Finally, they reached a set of ancient elevators. Unlike the modern, smooth guest elevators, this one was old and made loud, cawing protests as it lowered the three passengers into the bowels of the building. The manager talked a mile a minute, and while Schwartzman couldn’t see Hal’s face, she knew he was not enjoying this.
“And you don’t know if she works in the hotel?” Hal asked again.
“Not yet,” he said, cringing with the admission, before adding, “But I don’t believe so. We employ about two hundred people between the two restaurants and the hotel. My human resources manager is out this week,” he said with an expression that implied this sort of luck was usually the sort he got—bad. “So I’ve got one of the assistants checking the files.”
“We’ll need to view the recordings from any available cameras,” Hal said. He, too, was repeating himself.
The manager looked nervously at his phone. “I’ve asked for those, so yes, it shouldn’t take long. An hour at most, possibly sooner if they can consolidate the film. That might take some time,” he went on, saying everything with as many words as possible.
Schwartzman held her empty hands together, wishing again that she had some supplies. It felt strange to be entering a scene without her kit.
The elevators doors yawned open, and the stench of bleach assaulted her, the chemical smell stinging her nose and burning her eyes. A single gallon-size jug lay on its side, the contents poured across the floor.
The concrete room they’d entered was small, with a door on each end. Without any ventilation in the room, the bleach seared her lungs. She coughed and buried her face in the crook of her elbow.
“We were told not to move anything until the police arrived,” the manager said, coughing as well. “It’s all evidence, and if we change anything, we may destroy something that will help catch the”—he coughed again—“killer.”
Hal pulled out his phone. “Our Crime Scene Unit should have someone down shortly. You can get someone to mop up the excess bleach. It tends to destroy evidence anyway,” he added with a hint of sarcasm.
The gray color of the walls and door brought to mind the inside of a prison. A large B was painted in white on both doors. Beside one, two small black plaques read “Receiving” and “Administrative Offices.”
The manager led them to the opposite door and shoved it open with considerable force. No plaque marked this door, which screeched as its bottom dragged on the floor, traveling along a deep etch in the concrete where the door had carved a path over the years. The threesome stepped into a similarly painted corridor. Schwartzman counted three doors in front of them.
“What’s down here?” Hal asked. “Laundry?”
“No laundry,” the hotel manager said. “That’s all done off-site. This is mostly storage.” He pointed left.
Hal nodded to the door, and the manager touched his keycard to a flat black panel at the right of the door. The door clicked, and the manager pulled it open.
He stepped inside, and fluorescent lights flickered on like overtired workers being rustled from sleep. “This room stores banquet supplies—tables, chairs, that sort of thing.” The front half of the room was lined with wheeled racks that hung long, folding tables and individual dollies, each with chairs stacked so high that they bent toward the walls. An assortment of boxes dominated one corner, and a white pergola-like structure filled the opposite one. “But you can’t get in without a keycard,” the manager added.
“Who has those?”
“All the employees have one, but this area can only be opened by banquet employees and managers.”
Hal glanced farther down the hall. “What else?”
“The staff lockers and break room are through that far door on the end. You need a keycard to that one as well.”
“And this door?” Hal pointed to the one opposite the storage room.
The manager looked at the door nervously. The room that held the body.
“Cleaning supplies.”
There was also a panel beside this door, but the flat black plastic hung from the wall, dangling from a collection of colored wires.
“So someone broke in?” Hal asked.
The manager studied the screen of his phone again. “No. This has been a maintenance issue. The lock is broken.”
“How long has it been broken?”
“A few weeks,” the manager admitted.
“I should check the body,” Schwartzman said. The bleach burned in her nose, and she welcomed the distraction.
“Of course.” The manager made no move to open the door but used both hands to wave them toward it, as though ushering young children out of his hair.
Hal looked at his phone. “My text didn’t go through. No cell service down here?”
