He put a glove back on and tried to reach his fingers into the narrow space. Behind him, a car pulled into a spot in the lot.
He jammed his hand farther down, feeling the edge of the wrapper against the tip of his middle finger. He couldn’t get hold of it. He was breathing heavily.
Two women emerged from a black Lexus SUV and walked toward the Embarcadero. The van wasn’t parked in a spot. Someone would notice it soon.
The situation was no longer sexy. His erection was gone, and he was growing increasingly angry.
Time to go.
He put the glove in his pocket and double-checked that he had everything. Everything except the foil wrapper. He used the handkerchief to open the door and closed it with his hip. Then he crossed in front of the van, hugging the north edge of the lot until he reached its western edge. Head down, he walked casually until he reached Green Street and made his way home.
Backtracking a few blocks, he disposed of his various tools. By the time he finally reached the house, he had thrown the wet wipe into a trash can on a quiet corner of Vallejo and deposited the windbreaker and eye drops in a dumpster behind a popular Italian restaurant on Broadway. The gloves, the spray, and the handkerchief were rolled into his sweater, which was tucked under his arm as he walked the remainder of the way home in his shirtsleeves.
He unlocked the door, and immediately Trent was calling for him.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” he said, heading straight into the living room, where he started a fire. He slid the canister behind the stack of firewood and added two thick logs to the fire. Briefly he studied the strange blue flames that emerged from the pair of $400 gloves. If he dumped the gloves along his route, someone would find them. The homeless were always searching for treasures in the trash, and those gloves would certainly be a treasure.
They were too distinct, too unique to be thrown away. It would take a few fires to burn them enough to make them unrecognizable. Thankfully he was the only one who used the fireplace.
Trent hadn’t screwed that up yet.
He stared at the fire, the handkerchief in his hands. He should have destroyed it, too, but it had been his father’s, and, oddly, he couldn’t bring himself to give it up. He slid it behind the stack of wood with the canister and found Ginger’s number on his cell phone.
4
Even though the room temperature was where she always kept it, Schwartzman was sweating heavily beneath the protective face shield. The double layer of hand protection—heavy utility gloves over her examination ones—made the autopsy on Todd Posner awkward and inefficient. She had wanted to complete the autopsy this morning, but it had taken most of the day to get the body released from the hazmat team. It was no easy feat to find a place where they could safely autopsy a body that had ingested a toxin in such a large concentration.
In the end the hospital had loaned her a quarantine room for the procedure. Being in the strange room added to the bizarre sense that she was performing her first autopsy. At least the nausea had mostly passed.
Posner’s body had been x-rayed, and the films were displayed on a giant screen along one wall. From them she identified a broken clavicle on his right side and a hairline fracture of his left ulna. Both showed remodeling that indicated they were several decades old. Nothing in the X-rays offered any direction for cause of death.
Schwartzman drew blood from the femoral artery to test for the presence of drugs or toxins. Would the Adriamycin have gotten into his blood system? Through his stomach maybe or through the thin tissue of his mouth? There were multiple ways to absorb a toxin.
She’d know more when she opened him up.
Recording as she went, Schwartzman did her external exam of his clothing first. She collected several hairs that might have been Posner’s own and a few she would wager belonged to Buster, his Australian shepherd, as well as a variety of fibers. Some she recognized as carpet fibers. Most would likely be useless in identifying a suspect, but it took only one.
Once she collected what was visible, she turned off the overhead lamp and used her flashlight to create indirect light, hoping for some surprise in the shadows and creases of Posner’s clothing. She found nothing. As a last step before undressing Posner, she removed the paper bags that covered his hands, scraped under his fingernails, and took clippings to send to the lab to test for the presence of epithelial cells other than his own. She studied the scrapings from his left hand and the scratches on his face. It was a safe bet that they would find little under those nails that didn’t belong to Posner.
She then undressed him and packed his clothing into plastic bags to be submitted into evidence. With the naked victim on the table, she studied his skin, beginning with his scalp and moving downward. No injuries to his cranium or his jaw. Aside from the burns on his face, there were no markings on Posner’s body to suggest a cause of death other than the poison itself.
In addition to the bolus she’d pulled from his mouth at the scene, she found something adhered to his first molar. It was half the size of a pencil eraser, and flesh-colored, but it didn’t have the consistency of flesh. It was more like gum. A strange color for gum. Maybe nicotine gum.
Had Posner been a smoker?
From habit, she bent down to smell and realized it was impossible through the heavy gear. She collected the evidence carefully, trying to retain the imprint on the sample in case it had come from something they might match later. The strange substance kept her focus on the victim’s mouth longer than warranted. Aside from the gum and the paper bolus, it was absolutely clean. Nothing between his teeth when she flossed them. Though the Red Devil had caused some staining along the plaque at the gum line, there was no other residue in his molars.
Posner wouldn’t have ingested the Adriamycin without a fight, so there should have been some evidence of a struggle. And yet there wasn’t. No signs that he’d been bound. No defensive wounds.
