Justin tried to stand. Trina gripped his arm, helping him.
Hal scanned the room. The vase with the peonies. He yanked the flowers out and threw them on the floor. Knelt beside her and poured the water over her face.
Her eyes flew open, shocked. She coughed and choked, spit water.
He let the vase fall to the carpet, grabbed the canister from where it had fallen on the floor, and reached for her. Schwartzman wiped the water from her face.
Justin Finlay was on his feet. Hal lunged toward Justin and punched his leg. His fist struck the gunshot wound. Justin screamed and dropped like a rock.
“You move one inch, and I’ll shoot you,” Hal said, kneeling beside Schwartzman.
Justin’s face was twisted in pain. Trina sat sobbing beside him, her arm wrapped around his shoulders.
“Are you okay?” he asked Schwartzman.
She nodded, rubbing her face and blinking a few times.
“Say something, Schwartzman!”
“I’m wet.”
Relief humming through him, Hal laughed. Then he turned to look at Trina and Justin Finlay. He stood and pulled Trina off her brother.
“Justin Finlay, you are under arrest.”
39
Hal wouldn’t let it go, so Schwartzman agreed to go in the ambulance to General Hospital. But she was fine. She’d heard the whisper of the cyanide spray as she stabbed the key into Justin Finlay’s thigh. She’d been holding her breath, and the cool spray had hit only the side of her face before she’d dropped to the floor.
It stung.
Her skin was irritated.
She was alive.
Trina Finlay had suffered a little chemical burn from the cyanide, as well. Facing Justin, Trina had likely inhaled more of the poison than Schwartzman did, but she would recover.
Justin Finlay was going to prison. For a long, long time.
Because Hal had to take Justin Finlay into custody to interview him and Trina, he arrived at the hospital almost two hours after Schwartzman. She had been asleep when the familiar sound of Hal walking woke her. He was a loud walker. Scuffed his right foot a little. Big feet.
He entered the small, curtained-off cubicle carrying her purse. “You left it in my car.”
Schwartzman encouraged Hal to sit, but he would have none of it. Instead he paced a circle around the small cubicle where she was waiting to be seen. She hoped the doctor came before Hal wore through the linoleum.
“Where the hell is the doctor?” he asked.
She opened her eyes and looked over at him. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked, and this time she didn’t answer. She had been triaged, and she was waiting because someone else was in worse shape—a bad car accident, a gunshot wound. The doctors were working to keep some victim off her table. She was okay with waiting.
She thought again about Ken Macy, five months ago, and the eighteen fresh stab wounds peppering his body. About her waking up in a room like this with Hal asleep in the chair. About running. She wouldn’t be running this time.
The doctor would get to her eventually, and the nursing staff had already treated her. There was nothing to do other than make sure the skin was thoroughly washed and apply a topical cream for the irritation. And check her lungs.
They had done a chest scan when she’d arrived and a second one after about ninety minutes to see if there was any change. Cyanide was fast acting. The damage, if there were any, would show quickly. The first scan had looked okay—no damage worth worrying about. She couldn’t imagine the second test would show anything different. No doubt some particles had entered her lungs. It would have been impossible to avoid inhaling the cyanide completely.
Of course, Hal had inhaled some, too. He hadn’t been holding his breath.
All of them were fine. There was cyanide in all sorts of things—almonds, of course, but also apple seeds and cherry pits. The human body could handle trace amounts.
“You can go back to the station,” she said again. “I can call you.”
“No.”
She knew he had to go back and interview Justin Finlay again. When he arrived, he told her that he’d interrogated Finlay until he lawyered up. That was when Hal had come to the hospital. But Finlay’s attorney would arrive soon, and Hal would meet with them.
“Tell me what Finlay said,” she asked again. He had waved her off when she’d first asked, saying he wanted her to focus on getting better, as though the act of thinking might slow her recovery.
He opened the curtain and stared into the corridor. “I don’t even see a doctor out there,” he said when he came back.
“Tell me about Finlay,” she repeated.
Hal hesitated.
She pointed to the plastic chair in the corner. “Sit.”
He sank into the chair.
“Talk,” she demanded.
“Bossy.”
“Yes.”
He smiled, and then his expression changed. Thoughtful. “Posner showed up at the house. Trina was dressed as Ruth Finlay, but she didn’t fool Posner.”
“So Posner threatened Justin, the way he threatened Patrick Fraser?” she guessed.
“Right. Posner was blackmailing Justin for more control in the organization. If he didn’t get it, he would expose the fact that Trina was playing the part of their mother. Justin couldn’t let that happen. Someone would start to ask questions about Ruth Finlay. They would want to see her.”
“And she was dead,” Schwartzman said.
“Right. And Justin knew giving Posner more control in the organization meant he and Trina would be pushed out. They would lose access to their mother’s money.”
“What about Fraser?” she asked. “Did he have anything to do with any of this?”
“No,” Hal said. “It looks like Justin Finlay was working on his own.”