“It really depends on your cell carrier,” the manager said. “Now me, I use—”
“Got it,” Hal interrupted, pulling a rubber glove from his pocket.
The manager stopped talking and watched Hal pull the purple glove over his huge hand.
“I’m going to get in touch with Roger and make sure he’s got someone en route,” Hal said, speaking to Schwartzman. “But first I’m going to collect that bleach jug before someone picks it up accidentally.”
“Sure. I’ll get started.”
“I’ll be right back,” Hal added.
Once he was gone, the manager looked between Schwartzman and the door.
The door at the end of the hall opened, and the manager yelped with a little jump. Two women—one Hispanic and one Asian—emerged in black skirts and tops, wearing the flat black shoes that nurses wear. They moved past without speaking.
“I can manage this myself,” she told the manager.
“Okay. I’ll check on the video footage.” He left, moving quickly.
She pulled a glove from her own bag and opened the door, using her index finger and thumb to avoid smudging any useful prints. Once inside, she removed the glove and put it in her bag before donning two fresh ones and approaching the body.
What struck Schwartzman first was the lack of blood. There had been so much blood in the upstairs closet, but there were no signs of it here. Not even a drop.
The deceased was female. She lay on the linoleum floor between two metal racks stocked with gallon-size containers of cleansers. Next to the bleach on the bottom shelf sat Pine-Sol and ammonia and Comet and, above them, rows upon rows of toilet paper and tissue boxes. Open cardboard boxes occupied the third level, their insides filled with tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner. The shelving was packed floor to ceiling, so that the recessed lights above were partially blocked. A fire hazard, surely.
Considering the room, the area where the deceased lay was relatively well lit. The woman lay on her back, one arm across her body and the other flung off to the side. Schwartzman estimated her age between sixty-five and seventy-five. She wore a low-waisted shift in deep burgundy over a turtleneck and stockings of the same color. On her feet was a pair of comfortable walking shoes over thin socks, both black, not unlike what the two women in hotel uniforms were wearing. So maybe she did work in the hotel.
Her long, braided hair lay over one shoulder and reached to her waist. Stark gray streaks on the sides of her head softened toward the crown and wove unevenly through the dark color. She had olive skin and a long, slightly beaked nose that made her look of Middle Eastern heritage. Schwartzman squatted beside the woman’s head and studied her features. Her thoughts drifted naturally to Aleena Laughlin, but the two women looked nothing alike. Where Aleena’s skin was the shade of an acorn, this woman’s was lighter with more yellow undertones. Her eyes, when Schwartzman opened them to check for petechiae, were a cool gray.
The whites were clear—no signs of petechiae that would signal strangulation, and no pupil irregularity consistent with blunt-force trauma to the skull. Schwartzman opened the woman’s mouth, the jaw muscle not yet stiffened from rigor mortis. She had been dead less than two hours.
The inside of her m
outh was clear. No visible signs of evidence caught in her teeth. Back in the morgue, Schwartzman would use floss to check between the teeth to be certain, but nothing noteworthy presented itself in the mouth at all—no injuries to the tongue or soft tissue, and no signs of foam or extra saliva that might indicate specific types of natural deaths, such as pulmonary edema or heart attack. Foam might have also suggested a drug overdose.
Schwartzman did a cursory check for blood on the body and found none. Whoever had been in that upstairs closet would have been covered with blood. However this woman had died, she was not the stabbing victim from upstairs. Which meant they might be dealing with two victims. So where was the one who’d lost all the blood?
A natural death would mean they’d found an employee. Her appearance didn’t suggest that she was homeless, and who else would wander into a hotel’s basement supply closet to die?
Her goal in the field was always to determine cause of death. When she could provide that early, her analysis streamlined the process. A natural death meant fewer people needed to be interviewed; the police needed to know only who might have seen the victim last to confirm that there had been no foul play. In a natural death, the Crime Scene Unit stayed away, as did Hal and the other inspectors. Even the autopsy became less pressing.
