“Wish it would think a little faster,” Vich said.
The phone buzzed again, reminding Jamie that she hadn’t answered Tony’s texts. Certainly, she couldn’t afford to send Z to City Academy without the scholarship. But he was her child. She couldn’t send him away. She hated the idea that Tony was moving to Ohio and breaking up their family, as untraditional as it was. Tony was like her brother. She hated the idea that he wouldn’t be close. Losing her son was unthinkable.
The layers began building again. Slowly, the suspect’s hooded eyes were unveiled followed by his wide nose. It was his full lips and the angular jaw line that gave it away. Jamie grabbed hold of the table.
Vich touched her arm, but she couldn’t pull her gaze from the image.
“I’ll put it through face recognition software to see if I can find a match against the database,” the tech said.
Jamie cleared her throat to get the words to come out. “You don’t need to do that.”
The tech spun in his chair. “You know him?”
“His name is Michael Delman,” she said.
“Delman,” Vich repeated, putting it together.
“Right. The man who dropped off our victim is my son’s biological father.”
Chapter 3
Whenever Jamie drove to see a victim at San Francisco General Hospital, she needed quiet. It was a time of meditation for her. No fifties radio that she blared when no one else was in the car because it reminded her of climbing on the fire trucks and sliding down the poles at the station when her father was working. No ESPN radio that she and Z compromised on when they rode together because she’d much rather hear sports than his music.
On the way to meet a victim, Jamie wanted silence for the chance to clear the fray from her intentions. For the victims, she was often their first conversation, their first eye contact, their first touch after an attack. She believed how she handled that had an impact on how they recovered. Whether they recovered.
After a particularly harrowing case a couple of years back, a nurse tried to convince Jamie that she ought to take ten or fifteen minutes to meditate. She taught Jamie to imagine using a huge broom to sweep out any thoughts that entered her mind. This drive was as close to meditation as she got.
Today, though she tried to keep them at bay, sounds of the world rose and batted against the car as she drove. Electric buses emitted high-pitched hums as they pulled away from the curb. Music blasted from another car—Robert Plant singing “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” The rev of a motorcycle, a distant siren.
She prayed the phone didn’t ring. Not even Vich, who would manage dispatching the crime scene team to the hospital parking lot and contact their captain to try to get a warrant to search Michael Delman’s home. She drove with purpose, breathed with purpose, and she did not think. Not on any one thing and certainly not on whether Captain Jules would rule this case a conflict of interest because the suspect had fathered her adopted son.
More than five years had passed since Zephenaya last saw his biological father. Michael Delman had been in prison twice. Jamie pulled Delman’s rap sheet every few months. She kept track of where he lived, how close he was to their son. Her son. She had no way to find out where Delman worked, to really know where he was, so she settled for knowing if he was in or out of jail.
Her thoughts stirred like a dust storm. Using the big brush that nurse had described—one that always looked like a broom that a witch might ride—she brushed them out. She needed to come to this with a clear head.
Even if Charlotte Borden was in a coma, Jamie wanted to be in the right frame of mind.
Maxi had said that Charlotte Borden was in the ICU. Most of their cases were seen in a room Maxi and Jamie called “2R.” It had been called the “Rape Room” before Jamie joined the department, although no one seemed to know exactly where the nasty and inappropriate nickname had come from.
A patrol officer accidentally dropped the words “Rape Room” in front of a victim, causing a bout of screaming hysterics that lasted until a doctor pumped her full of Valium. The officer was suspended without pay; the name of the room permanently changed.
2R was a small, pale yellow exam room with a single bed and bright, glaring lights—both overhead lights as well as several that could be moved around the room. Other than that, the room had gloves, tissue, and almost nothing else. If a victim required an x-ray or scans, she (or, rarely, he) had to be moved. Unless a victim was physically unstable, she stopped at 2R. Charlotte Borden had bypassed 2R, which meant samples and photographs would have to be collected in the ICU.
Jamie showed her badge to the security officer seated behind the desk. “I’m here for Charlotte Borden.”