It was possible that he was incapacitated when the liquid was poured down his throat. But if the liquid hadn’t been administered in tiny doses, he would have choked on it. Was that what had caused the burns on his face? Had he been drugged first?
Her examination of the stomach would tell her. But if he had been unconscious, why were there burn marks on his fingertips? Perhaps touching his face had been an involuntary reaction to the burning sensation.
Then, the question would be, what killed him if not ingesting the Adriamycin?
From her kit, she removed a small fluorescent light, long and thin like a wand. She examined the anterior of the body in the fluorescence, searching for things she might have missed—other fibers or, better yet, biological samples left by the killer. Maybe even a fingerprint.
There was nothing.
She repeated the exercise with a UV lamp and peered through a pair of goggles she held up to the glass of her hazmat helmet. Again she found no additional evidence on Posner’s corpse.
With the exterior exam of Posner’s anterior complete, she moved to the hospital phone to request two orderlies to help her flip the body. With the exception of obese victims, Schwartzman used to be able to turn the bodies herself. But since the surgery, she’d needed help. The doctor wanted her to avoid lifting heavy objects for twelve weeks. Plus the chemotherapy sapped her energy. Some days she could hardly lift her own legs to climb a flight of stairs. Still dressed in her hazmat gear, she pushed the “Speaker” button for the hospital phone and shouted awkwardly through the mask.
Then she waited. The process seemed to take forever. The hazard risk of the toxin meant the orderlies had to suit up fully in order to enter the room. Schwartzman could have used the time to get something to eat. Or—as she was parched—to drink. But that meant going through the full decontamination process only to have to suit up again.
Her hunger and thirst could wait.
As soon as the orderlies were gone, she went back to work on the posterior. Her first interesting find was two burn marks on the deceased’s posterior, just above his rig
ht kidney. Each mark measured five and a half millimeters in diameter, and the two marks were six and a half centimeters apart. She’d seen these before.
Taser marks.
So that was how the killer had coerced him. She examined his posterior for additional burn marks, but it appeared the Taser was used only once. She viewed the burns under a handheld magnifying glass. Attached to one of the burns was a single pinkish fiber. She collected the fiber and was depositing it into a small paper coin envelope when the door opened.
Hal stepped in, wearing the largest hazmat suit she’d ever seen. She laughed at the sight of him. He raised his arms and looked down. “What?”
“You look great.”
“Of course I do,” he said, joining her at the table. “God, it’s hot in here.”
“The thermostat says sixty-seven.”
“In all this gear, it feels like eighty.”
“Turn it down.”
Hal was already punching at the thermostat with a heavily gloved hand. “I figured you’d be almost done by now.”
Schwartzman stared at the uncut body. Precautions slowed things down. And she was slower. For now. She would not always be slow. One more round of chemo. Another three weeks—twenty days actually—and she’d be done and on the road to being herself again.
“Don’t do that,” Hal said.
“Do what?”
“Think about being slow.” He pointed at her face. “I can see all your worrying in those scrunched eyebrows.”
That he could see anything under her shiny face mask was surprising. “I’m not worried about being slow.” She tried to release the tension in the muscles of the glabellar complex between her eyes and the frontalis muscle of her forehead. It was harder than she expected. Those were her thinking muscles. Women her age used Botox to erase those lines, but Schwartzman didn’t mind the proof that she was thinking.
She knew from experience—not thinking had never served her well.
Hal laughed. “Now I don’t know what you’re doing up there.”
“I was trying to relax those muscles.”
“Well, don’t.”
She returned to the body and checked the two burn marks with the magnifying glass. They were consistent with the injury from a Taser. She spent another moment to make sure she hadn’t missed anything else. “I’m almost done with my external exam. I’d love your help flipping the body again.”
“Sure. I can wait. You have anything yet?”
She handed him the envelope. “Collected a fiber off these burn marks.”
Hal studied the burn marks. “He was Tasered. You find others?”
“No. Just that one place.” She continued her exam. There was a small abrasion—about six centimeters wide—beneath the base of the fibula. Again she used the magnifying glass to study it. The abrasion was covered with a thin, shiny layer of serum, the fluid in blood that remained when platelets coagulated to create a scab. The presence of serum suggested the injury was either pre- or perimortem.
Either way, it had happened before Posner’s heart stopped pumping.
Schwartzman documented the abrasion even though there was nothing telling in the wound. Abrasions often preserved the pattern of whatever caused the injury. She had once used an abrasion to match a specific shoe tread that led to an arrest. Maybe they’d get lucky here, too. She swabbed to test for foreign substances and noted a large mole on the inside of Posner’s left heel. It was a compound nevi—a raised mole.
“That thing’s huge,” Hal said over her shoulder.
Schwartzman measured it. “Fifteen millimeters diameter.” She was surprised it hadn’t been removed. Dermatologists tended toward removal in the case of moles, especially the large ones that came with an increased risk of melanoma.
“And right there—it must have driven him crazy in shoes,” Hal said over her shoulder.
Schwartzman observed a small divot in the crest of the mole. Through the magnifying glass, a puncture mark was evident. She handed the glass to Hal. “Take a look at that.”