Deaths not immediately identifiable as either natural or unnatural had to be processed as a possible homicide.
Her legs stiff from squatting, Schwartzman shifted her position to kneel beside the victim. She noted the presence of livor mortis in the hands—the blood, when the heart had stopped pumping, pooled by gravity. The backs of her forearms were darker in color where the blood had collected, which implied she hadn’t been moved. Livor mortis normally set in between thirty minutes and two hours postmortem. The presence of liver mortis without rigor mortis implied the victim had been dead somewhere between forty minutes and one and a half hours, as a best guess.
She hesitated to move the body before photographs had been taken, and without her ActionPacker, she didn’t have her camera. Hal would be back soon. He should have been back already. Using her iPhone, she documented the body as best she could. As she moved to stand, she noticed the deviation along the victim’s spine.
Schwartzman bent down for a better view and then walked her fingers along the woman’s vertebrae. Palpating along the cerebral column, she found a bump and a twist in the cord. Someone had broken her neck, severing the cerebral spine. Working by touch, she counted from the first vertebrate, then to the second, also called the axis. The next one down bulged unnaturally. C3. The victim had experienced a violent injury at the third cerebral vertebrae. Death would have followed in a number of ways.
Two possibilities were most probable. If the spinal cord had torn, the nerve supply to her entire body would have short-circuited. No signals would reach the heart and blood vessels, and the result would have been an instantaneous and profound drop in blood pressure. The resulting death would be quick. The process was called spinal shock. But if the spinal cord wasn’t torn through but only severely injured, death would have come by asphyxiation and taken a bit longer.
No matter how the injury had killed her, this was not a natural death.
When Schwartzman rose and took a step toward the door, it opened. Naomi entered first, her camera raised in one hand, ready to shoot. Schwartzman motioned to move by her, but Hal stood in her way.
“Damn it all,” he said, his voice sharp.
Hal’s gaze was focused on the small supply room.
He was staring at the victim.
“What is it?” she asked.
Hal swung around and took three long strides down the corridor before returning in another three. His hands cupped his shaking head. “No. No. No.”
“Hal?”
He stopped moving and looked at the victim again. He blinked hard and tucked his chin to his chest, let out a choked noise. Anger, frustration, grief. Maybe guilt. He knew the victim.
She touched his arm, and he froze. “It was an injury to the spinal cord. It would have been pretty quick,” she offered, as though it might soften the blow.
When he said nothing, she asked, “Who is she?”
“Her name is Parveen Yasmin. She was a friend to Aleena Laughlin.” He stepped toward the door. “And her kids.”
Schwartzman felt the sensation of something crawling along her spine. Another Muslim woman. Her fingers brushed the shivers off her neck before she realized she still wore her gloves. She pulled them off, balling them into her bag. “It looks like someone broke her neck,” she told him.
“I need to call Phyllis and Ben Johnson. Make sure they’re all right.”
“And the kids,” she said.
From his expression, it was clear that Hal had thought of them, too.
28
On the way back to the station, Hal called the Johnsons. He checked that the kids were doing okay.
“They seem okay,” Ben assured him.
“Is Kaelen talking about that night at all?”
“He hasn’t said a word about it to us. Phyllis took him to a psychologist that the hospital recommended, and he didn’t say much. They have play therapy. He’s going back Monday.”
“Okay,” Hal said, trying not to be disappointed. He took a long, slow breath and then told Ben the news about Parveen Yasmin.
Ben sat on the other end in stunned silence. When he spoke again, Ben asked Hal if he could call him back. “Of course,” Hal said and listened to the click on the other line.
Ben Johnson phoned back as Hal was parking in the department’s lot. Hal shut off the engine and opened the car door to let in the cool air as he listened. In light of Parveen’s death, Ben and Phyllis had decided to take the two children down to Phyllis’s sister’s house in Santa Cruz and stay there until Jared got home in two or three days, depending on the connections out of Afghanistan. He gave Hal the sister’s name as well as his cell number, and Hal scratched the information down in his notebook.