“I don’t have a Charlotte Borden,” he said. “You sure she’s at General?”
Jamie dialed Maxi. “I’m at the front. She’s not listed.”
There were voices in the background. “413.”
“Why isn’t she listed?”
“Uh huh,” Maxi said, letting Jamie know she was with the parents.
“They requested her name be kept out of the hospital registry?” Jamie asked, as she started for the elevators.
“Oh, yes. Definitely.”
“There’s more?” Jamie guessed.
“Much.”
Jamie hung up and felt the vibration of her phone. A text from Vich. Warrant’s a no go. Delman could be a good samaritan. We need more.
That the warrant had been denied to give Delman the benefit of the doubt was comical, although not at all humorous, but Jamie understood the argument. Arresting people for bringing an injured woman to the hospital would create a disincentive to help people out. They didn’t want to do that. They had no reason to bring in Michael Delman. Until they could tie him to Charlotte’s injuries.
Coming down the hospital corridor, Jamie didn’t need a room number to locate Charlotte Borden. The hallway outside her door was congested with people—mostly men, and a token woman—dressed in expensive suits. Jamie held up her badge as she made her way through the mass. The suits watched her, but no one said anything as she knocked on the door and it opened to reveal Maxi’s face.
As Jamie entered the room, she went straight to Charlotte. Without touching her, Jamie stared. Beyond the breathing tubes, she had a beautiful face. With small, delicate features and high, round cheekbones, she looked older than sixteen. Charlotte’s mother stood on the far side of the bed and two others sat in chairs across the room. They watched her, but Jamie wanted to focus on Charlotte first. There would be plenty of time for everyone else.
Careful not to touch anything, Jamie took note of the left side of her face. Her eye was swollen shut; blood pooled thick under her skin where the bone in her cheek may have been broken. There were no apparent injuries on the right side of her face. Her hands lay at her sides, tucked under the blankets. It was something parents did. Nursing staff usually kept the hands out so as not to tangle the IV and to make it easier to check vitals. Parents tended to cover their children as though they were tucking them into bed for sleep. Jamie pulled two gloves from a box beside the bed.
“Excuse me—”
The man behind her had to be Charlotte’s father. The lines in his face were pressed deep into his skin as though he’d slept on a wrinkled sheet. His tie was pulled loose, and he smelled faintly of sweat and expensive cologne. “Mr. Borden, if you could give me one minute.”
Charlotte’s mother backed away from the bed and began crying.
Her hands gloved, Jamie turned Charlotte’s right hand over in her own. She noticed the bright orange nail polish, a ridiculous color that managed to be gorgeous against the young woman’s brown skin. She repeated the process on her other hand, then pulled out her notebook. She would do an entire exam, but not with her parents in the room.
“What are you writing?” Charlotte’s mother asked.
In the room were Charlotte’s parents and a gentleman seated in a chair in the corner. He rose and crossed to Mrs. Bord
en, placing his hand on her shoulder. “What are you writing down?” Mrs. Borden repeated.
“I appreciate you giving me a moment to see your daughter before we spoke,” Jamie said without answering the question. “I’m Jamie Vail. I’m an investigator with the San Francisco Police Department.”
Neither Mrs. nor Mr. Borden reached to shake Jamie’s hand. “Has the doctor been in to talk to you about her condition?”
The man behind Sondra Borden stepped forward. In pressed slacks and a dark denim button-down, he was probably from the mayor’s office. Or an attorney. Jamie tried not to dislike him immediately. It wasn’t easy. “I’m Dr. Travis Steckler.” He reached out his hand and, maintaining her game face, Jamie pulled off the glove on her right hand and shook. While her skin was rough and callused and probably clammy, his felt like it had been recently dusted with baby powder, warm and dry. “I’ve explained to Sondra and Gavin that Charlotte has suffered a contrecoup contusion. A contrecoup contusion means—”
“That her head hit something hard, and her brain struck the inside of her skull,” Jamie interrupted the medical lesson. “Most commonly associated with a fall.”