Hal leaned over. “It’s like a hole in the center? What is that from?”
“I think it’s a needle mark.” With a scalpel, she removed the mole, taking with it a narrow edge of skin around its circumference. “We’ll be able to tell under a microscope if it’s a needle mark. We’ll want to run a tox screen on a sample, too.”
“Maybe the Taser was used to stun him so the killer could inject a longer-lasting sedative.”
“If the goal was to get Posner to drink that poison, he’d have to be alert.”
“So injecting him with a sedative would defeat the purpose.”
“Too much sedation would make it hard to get him to drink.” She thought again of the scratches on his face. “There are signs that he scratched himself—the burns on his fingertips and the skin and blood under his nails—so it’s unlikely that he was unconscious.” Schwartzman studied the mole in her petri dish. Definitely a puncture site. It was possible that the doctor injected himself, but there was no evidence of scarring, which she would expect if the site was used regularly. And why hide it so carefully? If it wasn’t the doctor who had injected himself, was it simply luck that the killer found such a camouflaged spot? It would be an easy place to overlook in an autopsy—especially considering the burns on his face.
“How did the killer know he had that mole?” Hal asked, his thoughts running parallel to her own.
“I had the same thought,” she said. “It would be covered most of the time by his shoes. Did you notice his socks this morning?”
“They were short ones, like for tennis,” Hal said.
“Right. They looked odd with his dress slacks, but the mole would have been visible just above the sock.” Schwartzman put a glass cover on the petri dish and set it aside. She swabbed the area around the mole and checked between Posner’s toes once more. “Will you turn off the overhead light?” She drew her fluorescent wand from her kit and held it over Posner’s neck and upper back.
“What the hell is that?” Hal asked as Posner’s skin began to emit a pale-violet light.
“It’s the fluorescence.”
“The light makes him glow?”
It was hardly a glow. She recalled seeing bioluminescence for the first time, the brilliant blue beneath the water. The fluorescence gave Posner’s skin a slightly purple tint. Nothing spectacular.
Hal was wide-eyed behind the mask. “Does it have to do with the poison he drank?”
“No. It’s the fluorescent light. When the light strikes human skin, some of it is reflected off like regular light, but some is absorbed into the tissue. The atoms in the skin become excited, so they vibrate faster than usual. When the excitement stage ends, the excess electrical energy creates the glow.”
“Damn, that’s creepy.”
“But sometimes it reveals things we’ve missed.” With the magnifying glass, she went over the skin.
“Anything?”
“No.” She tried to hide her disappointment and failed. She repeated the process, moving down the body while Hal continued to talk about how creepy the effect of the light was. She made it to the abrasion at his ankle and studied it carefully.
After she switched off the fluorescent wand and the body returned to the yellow-gray color of death, she used the ultraviolet light to check again. She handed Hal her extra pair of UV goggles and put on her own.
“What’s that?” Hal asked immediately.
Sure enough, there was a contusion—or bruise—forming in the skin below the abrasion. It appeared to have some sort of pattern.
“Is that a shoe print?” Hal asked.
“I don’t think it’s big enough. Grab the camera from my bag.”
Hal handed her the camera, and she took a series of close-up photographs of the markings. Standing back from the body, the two studied the images, zooming in to study the small screen. Whatever had been pressed into Posner’s skin had done so with enough force to create a lasting mark. Had he lived
longer, it would likely have become a bruise.
“It doesn’t look like a shoe,” he said.
“No,” she agreed. “It’s too long and thin.”
“Some sort of stick.”
“But it’s a pressure mark, not a strike. Something held and pressed against that spot,” she said, trying to make sense of the marks. “Or it’s from whatever was used to hold him.”
Setting down the camera, she returned to the body with the UV light and studied the other side of Posner’s leg. A similar mark emerged under the UV light. “There’s something here, as well.” She handed Hal the UV light. “Hold this.”
Again she took photos to document the pattern. Each was roughly one inch wide and around three inches long. Inside the inch-wide mark were two darker vertical lines, approximately a quarter-inch apart. Along the darker lines were a series of horizontal hash marks, and between the two lines, small half-moon shapes. She stared for some time but couldn’t puzzle out what weapon would have made the pattern.
“I can’t figure it out,” he said.
“Me neither.”
“We’ll get the pictures to Roger and see if his team can match it.”
She placed the light in her kit. “I’m ready to turn him over.” She went to slide her hands under the victim’s shoulders to help.
“I’ll do it,” Hal said.
“I can help you.”
He watched her. “You’re not supposed to lift anything heavier than a cantaloupe.”
“Watermelon,” she corrected.
“Whatever.”
“It’s a big difference,” she went on. “A cantaloupe might weigh three pounds but a watermelon weighs twenty.”
“Well, this guy weighs more than twenty pounds.”
It was true. His head would weigh between ten and twelve pounds on its own. The restricted maximum weight for post-op patients wasn’t random. Doctors granted the twenty pounds so that parents could lift their infant or young toddler postsurgery. The equivalent for her would be a dead man’s head.
Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2) Page 4
