine-one-one.”
That wasn’t unusual. Not with the rising number of lawsuits over Good Samaritan acts gone wrong. Not to mention the large homeless population in the city. More often than not, people hesitated before getting involved.
“Responding officers interviewed him and his wife,” Hal added. “Story holds.”
Schwartzman scanned the area. From the road, the land sloped down to a row of shrubs that would have obscured the body from passing cars. The walking paths that runners most commonly used were over the next knoll, closer to the pond. Those factors made the site an ideal location if the killer had hoped she wouldn’t be discovered quickly. But too many people used the park for a body to go undiscovered for long—certainly not one left aboveground.
Another crime scene van pulled to the curb as Roger made his way back down the hill from the road. He wore a black ski hat over his bald head, the color a strange contrast to his fair, hairless face. Roger suffered from alopecia universalis, a condition that left him completely hairless. No eyebrows, no eyelashes. Not a hair on his body.
“You okay if I turn her?” Schwartzman asked when Roger reached them.
“Sure. We’ve got the images we need of the scene.” Roger motioned to the area around them. “I called in extra techs to broaden the search area. So far, we haven’t found anything other than the imprint in the grass,” he said.
Schwartzman studied the ground around the body to find what she had missed.
“It’s here,” Hal said, pointing to a spot farther from the body where the grass was flattened. The impression was roughly T-shaped. It was not something she would have noticed and, thankfully, not where she’d been walking.
“Whatever was there stayed for more than a few minutes,” Roger said as though reading her mind. Hal squatted down to study the area. He’d likely already done it a dozen times.
There was frustration in his expression.
She pulled a clean Tyvek suit from her kit and stepped into it. “Maybe there will be something under the body.” Hal adjusted the hood in the back of her suit as she zipped herself up. “Thanks.”
When she looked up, she caught the flicker of something on Roger’s face, but it was gone before she could read it.
Once they were gloved, the three approached the body. Hal took the shoulders and Roger, the feet. Because the victim was in full rigor, Hal had to work to lower her arm as they rolled her.
The hair covering her face fell away.
Her eyes were open, and they were a deep brown. A thin band of eyeliner ran along the lashes. No mascara.
Eyes Schwartzman had seen before. The rest—the perfectly colored red lips, the blonde tips of her hair—had been hidden beneath the burqa.
But not the eyes . . . She remembered them.
It was the same woman.
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
“What?” Hal asked.
This woman had been sitting in a Jeep only ten hours ago. She had been fine, waving . . . alive.
Schwartzman stood and stumbled from the body, staring into the rising light. Her gaze was pulled toward the street where the Jeep had been parked. It was gone.
Schwartzman froze. The boy. “Where’s the boy?”
“What boy?” Roger asked.
Schwartzman started for the road, walking and then running. “She was with her son last night.” Why did she assume they were mother and son? He had the same eyes? Or had she imagined the resemblance? It had been dark.
Hal was on her heels, Roger behind him. “Schwartzman, where are you going?” Hal shouted after her.
She reached the street. No Jeep. “They were parked right here. In a maroon Jeep. That woman”—she pointed toward the body—“and a boy. He was wearing a karate uniform. Young—maybe seven or eight. Maybe nine. I don’t know.”
Hal walked in a circle in the street. “We found only one body.”
“Well, get someone out here, Hal, because there’s a little boy, too.”
Roger and Hal stared at her. Hal’s hand rested on her arm.
Only then did she realize she had ahold of his jacket sleeve. She let go and rolled the latex gloves off her hands, balled them into one fist.
“You’ve got to find him,” she whispered. “He’s only a kid.”
Everything about this had just gotten much, much worse.
5
Hal had the entire city hunting for the maroon Jeep Schwartzman had seen in the park the night before. So far, there was no sign of it or the boy. Missing Persons was not his unit. He had a killing to solve, and normally, his entire focus would be on the victim’s remains. Without clothes or evidence from a crime scene, the body was all they had. The sooner Schwartzman performed the autopsy, the sooner they’d figure out what had happened and could start searching for a suspect.
The search parties had begun to arrive at the scene as they were loading the remains into the van for transport, and she had watched them with what looked like envy. He understood the desire to be involved, to help. Even in the course of looking for the boy, they would be doing something.
“I’ve got to get to the morgue,” she told him, as though by saying it out loud, she might propel herself to leave.
“I’ll make sure I’m the first to know if they find any sign of him,” he told her, watching the way her shoulders settled.
“And you’ll call me?”
“Of course.”
She touched his arm. “Thank you.”
“I’m going to stay for a bit, and I’ll meet you in the morgue.”
He and Schwartzman had grown close since she’d moved into her new house. They regularly got together for a drink and talked. He’d found her to be an intense soul and not likely to chat on the surface. Instead, they delved, sometimes into cases—past or present—and sometimes into themselves. She spoke candidly and reflectively of her past with Spencer.
As time moved on, the power of Spencer’s hold on her—her fear of him—had diminished. She smiled more. She could be funny. Aspects of her he’d never known—ones she didn’t share with others—had emerged.