Dr. Travis Steckler smiled, and Jamie was frustrated at his condescension. Except, he wasn’t actually being condescending. She looked at his casual attire. “Are you the attending?”
“I’m an emergency department physician, but I practice out of UCSF,” Steckler said. “I’m here for Gavin and Sondra as a friend.”
Jamie turned her attention to the parents. “If it’s okay, I’d like to ask you both a few questions.”
Sondra began crying again. Gavin went to a chair and sat, rubbing his head and staring at the ground. He was a tall man and in the small chair his knees rose almost to his chest. “Go ahead, Inspector,” he said, ignoring his wife’s crying.
“When was the last time you saw Charlotte?”
“This morning. Before school.” Gavin glanced at his watch and rubbed his face. “Fourteen hours ago.”
“Was there anything unusual about this morning?”
“I left around 7:00,” Gavin said. “Lotti was having breakfast with her sister. They were still in their pajamas.” Gavin Borden winced as though the words came with a painful image. His daughter in her pajamas and now in this hospital bed.
“Her car was found in the hospital parking lot,” Jamie continued. “Does your daughter drive to school?”
“Yes,” Sondra said.
Jamie flipped a page in her notebook although she remembered the car exactly. “She drives a red Mercedes 510?”
“It’s a 520,” Gavin said, his voice fading over the last number.
The “2” Jamie had written looked like a “1.”
“But that isn’t her car,” Gavin said. He started to turn to his wife but didn’t make it that far. Instead, he crossed his arms and sat stiffly in his chair.
“Whose car is it?” Jamie asked.
Sondra Borden seemed to shrink. “It’s mine,” she said, then quickly added, “I was picking up a silent auction item—a curio bookcase—and I needed the Jeep.”
“Is it unusual for your daughter to take your car?”
“Yesterday was the first time,” Sondra said. “But I’ve only had the car a couple months.”
Gavin stood. “I need a cup of coffee.”
“Mr. Borden, I know this is hard, but I’d like to get as much information as I can to help our investigation.”
“I don’t know anything,” Gavin said. “I left and she was in a pair of polka dot pajamas.” His eyes were red and swollen. “Purple and yellow polka dots,” he continued. “Next thing I know, I find out she was driving her mother’s car, wearing her mother’s clothes, that she was—” He choked on the next word, clamped his mouth shut, and strode from the room.
“He blames me,” Sondra said, sinking into a chair.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Steckler told her.
Jamie made no such promises. “What did he mean about her wearing your clothes?”
“She borrowed a sweater of mine. And a scarf. Shoes.”
“Did she do that often?”
“More and more. We’re almost the same size and you know how teenage girls are.”
Jamie said nothing. She couldn’t remember being a teenage girl herself—certainly not the kind who shared clothes with her mother—and she had no frame of reference with Z, either.
“Gavin didn’t approve,” Sondra went on. “He thought she was growing up too fast, but it was just a scarf or a pair of earrings. My boots. It wasn’t like she was wearing high heels to school.”
“Is it possible she was dressing up for someone?” Jamie asked.
“She wasn’t dating,” Sondra said without hesitation. “She didn’t have a boyfriend. I’d know if she did.”
Travis Steckler’s gaze held a silent plea not to tell Sondra Borden that she was crazy to think she’d know everything about her daughter’s love life. “I know this is difficult to hear.”
Sondra went still.
“I’d like to do a rape kit on your daughter. It will allow us to collect evidence of what happened to her.”
Sondra looked to Steckler.
“Let the police do their job,” he told her.
“Okay.” She went to Charlotte’s side and smoothed the covers over her daughter’s motionless form.
“I’m going to ask you to wait outside.”
Sondra nodded without taking her eyes off of her daughter.
“While you’re waiting, I’d like you to make me a list of Charlotte’s closest friends. Names and phone numbers. It’s important that I talk to as many people who know Charlotte as possible.”
