Standing back in the foyer in front of the victim’s door, he studied the crime scene tape. He could pull it down. It would probably be a nice gesture. He wasn’t feeling very nice. Instead he crossed the foyer to Carol Fletcher’s door and rang the bell.
“Who is it?” came her voice from inside.
“Inspector Hal Harris. We talked the other day.”
There was the sound of locks turning, and the door cracked open.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, opening the door as she worked to tie her sweater closed. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“I’m sorry to come by unannounced,” he said. “I came back to release the crime scene and was hoping to ask you one more question.”
“Sure. Of course.” She hesitated, then let the door fall open. The dining room table was covered in papers. She motioned to them. “Sorry for the mess. I’m working on a deadline.”
“I’ll get out of your hair, then. I just wanted to ask about your interactions with your neighbor’s sister. Had you met her before?”
“No. I’d never met her.”
“Had Ms. Fe—” He caught himself before he called her by her real name. “Had Ms. Stein mentioned a sister?”
“Maybe. I knew she had a sister, but I don’t know if Victoria ever told me anything about her. I’d seen the pictures of the two of them—the ones Victoria had in her place.”
Carol glanced over his shoulder at the other apartment. As she did, the entry light shifted on her face, and the dark circles under her eyes were more pronounced.
“I appreciate your help. Are you doing okay?” he asked.
She looked a bit startled. “Having a little trouble sleeping,” she admitted, motioning into the living room. “Plus the deadline.”
“There are some good local support groups if you want to talk to someone,” Hal offered. “I can send over some information.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that. And I’ll be in touch if I think of anything useful about Terri.”
Hal thanked her and left her apartment. Maybe he looked as bad as she did. He wouldn’t be surprised. He felt like shit. Across the foyer, the yellow tape on the victim’s door caught his eye again.
“Ah, damn it all,” he muttered and crossed the foyer to tear the crime scene tape down.
Hal waited for Roger in the small interview room. The plan was to outline everything they had on the whiteboard to try to pull the case together. Hal could buy himself only another day or two on this case before he would need to shift it off his priority list and get caught up on the new ones. Hailey and Naomi joined them in an effort to make it happen quickly.
Hal had drawn in the timeline for the San Francisco events in black. In green he added the events in South Carolina, though there was no evidence to link the deaths. Beside him, Hailey posted the images of the victims—bios, possible connections, dates and causes of death. Roger and Naomi filled in columns beside each victim with the key evidence they had collected.
Written next to Sarah Feld, the first item was “pendant.” It was not identical to Schwartzman’s. The variations suggested the two were crafted by different jewelers. The police had yet to trace either to a source. Line one amounted to nothing.
Next there were prints. Macy’s print on the napkin led nowhere. The prints on the glasses and the bottle in the kitchen were the victim’s, so nothing from them either.
Three, the lavender seeds from Feld’s lungs. No good lead from those.
Four was the BOLO out on the woman posing as Terri Stein. Again, nothing yet.
Five, the security system failure at Sarah Feld’s apartment was the result of a virus. The IP address came back to Feld’s own apartment, which gave them nothing either.
Hailey stood beside him as he rubbed his head. “Not a lot to go on,” she commented.
“Nothing to go on.”
“We’ve got some traffic cam images of the person who entered Schwartzman’s apartment before Macy was attacked,” Naomi offered. “I think you saw these—right, Hal?”
“Roger sent me one.”
“Let me take a look,” Hailey said. She took the tablet and held it so Hal could see over her shoulder. The time stamp on the first was 11:09 p.m. The woman in the photograph had wavy, dark hair, shoulder length, partially hidden under a plain black baseball cap. She wore a black coat, tied at the waist. Black pants, but it was hard to tell if they were real slacks or the yoga kind women loved so much. Tennis shoes. She carried a black bag in her right hand, like a small duffel bag. Hal felt the same way as when he first saw the picture. It could be Schwartzman, or it could be someone else.
Hailey skipped to the next image, then the next. They all showed more or less the same thing. The woman never looked up. The cap covered her face in every shot. Her hands were under the coat sleeves. They literally had no clear image of her.
“What do you think? Is it her?” Hal asked Hailey.
“I can’t tell,” Hailey admitted.
“Not likely,” Roger answered, walking through the door with a cup of coffee in hand.
“Why do you say that?” Hal asked. The hat was wrong for Schwartzman, but that wasn’t enough. Roger would have another, more substantial reason.
Roger set his coffee down and pulled his phone from his pocket, handed it to Hailey. The image was a clear shot of Schwartzman’s face behind the windshield of her car. “We have her entering the garage at 6:52,” Roger explained. “She checks her mail at 6:56 and lets herself into her apartment at 6:59. She doesn’t emerge again. The cameras inside the building are functional until 11:17 p.m. By that time, we’ve got this other person on the traffic cam.”
“So no way it can be Schwartzman,” Hailey said.
“Right,” Roger agreed.
Hal studied the image. With the hat, the coat, the person might have been a man or a woman. There had to be something in these films to help them. He couldn’t believe anyone could be that careful.
Somewhere there had to be a mistake. Find it. “Can we trace her back to where she starts walking?” Hal asked.