Fraser had seemed so wild in the parking lot, talking about the photos of Patrick. Then they’d discovered the story of the kid Fraser had beat up. Allegedly. Even if he did it, it would be hard to blame a father for protecting his son. Was it that different from a brother protecting his sister? How many degrees of desperation had caused Justin Finlay to kill Todd Posner? Would Fraser have done something so drastic?
“It seemed like a lot of the clues pointed to him,” she said.
“Fraser, you mean?” Hal said.
She nodded.
“Fraser had cut Justin Finlay’s contract.”
“What do you mean? What contract?”
“The cancer center was one of Justin’s clients,” Hal explained.
She shook her head. “I don’t think I ever knew what Justin Finlay did.”
“He’s an efficiency expert. Was. He worked there to help trim the fat.”
“That’s how he got the Adriamycin,” she said.
“Right,” Hal agreed. “He had full access at the cancer center. And he wasn’t on any of our lists because—”
“He wasn’t an employee,” she finished for him.
“Exactly.”
“So Finlay tried to set Fraser up for the fall because he was angry about the contract?”
“Justin Finlay must have known that Posner had turned Sandy Coleman away and Fraser had cared for her.”
Justin had worked alone; there was no accomplice. It was pretty clear that, aside from hiding their mother’s death, Trina had nothing to do with it. Justin Finlay was going down for multiple counts of first-degree murder.
The attorney would try something to reduce the charges. They always did. Temporary insanity? She didn’t see how that would work.
“Where’s the mother?” she asked. “Her remains, I mean.”
“In the basement. Roger’s team is collecting them.”
“I’ll look at them tomorrow.” She thought back to Posner’s death. “Trina had a horse.”
“Right,” Hal said. “Roger confirmed that the sedative came from the stable where they boarded Trina’s horse. They’re sending up a sample of the sedative so Roger can confirm
the compounds are identical.”
“He’ll get to use Rita.”
“Rita?” Hal asked.
“His new mass spectrometer.”
“Oh, right,” Hal said. For a while he appeared lost in thought, so she gave him some time before asking, “And Gustafson was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“We haven’t gotten far with Gustafson yet. Best guess is Justin was worried he would talk.”
A cable guy taking side calls to make a few extra bucks and cheat his company ended up at the Finlays’. Dumb luck. “You find out what made the imprint on Posner’s leg?”
“Justin Finlay had a penchant for very expensive gloves—a brand called Fratelli Orsini. We’re working with the company to match the imprint, but we’re pretty sure that’s what did it. It also sounds like Posner had a thing for wearing short socks with his dress shoes, so it’s possible Finlay had noticed the mole on his leg and knew it would be harder to see a needle mark there.” Hal paused. “But so far Justin’s not giving us those details.”
The imprint made sense to her now. Justin Finlay would have been applying a lot of pressure to hold Posner down while the horse tranquilizer took effect. “Doesn’t sound like you’ll need Justin to confess about the gloves in order to make your case,” she said. “What about David Kemp?”
“We’re not sure yet. Justin says Denise Ross killed David Kemp,” Hal said. “An affair gone bad. We did find a copy of the news article about Posner’s murder in her home. It looks like she might have decided to copycat Posner’s death to keep the focus off herself.”
That one sounded like temporary insanity.
“But we’ll get Justin for Denise Ross’s murder.”
“She scratched him.”
Hal nodded. “We’re working on Justin to give us the fingers.”
Justin had told Trina the scratch was from the cat, and she had applied makeup to it. Didn’t Trina wonder why her brother would need to cover up a scratch from a cat? Or how he’d gotten the scratch to begin with? Or was she simply happy to be needed, to be useful?
She had trusted her brother. Since Posner died so soon after he’d discovered their secret, had she never suspected her brother was the killer? Or had she suspected him in some recess of her mind and wanted so badly to be wrong that she’d suppressed any notion that might lead her to consider his guilt?
The human brain was capable of amazing feats.
She adjusted her pillow. That very morning, she’d learned that Spencer would likely be released from jail, although if that creepy attendant was planted in her morgue by her ex-husband, then Spencer had been with her in spirit for some time. “What about Roy?”
“He’s MIA,” Hal said. “No one’s seen him since he left the morgue.”
She thought again about Spencer, about whether there really was a connection. There had to be. Otherwise she would have to accept that the morgue just happened to hire a racist morgue attendant with psychopathic tendencies while she was out on medical leave. She could not buy that Roy’s appearance in her morgue was coincidence. It was Spencer.
Hal looked ready to comment when the curtain opened, and the doctor came in.
Hal shot out of the chair. “How is she?”
The doctor, a fine-boned man with warm brown eyes and silver hair, glanced up at Hal. “Hello, there. I’m Dr. Green.”
“Hal Harris.”
The two men shook hands.
“Dr. Schwartzman, how are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said, sitting up in the bed. “The chest scans clear?”
Green looked at Schwartzman and then back to Hal as though judging their relationship.
“It’s fine to speak in front of Hal,” she said.
Green pulled a thin computer tablet from under his arm and touched the screen before turning it to face her. “Here’s the most recent scan.” After a moment, he flicked his finger across the screen. “And the first.”
