Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2)

by Danielle Girard

  ALSO BY DANIELLE GIRARD

  DR. SCHWARTZMAN SERIES

  Exhume

  OTHER WORKS

  Savage Art

  Ruthless Game

  Chasing Darkness

  Cold Silence

  Dead Center

  One Clean Shot

  Dark Passage

  Interference

  Everything to Lose

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Danielle Girard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503943216

  ISBN-10: 1503943216

  Cover design by Damonza

  For Chris, who always believes

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  The victim was a white male, late thirties.

  That was all she knew so far. It was enough.

  Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman arrived at the crime scene and parked in the farthest corner of the lot. Hal would be waiting. He’d called her almost an hour earlier to give her the address of the crime scene and the basic vitals. She preferred to draw her own conclusions, so he’d avoided any insight that might prevent her from processing the scene on her own.

  Nausea and lethargy from chemo meant it had taken her longer than normal to get to the scene. She opened the driver’s side door even before she had turned the engine off. The car air felt stagnant and too warm.

  Her fingers found the release on her seat belt, and she slid off the driver’s seat. She hadn’t gotten used to the new car. It was higher off the ground than her last one. What the ads called a small SUV, as if there were such a thing. She’d gotten it so she could see around all the other massive cars and because the hatchback offered a spacious rear to carry her equipment and easily load and unload her kit.

  But it felt . . . massive.

  She stopped at the edge of the asphalt. Somewhere nearby was a construction project echoing with the ramming of pillars and the clang of metal on metal. The shriek of heavy machinery and a smell like burning electrical wires made her feel even worse. Bent at the waist, she wrapped her arms across her stomach and drew air slowly through her nose, then blew it out her mouth.

  The temperature today would get up to the seventies, but for the moment the air was cool, and she was grateful for the moisture from the morning fog.

  Saliva collected in her throat, pooled in her mouth. In, out. In, out. The breathing wasn’t working. She was going to vomit. Again.

  It would be the fourth time in two hours.

  She was angry and frustrated. This was a crime scene, and she was needed inside. Given how close she lived to the victim’s house, she should have been able to get there in thirty minutes.

  Three and a half months ago she could have done it in twenty. But that was before the mastectomy, before the start of chemo. Between the pain from the injections and the nausea, the experience was like having a nasty case of food poisoning after being run over by a truck.

  These past seven weeks, everything took longer. There was no rushing the side effects of chemo. And the side effects meant there was no rushing at all.

  Another wave of nausea rose into her throat. She took a slow breath. Waited.

  “Be patient,” her oncologist had told her. “Take a minimum of four weeks off work,” the surgeon had directed.

  Four weeks out of the morgue had felt like a year. She was not born for inactivity. She liked structure and work, and she thrived on the interactions of the job. Being in her condo that long had served as a daily reminder of how empty her place was, how little like a home.

  She drew another breath in through her nose, but it wasn’t working. Too much saliva. The next wave of nausea rolled in her stomach and rose into her throat. She ran the few feet past the pristine landscape and vomited. Pitched forward, hands planted on her knees, she was grateful for the low fog and the bit of empty parking lot that offered some privacy.

  Schwartzman drew a slow breath and knew from her overproductive salivary glands that she wasn’t done being sick.

  “There you are.” Hal’s voice.

  Without turning to look at him, Schwartzman raised her palm to keep him from coming closer. Hal had been the one to drive her home post-op, to get her set up for those first couple of days when she could barely make it from bed to the bathroom and back. Since then he’d been watching her like a hawk.

  “I’m almost done,” she said as another wave of nausea filled her throat, and she retched again. Nothing came up but a thin string of stomach acid. She shuddered.

  With a couple of deep breaths, she tested the nausea. Maybe it had passed. She shifted the waist of her slacks so that it didn’t press against her stomach. She was wearing her loosest pants—they were all loose now—but the sensation of anything against her skin made the nausea worse.

  Maybe she could show up to a scene in her pajamas. At least she might get there quicker.

  “Take this.” Hal pressed a travel package of tissue into her palm.

  The pressure in her stomach was gone. She pulled a tissue free of the pouch and touched it to her mouth. “Much better.”

  “Take your time.”

  She took a few slow breaths and stood upright. When she felt confident she wouldn’t vomit on the homicide inspector, she turned toward him. “How’d you know I was here? Someone hear the sound of retching?”

  Hal grinned, his teeth bright against his smooth, dark skin. “I think they heard your car, but it might have been the vomit that tipped them off.” He wore a gray button-down and a black blazer, more formal than usual. He looked sharp.

  “I can’t believe you can just stand there and watch me.” She returned to the car for the tin of mints and put two in her mouth. “It doesn’t make you sick, watching someone throw up?”

  “Nope,” Hal said a little proudly.