“We tried,” Roger said. “She comes from somewhere down by the water. We pick her up about eight blocks from Schwartzman’s apartment.”
“If it’s a ‘she,’” Hailey said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Naomi agreed.
“How tall is she/he?” Hal asked.
“We estimated somewhere between five eight and five ten.”
“Could be a man or a woman,” Roger said.
Hal turned his attention to the board. Go through the timeline again; review what you know. He felt so close to some realization, some clue that would break this thing open. He just had to knock it loose. “So there’s an alarm in the basement at 11:39 p.m. Desk clerk follows procedure and locks the front door and goes to check the alarm. Comes back three minutes later and clears the code. What happened in that three minutes?”
“That’s where we have a problem,” Roger admitted. “From the desk, everything was working, but the system stopped recording, so nothing was captured. The guard didn’t see anyone go by him, so our best guess is that the person posing as Schwartzman entered the building while the front desk clerk was in the basement.”
“How did they get in the building?”
“That’s the clever part,” Roger said.
“I don’t like clever,” Hal said.
“Explain,” Hailey told him.
Roger nodded to Naomi. “The alarm code in the alarm was for the exterior door. Shutting off the alarm requires a system reboot. The whole system goes down for about twenty seconds,” Naomi explained. “There’s no built-in redundancy to cover that time.”
“Wow,” Hailey said. “So the whole thing was planned to the second.”
“Not necessarily,” Roger countered. “It looks like the person on the street is holding a smartphone.” Roger took the iPad and scanned through the images, pointing out a black blob that might or might not have been a phone. “The wa
y she’s got it in her hand, I’d guess it’s a phone.”
“And if it is? How’s that help?” Hal asked.
“She—or he—could have set off the alarm from the phone. Easily.”
“What about Schwartzman? She was inside the apartment.” He could not stop thinking about her. Down in South Carolina . . . where was she this minute? Where was Spencer? Was she safe? Was Harper watching out for her?
Damn this whole thing.
“Halothane,” Roger explained. “It’s a general anesthesia, pretty readily available.”
“Like laughing gas?” Hailey asked.
“Right. The gas was piped into her bedroom through the vent. There was a pressurized tank in the wall at the back of her closet. Controlled remotely. We don’t know how long the tank has been there. The gas would have knocked her out pretty quickly.”
“A tank in the closet? How the hell is that even possible?” Hailey asked.
“We think it happened from the neighbor’s apartment,” Roger explained. “That unit was rented about two months after Schwartzman’s was. Security deposit was put down, lease signed, but then the rental fell through about a week later. It could have been done then.”
“I’d like to see a copy of the lease,” Hal said.
“Sure.”
“Also,” Hailey asked, “do we have security footage?”
“No. We don’t have anything,” Hal said, cutting them off. “Even if Schwartzman is passed out, doesn’t explain how they got into her apartment.”
Hailey nodded. “And Macy? How did they get him to Schwartzman’s place?”
“Text message,” Hal said, hearing his own frustration. He already knew this. They were literally following this thing in circles. Every clue led to a dead end.
“Schwartzman sent Macy a couple of texts. Around ten fifty p.m.,” Roger explained.
“How did this person know that Macy would even get those?” Naomi asked. “Someone texts me that late on a workday, and my phone’s on silent. I don’t hear a thing.”
“Who the hell cares?” Hal said, his voice exploding off the walls of the small room. “It was a text. Macy got the text. He showed up there. He got stabbed eighteen damn times.”
He crossed the room to the table and pulled out a chair, slammed his body into it. “Sorry.” He was so angry, so frustrated. Terrified. The thing that made him angriest was the fear. He had no idea what she’d be facing down in South Carolina, how dangerous it was. If Spencer could manage to stab Ken Macy eighteen times without leaving South Carolina, Hal didn’t want to imagine what he could do with her right around the corner. How had he let Schwartzman leave this town? How was it possible that they had nothing at all on Spencer MacDonald?
There was a knock, and the interview room door cracked open. Another inspector in Homicide poked his head in. “Harris, there’s someone here I think you’re going to want to talk to.”
“We’re sort of busy—” Hal stopped when he caught sight of the woman standing behind the inspector. Her short red hair threw him off, but the rounded nose, the wide-set eyes—they were the same ones in the artist sketch Macy had done of the woman posing as Terri Stein. “You—”
The woman tried to shrink back, but the other inspector stood behind her, leaving her no way to escape.
Hal felt a surge of anger, the rush of relief. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“I know,” she said quickly. “I came as soon as I found out that Sarah was really dead.”
“What do you mean when you found out she was dead? You were the one who found the body,” Hal charged.
“Why don’t we let her come in,” Hailey suggested, pulling gently on Hal’s arm before reaching out her hand and introducing herself. “I’m Inspector Hailey Wyatt.”
“Stephanie. Stephanie O’Malley.” She stepped into the room, and her gaze found its way to the whiteboard.
Hal motioned to Roger, who pulled the screen down to cover their notes and the images. “Naomi and I are going to grab a bite. We’ll check back in an hour.”
“Perfect,” Hal told him.