He liked that she shared these with him.
And he opened up as well. About his father’s death, about his marriage to Sheila.
But this case had brought back the fearful Schwartzman. It rattled her—seeing the victim before she’d died and knowing there was a child out there. She had told him how the boy had noticed Buster as she had driven past, how the boy had pointed to the dog, looking joyful the way only a child did. That the victim had been in the driver’s seat, wearing a full burqa. Maybe the dead woman and her missing son tapped into an old fear. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Spencer at all. She could be afraid for the boy. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to let her down.
He tried to reassure her that it was most likely a domestic dispute. The boy was probably with his father. But those were empty assurances. Even if the boy was safe, his mother was dead.
Had the boy witnessed her death?
Hal kept mentally returning to images of the victim. Her red lips and blonde-tipped hair. It was hard to picture her as a devoted Muslim, and it made him wonder if the burqa had been some sort of disguise. Perhaps she was on the run from someone. Or maybe that was simply his own prejudices at work. What did he really know about Muslims?
Nothing.
It was his job to solve her homicide; the child was the department’s first priority. And his, too.
With the volunteers, police, and firefighters, more than seventy-five people arrived in the park within an hour to search for the missing boy. His old partner Hailey Wyatt, who now worked on a special task force targeting domestic violence, had come to help, as did some off-duty inspectors, faces Hal recognized. Not people who usually showed up for a search like this.
Hailey told him t
hat Schwartzman had emailed her and requested that Hailey forward Schwartzman’s message to the inspector’s listserv. Hal hadn’t seen it yet, but he imagined the way Schwartzman would ask, something along the lines of, “I saw a boy last night . . . he’s missing now. You all see this too much . . . If you have time . . .” There would be a touch of her Southern speech in there. Subtle, quiet.
Though her work was limited to homicide, Annabelle Schwartzman was popular among the department, especially with the inspectors and the patrol officers she saw on her scenes. As medical examiner, she had made a point to learn people’s names and to greet them personally. At first blush, Schwartzman seemed shy. Other than talking about a victim, she didn’t speak up, and she wouldn’t interrupt. Not the kind of person you’d expect to be friends with everyone.
What attracted people to her was her attention to detail. Hal had observed the same thing when they’d first met. She sent flowers to colleagues when they had babies, even ones she hardly knew. She brought a cooked meal when someone was out on leave.
If she’d asked people to join the search for this boy, they would.
And they had.
The other thing about Schwartzman was that she was unable to hide her fear—at least not from him. That raw emotion, so close to the surface, had an impact on him. He’d seen that fear on her face this morning.
That boy had been alive, laughing. And now he was gone.
Hal wandered among the clusters of volunteers, scanning their faces, watching the body language for the one who was twitchy, nervous. There was a chance—maybe a good chance—that their killer was in this crowd.
But no one stuck out. Like the city itself, the mix in the park was profound. The volunteers searching for the boy were black, white, Asian, Middle Eastern. They were young and old, fat and thin. Some were pierced in a dozen places and heavily tattooed, others draped in gold jewelry and carrying thousand-dollar purses. A few were a surprising combination of both.
And they were all unsuccessful.
No one found a trace of him.
As Hal prepared to leave the scene, his phone buzzed on his hip. “Naomi. Tell me you’ve got something.”
“We got a DMV match to her prints.”
Hal reached for his notebook and pen. “Who is she?”
“Name’s Aleena S. Laughlin. I’ve got an address.”
“Text it to me. Any cars registered in her name?”
“No. But there is a 1994 maroon Jeep registered to a Jared Laughlin at the same address.”
“Check for a phone number to go with the address. And hurry, would you?”
“I’m on it.”
As Hal strode toward the department car, his phone rang again. He hoped it was Schwartzman with his autopsy results, but it was way too soon. He checked the screen and found his mother’s number. The second time she’d called today. He’d been focused on the boy. If he told her, his mother would understand.
But he would never tell her.
He got into the car as he answered. “Hi, Mama.”
“Harold Clint Harris.”
He smiled at his mother’s use of his full name as he started the engine and pulled away from the curb. It had been a while since he’d made her angry enough to warrant being addressed by his full name.
“You answer the phone when your mama calls. Or send her a text message to tell her you’re still breathing. You hear me?”
“Sorry, Mama. Tough day.”
“I’m sure of that,” she said with a sigh in her breath. She’d been married to a cop for almost twenty-five years and then buried him while her only son was in the academy. She knew more about living this life than most.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“We are planning Christmas, and we want to know your plans.”
Hal rubbed his head as he drove out of the park. “Christmas, Mama? That’s almost five weeks away. I don’t know what the schedule is. You guys going to be at Becca and Dave’s?”
“Think so.”
There were a dozen flights a day from San Francisco to LA, three times that if he flew out of Oakland or San Jose, or into an alternative airport in Southern California. But that time of year, flights filled up, and he tended to let the guys with families take leave. He wouldn’t know his schedule for another few weeks. But he hadn’t been down to Becca and Dave’s house in San Fernando in years. “I’d love to join you . . .”