Steckler led Sondra from the room. A beat after the door closed, Jamie turned to Maxi. “What do you think?”
Maxi waved at the door. “I think that’s the whitest black couple I’ve ever seen. You hear how they talk to each other? My mother’s white family is blacker than those people.”
Maxi’s mother was white, her father black. Married forty years, Maxi described her parents as the perfect couple. Like Jamie, Maxi had been married too. Hers only lasted a couple of years. Jamie’s had ended with finding her husband in bed with a woman she’d thought was a friend. It was understandable why the two of them almost never talked about men in any positive way. It was also probably a natural side effect of the job.
“They obviously love their girl,” Maxi added in a quieter voice. “They both look torn up.”
Jamie imagined the expressions on Sondra’s and Gavin’s faces, then forced them away again. “What do we have so far?”
Maxi handed Jamie the initial exam results. “I’ve started her file. The on-call nurse got initial images of the surface injuries. The hospital’s CMO ordered a full set of scans, so she’s already had those, too. I should be able to get those e-mailed to you this afternoon. All that’s left is to do a rape kit and get it to the lab.”
“Wow, you’re on it today, Maxi.”
“Well, it’s easy when you’ve got everyone paying attention,” Maxi said. “Didn’t have to ask twice for anything. Not like most times.”
“Okay. Nail scrapings first?”
“There’s some sort of gray chalk under a couple of the nails on her right hand,” Maxi said.
Jamie placed a collection sheet on the bed and lifted Charlotte’s right hand. Carefully, she scraped the substance onto the sheet.
“What do you think it is?”
“It’s too rough to be chalk.”
“Sand?”
“I don’t think so. Not uniform enough. We’ll get the lab to work it up.”
Maxi and Jamie fell into a comfortable silence as they worked Charlotte’s rape kit. The victims usually required constant reassurances, confirmation that they were safe, that it would be over soon. Maxi uttered these to their comatose patient. “We’re going to comb your hair, see if we find anything. I’ll try not to pull,” she told Charlotte. Charlotte didn’t respond in any way.
Maxi would have said the same thing to a victim who never made it to the hospital, to the ones they did rape kits on in the morgue. She had before.
When they were done, Jamie checked that each sample was labeled and collected it all into a single bag.
“There is one more thing I think you’ll want to take.” Maxi started across the room to a small veneer locker above the sink. From it, she pulled out the white bag that held Charlotte’s personal items. Still wearing her gloves, Maxi removed a lace bra. It was bright orange.
“Not the kind of bra I was wearing at sixteen.” Or thirty-nine, Jamie thought.
Maxi showed Jamie the tag. “And check this out.”
“Agent Provocateur,” Jamie said. “Never heard of it.”
“Me neither, but Carly down in Labor and Delivery says she sees it all the time at Pacific Medical, on the mothers who come down from Sea Cliff and Pacific Heights.”
“So, it’s expensive,” Jamie said.
Maxi snorted. “I Googled this Provo-ca-whatever. This shit’s not expensive; it’s like a car payment. We’re talking a hundred and eighty bucks for the underwear, which is only about four inches of lace. The bra?” Maxi paused for dramatic effect. “The bra costs another two hundred.”
Jamie looked over at Charlotte. “And she had a matching pair?”
Maxi lifted a paper evidence collection bag off the table and handed it to Jamie. Jamie unrolled the top and looked in at the matching lace underwear, no larger than a cocktail napkin. “Four hundred dollar underwear. Makes it seem like she had plans for someone to see them.”
“Damn straight,” Maxi agreed.
Chapter 4
With the evidence collected and bagged, Jamie emerged from Charlotte’s hospital room about an hour later, somewhat surprised that—despite the late hour—the crowd had not dispersed. If anything, it may have grown. Or maybe the attorneys or assistants or whatever they were had simply grown restless and were beginning to pace rather than sit quietly. Tucking the paper bag of evidence under her arm, Jamie waded through the bodies, scanning for Sondra or Gavin.
Everything to Lose Page 2