  “It does me,” Schwartzman admitted. “I watched a patient throw up in the OR in med school. The anesthesia made her sick. She’d had chicken salad for lunch, and it came back up—you could see the red peppers and the asparagus.” She stopped herself before the image filled her mind. Even the thought of it made her gag. “I had to leave the room. Ran across the hall, looking for a bathroom, and ended up in an empty OR. Vom
ited all over the floor in a sterile room.”

  Hal’s booming laugh made her smile. “I’ll bet that made you popular with the cleaning crew.”

  “Not very.”

  “You spend enough years in homicide, and you lose your gag reflex,” he said. “Anytime we get a new inspector, I end up watching somebody vomit. At least the first few scenes.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” she said. It took time to get used to dead bodies—the sight of them, the smells. Dead bodies didn’t make her gag. Even the particularly smelly ones. She was accustomed to rotting flesh and decomp. But someone else vomiting—that was gross. Better, then, that she worked with dead patients rather than the live ones.

  The dead didn’t vomit.

  She folded the tissue inside out, used it to dab the moisture from her eyes, and handed the package back to him.

  “Keep it,” he said. “I borrow them from Hailey’s desk.”

  Schwartzman smiled, and a beat passed between them.

  He scanned her face, examining her. She knew he was wondering, How bad does she feel? How much energy does she have? He was going to tell her to go home, to rest.

  She lifted her hand. “Don’t say it.”

  “You don’t have to be here,” he said at the same time.

  “I’m here.” She opened the trunk of her car with the key fob for her crime scene kit. Hal stepped in and picked it up for her.

  It was awkward to stand aside and let him take it. After her first chemo treatment, she had argued about carrying her own case. She must not have been that convincing, because Hal didn’t listen. And she didn’t fight him. Before, she would never have allowed someone else to carry her equipment.

  But this was after.

  Today, she was grateful. She had read all the warnings about how the chemo would make her feel—the exhaustion, the nausea, the sores—but she had sworn she would make it through. “I won’t barf on your scene.”

  “You might. You haven’t seen him yet.”

  Hal carried her case toward the entrance.

  Schwartzman looked up for the first time, taking in the swanky structure. It was maybe thirty stories high, and the building had a rounded roofline and huge semicircle windows on the top level. The penthouse. Where their victim was.

  The residential building was one of the new projects that ran along the Bay Bridge, condos that started at a few million for the basic model and rose quickly in amenities and faster in price. Full of Silicon Valley millionaires whose companies had migrated up to the city. She was ready to move out of the condo she was in, which held memories of the deaths that Spencer, her soon-to-be ex-husband, had brought to its doorstep.

  Hal hit the “Handicap” button with his hip and nodded for her to go first. As soon as they entered the building’s bright foyer, he whistled. The place was dense with foliage—as though they were entering a lush greenhouse. It smelled of wet jungle, and she imagined it would have been a peaceful place to come home to, if you weren’t already nauseated.

  Schwartzman swallowed, hoping that she wouldn’t be sick again. “Who’s the victim?”

  “Todd Posner. He’s—”

  “The oncologist?” Schwartzman halted.

  “You know him?”

  How many times had Dr. Fraser assured her that Todd Posner was the best surgical oncologist in the city? Breast cancer wasn’t his specialty. He was normally sought after for more involved procedures. Despite that, he had ended up taking her case. She’d met him once, for ten or fifteen minutes, before he’d performed her double mastectomy.

  “Posner did my surgery.” Nausea rose in her throat again. Another connection to her. Another person dead. Spencer. But he was in prison, awaiting trial.

  That didn’t mean he couldn’t get to her. He could have someone else doing his bidding. Just like before.

  Hal shook his head firmly. “No. You’re not thinking of him.”

  But she was. Hal had obviously thought of him, too. How long would it be before his name wasn’t the first to enter her mind when someone died?

  “No way, Schwartzman,” Hal went on before she could answer. “No way Spencer’s got anything to do with this. The DA down there is on every conversation, every interaction. When that bastard flosses, they know about it.”

  “You’re right,” she said. Spencer was safely behind bars, and so was his accomplice. There was no way either of them could have killed Posner. “Posner’s not my oncologist anyway.” Spencer wouldn’t want him dead. There would be no reason. “He was my surgeon, and the surgery is already done.”

  “Right,” Hal agreed as though that was all it took. But the words weren’t convincing in her own head.

  They continued through the foyer and rode the elevator to the thirtieth floor. Hal hovered in the corner and watched the numbers above the doors. She knew he hated elevators. She wanted to distract him—it was the least she could do—but she couldn’t shake thoughts of Spencer. She started to tell Hal but stopped herself. Get a grip.