“But you got to wait and see,” she said, understanding his situation.
“Right.” He stopped at a red light.
“Okay then,” she said, her voice perking up. “What about Thanksgiving? Up at Tasha’s?”
His other sister lived up in Elk Grove, one of the many developments that had grown around Sacramento like spokes off a bike wheel. Hal laughed at his mother. Of course, she’d asked the tough question first. If he was unable to commit to Christmas in LA, then he had to commit to a Thanksgiving meal a little more than an hour away.
“We’ll all be there Wednesday to Sunday morning,” she went on. “Now, I’m sure you can make it for part of that.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’m holding you to that,” she said. “Now you get back to work.”
“Yes, Mama,” he promised as the light turned green and he continued toward the Laughlin address.
A patrol car met Hal at the address on Sixth Street. The Laughlins’ apartment was on the third floor. He rang the bell, and when there was no answer, knocked and listened to the door. No noise from inside.
No one was home.
He knocked on two other doors on the third floor. No one answered. It was the middle of the morning on a Wednesday. When he returned to the street, he sent one of the patrol officers to knock on the second-floor doors while Hal approached the only unit on the first floor, located next to the dance studio.
An older black man answered the door almost immediately. The apartment sat directly under the Laughlins’, two floors down.
“My name is Inspector Hal Harris,” he said, showing the man his badge. “I’m trying to locate Jared Laughlin. He lives up in 302.”
The man removed reading glasses and peered at Hal as the glasses dropped to hang from a chain around his neck. “Jared?” The man shook his head. “He ain’t home.” He leaned back into the apartment. “Phyllis?” he called out. “Jared be home next month?”
From the back of the apartment, a woman said, “January.”
“That’s right,” the man said. “He’ll be home in January.”
“January?” Hal repeated.
A thin white woman arrived at the door, her long, gray hair braided over one shoulder. She wore a black tank top and yoga pants, and her feet were bare, the toes spread widely as though each one was working to grip the wood floor all on its own. “That’s when his tour is up,” she said, her brow furrowing.
When Hal said nothing, the woman clarified, “In Afghanistan.”
“Is there other family we could contact?” he asked. “A grandparent or aunt or uncle?”
“There’s his wife, Aleena.” She touched her arm as though for a watch. “I’m not sure if she’s home.”
Hal pushed his hands into his pockets and let his shoulders round, contemplating the best way to proceed.
The two exchanged a look, and the man put his arm around her, as though sensing something was wrong. It was the woman who spoke. “I’m Phyllis Johnson. My husband, Ben, and I are about as close as Jared and Aleena have to family. Is something wrong?”
Hal couldn’t answer that question, not to someone who wasn’t family. “Are his parents living?”
“Yes,” the man said. “But he doesn’t talk to them. There was a falling out after he married Aleena. With her family as well.”
Hal watched the two of them communicate with a glance. Ben asked her a silent question. She tilted her head in the slightest of nods.
“His parents were against the marriage—her being Muslim and all,” Ben explained. “Same thing on Ale
ena’s side. Parents act like she doesn’t exist.”
“We know something about that,” Phyllis added, shifting closer to her husband.
Hal wondered how long they’d been together. They were probably in their midsixties. Maybe forty years, plus or minus. Forty years ago, a mixed-race couple might not have stopped traffic in San Francisco, but it wouldn’t have been easy. “Does Aleena work?”
“She does. Three days a week in the pharmacy down Judah Street. She works a couple of mornings while Kaelen is in school, and one night. We cover for her some nights. There’s also a woman from Aleena’s mosque, Parveen Yasmin,” Phyllis said.
Ben nodded. “Parveen and Aleena are quite close.”
“She lives a couple miles from here,” Phyllis added.
Ben lifted his glasses back to his face to study the watch on his arm. The watch’s elastic metal band reminded Hal of the one his father used to wear. “Aleena might be home.” He turned to his wife. “Don’t you think?”
Phyllis reached across to Ben’s arm and shifted the watch to read the time. “I’d guess they’re picking Kaelen up at school.”
“Do you know the name of the school?” Hal said.
“Sure. It’s the elementary right down on Seventh. Bessie Carmichael.” Hal made a note. Phyllis shifted her feet. Pointing the toes on one foot and then shifting her weight to point the ones on the other foot. Her restlessness was graceful. It was probably her dance studio up front.
“At his age, the kids get out at twelve fifteen,” she said. “They usually leave to pick him up by about noon and are back by one or one thirty. We could give her a message.”
The pen froze in his hand. “You said they.”
“She’d have Naadiya,” Ben said.
“Naadiya?” Hal asked.
“That’s Jared and Aleena’s daughter,” Phyllis said, a smile breaking on her face. “She’s eight months old.”
Hal put a palm out and rested it on the wall. Christ. Had there been another child in that car? Were both of them missing?
Expose (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 3) Page 3