As the conversation ended, Ben Johnson sounded distinctly older than he had that first day at their apartment. Hal felt older, too. He promised to keep in touch with any news and asked that Ben do the same.
“If I don’t talk to you,” Ben said before hanging up, “have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.”
“You too,” Hal said, wondering if it was possible for the Johnsons to enjoy their Thanksgiving, if it would be possible for any of them. He had promised his mother that he would be there, and he would not disappoint her. But the idea of having this case hanging over him, of being no closer to discovering Aleena Laughlin’s and Malik Washington’s—and now Parveen Yasmin’s—killer hovered like a dark cloud over him. And over Schwartzman. She’d agreed to come with him—or not disagreed anyway. Which was good, because he wasn’t going to leave her in the city alone, not after the incident last night. Maybe there hadn’t been anyone in her house, but what if there had been?
She was a grown woman. She owned a gun. And a dog with a nasty bark, though no bite. Buster would more likely lick an intruder than attack, but he sounded intimidating through the door, and the bark would alert her to potential threats. She was likely safer than most women in the city. And she wasn’t alone. As a member of the department—a well-liked one at that—plenty of people would come to her aid if he went out of town.
He’d spent a lot of time thinking about it lately. And he had a hard time admitting this particular truth . . . it wasn’t that she needed him, or at least, it wasn’t exclusively that. He needed her. With Hailey settled into her new task-force position, a void had opened up. The role that she had filled in his life stood vacant, and the loss of his partner had made him lonely.
But that wasn’t the whole truth either. Schwartzman didn’t fill the role Hailey had left vacant. In some ways, he and Schwartzman were partners, yes. But that partnership felt different than it had with Hailey. Hailey was a married woman with two small children. Theirs had been a brother-sister relationship, and he and Schwar
tzman . . . well, he didn’t know what that was. But she didn’t feel like his sister.
And anytime he started to pinpoint exactly what it was, he experienced a wave of fear. A part of him thought they could be good together, not just at work, but in life. But what if she didn’t feel the same? That worry always reined him right back in.
Hal settled at his desk with a cup of black coffee that tasted like dirty sand. He missed Starbucks, but his bank account was grateful. He checked his emails and voicemails for news on the case. Two messages from Naomi Muir, the subject lines in bold. The first read Print Match to Laughlin Jeep. The second read Cell Records. Naomi liked to make sure her messages didn’t go unnoticed. She might have missed her calling as a tabloid journalist with headlines like that, but he appreciated her straightforward nature.
He double-clicked the email about the prints found on Aleena Laughlin’s Jeep and read the name before the message loaded fully: Tabitha J. Wilson. The home address matched the one on her driver’s license. Perry, Oklahoma.
He would need to talk to Tabitha Wilson’s husband. First, though, he opened Naomi’s other email and scanned the reports from AT&T. As he suspected, Aleena Laughlin’s cell had last pinged the towers around Golden Gate Park. Before that, Naomi had identified her locations as close to home, son’s karate lesson, and Bessie Carmichael Elementary—Kaelen’s school. Skimming back over Naomi’s notes, he concluded that Aleena Laughlin didn’t often stray too far from home.
The numbers, too, were consistent across her records. Naomi had also made notes on the people Aleena had contacted. The Johnsons’ landline, Phyllis Johnson’s mobile phone, Parveen Yasmin, the mosque, the pharmacy where she worked, and a couple of people Naomi had identified as mothers of Kaelen’s classmates. Hal highlighted those numbers.
The last noteworthy thing in Naomi’s email was several incoming calls to Aleena’s phone from a 580 area code. Next to the phone number, in Naomi’s neat block print, were the words: Tucker Wilson, Perry, Oklahoma.
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