He gave her the tablet and she toggled back and forth between the two scans.
Hal learned over to examine them, though she suspected he didn’t know much about lung scans. If they were from a victim, she would have said there was no sign of lung damage, certainly not enough to explain a cause of death. But this wasn’t an autopsy.
She wasn’t dead.
She handed the tablet back to Dr. Green.
“Well?” Hal asked, shifting from foot to foot impatiently.
“They look the same,” Green said. “No change, so I think she’s good to go.”
Hal clapped, the noise filling the small space. He didn’t seem to notice.
Green peered down at Schwartzman. “If you experience any wheezing or difficulty breathing—”
“I’ll come back,” she said.
“Good,” Green said and left the room.
Schwartzman swung her legs to the side of the bed.
Hal glanced at her bare legs. “I’ll wait for you out there.”
She nodded.
He hesitated before closing the curtain. “Do you want me to call someone? Ken maybe?”
She shook her head. Ken. She did not want to think about that now. She had to break the news to him, but not today.
“Okay.”
He closed the curtain, and she rose from the bed, slowly pulling on her clothes. As she grabbed her purse, the phone inside vibrated. She pulled it out and used her fingerprint to unlock it. On her screen was a stream of messages. Harper. Laura Patchett. The word Spencer.
He was getting out. She hadn’t read the words and already she knew. She grabbed the foot of the bed for support and drew a deep breath. Emotionally she was prepared for Spencer’s release. The next step would be to prepare physically. She would not be caught off guard again.
The phone buzzed again. She glanced down as another alert slid across the screen. A calendar reminder.
Hal’s birthday. Today at 5:00 p.m.
She pocketed the phone and stepped out into the corridor. “You ready to go, birthday boy?”
Hal frowned, starting to shake his head. “Wait, what day is it?”
“The nineteenth,” she said.
He was staring at his phone. “So it is.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you very much.”
The two of them walked through the hospital corridors and out into the darkening sky.
40
Two weeks later
Hal had kept his thoughts to himself during the tour of the house, but she had no doubt he would speak up. A quiet agreement had emerged between them over the past few weeks. There would be no more holding back.
On the street Schwartzman noticed the crescent moon above the rise of Glen Canyon Park. San Francisco was famous for the Indian summers that happened in October. But fall was coming. The air had a crisper taste that made her think of baked apples. With it came the cold.
She was done running. Done. She looked back at the house. It was tiny, in need of a roof, new paint, and a lot of love.
But it was hers.
She crossed her arms and felt a chill across her shoulders, the electricity of excitement, of hope.
Hal stopped beside her, his arm brushing her shoulder. “I like the house.”
“I’m glad.”
“You’re really going to buy it.”
“I did buy it.”
He winced slightly at the idea that it was done. Then he caught himself. “It’s what you want.”
“It is. It’s perfect.”
He nodded, but she saw it in his face. It was perfect . . . if not for Spencer. “Then, you’ll testify,” he said not quite a question.
“I can’t.”
“Anna.”
She smiled. “Is that like calling a child by his full name when he’s in trouble? When I’m in trouble, you call me Anna?”
“I like it.”
“Better than Schwartzman?”
His eyes narrowed. “You have to testify.”
She couldn’t. She w
as decided. The video was too damning. She was lucky they weren’t pressing charges as it was. Entrapment.
How preposterous to think that she might have been able to entrap Spencer. She had underestimated him. Again.
She would not think about it. She would maintain hope that some other evidence emerged. There was still the chance that the DNA on the sea turtle necklace they’d found in Spencer’s house wouldn’t match Lucy’s, that there would be some evidence of Ava on it instead. That somehow it would be enough to hold him.
It wouldn’t. Schwartzman knew the DNA would be Lucy’s.
There were other possibilities. Harper Leighton had narrowed down the day Spencer was at her daughter’s school to two possible days. There was a chance that someone in that school had noticed him when he was there. A slim chance, but a chance.
More likely he’d had a student deliver the necklace for him. But they might be able to find the student and follow the lead to Spencer. In an effort to find a witness, Spencer’s image had gone out to the entire student body, the faculty and employees, as well as the parents. Harper would be dealing with school security as a by-product, but she was determined to find some evidence of Spencer on campus. Her husband, Jed, had created a website where kids could upload pictures taken on those days. Any pictures, anywhere on or around campus.
The way kids took pictures these days, they were betting that someone had caught something.
No matter what they found at the school, Harper would testify. She believed the necklace had been given to her daughter as a way to set her up and put all the evidence in question. She would also swear to finding Schwartzman in Ava’s garage, tied up, and would assert that it would have been impossible for Schwartzman to tie herself up that way, and that there was no one else who could have helped her. Then Harper would testify about the deaths of Ava and Frances and their connection to Spencer.
Circumstantial at best. All of it.
“Schwartzman,” Hal said.
Schwartzman. Not Anna. “I’m not in trouble anymore?”
“How can you joke about it?” He crossed the sidewalk to his car and leaned against the side panel. “If you don’t testify . . .”
“He’ll get away with it.”
Excise (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 2) Page 31