  The elevator doors opened with a ping, and Hal exhaled as though he’d held his breath the whole way up. They passed two patrol officers who stood guard in the hallway. She scanned their faces, nodded.

  The men nodded in return. They were familiar, but she didn’t know them. There had been some changes while she was gone. They included a new group of patrol cops, fresh from the academy. A new lab assistant, a new custodian. She missed the old faces.

  In particular she missed seeing Patrol Officer Ken Macy at her crime scenes. Still limited to desk duty after the stabbing, Ken would not be there. She and Ken had seen each other regularly since her return from South Carolina, usually in the evening, for a dinner at whatever new ethnic restaurant Ken had discovered. Occasionally on the weekend. Despite knowing he wasn’t back on patrol, Schwartzman looked for him at every scene.

  She and Hal stepped from the dark entryway into a brilliant-white apartment. Floor-to-ceiling windows without shades added to the feeling that the sun shone directly in from all sides. Sleek furniture in oranges and reds was carefully placed around a room that otherwise seemed stark and bare. The furniture was strangely uninviting, as if it was meant as an artistic statement rather than something to actually sit on or use.

  A modern metal sculpture—red and gold geometric pieces soldered together—moved in a quiet circle in the center of the main room. On the opposite side, a spiral staircase painted in gold led to a loft that filled one corner. She could just make out a grand piano sitting in the center of the raised space. She wondered how they’d gotten the piano up there. Or how someone would get it down.

  “What do you call this style?” Hal asked, pausing to stare into the living room.

  “No idea,” Schwartzman said. It appeared expensive in the way of things that were designer one of a kinds. Like the bizarre dresses that came down the runway. Nothing you would ever buy. Except Dr. Posner had.

  “Nouveau ugly,” Hal muttered.

  Hallways led off in both directions from the main room. Around the corner was an expansive kitchen in the same gleaming whites. White cabinets, white slabs on the counter surfaces—marble or maybe some new composite material. An oversize Sub-Zero refrigerator in stainless steel sat beside a floor-to-ceiling wine cooler. This was beyond a nice house. Posner was rich.

  “He must have done well,” she commented.

  “We’re doing a check on his finances, but he was a doctor.”

  Few doctors these days were rich—not in the way of corporate CEOs and those in the financial or tech sectors. And certainly not the doctors forced to negotiate with the insurance companies. As an oncologist, Posner didn’t have the luxury of being paid cash. That was for boob jobs, not for mastectomies. But maybe he did other types of surgeries. If what she’d heard was true, he was certainly talented enough. “A surgeon,” she clarified. “These days the rich ones are almost all surgeons. Where’s the body?”

  “Den.” Hal led the way. “You think he had another source of income?�
��

  “I doubt I’ll get any sense of his bankbook from the autopsy,” she said.

  “Maybe he’s got gold teeth.”

  “Good point. I’ll let you know.”

  Hal stopped in a doorway and motioned inside. The decor in the den was more subdued than the other areas of Posner’s house, unless you counted some truly odd wall art and a floor-to-ceiling window with a stunning view. From his desk, Posner could see out across the San Francisco Bay to the rainbow of shipping containers stacked at the Oakland Port.

  Quietly watching the scene, an Australian shepherd lay in the corner of the room under an enormous three-dimensional steel-and-wire sculpture that stuck out from the wall maybe eighteen inches into the room. The sculpture was the kind of thing no parent would own for fear a kid would run into it and impale himself. But Posner didn’t have children.

  Schwartzman watched the dog a moment. He didn’t look like a threat, but dogs were protective. She’d come close to being bitten once by a German shepherd for examining his dead owner. She would keep an eye on Posner’s dog.

  Posner lay about three feet from the dog. He was facedown on a rug with a Native American print in reds and blues. The rug covered the room almost in its entirety.

  Most of the right side of his face was visible, but the area below his nose was obscured by his right hand. He wore dress slacks and a button-down shirt. On his feet were short athletic socks but no shoes. He looked dressed for work.

  Hal set Schwartzman’s kit down on the carpet.

  “Has he been moved?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.” An officer stepped forward. “My partner and I were first on scene. He—that is, my partner—checked for a pulse at the throat and the wrist. There was none, so we contained the scene and called you.”

  Hal reached out a hand. “That was excellent work.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Have you seen the crime scene guys yet?” Hal asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Hal drew out his cell phone and stepped from the room.

  Schwartzman opened her kit and pulled on a fresh Tyvek suit and a face mask before replacing her boots with the navy Crocs she wore at scenes. She spent the first few minutes photographing. Roger Sampers, head of the Crime Scene Unit, normally had his people take the photographs since they usually beat her to the scene, but Schwartzman enjoyed the process of cataloguing the space. It kept her initial focus broad. Normally her inclination was to go straight to the victim. Taking photographs made her slow the process.