Terri Stein aka Stephanie O’Malley watched nervously as Naomi and Roger left the room. When Hailey went to set up the video recording and get a waiver for the witness to sign, she looked as if she might cry. Hal didn’t say a thing. The more terrified she was, the better it was for him.
Within five minutes of the knock on the door, Hailey, Hal, and Ms. O’Malley were seated at the table, and O’Malley had signed away her rights. Too easy.
The witness shifted in her chair as Hal leaned in. “You said that you came in as soon as you heard Sarah was dead. You didn’t realize she was dead when you found her?”
“No,” she said emphatically, glancing between them. “God, no. That was all supposed to be part of the show.”
“What show?” Hailey asked.
“The reality show we were working on.”
“Reality show,” Hal repeated.
She nodded, looking back and forth between them before settling on Hailey. “The Biggest Fright,” she said. “That’s what they were calling the show last I heard.”
“They?” Hal asked.
“The studio, the director.”
“What were their names?” Hailey asked.
O’Malley shook her head, sliding one foot under her. “It was all done online. I never met with anyone. Neither did Sarah.”
“You knew Sarah before this?”
She nodded, licking her lips in a way that Hal associated with fear. “We knew each other from LA. We had auditioned for some of the same scripts.”
“Where exactly did you and Sarah meet?” Hailey pressed.
Her eyes widened. “God, I don’t even know. It’s probably been two years ago, maybe three by now. People think LA is this huge place, but it sort of just happens. You start to recognize people from the circuit. Similar age, similar style, we ended up going for a lot of the same stuff.”
“And this new show,” Hal continued. “You were approached?”
“I wasn’t. I don’t know if Sarah was. I found the job posted on this online actors’ board. Like a job board.”
Hal raised his pencil.
“It’s called the Cutting Board.” She shrugged. “No idea why. Maybe like the cutting room floor where they edit a movie or ‘cut’ for the end of a scene . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“So acting jobs are posted on the board,” Hailey said.
“Usually they’re audition notifications, but sometimes they post for smaller gigs,” O’Malley said. “This looked more like one of those. The posting was linked to a separate website where you entered all your information. I remember it was really specific. The listing was for two women. Midthirties, dark hair, prominent nose. The listing said to send head shots.” She motioned to herself. “That’s obviously not me, but I threw my stuff in there just for the heck of it. Sometimes a director thinks he knows what he wants, but he really doesn’t.”
“What happened next?” Hailey asked.
“I got a request back for some additional pictures with longer hair, darker hair, so I had a friend take a few with a wig. Then there were questions about how long I could be away, what kind of flexibility did I have.”
“And that didn’t strike you as odd?” Hal asked.
O’Malley rose in the chair to slide her foot out from under her and set both feet on the floor. “Not really,” she said when she stopped fidgeting. “A lot of gigs require time away from home. And this was a reality show. I knew that much.” She licked her lips again.
Hal recognized fear in the way she fidgeted, unable to sit still, but she presented none of the classic signs of lying. She didn’t cross her arms over her body and avert her eyes, touch her face or neck. It seemed as if she was telling the truth.
“Plus, the pay was great,” she added.
“How great?”
“Five thousand a week.”
That was great. He barely cleared that in a month. “So how did they
get in touch with you after you were hired?”
“It was all through the site. Details about where to go, what to expect. I just followed the directions, exactly like it said. I was to go and find the body. Scream and make a scene. Then go to the hospital for shock. Leave exactly forty minutes after I’d arrived, take a cab back to my car. They had a hotel for me. I was instructed to change my appearance and lay low for two days, then go visit the medical examiner. There was a guideline script for that. I was supposed to say how much they looked alike. They really did look sort of alike. It was weird.”
“And after that?” Hal asked.
“Go home. Just drive back to LA.”
“What was the address of the website?” Hailey asked. “Where you got your instructions?”
She stared at her phone. “Actually, I tried to get on the site today, and I couldn’t. The site is gone.”
Hal watched her. “You and Ms. Feld competed for jobs?”
“Compete?” she repeated.
Hailey met his eye. He didn’t buy her as a killer either, but he had to ask. “Was there a rivalry between you?”
“God, no.” Her eyes widened. “Absolutely not. We were totally different looks. She’s so much more sophisticated, edgier. I’m so—” She motioned to herself, her round cheeks and ruddy complexion. “Me.”
“Is there any other reason why you’d want to hurt her?”
“I didn’t hurt her. I would never.” She flattened her palms on the table. “I didn’t even know the other actor was Sarah until I walked into that bedroom. I had no idea she was going to play the—” She covered her mouth. “You have to believe me. I would never hurt anyone.”
“You stopped for gas? On the drive up from LA?”
The wide eyes returned. It read like genuine shock. “Yes,” she said. “Right. I stopped for gas. That was part of the directions. I gave that officer my receipt. He said that was a strong alibi. He said I couldn’t have killed her because I was on the road when she—” Again she stopped.
When she didn’t continue, Hal asked, “And why didn’t you answer my calls?”
“Right,” she said. “That was in the directions, too. I was told to text or exchange messages—like phone tag or whatever—but not to actually sit down with the police.”
Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) Page 27
